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enterprise although it does reveal that the task is more complex then
envisioned.
A result of the process, the biography is an achievement that is not
measured solely by its isomorphic relation to the often elusive historical
subject, but by its ability to provide a satisfying, coherent and unifying
account of the evidence that pertains to the biographical subject. Its
literary or interpretative character should not, however, suggest that it is
bereft of methodological rigor. The biographical subject is best construed
as a locus which insists and, as a methodological minimum, is constrained
by two general hermeneutical axioms for arriving at an accurate histori-
cal/interpretive description: 1) "As in literary interpretation, historical truth
is based on constructing an account one beUeves to be a plausible and
meaningful context in which to place various data"^; 2) "No agent can
be eventually said to have meant or done something which he could
never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had
meant or done.""
Viewed philosophically, the biography is, in effect, an attempt to
provide a formal solution to certain methodological and philosophical
problems implicit in the attempt to reconstruct responsibly the life-history
of an individual and to provide meaning for an individual's life by
transmitting personality and character through prose. These include epis-
temological, ontological and historiographical concerns. The practice of
biography is ill-served by the adoption of the masquerade that it is an
exact science. Rather, the task must be seen in the somber realization
that completeness is an idealization since a biography "is a record in
words of something that is as mercurial and as flowing, as compact of
temperament and spirit, as the entire human being.'*^ Hence, from a
practical point of view, one is wise to heed the warning Carlos Baker
offers in his biography of Hemingway, that "No biography can portray
a man as he actually was. The best that can be hoped for is an
approximation, from which all that is false has been expunged and in
which most of what is true has been set forth . . . If Ernest Heming-
.
way is to be made to live again, it must be by virtue of a thousand

" Stuart L. Charme, Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives, (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 150.
" Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,"
History and Theory 8 (1969), 28.
^ Edel, "Biography and the Science of Man," 2.