BOOKS

By Paul Gray

As a literary phenomenon, there is less to Nancy Reagan than meets the eye. Kitty Kelley is hardly the only slash-and-burn chronicler currently at work. Her smartest move has been to choose living victims for her killer bios; speaking ill of the dead (Albert Goldman on Elvis and John Lennon, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington on Pablo Picasso) is profitable but a tad less sensational. And the instant renown achieved by Kelley's Nancy does not really signal the end of civilization as we have known it. Good, balanced, substantial biographies about controversial figures continue to appear and win notice. Last week Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, written by two obscure authors, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Still, these are undeniably salad days for people interested in reading about scandal in high places. Never mind that this has been true for roughly the past 3,000 years. What of the adultery between a queen and a prince that launched a 10-year war and ruined a nation? The Iliad is the place to bone up on that one. Then there was King David of Israel. One day, while strolling on his rooftop, he spied a woman bathing and summoned her (nudge, wink) to his royal presence. After Bathsheba told him she had become pregnant, the King 1) tried to trick her husband, a loyal if unimaginative soldier, into sleeping with his wife and 2) when that failed, arranged for the unwitting cuckold to be placed in optimum jeopardy during a battle with the Ammonites. Shocking stuff, told with no holds barred in the Old Testament.

For random polymorphous perversity, it would be hard to top The Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (born circa A.D. 69). A classic capital insider, Suetonius served as chief secretary to the Emperor Hadrian and wrote a number of books that certainly sound like best sellers, most of them, unfortunately, now lost. Connoisseurs of the carnal particularly lament the disappearance of his Lives of Famous Whores. But The Twelve Caesars still packs plenty of punch per sesterce: Augustus as an elderly man, relentlessly deflowering virgins, some of them procured for him by his wife; Tiberius training young boys, whom he dubbed his "minnows," to nibble at him lasciviously during his swims.

So there is nothing new about biographies that portray the bad or disreputable along with the good. Outrageous conduct might incur punishment somewhere down the line, but that was an important part of the story. Men could lead mighty armies, forge tribes into nations and still behave like swine; women could embody all the public virtues and pieties and then drop poison into wine goblets or turn into manipulative she-devils in the boudoir. Of course. What else is new?

That tolerance, though, dwindled, thanks in large part to the spread of Christianity in the West. The notion grew that there were admirable lives (hagiographies) to be emulated and horrible examples to avoid. The old curiosity remained, to be sure; how else to explain the legends about Napoleon's sexual capacities and the insatiability of Catherine the Great? But the theological abyss between the saved and the damned strained the pursuit of objective truth. In the 18th century, Dr. Samuel Johnson, a devout Christian and a leading biographer of his age, complained, "There are many who think it an act of piety to hide the faults or failings of their friends, even when they can no longer suffer by their detection; we therefore see whole ranks of characters adorned with uniform panegyrick, and not to be known from one another but by extrinsick and casual circumstances."

Among those paying attention was the young Scotsman James Boswell, whose Life of Johnson (1791) remains the greatest biography in the English language. Boswell revealed nothing particularly scandalous about his subject; it remained for later scholars to exhume hints suggesting Dr. Johnson's fondness for being tied up and whipped. But the overwhelming intimacy of the Life of Johnson -- its almost minute-by-minute portrait of a volatile genius -- sent shock waves throughout the 19th century and caused a number of noteworthy people to guard their privacy and papers with increased diligence.

What they feared was pretty much exactly what followed: the exposing of personal foibles for public inspection. Lord Byron became a celebrity because of his poetry and a reprobate and rogue thanks to allegations about his sexual relations with his half sister. Charles Dickens tried to disguise his relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan, all for naught, since suspicions about its true nature flourished then and ever since. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians wickedly and fastidiously punctured an era of hypocrisy, and the writings of Sigmund Freud unleashed the psychological deluge.

That tide is still running and with it the mistaken notion that weaknesses not only constitute part of human nature but absolutely define it. Suetonius would be amazed at the likes of Kelley and at the prospect of biography as target shooting. When the Roman noted in passing that Augustus had been accused of effeminacy and of softening the hair on his legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells, the information was presented as simply another part of a complex mosaic of personality. Nothing to get excited about or to stop the presses for. Nancy Reagan should have been so lucky.