Biographer Aggie Wiggs (Claire Daines) is stuck. She has been trying for four years to connect with her subjects: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. A real estate developer Niles Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) moves into her neighborhood and begins pestering her, even saying she has chosen two boring subjects. She is annoyed, especially because he immediately presumes they have a connection: She is full of fury at the young man whom she believes caused her young son’s death in an automobile accident. Jarvis, suspected of murdering his first wife, suggests that he understands the biographer’s rage because it is so like his own. I’m reminded of what Paul Murray Kendall, biographer of Richard III, said in The Art of Biography: “Every biography is also an autobiography.”
The Beast in Me, streaming now on Netflix, is a thriller, and I don’t want to spoil it for you. Instead, I will concentrate on the biographer-subject dynamic that I have experienced in writing about living subjects. Jarvis proposes that Wiggs write his biography, giving the public insight into the man who has been vilified in the press. She resists him yet ultimately grasps at the opportunity to produce a book likely to be a bestseller.
This opportunistic side of biography cannot be gainsaid, and biographers are often blamed for exploiting their subjects. But why write a book except to attract an audience, especially if the biographer begins to detect certain resemblances between herself and her subject? Wiggs has not been accused of murder—not yet—but Jarvis shrewdly reads her character, breaking down her resistance to the idea that they are alike.
Wiggs tells Jarvis she is writing an independent biography, and he grudgingly accepts her terms. But when he discovers that she has interviewed an FBI agent investigating Jarvis as a murder suspect, he tells her he no longer wants the biography. She does not back down, saying her publisher is excited about the book, and that if Jarvis withdraws his cooperation, she will write an unauthorized biography which the publisher may like even better.
Jarvis cannot resist continuing with Wiggs anymore than Labour Party leader Michael Foot could resist talking to me as I uncovered his adultery and other compromising facts about him. Like Wiggs spending hours in Jarvis’s house, I did the same with Foot, even sleeping many times in his library on a sofa bed. At one point, he irately demanded I remove certain statements made by his stepdaughter alleging that Foot’s wife, Jill Craigie, was afraid of his rage. I refused, pointing out that I had proof (letters Craigie had written to her stepdaughter) and like Jarvis, Foot backed down.
Foot’s friends assumed all along that I was his lackey, i.e., an authorized biographer, even though I made it clear to Foot at the outset that it was “my book.” He agreed. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was angry when he then tried to manipulate me as Jarvis tries to manipulate Wiggs. Foot, a politician used to have adoring women around him and male friends who shored up his reputation, could not fathom a biographer who would not be as complicit in protecting him as Jarvis’s family and henchman protect him.
When Wiggs says it is her book, when I say it is my book, we, in effect, are projecting—that is turning our subjects into our story as much as our subjects are trying to turn us into theirs. What saves Wiggs, and what I’d like to think saved me, is—to use the current cant—the “receipts,” the evidence painstaking gathered in interviews and in archives.
Yet there is no doubt about the “beast in me,” and the beastly business of biography that Janet Malcolm exposed in The Silent Woman, her book about Sylvia Plath and her biographers. What Malcolm misses, however, is how the subjects of biography are projecting into their biographers—in Jarvis’s case, he strikes out the title of Wigg’s typescript, The Beast in Me and substitutes The Beast and Me.
The conflict between biographers and their living subjects can turn deadly. How so in The Beast in Me, I leave to your viewing pleasure. You will be excited by the twists and turns of the plot and, I hope, reflect on the fraught equation between biographers and their living subjects.