1993

The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner #ABookADayInMay No.1

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I was really hoping that Madame Bibi Lophile would do her A Novella a Day in May challenge again, and lo and behold the first post has gone live. I’ve joined in the past couple of years – I’m going to start this year too, though won’t make promises of completing. (My eyes are so, so, so much better than they were in December/January, when the thought of being able to read a book a day would have been completely impossible.) I’ve decided to call mine A Book a Day in May because they won’t all be novellas – for instance, the first book I’ve chosen is non-fiction.

I hadn’t heard of Joan Givner when I picked up The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer (1993) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago. I haven’t even read anything by either of the authors that Givner wrote biographies of – Katherine Anne Porter and Mazo de la Roche. But I’m so glad I read this memoir, because it is brilliant.

It’s very unconventional, in a way that intrigued me enough to buy it in Richard Booths’ bookshop. The portrait is told through 381 numbered short sections – rather like 381 different note cards. Indeed, it sounds like that’s exactly what they are. Often there is a short series of sections which connect and tell more or less the same story, but equally the next one might splinter off to a different theme, different country, different time. They aren’t in chronological order by any means, and we follow Givner at various times through a childhood in northern England, through an unsuccessful first marriage in America, through the research and publication of her biographies, and through their reception.

Though the title tells us this is a self-portrait of a literary biographer, Givner’s work isn’t given priority over her experiences as a wife, a mother, a teacher, a colleague – and perhaps most of all, a daughter. With unflinching honesty – and it does seem honest, even while it is deeply subjective – Givner portrays her parents’ keenness for respectability, their pride in her getting into grammar school, their bewilderment at many of her life choices (including her divorce). And most vivid of all is the portrait of her mother in the present – given to slightly foolish sweeping statements, or contradicting her past self. It is a fascinating depiction of a mother/daughter relationship throughout the decades that is neither close nor estranged, but inescapable even with an ocean between them. Givner looks at family, and her place in it, with the same remorseless quest for precision that she apparently had as a biographer:

When I went to the U.S. I spent the summer with my first husband’s family. It was my first experience of a peaceable, harmonious family in which members went their own ways uninterfering, and uninterfered with, treating each other with a kind of friendly respect.

In my own home, relations were combative, adversarial. Every act – even the simplest one of eating a meal, choosing a helping of this over that – was subjected to criticism, moral disapproval, and ultimately, strident quarreling. Granted, this sometimes – not by any means frequently – dissolved into laughter.

I think I had always suspected that my family life was more unpleasant than most and something to escape from. I did escape and yet was crippled by it, still.

But the title of the book isn’t lying. As it progresses, we see more and more about her experiences as a biographer. If I had read one of her biographies, or even knew a bit more about Katherine Anne Porter (who figures much larger than Mazo de la Roche) then maybe this would have been even richer, but I still loved it. There isn’t much about how she went about writing the biography, or what to include or exclude, but there is a lot about the research – about the people she meets and interviews, and often leaves feeling embittered or affronted. No less a figure than Eudora Welty writes to say that she is concerned that Givner’s motives are malice and busybodiness.

Givner does not spare herself in Self-Portrait. Though she may defend herself at times, she also includes negative reviews of her writing without comment. We get fascinating glimpses of a Katherine Anne Porter conference where she is berated from the stage by more than one speaker. Evidently she is a controversial figure in this world, and records the controversy.

Somehow, even with a format of those 381 different sections, Self-Portrait never feels disjointed. Givner expertly always gives us enough information to know where we are at all times, or at least to manage without knowing all the context. I suspected that I would find the book maddening or sublime, and it was the latter. More than that, it was a compelling page-turner. I was reminded of Kate Briggs’ excellent This Little Art about translation, which is written in a similar way, with vignettes following one another. In fact, I could see Self-Portrait fitting in well as a Fitzcarraldo reprint.

What an experience, and what a great start to A Book a Day in May!

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

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My love for Janet Malcolm continues apace. I’ve been buying up her books but initially hadn’t bothered with The Silent Woman (1993) because I’m not especially interested in Sylvia Plath. Then somebody told me, probably on here, that it’s much more about the ethics and process of writing a biography than it is about Plath – and that sounded completely up my street.

Malcolm sets out the key moral quandary at the heart of writing and reading biographies, and she puts it so well that I’m going to quote a long passage:

The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

One of the catalysts for this exploration was Anne Stevenson’s 1989 biography of Plath, Bitter Fame, which Malcolm describes as ‘by far the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies of Plath written to date’. This was 1993, and I’m sure plenty have been written since – but Malcolm tracks down all the biographers and memoirists who had written about Plath, critically and sympathetically, from personal experience and none. Because, though Malcolm admires Stevenson’s book, it was apparently received very critically – because it is sympathetic to Ted Hughes.

This is all before Hughes published Birthday Letters and the tide started to turn a little on seeing him as the villain of the piece. At the time, any criticism towards Plath or sympathy towards Hughes was seen as giving into the dominant force of the Plath estate: Olwyn Hughes. She is the most vivid character in Malcolm’s book. As Ted Hughes’ sister, she is the gatekeeper to Plath’s works and archives, and tries fiercely and hopelessly to determine the narrative. Well, again, Malcolm puts it best:

After three and a half years of acquaintance with Olwyn – of meetings, telephone conversations, and correspondence – I cannot say I know her much better than I did when she first appeared to me in her letter. But I have never seen anything in her of the egotism, narcissism, and ambition that usually characterise the person who welcomes journalistic notice in the belief that he can beat the odds and gain control of the narrative. Olwyn seems motivated purely by an instinct to protect her younger brother’s interests and uphold the honour of the family, and she pursues this aim with reckless selflessness. Her frantic activity makes one think of a mother quail courageously flying in the face of a predator to divert him from the chicks scurrying to safety.

And there is some truth to the reputation Stevenson’s book apparently had. She is so beset upon by Olwyn, every word of the biographer examined and questioned, that (in interviews with Malcolm) she describes the experience of writing the book as a kind of trauma. In many cases, she gave up. But when Malcolm meets and interviews the others who have written about Plath, she also pierces through all of their veneers, finding the real moral and personal choices behind their books (as well as the academic or supposedly objectives ones).

Malcolm is always arrestingly honest in a way that makes it seem like candour was the only option that occurred to her. She relays conversations with all her interviewees without even seeming to notice when they have exposed themselves and their flaws. There is an astonishing immediacy to it all and, given the discussions in the book about the difficulties of getting permission to quote from letters, I’m amazed that everybody involved signed up. Malcolm must be very persuasive. Some of the letters between Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes, for instance, are quite shocking. At one point, it’s almost like watching an abusive relationship from the inside.

As I say every time I write about a Malcolm book, she is the main draw. Don’t pick this up if you chiefly want to know the facts of Plath’s life. But if you’re at all interested in the ethics and practicalities of biography, or even just in how people interact when there is a lot at stake, then The Silent Woman is a brilliant and fascinating book.

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

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I was finding 1993 quite difficult to fill in my century of books, and I asked people on Twitter which of my 1993 books they’d recommend that I pick up. It turned out that I didn’t have one of them on my shelves any longer, a biography of Elizabeth Gaskell, but I did have Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. For some reason I wasn’t especially keen to read it, but enough people on Twitter convinced me that I should give it a go that I took it away on holiday and, guess what – it’s amazing.

This isn’t the first Kingsolver novel I’ve read, in fact it’s the third. One of those is her most famous, The Poisonwood Bible, which I actually didn’t like as much as most people seem to have done. I suppose my problem was with her painting this ogreish portrait of the patriarchal missionary, and then implying (or at least I inferred) that he was intended to represent the whole world of missionaries. It felt a little lazy. But before that I read The Bean Trees, I think before I started blogging, and it turns out that Pigs in Heaven is a sequel to that. I should say from the outset that it’s fine to read this novel independently, and in fact I couldn’t remember very much about The Bean Trees that except for the fact that I liked it. Pigs in Heaven tells you everything you need to know about what came before.

The main thing you need to know from that novel is that Taylor adopted young Native American girl called Turtle, given to her by a stranger in a car park. The years have passed, and Taylor is a devoted mother, unable to imagine a life without her young daughter. She is also in a relationship with a musician-of-sorts, called Jax. I rather loved reading their conversations, which were believably affectionate while maintaining a constant undercurrent of uncertainty – just how much are they joking and how much are real tensions coming to the surface? It is something dramatic that starts to change the life Taylor has made for herself, even though that dramatic thing happens to somebody else. While on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, her daughter sees a man fall into a dangerously deep cave – being so young, Turtle doesn’t realise the gravity of this until afterwards, and assumes her mother knows what has happened and is unconcerned. It is only when bringing its to Taylor’s attention that a rescue mission is mounted – despite police initially being reluctant to believe that the 4 year old has not imagined the whole thing.

The man is rescued, and Turtle becomes something of a celebrity – at least temporarily – and is invited onto an episode of Oprah for children who have saved lives. This catches the attention of a lawyer, Annawake, who decides to intervene. She is from the Cherokee Nation herself, and knows that the adoption which Taylor describes is not legal. With her own history of a brother who was taken away from family and community, Annawake sees it as her responsibility to reunite Turtle with her heritage – even if that means taking her away from her mother. (The pigs in Heaven, incidentally, are stars – a constellation you may know as the Seven Sisters.)

There are plenty of novelists who use a moral quandary as the centre of a narrative, to greater or lesser levels of success. To be honest, I am likely to run from a novel that describes itself as issue-driven – and the great thing about Kingsolver is that it never feels as though the ‘issue’  is the driving force. Nor is there any sense that there is a correct answer – as a white person myself, I am very likely to be drawn towards the argument that a child should not be separated from her adoptive mother, but Kingsolver has characters like Annawake who can vocalise that this sense of priorities is not any more objective than those which might make somebody wants to reunite a child with her ancestral community. And so what drives this novel, perfectly, is character.

Unlike The Poisonwood Bible, there are no cartoonish villains. There are simply people who are trying to do the right thing – or, with some of the more incidental characters, have lost any sense of what the right thing might be.

Women on their own run in Alice’s family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

That is the opening paragraph of this multi-generational novel. Alice is Taylor’s mother, and has recently made her own possibly ill-advised marriage. The family do not have the ingrained traditions of the Cherokee Nation, but they have their own localised one of women being alone – though none of the women in this book are alone as it starts, it hangs over them like a threat, or occasionally like a happy promise. Taylor’s fear of losing Turtle means they go on the run together, and Kingsolver masterfully weaves a road trip novel into this multifaceted narrative – with the possibilities that brings for funny or strange or poignant temporary characters.

As I say, it is character that is foremost – with their reflections on anything from their choice of words to their ultimate fate. Kingsolver uses her premise to give us a rich, rich portrait of many different people – even when they’re not the most pleasant people, she makes us want to spend time with them. It is riveting, as well as beautifully written. It is also evocative, not just of place but of being. I suppose what I mean by that is that it is wholly immersive.

I read a lot of books, as do we all, and it’s not often that I miss the world that I have been in once it is finished. But I wish I were back in Kingsolver’s world – and I think I might be left in the curious position of wanting to reread the original to this sequel, just to stay in that world. Hopefully that won’t leave me in an indefinite loop, but if it does, there are worse places to be. (And, to escape that loop, which Kingsolver novels would you recommend?)

Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin

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Remembering DennyI love Calvin Trillin’s fiction and his non-fiction, and picked up a couple of his books when I was in America last year (do other people see him on shelves in the UK? I don’t think I do). I wasn’t sure quite when I’d want to read an account of the downfall of a highschool sports star, but something about the unusually specific nature of this biography appealed to me when I picked it up a couple of months ago. That unusual memoir angle seems to be the theme of this week, doesn’t it?

Remembering Denny (1993) is a peculiar choice for Trillin. The book is about Denny Hansen, somebody Trillin knew at Yale, and the account of how he went from being a high school star to taking his own life in his fifties. Despite only knowing him for a short period of that time, and certainly not being a close friend for life, Trillin wanted to document the journey – speaking with various people who knew him at different stages, putting together a composite image of a single Hansen from many seemingly irreconcilable Hansens. (The title of the book seems one that reflects friendship, but to call him Denny in a review would feel patronising, so I shan’t.) And then: could Trillin discover exactly why it was that Hansen killed himself?

Trillin is such a fine, intuitive, and sensitive writer that he can take the ordinary and mundane and somehow turn it into gold – without ever seeming to overwrite or even display a style. It is the writing of a very talented journalist, rather than a novelist (though in his novels, style and timbre come to the fore); we hear about Hansen’s warm smile, his popularity, his promise, and Trillin makes it seem original. Even more impressive, he makes it seem personal even when writing about a Hansen he had not yet met. Of course, at Yale we get a closer view of Hansen – from Trillin’s own eyes. There are more anecdotes – or perhaps, rather, more evidence to back up the summation of traits, since nothing here seems framed in the ‘here’s-a-funny-story-you-should-hear’ that one expects from a biography. Instead, they compose a narrative of a successful, kind, loved, but very pressured man:

As Denny, he seemed to have a limitless future. We emerged from Yale in June of the year that has since been called a high point in American prosperity. With the peace-making general in the White House and the Cold War having settled into what seemed to us to be a more or less permanent struggle between the good guys and the bad guys, there were reasons to see limitless futures for a lot of people. When I talked to Andre Schiffrin after Denny’s death, he said the picture that comes into his mind when he thinks about how Yale undergraduates viewed the future in those days is Stairway to Heaven – moving up through the clouds on a blissful escalator. We had the usual problems of deciding what we wanted to do, of course, but those problems came partly from the assumption that very little was shut off.

Away from Yale, particularly as the decades move on, the portrait becomes less clear. People lost touch with Hansen; those who met him for the first time in these later years gave less detailed pictures, and seemed less close. Hansen’s character becomes more of a mystery to the reader, presumably because it was a mystery to those who had known him. If Trillin wants to join the dots between the high school success and the man who took his life, then he doesn’t quite succeed. The trail runs cold, because the character becomes less vivid.

Hansen is described as depressive, in debilitating back pain (requiring several, ultimately unsuccessful, operations), and struggling with his sexuality. Any or all of these could have contributed to his decision to kill himself, Trillin writes. But for him, it seems almost as though suicide were the inevitable end to the downward trajectory that Hansen’s life had taken. And this is where I take issue with Remembering Denny, for all of its excellent and often very sensitive writing.

My main problem with this book – but it is a problem that came up on almost every page – was that Trillin took it for granted that Hansen was a failure in his career. He was supposed (so goes the high school reputation) to be a part of a government, if not the President himself. He was not these things, but he was a respected professor with many publications to his name, still working and teaching in his field. I cannot emphasise enough (from the perspective of somebody who has done graduate study and has many friends who are or want to be professional academics) that this is a huge success that relatively few aspiring academics achieve. There must, of course, have been factors that led to Hansen’s suicide, and perhaps he viewed his own career as a failure – but there is no reason for Trillin to consider it that. It really wasn’t. The stumbling block seemed very strange, given Trillin’s usual sensitivity and empathy.

But if one can overlook that, Remembering Denny is an interesting and unusual book. Only Trillin could have written it, I think, and – for any faults it has – that is something rather special.

Something Happened Yesterday – Beryl Bainbridge

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The Beryl Bainbridge Fest ain’t over yet, folks, and here’s my final review of the week – Something Happened Yesterday.  It isn’t a novel, it’s a selection of columns which Bainbridge contributed to the Evening Standard in the 1980s and ’90s, with short (often quite bizarre) introductory paragraphs to each column, written when the book was published (1993).

Well, although it takes a different format, Something Happened Yesterday has the same disjointed, playfully subversive tone that I have come to expect from Bainbridge.  Each column involves some event which has recently befallen Bainbridge, or recently come to her mind, suggested by something else.  It’s a whole mix – from visiting the village of her youth to a zoo trip to her time on a BBC children’s radio programme.  The occasion scarcely matters, for it is the eccentric musings on life which Bainbridge incorporates that make this book so distinctive.  The dark humour of her novels is definitely present.  Here’s a representative sample of her style:

It did however remind me of the cautionary tale of my son’s nursery school teacher, a lady named Miss Smith, referred to as Mith Mith by her lisping charges.  It’s a true story, albeit tragic.  A group of infants on a Tuesday morning just before Christmas in a house in Ullet Road, Liverpool, were discovered at home-time marching up and down swigging bottles of milk in an abandoned manner while Mith Mith lay slumped across the piano.  She had been dead for a quarter of an hour and had apparently passed on in the middle of The Grand Old Duke of York.  This shocking incident has remained fresh as a daisy in my memory because I hadn’t got round to paying the fees, whereas the rest of the mothers had stumped up the three guineas a term in advance.
Most amusing, probably, is the way in which Bainbridge can end up at the most curious of statements.  ‘A knowledge of sex and moths is no substitute for Latin, science and maths’, for instance, or, as an aside, ‘(I once knew a countess, an ex-theatre sister from Liverpool, who messed up my kitchen while trying to decapitate her husband, the Earl.)’  These statements are equally startling in context – not completely incongruous, because Bainbridge has more or less built up to them, but then takes a leap to something extraordinary.

Those introductory passages I mentioned – it’s a little odd to read them before reading the column in question, but often they feel no more normal afterwards.  They go off at tangents; they reveal less than they appear to, and add new questions rather than answers.  Sweet William could have written them.  Here’s one which prefixes a column which is mostly about Snow White:

I’m not going to enlarge on the events recounted here: they are too painful.  The moment he set eyes on me my ex said I looked very withered.  The last night he was here the cleaner confronted him.  How could he have walked out on his children all those years ago?  His response was pretty predictable, given the guilt we all feel.  He said, “This is all very boring”, and caught a taxi to the airport.
Which brings me onto another point.  Bainbridge makes pretty free with her relatives and friends.  Often her daughters and grandchildren are mentioned, but also talks about neighbours and acquaintances – surely they then read the Evening Standard, and recognised themselves?  But, but… sometimes Bainbridge’s introductory paragraphs make it clear that the anecdote she’s relating is not, in fact, wholly true… or is true in essentials, but happened with other people, in a different way…

Like some of Bainbridge’s characters, and like her own quirky narrative style, nothing can quite be trusted in her journalism.  I’m very glad that her style and tone didn’t get diluted by the demands of a newspaper column – it really is just an extension of the qualities I enjoy in her fiction, with a personal twist and a drier, acerbic view on life.  Great fun, very unusual, and a lovely way to finish off my first dive into Beryl Bainbridge territory.