T O D A Y THE STORIES OF A LIFETIME: Lives 'R' us By Joyce Millman A&E's "Biography" is the People magazine of famous lives The Art of Life By Jay Parini A renowned biographer discusses the biographies that have inspired, enthralled and moved him most Parini's list The best literary biographies of the century The Salon List Our favorite bios of the year - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E+T A L K Sir Isaiah Berlin is dead. How much poorer are we without him? Discuss it in the Books section of Table Talk. R E V I E W S LOVE IN A BLUE TIME By Hanif Kureishi (11/19/97) R E C E N T L Y The Gospel according to Paul By Mark Hertsgaard (11/12/97) The Salon interview: Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) The man who took sex out of the closet By Scott McLemee (11/05/97) Reckless genius By Galway Kinnell (11/03/97) Cents & sensibility By Gary Kamiya (10/31/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the BOOKS ARCHIVE		__T H E art O F_L I F E A RENOWNED BIOGRAPHER LISTS THE LITERARY BIOGRAPHIES THAT HAVE INSPIRED, ENTHRALLED AND MOVED HIM MOST. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY JAY PARINI | I've been addicted to reading writers' biographies for 30 years or so. Literary lives attract me, in part because I'm curious about how the great writers were able to assemble their masterworks and, somehow, also manage to get to the dentist, play with their children, pay their bills, visit elderly relatives and do all the time-consuming things one must do in the natural course of a life. What often fascinates me is the source of writers' inspiration and the specific details of their working lives: how many hours they spent at the writing table, under what conditions and with what results. I'm hardly alone in liking, even loving, biographies. The art of biography is an ancient one, preceding the novel by centuries. Among the first major biographers was Suetonius (A.D. 75-150), who wrote "Lives of the Noble Caesars" -- a book I often thumb through for gossip about Caligula, Nero and Tiberius. These manic, grandiose emperors may never recover from their first biographer, who lingered over the most salacious and melodramatic aspects of their lives. Indeed, this scandal-mongering style of biography has rarely been out of vogue, although in recent years we have been deluged with examples of what Joyce Carol Oates has called "pathographies" -- biographies that dwell on, revel in, the dark side of the subject. (As a biographer myself, I often wonder why anybody would bother to spend years and years doing research on somebody they didn't actually admire.) Dishing the dirt in the mode of Suetonius gave way, in the Middle Ages, to hagiographic lives of saints, which were meant to inspire devotion more than entertain the reader. But literary biography, in English, got underway with a bang in the 18th century with Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets" and, of course, Boswell's "Life of Johnson." These were both works that raised the genre of literary biography to the level of art. In the case of Boswell, certainly, the biographer was in love with his subject, and the resulting book remains a model of sorts, the biography-as-work-of-love. Despite the grand achievements of Johnson and Boswell, the 20th century has been, in fact, the consummate age of biography, beginning with Aylmer Maude's "Life of Tolstoy," first published in 1910 but considerably revised and expanded in later editions over three decades. Maude was a brilliant critic who also knew Tolstoy well as a friend. In the tradition of Boswell, he spent a good deal of time in the company of his subject, taking notes on conversations, quizzing Tolstoy's contemporaries, interrogating the great man himself. Maude's Tolstoy offers a pioneering example of modern biographical practice. It is commonly agreed (and I concur) that the two best examples of recent biographical scholarship are Richard Ellmann's "James Joyce" (1959) and Leon Edel's five-volume "Henry James" (1952-1972). These books will be hard to surpass. While neither is exactly hagiographic, both biographers adored their subjects, and they lavished decades of careful attention on them. They made every attempt to understand their subjects' foibles and failures, too, although they put them in the context of lives filled with achievements -- personal and artistic. Ellmann's "Joyce" bowled over most readers when it first appeared -- no one had seen such scholarly detail, such professionalism, such astute use of modern critical techniques. Ellmann was teaching at Yale at the time, and was rigorously prepared for writing this book by years in the classroom. Having already written two groundbreaking books on William Butler Yeats, Ellmann had a remarkable command of Anglo-Irish literary politics. He also understood the complex ways that life and art interweave. "The life of an artist," he wrote, "but particularly that of Joyce, differs from other lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command his present attention." Joyce was, of course, an extreme example of the writer-as-autobiographer, which made him an excellent subject for a full-scale biography like Ellmann's. N E X T+P A G E+| Portrait of the artist as a family man - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE STREETER