About a month after Lucas Alamán’s death on 2 June 1853 the architect and civil engineer Manuel Gargollo y Parra carried out an inventory and appraisal of the Alamán family home at 23 Ribera de San Cosme, in what was then the northwestern edge of Mexico City, since engulfed by the urban sprawl of the Mexican capital.³ From the roof of this house in the fall of 1847 Alamán had been able to observe the battles between invading American forces and the defenders of Mexico City. He wrote that the Americans had placed two cannon on the roof, thus making of the building a perfect target for the defending Mexican artillery and causing considerable damage to it (Van Young, 2021: 607).

The main house was very large, the two stories laid out in traditional form around a central patio with twenty-one rooms in the residential part on the second floor, occupied at one time by the large family, and a mirador above. There were several ancillary buildings, including stables, a casa de vecindad with ten rooms, and other structures; the ground floor of the main house seems to have been occupied by some sort of commercial establishment as was typical of such large family homes in the period. The “jardín grande” had nearly sixty fruit trees, forty large pines, and ten poplars. An enormous orchard on the property had a further 350 fruit trees, 78 mature cedars, and a variety of flowering plants and bushes. The total value of all this Gargollo put at over 42,000 pesos, not among the most expensive of upper-class homes, but still very substantial. When she died six years later at the age of 54, Alamán’s widow, Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán, possessed personal valuables including diamonds (of which one item was “un fistol de brillantes” evaluated at 500 pesos, which presumably had belonged to her late husband); gold jewelry; silver plate and other silver objects; and paintings (ten framed oils, of which eight were of Christian saints) for a total value of 2,615 pesos-certainly not a huge amount in personal valuables, but again, significant. The self-made inventory of his wealth by Alamán in 1841 in connection with the collapse of the enormous Cocolapan textile factory in Orizaba of which he had been managing partner; a detailed appraisal of his personal library shortly after his death; and his final testament of 1850 all add considerable detail to the picture we have of his wealth through time. The bottom line is that after deductions for his large outstanding debts Lucas Alamán’s fortune amounted to 150,000200,000 pesos at his death. He was a good deal less wealthy than he had been a decade or so earlier, although still a man of the small novohispano and Mexican upper class.⁴

I have mentioned all this by way of suggesting the distance between what a biographer might come to know of a subject’s material life and that subject’s internal life or even his or her daily routines. In this case the person’s property is particularly well-documented since Lucas Alamán was a relatively wealthy man, a private entrepreneur of some ambition, a government official engaged for many years in the formation of economic policy, and the head of a large family, the economic wellbeing of whose children depended in part on inheritance possibilities. These inventories and appraisals by no means exhaust the sources describing Alamán’s property, that of his family, and his business dealings since there is also an abundance of notary documents recording purchases and sales, invoices and receipts among his personal papers, litigation records, business and casual correspondence, and so forth. But although we can draw reasonable inferences about him from his property, such documentary remains tell us barely anything at all about his interior life or even how he lived out of the public spotlight focused on him for more than three decades. There is almost nothing in the way of family correspondence, for example, and since Lucas Alamán was often away from his wife and large family for extended periods on government or private business, and otherwise authored a vast business and political correspondence, one would have assumed that he wrote letters to his wife and adult children. But if he did, virtually none of these letters have survived, their fate unknown. It was only by serendipity that I happened across Alamán’s unfinished and unpublished memorias of 1833 (more on this below), which have proved a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding Lucas Alamán’s life. This was also used by José C. Valadés in his impressive, judicious, and even sympathetic 1938 biography of the statesman.⁵

The documents we do have, as I have said, tell us little about Lucas Alamán’s personal or interior life. For example, since he was a man who seemed to tend toward corpulence, did he struggle with his weight in his later years? As one of the most active men in economic and public affairs of the time, how present was he in the domestic sphere of the Alamán-Castrillo household, and did this change over the course of his married life? What were his relations with his children; how did the deaths of several of them at tender ages affect him emotionally; and what was the nature of his marriage to Narcisa Castrillo?⁶ And what of his connections to his two-decade older half-brother, the child of his mother’s first marriage, the high Church official Dr. Juan Bautista Arechederreta (sometimes de Arechederreta), a canon in the Mexico City cathedral and author of several works on institutions of the Mexican Catholic Church? They had been estranged due to intra-family conflicts over inheritance issues, though after a rapprochement while Lucas was still an adolescent they became close for the last decades of the churchman’s life-but what was the nature of the reconciliation and of the relationship the two developed? (Alamán, 1968; Arechederreta, 1927)⁷ How did he feel about his own father, the Spanish immigrant miner, mining financier (aviador), and merchant Juan Vicente Alamán (1747-1808), barely mentioned in his son’s uncompleted and unpublished memorias of 1833 or his other writings, except to be described as a hard worker? His mother María Ignacia Escalada de Alamán, by contrast, was unambiguously praised by her son as one of the most beautiful women ever seen in Guanajuato, appears frequently in his autobiographical account, and was to play a major role in his life well into his maturity. What were Lucas Alamán’s intimate thoughts and feelings about his religion? We know he was personally very pious and observant, as a young man joined the Third Order of Saint Francis (and must therefore have been interred in Franciscan habit at his death in 1853), was an ardent supporter of the Church politically, and believed it was the only social bond that held Mexicans together at a time when the claims of the “imagined community” were still very weak among them (Anderson, 2006). When the large Alamán family lived on the Ribera de San Cosme did don Lucas stroll contemplatively in the vast gardens and orchard of the property? We may suppose so but do not know. And although we know that he wrote standing at a desk (because Guillermo Prieto tells us so), what hours did he keep as he composed his monumental Historia de Méjico in the final years of his life, and what were his other work habits? (Prieto, 1906). What were his feelings about the three major less-than-successful private entrepreneurial projects that in his last years came to shadow him with a large debt overhang, and at his death in 1853 left him a poorer man than he had been at the age of fifty or so? These included his involvement with British mining investments in Mexico in the 1820s, his purchase and later sale of a hacienda in the Celaya region of which his hopes for it as an income-producing property had been hugely disappointed, and the resounding failure of an enormous textile enterprise he managed in the Orizaba area in the late 1830s and early 1840s. We may suppose these failures provoked disappointment in him, disillusion, or even bitterness; he offers hints about this but never any revealing insights as to his thinking.

The object of this essay is not to provide a thumbnail biography of the great statesman-historian, and still less to answer the questions I have just posed or a host of others that might be asked, but to use the two decades of research I have done on his life to discuss some general questions about the writing of biography while offering some reflections on my own experience as a historian (temporarily) turned biographer.

Why do we write biographies, anyway, and why do people read them? One reason among many is simple curiosity about the lives of the famous and infamous. A biography can be like a good detective story, and while an interest in the details of someone else’s life is not necessarily morbid, we do love the gossipy aspects. Especially if we already know the general shape of the life-course, we hope to experience the frisson of revelation and surprise at points of inflection in the narrative. Then there is the inherent interest that some people hold: great geniuses, great heroes, or great villains whose stories are told again and again. Did we really need a half-dozen or so biographies of Lawrence of Arabia to be convinced of his intelligence, bravery, and tortured personality, or yet another of Leonardo da Vinci to acknowledge his genius?; apparently so. Biographies also help us to make sense of our own lives as we follow a more or less organized narrative through the life stages we may not be able clearly to discern in ourselves, giving us names for them and comparative metrics by which to judge our own advance, accomplishment, or failings. Yet another reason for writing and reading biography lies in its instrumental value: the life story of some extraordinary human being, or of an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, may reveal how things got to be the way they are, and in some cases even how the curve of the future might be bent in one direction or another. Relatedly, biography is also the vehicle of remembrance -a particularly vivid way of not forgetting chunks of the past, of our common history, and thereby working against the impoverishment of universal human experience. My own motives for embarking on a two-decade project (as it turned out) of biographical research and writing conflate most of these.

Biography as a sub-genre of academic history writing once reigned, if not supreme, then at least co-equal with diplomatic and political history. Changing fashions (for example, the onrushing current of cultural history from the 1960s or so); the internal logic of research and interpretation, which on one end of the focus continuum has nourished greater granularity and on the other “big history;” and the leakage from other intellectual disciplines -these trends have all pushed biography by academic historians aside not as exhausted, exactly, since there are always more lives to chronicle, but as old-fashioned “great man (or woman) history”. This happened even as the craft of life-writing, and of its solipsistic sister autobiography, flourished outside the walls of academia and continued to attract readers as they had always done. This creaky old genre still has a lot of juice in it and may be making a comeback among academic historians, however, as the essays in this collection and recent works by a number of professional historians suggest.

A brief word about how I came to write a biography may throw light on some of my observations about such a project, and my frustrations with the process. I began my professional life as an economic historian and then moved on to study the Mexican Independence movement primarily as social and cultural history. In the latter research I became increasingly interested in the interiority of the historical actors I was studying. Although I felt it plausible with the abundant primary documentary materials at hand to make some statements about religious, political, and community culture, I felt I could never quite penetrate to the motives that placed any given insurgent in the line of fire at any given moment. The more intimate mental processes of Indigenous peasants and other insurgents remained inaccessible to me, their mental lives almost entirely opaque. I wanted to know their thought processes, not just as exemplars of the mentalité of certain groups formed by cultural environments, social forces, and historical experience, but the particular and idiosyncratic mental world of individuals and how this interacted with broader currents to produce action- choices regarding political violence, regime loyalty, passivity, criminality (Van Young, 2012).⁸ With overwhelmingly illiterate people this was a vain hope. Apart from relatively rare statements about circumstance and motive, many of which were suspect because of peoples’ desire to exculpate themselves before the military and judicial authorities to evade punishment, they are documented almost exclusively as objects. They figure in trial proceedings, criminal records, the reports from the field of royalist officers or the observations of other individuals who could write, and so forth, although one catches occasional glimpses of individuals’ cognitive and emotional processes.

In the face of this frustration it occurred to me that a study of the insane, based upon clinical observations and interpretations of mentally ill people by trained physicians, due to the richness of the documentation might furnish materials for an intimate access to the sort of interiority within a specific historical context that I was interested in exploring, albeit for people at the fringes of the accepted mental norms of their era. I should make clear that it was not necessarily the aberrations of the “normal” psychology of individuals that concerned me one way or another, but the interiority itself. Then again, apart from the inherent interest in the disturbed minds of the most floridly mad, this would obviously involve some sophisticated reverse engineering to see how individual asylum patients (internees, really, since there was little in the way of clinical intervention at the time and place I chose to study, although therapeutic ones such as water treatments were applied) arrived at their condition, their psychiatric and medical histories, the content of their delusional structures, if any, and other aspects of their internal lives. But after some preliminary research in the archives of the Castañeda Insane Asylum in Mexico City embracing the period 1910-1930 or so and with the initial plan to carry the research back into the later colonial period, I abandoned this project for various reasons.⁹

A fork in the road of my research thus brought me to biography as a more plausible entry point to an intimate portrait of an historical actor. I settled on Lucas Alamán because in doing my work on Mexican Independence I was familiar with his magisterial Historia de Méjico, I had become interested in the roots of Mexican conservatism, and I was curious about the political history of the country during the early republican era. The irony in choosing to research the biography of an elite political actor, of course, is that it did not get me any closer to the mental lives of the common people whose actions during the insurgency of 1810-1821 had initially spurred my interest in the question of interiority. And little did I suspect in settling on Alamán that I had selected a very reserved, unself-revealing personality; there is very little in the way of his intimate personal papers except for the 1833 memorias. So, while the public man is amply, indeed exhaustively documented because of his high political profile, the private man is not. One of my principal frustrations with the biography I eventually published is that except for what I considered conservative speculation based upon written evidence, I was not able to penetrate very far into his personality -that is, his interior emotional and cognitive life as opposed to the self-presentation he fashioned for others. While Lucas Alamán was not exactly a sphynx, he might as well have been for all the self-revelation he offered the world.

On the other hand, it has never become clear to me whether Alamán was particularly unself-revealing compared with other public figures of his time. He himself observed in the introductory passage of his 1833 memorias that the tradition of memoir and autobiography, or even the keeping of journals, was not developed in the Hispanophone world in contrast with Britain and France. And in general, despite the centrality of the individual personality in both the Romantic and Liberal intellectual-artistic currents, public figures of the time did not go around spilling their guts as modern memoirists and autobiographers do, maintaining a clearer barrier between their public and private lives. So it may be that my hopes to penetrate Lucas Alamán’s interior world were thwarted because my expectations were misplaced. I would, however, maintain the position that at the very least he was notably guarded and unself-revealing as a personality.

The process of writing a biography is familiar to writers of history, and as Henry James wrote in the second epigraph above may even be seen as a sub-genre of that discipline (professional biographers might dispute this); or at least the two forms are deeply entangled. Most historians, I would venture to say, write mini-biographies of the women and men who populate the worlds they portray.¹⁰ The problem for the historian who tunnels under the wall that divides the two pursuits (in the United States, for example, Pulitzer Prizes are every year awarded separately in both history and biography, and bookstores will often have distinct sections devoted to each) is that of upscaling from the mini-biography-a few sentences, paragraphs, or even a book chapter or journal article-to a long-format, book-length study. As a professional historian who has written in the modes of economic history and then in social-cultural history, I must confess that I have found little difference between working in those forms and writing a life. The focus, scale, and themes are different, of course, but the process is much the same. (There is a major sub-genre of biography, of course: the literary biography, which perhaps stands in relation to biography more generally as dentistry does to medicine- no disrespect intended.)

The most basic elements shared by history- and life-writing are the centrality of the passage of time and an organizing observer (an author) to represent it. This is one way to define the narrative process; that is, the arrangement of sequential actions/happenings over time, organized according to some principle of priority-what to include, what to leave aside-out of the chaos of life, the buzz of reality. Both are basically forms of puppetry, history typically more distanced and Olympian in viewpoint, biography more like ventriloquism, but both require interpretive intervention on the part of the writer, the observer doing the organizing. Many educated readers of historical works think that the “history” of a time and place is simply waiting to be discovered, that all the historian need do is scrape away the dead leaves and detritus covering it and -voila!- there it is to be inscribed on paper. A more sophisticated view is that writing history is more like assembling a jigsaw puzzle: there are many pieces, but they fit together in a predetermined pattern to make a coherent image. My own experience in writing economic, social, and cultural history is that the process is more like creating a mosaic image from many uniform pieces of glass or stone-the only vaguely determinative factor is color, and the assemblage may take any number of forms (within limits, of course) depending upon the goals, presuppositions, and methodological inclinations of the writer. On the other hand, I reasoned, a biography has a clear linear narrative, a path for the writer to follow laid out by the subject’s life from birth to death, or points in between, even though the path might be obscured because over-grown with weeds or might disappear altogether only to re-emerge later on. The clarity, breadth, and direction of the path, and therefore the coherence of the narrative and the revelatory value of the biography, depend upon the documentation of the life, of course -the sources, whether written or in other mediums, or oral accounts by those who know or knew the biographee- left by the subject her/himself, and/or by others. The further back in time the subject lived, if beyond the reach of one or two lives, the more the entire enterprise depends upon the accidental survival of paper or other material artifacts. But by no means does the story tell itself.

The Greek mathematician Archimedes (287-212 B.C.) is credited with saying “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world”. What the biographer needs is leverage -the capacity, in other words, inherent as much in the imaginative force of the biographer himself as in the sources, to extract as much information as possible out of a given source, resistant though it may be; to move the subject’s life, as it were, with the most effective instrument.¹¹ The biographer’s ability to do this depends upon the degree of inferential freedom he allows himself. Inferences about a subject’s life, especially her/his interior life, are typically informed by some implicit or explicit conceptual arsenal, or a theory if one wishes to elevate the process. The concept applied is the lever used to lift the meaning of an historical actor’s life out of the morass of happenstance, contradiction, and conflicting opinions about the subject. To extend the Archimedian trope a bit further, if the lever is too long-that is, if the structure of inference is too far removed in cultural or historical terms from the object, the lever is quite likely to snap and leave an implausible scramble of results. Since “meaning” is a relational property in which one thing is explicated in terms of another, the concepts applied are typically relational ones.

Three frameworks that immediately come to mind of a number of possibilities are the aesthetic, Marxian, and psychobiographical (a subsub-genre, if you will), none of them mutually exclusive, although even when combined one would be given priority over the others. Most rarefied of these (and perhaps frailest in its interpretive leverage) is the aesthetic, as those personalities to whom it might be applied would certainly claim for themselves, since it is a highly elitist attitude and life-style. Oscar Wilde, for example, is said to have lived his life as though it were itself a work of art: his predilections, selfpresentation, and philosophy, not to mention his works (for example, his famous essay “The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing” [1891]) all point in this direction.¹² The Marxian framework has produced some major works in biography, as for example Isaac Deutscher’s (1907-1967) three volumes (1954-1963) on the life of Leon Trotsky. There is information of a personal nature about its subject in this sprawling work, but the primary driver of the narrative is the life of a great political figure within a specifically communist revolutionary context-a work about a Marxist by a Marxist. I find this to be reductionistic to an extreme degree since in this framework individual thought and action are in large measure (not entirely, to be sure) reduced to social forces determined by the relations of production, or in this case at a remove in a massive political upheaval ostensibly fueled by the logical outcome of conflicting forces rooted in those relations. My good friend, the late Argentine economic historian Juan Carlos Garavaglia, who taught in Mexico for a number of years, left me with a number of fond memories, among which was the aphoristic injunction to remember that “people have psychologies as well as sociologies”.

This brings me to the question of the psychobiographical framework for biography, to which I devote somewhat more space here since I find it the most interesting, albeit the most risky, and it is closest to my own preoccupations as a biographer. The psychobiographical framework is less of a straitjacket in writing a life than the Marxian approach, for example, since it is specifically geared toward understanding individuals, the objective of biographical writing, rather than laying out broad historical generalizations as instantiated in the life of a single person. But in its many possible degrees of interpretive freedom also lie a great deal of risk, that of over-interpretation in the service of a decidedly slippery psychological model. As an explicitly identified sub-genre of biography (which may itself, as Henry James asserted, be viewed as a sub-genre of history) this dates from the works of Sigmund Freud and obviously employs psychoanalytic concepts (although other psychological models have been applied) to plumb the depths of historical actors’ minds and motivations. It is a tool that can have either a blunt or finely honed edge; that is to say, the conditions of its applicability and the subtlety of its application, and therefore the degree of its credibility, have varied widely. It has always seemed to me a very promising approach that has produced very mixed results, demonstrating its “idiosyncratic nature” (Kushner, 1993:20).¹³ There are a number of problems with this framework, of which I mention only three here. The first is the proposition that psychoanalytic models of psychological structure and function are transhistorical and transcultural-that they apply equally well to all cultures at all times in history, a problematic assumption. The second problem is that a knowledge paradigm developed and mostly applied in a clinical setting in which a dialogic process between patient and clinician is absolutely essential to the efficacy of treatment, is often applied to a dead subject who cannot answer back, elucidate, or progress emotionally; when it’s a live subject the published analysis becomes a fait accompli of which discussion may produce more heat than light. This is not exactly a static situation, since the biographer, try to avoid it though he might, will almost certainly paste some emotional projections of his own onto the subject of the study.¹⁴ But the biographee cannot object or correct for this. And a third problem is that psychobiograpical interpretations tend overwhelmingly to be directed at pathologies or abnormalities rather than talents or virtues.

There are, as I have mentioned, successes and failures within this framework, as there are with any such practice. Freud himself produced mixed results with his efforts in the field. His psychoanalytic interpretation of a childhood dream of Leonard da Vinci’s famously went awry when he mistranslated the species of a bird that as a young child Leonardo dreamt to have landed at the rim of his crib and stuck its tail in his mouth. Freud translated the word for the bird as a vulture when it was described by its dreamer as a kite, thus greatly changing the meaning of the dream (Freud, 1957).¹⁵ While it is true that this mistake pertains to the translation of a single word and not to the method more generally, it does point to the fact that the interpretation of symbols on which much of psychobiographical interpretation often rests can be problematic. An even more famous misstep by the father of psychoanalysis is his questionable collaboration as an elderly eminence with the American diplomat William C. Bullitt on a psychobiography of President Woodrow Wilson, a project with a fascinating history of its own. Critics have insisted that Bullitt was working out his personal animus toward the former president for having dismissed him as an advisor during the Versailles Treaty talks in 1919. The book, in other words, has been seen by such critics as a vituperative hatchet-job motivated by a personal vendetta, in which the actual degree of Freud’s collaboration has been a matter of considerable controversy (Freud and Bullitt, 1967; Campbell, 2008).¹⁶ The point here is that psychohistorical studies generally, and psychobiographical works in particular, are peculiarly marked by a contradiction: while the theoretical parameters are well-defined and fairly strict, and the conceptual arsenal well understood, the interpretive leeway, not to say the inexactitude or incompleteness of the sources, can produce very floppy results. On the other hand, Freud’s work on the psychopathology of the schizophrenic German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), based exclusively on a reading of Schreber’s own book about his illness, was more successful, perhaps because Schreber was so palpably nuts and his description of his own symptoms so detailed (Schreber, 2020; Freud, 2003).¹⁷ And there have been some notable successes in the sub-genre of psychobiography, a fine example being John E. Mack’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1976 biography of T.E. Lawrence, in which the psychoanalytic concepts are applied with care and delicacy to produce a nuanced study (Mack, 1998).¹⁸

Where my own biographical work is concerned, I have been attracted by the psychobiographical approach, but in the grip of early enthusiasm for the method I may have flown too close to the sun.¹⁹ In dealing with the life of Lucas Alamán, I promised myself at the outset that even were I to encounter sufficient sources to invite psychobiographical interpretations (which I did not) I would distance myself from making assertions, limiting myself to suggestive observations and questions. When in his unpublished memorias of 1833 and some correspondence, for example, Alamán mentions his mother’s unusual attractiveness and her other qualities while scarcely mentioning his father at all, and certainly with little emotional charge, an extravagant psychobiographical interpretation might have drawn conclusions about Oedipal tensions within the nuclear family and attempted to extend these into aspects of his adult life. Here the lever would have snapped from the weight of over-interpretation. So what I did was to stick close to the surface of the text, noting Alamán’s obvious admiration and affection for his mother and a certain coolness -or if not coolness, blandness- toward his father, and leaving the conclusions to the reader.

In the end I believe that a skeptical, reasonable methodological eclecticism is the best approach to the writing of biography, characteristics that the best biographies, of which there are many examples, seem to display. Not adhering to a strict psychoanalytic agenda (or any other framework, for that matter) in biographical writing may cost a work some methodological edge, but gains for it flexibility and accessibility. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin does not shy away from the subject’s complicated psychology but handles it in common-sense terms comprehensible to any educated layman. The same is true of Edmund Morris’s three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt (Bird and Sherwin, 2005; Morris, 2010).

Neither of these works is psychobiography as such but still allow ample room for the psychological dimension of their subjects.

As with the question of how much detail in a biography is too much (discussed below), there arises here the question of how much psychologizing is too much. Unless it is handled judiciously, the “psycho” in psychobiography can land with a thud and turn out to be just as reductionist as an injudicious Marxian approach. This is a tendency of some of the writing on Oscar Wilde, for example, even of a masterful work such as Richard Ellman’s. Studies of the Irish writer may over-emphasize Wilde’s closeted homosexuality, since the scandal of his relationship with the young English nobleman Lord Alfred Douglas, his trial, and his downfall was the cause célèbre of the late Victorian age. What is just as interesting about Wilde, of course, is that as an Irishman he was to a great degree an outsider looking in from the periphery, making his way in English society, successful at beating the English at their own literary and social games- up to a point. There are monumental biographical works that almost completely eschew efforts at plumbing the interior lives of their subjects, concentrating on their thinking, activities, and the historical context in which they lived and worked. Such a study is the biography of John Maynard Keynes by Robert Skidelsky, largely devoted to Keynes’s economic ideas and the times in which these developed-a complex portrait of a major historical and intellectual figure without much in the way of psychological discussion at all (Skidelsky, 2005).²⁰

A casual encounter with a written source of some kind may even precede the choice of a subject for a biography; this was certainly the case with my research on Lucas Alamán since I read parts of his magisterial Historia de Méjico while working on the history of the Mexican independence movement and knew something of him from general reading on the early republican period in Mexico. As I have already noted, given my ambition to write a biography by way of penetrating the interior life of a subject rather than simply narrating and analyzing an event or historical epoch, it is ironic that I chose Lucas Alamán since as a personality he was reserved to the point of opacity. There are generic types of sources that many biographers use; a catalog of these would not serve my purposes here, but I will briefly mention a few. In the case of a person as intensely involved in national politics as Alamán, in both ministerial and other positions, there are bound to be government documents that illuminate his career: official correspondence; reports he either wrote himself or edited; government newspapers; documents related to his appointments, to his relations with the national congress, and the administration of his ministries, complaints against him from other public officials or private citizens, and so forth. Biographers will also often lean on press accounts of public events and the individuals involved in them, and for this period of Mexican history such sources have proved especially important to historians, as well. Although I used these, I did not rely much upon the effusions of the fourth estate since the journalistic conventions of the time dictated that stories in the major Mexico City and other newspapers (including those founded, financed, or written for by Alamán himself) tended to be anonymous, opinionated, and deeply slanted politically. In his case his massive private business correspondence turned out to be especially important in documenting his thinking and opinions since a certain casualness crept into it over decades in which some insights about the writer’s personality and private life emerged.

These were primarily with a friend and business associate in Celaya, with his English business agents in London, and with the Neapolitan nobleman, the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, for whom Alamán worked as factotum in Mexico over a quarter century in the management and liquidation of the numerous properties the Duque held as lineal descendant and heir of Hernán Cortés. There are also Alamán’s own historical writings, principally his vast Historia de Méjico (5 vols., 1849-1852), in which there appear a few personal references, but which really are more important for grasping the tone of his mind.

One documentary source that I encountered unexpectedly is so specific to Alamán that I do not offer it here in the spirit of suggestion for other biographers, nor that of a general comment on the craft; but it warrants comment, nonetheless. This is the unfinished and unpublished memoir (cited in footnote 5 above) he began to write while he was in hiding in Mexico City during 1833-1834 to evade prosecution for his role in the judicial murder of Vicente Guerrero in early 1831 as well as other crimes alleged against him while he, Alamán, was principal minister in the Anastasio Bustamante government from 1830 to 1832. This was a period in which the practice of memoir writing in the Spanish world was not common, as I have noted above. Furthermore, he wrote that his memorias were not intended for publication, so they constituted a sort of message in a bottle to his heirs and general posterity, and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity. Over the next fifteen years this spare autobiographical fragment of about thirty pages morphed into the history of Mexican independence for which he is known. Initially he meant to write in some detail of the Guanajuato of his youth, his childhood, his own family, the great mining families of Mexico more generally, and the social customs of late colonial Mexico. There is much valuable information about his family background and the social customs of the time, but he only got so far with these themes and then either changed his mind or ran out of time and never completed the memorias.²¹ Truncated though it is, his autobiographical text is a kind of Rosetta Stone with which to make some sense of Lucas Alamán’s behavior. The tone of the text is elegiac, melancholy, and nostalgic. In it he recounts the decline of the family fortune, including the extinction of a noble title; the wealth taken from the silver mines of Guanajuato, as so many other colonial fortunes were, but lost through carelessness, fecklessness, bad luck, and excessive reproductive vigor over several generations.

It is my view that despite his clear and even prescient thinking about political economy, in his private investments he was pursuing not only material gain but was also trying to compensate for the sense of status loss he had experienced in the decline of his family from his grandparents’ time to his own, which comes through clearly in this text. Lucas Alamán was even willing to overleverage himself, as we would call it today, by assuming economic risks he could not cover and leaving others to hold the bag. Yet as far as I can tell, he was an honest official who never took bribes and never used his position as an insider to make a profit on government business.

The use of this sort of very personal document -as with autobiography, journals, personal correspondence, and even personal experience dressed as fiction, as in many novels- raises the question of the unreliable narrator, whether conscious or unconscious; that is, a narrator (in this case Lucas Alamán) who either shades the truth, misinforms, or outright lies to the reader.²² A writer or memoirist fooling her/himself would fall under this rubric, certainly by effect if not intent. Such a writer might consciously prevaricate or distort for any number of motives: to settle scores, for the purpose of self-vindication, for self-promotion, and so forth. Apart from conscious misrepresentation, unreliable narration would seem inherent in all first-person accounts and would in any case be difficult to distinguish from the point of view to be expected arising from subjectivity. The biographer may even be able to gain some leverage in decoding a personality by analyzing the mistakes or misrepresentations in the subject’s writing and comparing them to external, more “reliable” sources. Alamán was certainly no Baron von Münchausen. He made mistakes in his memorias, principally of a genealogical nature, but to the degree I have been able to check his statements, recollections, and impressions in “objective” modern historical writings, they seem truthful and accurate (Brading, 1971; Ladd, 1976). In the end there seems to be no way around this problem except reasonable caution on the part of the life-writer.

There are two issues relating to sources that I want to discuss before moving on to a brief discussion about how much detail in a biography is too much, and then to a conclusion. The first of these concerns a narrative strategy (or if one prefers, an anti-narrative strategy) I employed in my book on Alaman that arose less from an abundance of documentary sources than from their absence. Although it was relatively easy to document his public life in terms of actions, it proved difficult to plumb his internal life, as I have said. An admittedly rather crude model of Alamán’s worldly presence would progress inward from the level of his actions, mostly observable since he lived so much of his life in the public eye; to his words, both uttered and written; and then to his interior life, the last being the hardest to get at. But he wrote so much, especially in private and business correspondence, and in his historical works, that I felt I might at least try to gauge the quality of his mind, and demonstrate some of his preoccupations, by taking the liberty of quoting his words at greater length than one might ordinarily expect to find in a biography. Had he been more self-revealing in a philosophical or emotional register I might not have felt compelled to do this; but to get at the man -at least at his thinking and at the style of his thought- this seemed to me justified. The fact that he was a leisurely and eloquent writer was of some help here in forestalling the boredom some readers might have experienced; whether this was a good strategy or a bad one I leave to readers to decide.

The second technique I employed I have not seen much, or perhaps at all, in the many biographies I have read, and stands at the exact opposite end of the evidentiary continuum from what I discussed in the preceding paragraph. Life-writing will inevitably pause at plateaus in the subject’s life to offer a more intense discussion of this or that aspect. In writing of Lucas Alamán’s life I expanded these plateaus into more extensive interventions; this had to do not with the absence or thinness of sources on certain aspects of Alamán’s life but their abundance, which allowed me a certain experimental freedom in dealing with several important aspects of his life, chiefly in the economic realm. There are four analytical chapters in the book (aside from the final two, which discuss the writing of his monumental Historia de Méjico): on the life of his elder half-brother, the churchman Juan Bautista Arechederreta; Alamán’s involvement with British capital in the 1820s in an attempt to revive the silver mining industry; his relations over nearly thirty years with the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone; and his embroilment in the textile enterprise of Cocolapan, near Orizaba, between 1836 and 1843. Although the chapters on the mining episode and the textile enterprise are placed roughly where they occurred during his life, they share with the much more temporally extended treatments of his brother and his relations with Terranova y Monteleone the characteristic that they were plucked out of the life-stream, as it were, and were not narrated as he lived them, stretched out over a number of years and naturally mixed in with the other events-personal, intellectual, political-of his life. I have therefore referred to them as analytical, since these almost discrete essays were thematically rather than narratively driven and cut across the chronology of his life rather than flowing within it. What has been lost in structuring the book this way, of course, is the way in which the events of these extended episodes collided with other aspects of Alamán’s life; but what was gained was a more coherent picture of some key moments and activities. I do not feel I can necessarily recommend this technique to other biographers, but it has lent what I felt an interesting texture to a long book, and beyond that has illuminated important extended moments in his life in a way that would not have been possible had the events in these experiences been diluted according to the way he actually lived them.²³

My own answer to this question is that it would be unlikely for a biographical work to include too much detail. This is not exactly what Montaigne was saying in the third epigraph above, but it is close. It has been said that Plutarch included in his biographies of famous statesmen of the ancient world many anecdotes and trivial factoids because he felt them to be more revealing of his great figures’ lives and personalities, perhaps, than a simple recounting of their public accomplishments. Lucas Alamán himself struck a similar note in the opening pages of his unfinished and unpublished memorias of 1833. Here he suggested with typical density and eloquence several important ideas at the same time: that the tradition of the personal memoir was weak in the Hispanophone world; that such documents could cast much light on the workings of history; that large events may have trivial beginnings; and also that a famous person’s life outside the glare of the public spotlight might show more about character than the public persona projected by that individual. He wrote:

There are, of course, reasons why lots of detail in a biography might be too much detail: it may try the reader’s patience if deployed in a boring fashion; it may incur the risk of needless repetition and irrelevance; it may run up against the physical requirements of publication. In my own case, I fell afoul of this last hazard. The original manuscript of my book on Alamán was 650,000 words long. The publisher, Yale University Press, asked that I cut it down to 350,000 words, or almost in half. Publication of the entire original work would have entailed two volumes, each of 600 or so pages. The publication costs and the sale price of such a work would have been prohibitive and the market correspondingly reduced (not that it was likely to be a bestseller, anyway), especially for a scholarly work on a Mexican statesman whom writers outside Mexico, Mexican historians, and the educated Mexican reading public, are unlikely ever to have heard of. I believe the final published version of the book holds up well, but I also believe that the book is considerably impoverished by the cuts I felt it necessary to make, precisely the deletion of revelatory details about his life. One example among many is the fascinating episode in which the twenty-year-old Alamán embroiled himself in a controversy in the capital’s Diario de México in 1812-1813 with the much older Fermín de Reygadas, a well-known mining engineer, astronomer, and ardent pro-royalist pamphleteer. The young Alamán heaped scorn on Reygadas’s attempt to refute Copernican theory in favor of an antiquated geocentric model of the solar system, causing sparks to fly for two or three issues of the journal. I devoted some pages to this episode in my manuscript, but scarcely a dozen lines in the book. The incident demonstrated the young man’s burgeoning scientific culture in his command of Copernican theory, his precocity, and his intellectual combativeness -hardly insignificant details, and a foreshadowing of his style when fully mature.

Abundant details about minor aspects of a biographee’s life give one a picture of how people notable for their political, cultural, or other accomplishments lived their lives on a daily basis, providing biographers and their readers a 360-degree picture of how they fit into the world and satisfying our natural curiosity about how great (or even humble) people live. Information about how such individuals carried on their domestic lives, for instance, helps to round out the image of their public lives and may suggest interactions and contradictions between what they do in private, when in robe de chambre, and when in armadura ó peluca blonda. Where the subject’s interior life is concerned, it would be a rare case (except perhaps in the arts) in which public words or actions take on a confessional nature, whereas the details of daily life and other “trivialities” may well be more revealing. Assuming the data are there, of course, the decision about how much detail to include in a biography depends upon the sort of study one hopes to produce.

All this basically boils down to the question of how to interpret a life. What does a life mean (again, “meaning” being a relational property) in terms of its significance to larger historical currents, its achievements according to the conventional standards of the subject’s times or our own, its connection to other people, and to the figure her/himself? Assuming we seek to be as objective as possible rather than settle a score, as William C. Bullitt is alleged to have done, or advance some other nefarious project, what criteria do we apply to evaluate our effort? The ways in which a life affects and is affected by larger historical currents may not be obvious, but since biographical subjects are often prominent people whose public life is more or less well-documented, as in Lucas Alamán’s case, this should be the easiest aspect to deal with. Nor are the achievements of a life necessarily clear immediately: often they are, or with the passage of time become so. Somewhat more difficult to ascertain is the quality of connections to other people. And still more difficult may be the uncovering of secrets the subject of the biography does not wish to reveal. My obligation to the truth of the biography, for example, would have included “outing” Lucas Alamán had I found evidence that he was a closeted gay man, or exposing him for having taken large bribes while in his ministries, or having been an abusive parent. The biographer thus becomes a snoop, and the subject of a biography has in a sense waived her or his right to privacy by being prominent and being dead.

Finally, absent autobiography, memoirs, or a particularly self-revelatory body of personal correspondence, the meaning of a biographical subject’s life to himself is the hardest to get at, especially where the personality of the biographee is as opaque as Alamán’s. The recognizability to him of the portrait I paint, were he around to read it, might be one standard, but an impossibly high bar to clear. I can never hope to portray him as he would have portrayed himself had he written a complete and relatively honest autobiography, nor should I.²⁵ It is not that his self-representation would necessarily be “wrong”, but it might be several degrees askew from how other people, including me, saw him. We are often surprised, after all, to find that the impressions we create in other people are quite different from our own. So his complete selfrecognizability in what I write of him, or what any biographer writes of any subject, cannot be the measure of success. What, then, do I owe to Lucas Alamán as well as to my readers? What we owe is to try to see them in 360 degrees, the bad with the good; to be sympathetic to them but not indulgent; to look at evidence about their lives with caution but not skepticism; to try to triangulate on major aspects of their characters and activities that might be in dispute rather than take isolated sources at face value; and to try as hard as we can to see through their eyes the times in which they lived. If we fail in this program it is doubtful that those subjects of biography who have passed from this vale of tears will come back to hold us accountable, although book reviewers might; if we succeed even a bit by all these criteria we will in great measure have fulfilled our obligations to them. And in finding the meaning of a life we need to acknowledge that the writing of biography is a peculiarly humanistic undertaking, more intuition than science.