The Biographer’s Dilemma

I was halfway through Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs when I suddenly went searching through my bookshelf for the book he wrote about Benjamin Franklin. I had read the latter biography when it came out in 2003, and I remembered it fondly. I was trying to figure out why “Steve Jobs,” despite being full of new information about the most compelling businessman of the modern era, was leaving me cold.

It didn’t take long to find the answer. “Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us,” wrote Isaacson early in Chapter One in “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.” Oh, for such a sentence in “Steve Jobs!” Oh, for such an insight.

Let me acknowledge that the task facing Isaacson was daunting. He began his research in early 2009, knowing that Jobs had cancer and that his time remaining on this earth was likely to be brief. Although many books have been written about Jobs, Isaacson was the first writer the Apple co-founder had ever cooperated with. (Indeed, it was Jobs who approached Isaacson about writing his biography.) They spoke more than 40 times, about all aspects of Jobs’s life — including his personal life, which he had always guarded fiercely.

Combine that with the enormousness of Jobs’s accomplishments — from starting the personal computer industry in his garage to creating a half-dozen of the most iconic consumer products ever invented — and it’s practically a miracle that Isaacson’s book was published as quickly as it was. (The official publication date was Monday.)

Its 627 pages is, indeed, chock full of revelations, from Jobs’s difficult relationship with a daughter he fathered in his early 20s — and then abandoned for years — to the lessons he learned from his adoptive father, whom he adored. We go behind the scenes during the boardroom battle that forced Jobs out of Apple in 1985 — as well as the one that brought him back a decade later.

“Steve Jobs” offers so many examples of his awful behavior — incorrigible bullying, belittling and lying — that you’re soon numb to them. Isaacson gives us the back story of all of Jobs’s creations, from the Apple II to the iPad. His descriptions of the more recent products — iPod to iPhone to iPad — have a flat, rushed quality, as if the author was racing to finish before his subject died. Chances are, he was.

That there is such a hunger for information about this most private of men is undeniable; that’s why the book went to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-sellers list practically the moment Jobs died. But facts alone — even previously unknown facts — do not, by themselves, make for great biographies. What is required for that is genuine insight. And that is where “Steve Jobs” falls down.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the bond that developed between subject and writer made it nearly impossible for Isaacson to get the kind of critical distance he needed to take his subject’s true measure. He didn’t just interview Jobs; he watched him die. There is a moving scene near the end of the book, with an emaciated Jobs, lying in bed, leafing through photographs with Isaacson, reminiscing. How can one possibly get critical distance about your subject when such moments are part of your experience of him?

“I think there will be a lot in your book that I won’t like,” Jobs tells Isaacson during that conversation, two months before he died. Isaacson agrees, but I don’t. Jobs’s bad behavior is something he never denied. He rationalized it as his way of getting the most out of people — and Isaacson largely accepts this rationalization. An alternative notion — that Jobs was an emotional child his whole life — is something the readers have to come to themselves, by reading between the lines.

When you think about it, it is rare for a truly great biography to be written about someone who is living; in my lifetime, the only one I can think of is “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses. When the subjects are alive — and Jobs was still alive when this book was finished — biographers always feel them looking over their shoulders, and pushing back. Jobs does that often with Isaacson, rejecting, for instance, the idea that his own abandonment by his natural parents had a major effect on him. Invariably, at such moments, Isaacson backs off and gives Jobs the last word.

There is another kind of distance biographies of the living lack — the distance of time. It can take decades to truly understand the context in which the subject’s life and achievements played out. Often we need to see what happens after he is gone to realize his true impact on our world. Steve Jobs has been dead for three weeks. We’re not even close to that understanding.

In “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson has recounted a life — a big, sprawling, amazing life. It is a serious accomplishment. What remains for future biographers is to make sense of that life.