The Granite and the Rainbow: Towards a New Biography of Louis Becke

Abstract

A biographer’s life, Gilbert and Sullivan might have suggested, is not an easy one. D Jean Clandinin proposes that people shape their lives by stories about themselves and others, yet Paul Murray Kendall, in his The Art of Biography, also cautions that researching and writing those lived stories is like trying to make sense of an incomplete play. This paper explores some of the issues biographers face while researching and writing life stories, using as an example the writer’s current work on the life of Australian author Louis Becke, who was renowned for shaping his own life by stories, altering chronologies and events to add drama to a life story that became difficult to distinguish from his fiction. This paper also explores the nature of the personal relationship that develops between author and subject, for in writing their story, we are writing our story.