David Gilmour spoke about the research behind his work ,The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (2007), as the most exciting part of the process. Sifting through the ruins of Lampedusa’s old home, he said, “I came across letters from his mother, photographs, in one cellar the diary that he’d kept when he was writing The Leopard. Actually finding this and sitting in his house, I knew it wouldn’t happen again.”
In response Pico Iyer—author of a work on Graham Greene, The Man Within My Head (2012), and the Dalai Lama, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008)—said he felt like an impostor. “I’m not a real biographer,” he said. “I did no research. For Graham Greene I read all the books that had been written so I knew what had been covered and then I sat in a room and read his books again and again.” With the Dalai Lama, he said, “I’d known him for 30 years before I did the book.” “People say to be a proper biographer you have to be a conscious enemy of your subject to avoid hagiography,” Davis told the panel, asking Iyer how he managed to keep that in mind while profiling a beloved figure such as the Dalai Lama, who spoke at the festival on Friday. Iyer responded that he was conscious of the burden of such adulation. “Just saying that is almost to diminish him,” he said. “I’m not a Buddhist, I’m not a monk, I’m the opposite—a journalist. I tried to ask him the most difficult questions… To what extent has Tibet died on his watch, how has he managed to transform celebrity culture without being transformed by it. He said, ‘I wonder if I’ve done enough.’” Gilmour, who also wrote a biography of Lord Curzon in 1995 and had worked in Lebanon earlier in his career, said he felt better suited to biography than political writing.
Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author and photographer, whose biography of George Mallory and the team that climbed Everest took 12 years to research and write, began with the statement in defence of the genre. “People have no idea of the amount of work that goes into the construction of a biography,” Davis said. “I had the idea to write it and got an advance in 1999, and then three months later Mallory’s body was found on Everest and, within a year, there would be ten books out.” His publishers were encouraging, he said, and pursued the project with the assurance that they didn’t want any old biography on Mallory—they wanted one written by him.
I read all the books of theses authors that had been written so I knew what had been covered and then I sat in a room and read his books again and again.
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