Over and over again I seem to forget how exhausting biographies can be, so I stupidly keep getting new ones.
Do we really need another “tome” about Winston Churchill or General Grant? Who are these books for anyway? Seven, eight, nine hundred pages of the most careful scholarship, with the footnotes to prove it — but the story must be rousing, the style must be “magisterial”, the work must be “monumental”. It must tell us all we need to know about its subject and their time, and it must give us insight into our time too. It must be entertaining, informative, instructive, and not too speculative, not too tendentious, not too “dense” or “plodding”. We suspect it will take some dramatic license somewhere, but it better not be too obvious. We must be assured of the strictest adherence to the facts, but please, don’t make it too academic either. We don’t want it to feel like a research project, with evidence and arguments strewn about. We should hardly notice the footnotes — but they should definitely be there. We want a good yarn from an authority on the subject, dammit, one that starts with birth and ends with death, that we learn something from and can put on the shelf afterwards!
All this is to say that the challenges of the genre are so myriad and vexing that great biographies are, in my experience, exceedingly rare, and biographers of consistent genius rarer still. So I come to any assessment of one with some apprehension. I’ve seen how difficult it can be. But it’s painful for the reader too, if the book really fails. All those endless hundreds of pages and you could still come away frustrated.
David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom was universally well-reviewed and won the Lincoln Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2019, but it is one such book. This is a difficult judgment to render because there are things to like and respect about it. As far as I can find, it is the most thoroughly researched and referenced full-length biography on Douglass ever produced. It is written with deep empathy for Douglass and for other figures in his life, especially his first wife Anna. It is nobly committed to recognizing the trauma of slavery in America, determined to see the horror plainly. All in all it carries the reader through seven hundred fifty pages fairly well. We learn what we need to know, from an attentive and reliable observer.
But once we pass from observation to those other biographical duties — portraiture, interpretation, meaning-making — the book falters. Its central image of Douglass, its argument of how we should interpret his life, is inadequately developed, and the moments of bad writing are so poor as to be shocking. It makes for jarring reading, as the book at its best is eloquent and capable. Why wasn’t it trimmed down? It should have played to its strengths and calibrated its ambition accordingly. Instead we get an end-product that is a frustrating mix of success and failure, and so is not easy to judge.
It would seem to be difficult to find a center for Douglass’s long and varied life. His times changed around him and so did he. He apparently is also yet another meme for the culture war to fight over, and has been claimed for every reductive political label. Blight admits Douglass is a “malleable figure”, but he wants to stop right-leaning groups from claiming Douglass too completely. Yes, his most popular speech was “Self-Made Men” and he did his share of scolding about “personal responsibility”, but he was a radical social reformer all his life. What matters about Douglass, says Blight, is the prophetic intensity of his public voice, his relentless drive to awaken the American conscience.
This seems reasonable to me, but “prophet” as center for the book ultimately just makes the point about his enduring radicalism and not much more. It captures the voice in Douglass’s speeches and his autobiographies, but otherwise its potential is squandered. We might think that it could throw some light on Douglass’s religious convictions, but they are inadequately explained. He has a conversion experience as a teenager, his early speeches are said to be characteristic of the Christian millennial sensibility of the time, but later in the book Douglass is just a Bible-quoting speechmaker with penetrating social insight, with no apparent religious dimension to his views. It can be assumed that something in Douglass changed, but it is never addressed. References to scholars of religion or the prophetic tradition are brief and without elaboration.
When the book tries to deepen the “prophet” framing and discuss the Bible’s influence on Douglass’s autobiographies, the writing gets sloppy. For example:
In his brilliant depiction of slaveholders’ psychic unease about the evil system they practiced on the Wye plantation, we can feel Douglass’s cadences even as he names his text. “This immense wealth,” he wrote, “this gilded splendor; this profusion of luxury; this exemption from toil; this life of ease; this sea of plenty; aye, what of it all?” Douglass loved repetition. … Douglass intones with his trademark contrasts … Then he simply gives Isaiah and Jeremiah the last word in this oracle about the woe in history’s plan for slaveholders … Thus for Douglass style and argument flowed together in the same torrent of words.1
It took me a while to figure out that “even as he names his text” at the end of the awkward first sentence refers to the title of the second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. Then we have awkward phrases like “the woe in history’s plan for slaveholders” or “his trademark contrasts”. But the worst is “Douglass loved repetition”, the most forehead-smackingly obvious observation about the writing style of the King James Bible. Style and argument apparently “flow together”, and so shape Douglass’s view of the world. But no deeper analysis is offered other than some offhand quotes from Jeremiah and pointing out repetition in the rhetoric. This is the fullest account we’re given of the Bible’s influence on Douglass’s writing! And yet Douglass as prophet is supposedly central to the book.
The other half of the book’s formula, “freedom”, is bland and poorly delineated. Douglass is said to have “captured the multiple meanings of freedom”, but what this really means isn’t made clear. Instead we get a somewhat blank image of a hero of the past whose quest for freedom is of universal significance for Americans and for the world, but any attempt to pull together that significance into a coherent statement falls flat.
Take for example Douglass fighting back against Edward Covey, the vicious overseer made famous in his autobiographies. This early scene in Douglass’s life is central to his self-mythology, and so is a great time to reach at higher meaning. This is what we get:
… this place would be the “tyrant’s home”, the “dark night” of a strong young teenager broken and rendered a “brute” by a totalitarian regime ruled by one savage man. Ishmael found his Ahab, the ultimate tyrant whose obsessions could never be tamed, and by whom the world could be wrecked and taken down; Douglass found his Covey, who would bludgeon and wreck the young slave, but against whom the sufferer would resurrect himself through violence and will and find another reason to live. … Douglass left a good deal of blood in the soil of that archvillain’s farm, while also extracting a story he would one day make almost as immortal as Herman Melville’s whaling ship. Douglass’s great gift, and the reason we know of him today, is that he found ways to convert the scars Covey left on his body into words that might change the world. His travail under Covey’s yoke became Douglass’s crucifixion and resurrection.2
Here Douglass is a “strong young teenager” who is somehow both Ishmael from Moby-Dick and Christ, and Covey is an odd version of Captain Ahab, who is taken as the leader of a “totalitarian regime” whose quest to kill the white whale is equated with the madness and brutality of the slaveholding South. And out of this struggle Douglass “extracts” a story “almost as immortal” as, uh, the ship from Moby-Dick. Hmm. Moby-Dick is brought in to make the point that Douglass’s story deserves status as a classic in the American canon, but there’s no larger idea here, and the clumsy writing only makes it worse.
Maybe it’s a little unfair to attack these particularly bad paragraphs — they might be the worst in the book — but they show the weakness of its foundation. I noticed them on my first read-through, but they were amidst largely competent history writing, so I moved on. But the lingering impression after finishing the book was too irritating to ignore. Something was lacking — I felt I knew all the facts of Douglass’s life but could make only poor sense of him. Who was this person, really? How should I understand the meaning of his life? When I looked back, I found that whenever the book needs to go deeper, to justify intellectually its organizing ideas, it breaks down. This was why I couldn’t make sense of Douglass even after reading so much about him.
I see the book as a failure of ideas and also of energy. The intense demands of the biography genre seem to have defeated it. Even when there are no bad analogies to bash, the style has moments of real tiredness. The word “intrepid”, for example, is used to describe no less than eight different people, with seven of those usages in the first one hundred fifty pages. Douglass’s wife, his friend Julia Crofts, his mentor William Lloyd Garrison, his friend and lover Ottilie Assing, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, two different scholars of Douglass’s life, and Douglass himself (twice) — are all described as intrepid or having done intrepid things. It starts to ring in your ear, you hear it so many times.
Repetitive writing like this makes for bad biography. Events are described, figures come and go, insights are offered, but no one is distinct or alive. Blight is concerned about modern-day conservatives claiming Douglass as their own, but the right counter to that would have been to give us a living, many-sided Douglass, in his own context. Instead we get an inconsistent patchwork, a reaching at meaning that never coheres.
At times it seems like Blight doesn’t quite know what to make of Douglass. When he cringes at Douglass’s crass jokes about the Irish, the Native Americans, and even his own race; when he seems perplexed about Douglass’s “Horatio Alger” self-mythology from his later years; when he depicts Douglass as something close to a victim in his own extramarital affair, clearly wishing Douglass’s lover would go away, assuming Douglass felt the same; when he quotes a cheesy Obama speech about “buttoning up our Union blues” and meeting Douglass’s “leonine gaze” and then fails to offer anything sufficiently coherent to meet said gaze — all this gives us a Douglass who comes through as more puzzle than person. He is forbidding, elusive, a bit too nineteenth century for us, and we never fully take him in.
Still, there is a good book in there. The history writing is well done and will take care of itself. Just cut or rewrite the introduction, which is deceptively wide in scope and promises a synthesis the book doesn’t attain. Then back away from any auxiliary disciplines — religion, literature, political science, etc. — and be careful when reaching toward higher meaning. Lean into the book’s commendable focus on empathy and faithful documentation. Make quick vivid sketches and move on. Then it will be a passable biography backed by sound scholarship. But as it is I can’t recommend it.
p. 259
p. 60
This was a beautifully written review of a biography I will never read, because I dislike biography for the reasons you cite. But you are inspiring me to reread Up from Slavery.
While I enjoy your usual drive-by, orbiting and relatively gentle style, I like that this piece is a direct assault on the reviewed book. You went for the pith and split the book down the middle; your judgements are about as comprehensive and damning as a quick review can fit. The feistier tone will elicit stronger reactions from your readers, I imagine.