Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (59 page)

“
The biographer’s genius lies in ha ving the sympathy and imagination to create the story of a life of which the subject would say, if he or she could, ‘That’s as close to me as anybody else could be expected to know.’ The biographer’s worst temptation is to transform the subject into someone preferable to the original
.”

“
Editorial lesson: It is important for the sake of truth and history to ha ve written the best biography of your subject; but it can be more lucrative to be first on the scene
.”

For forty years I have been editing biographies and autobiographies, large and small, light and heavy, but usually reputable, ranging in biographical subject matter from Enrico Caruso (my first) and Katharine Cornell to Anne Sexton, from Justice Holmes and Ezra Pound to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (my current project); and in autobiographical subject matter from Alfred Kazin to Farley Mowat, from the elegant memoirs of Louis Kronenberger’s
No Whippings, No Gold Watches
to the adoring rhapsody,
Discretions
, of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. I have even written an autobiography myself, entitled
Half Remembered
, and then, nearly twenty years after its first publication, revised and enlarged the book for paperback, even though I still could not remember the other half.

I have no experience in editing “celebrity” biographies like the fourteen extant “lives” of Marilyn Monroe nor in editing that particular breed of book that boasts of its “unauthorized” status in order to produce the maximum in sensationalism and thus provide free advertising—a sort of
relay race with the libel lawyers. Such books, these days, are baldly announced as unauthorized in order to suggest to the public that they contain everything the celebrity would have given his or her eyeteeth for you not to find out. You will search in vain through this essay for suggestions on how to write such a book: in fact, I’d suggest you don’t even try. It’s a dangerous game, requiring
chutzpah
in the highest and ill will toward its subject.

…

The French critic Roland Barthes once wrote that biography is fiction that dare not tell its name. The same applies even more keenly to autobiography, since memoirs (like first novels) are written, invariably, by the living and usually for the living to read, and they have a tendency to paint a self-portrait in the most flattering colors, unless they fall into the rare self-revelatory category shared by the
Confessions
of Saint Augustine or of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Most autobiographies treat the self as an example, or as a victim, or as a source of wisdom, or, sometimes, as the butt of humor. The living autobiographer, after all, still has to look the living reader in the eye. An editor, first and foremost, must determine which of these attitudes his author intends to take toward the subject of his personal story. He is responsible for understanding the writer and the story well enough to help the author choose. This is not easy when the editor doesn’t yet know the story and has to drag the mere truth out of some notable who is swollen with self-importance. It’s even harder when the editor does not know the author—though the author’s reputation will probably have preceded him, or the subject would not likely have exerted sufficient public appeal for the publisher to have commissioned the book in the first place. (We need not dwell on the unusual instance, these days, of a notable person who actually writes his memoirs and then seeks a publisher: in the Era of the Literary Agent it happens the other way around.)

I have worked with autobiographers who want to tell too much about themselves; but with more (one of them this week) who do not want to tell enough, who cannot imagine describing themselves in a bad light, or in what the author’s adoring—or divorced—spouse (the spouse is the hole card in every autobiography) regards as a bad light. The editor’s approach to the autobiographer has to be one of parental tenderness, even though parental strictness may also be called for to keep the memoir believable. Nobody wants to drop his pants in public except for the randiest exhibitionist, some of whom do in fact write great autobiographies, like Henry Miller, whose books are for some reason called novels. Worse: dropping somebody else’s pants in public, which is the bane of the editor’s—and the author’s—lawyers.

Should the autobiographer plan to begin his tale at the beginning? Usually
not: the exit from the womb takes pretty much the same course for all of us and is of principal interest to obstetricians. If the autobiographer can settle on a later, essentially formative scene or an episode, in childhood or adulthood, that somehow opens the door to the style and tilt for the whole book, the story stands a better chance of telling itself from start to finish in such a way as to cast the most revealing angle of light over its events. Agnes De Mille, who has written half a dozen volumes of memoirs and, in her eighties, a biography of Martha Graham, never began at the very beginning in any of her books: even in her very first,
Dance to the Piper
, she began with her discovery, at ten, of Hollywood, where she moved when her father gave up directing plays and went into the direction of movies, before it was revealed to her that she was a dancer, a gift that she exploited relatively late in life but that colored everything that came before and after. Justin Kaplan began his masterly biography of Mark Twain when his subject was thirty-one because “the central drama of his mature literary life was his discovery of the usable past.”

Bertrand Russell, Victorian to the core, did begin at the beginning (“My first vivid recollection is my arrival at Pembroke Lodge in February 1876”), identifying his lordly grandparents (his grandfather was a prime minister) before arriving at his unfortunate and sickly parents, who died in sequence, leaving the grandparents to bring up Bertie and his older brother Frank, wards in chancery, in high palatial splendor. Being set apart from other children would make Russell for over ninety years yearn to sympathize with others—with all mankind! Few, his childhood told him, had sympathized with the lonely orphan in the lordly estate, but the boy early and often found ways of consoling himself with philosophy, protecting his tender feelings with his brilliant mind, and having opinions on
everything
.

Autobiography depends not only on the nature of the subject, but on the audience imagined for it, to which the editor must be sensitive indeed. Those who read the magnificent memoirs of George F. Kennan knew him beforehand as a behind-the-scenes adviser on foreign relations whose influential articulation of the “containment” policy was written anonymously; but Kennan also had a personal story to tell. Accordingly, he began, very tentatively, with his happy childhood in the Middle West, in a dream country that, as a lifelong diplomat, he would never return to: “There are, of course, great variations in people’s capacity to remember consciously their early growth. My own falls, I fear, at the weaker end of the spectrum.” On his return to his native land after years of foreign service, the rural simplicities of Wisconsin had long since disappeared. Kennan’s memoirs beneath their surface croon a lament for an imagined innocent America while advocating an informed realism in foreign affairs. It’s not strange that his sympathy with contemporary America is limited and often so expressed.

I think that autobiography requires, more than anything else, a most particular attention to tone: what tone does the author take toward himself? Kennan is nostalgic, Russell is witty; Mary de Rachewiltz, the daughter of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge, begins by exulting in the simplicities of the peasant upbringing that her foster parents gave her in the Tyrolean uplands for years before she even knew who her true parents were—a theme that would never leave her alone. Throughout her adored father’s stormy career she would keep hoping that she could create once more that Alpine simplicity, and somehow include him in it—the last thing he wanted for himself, which was the last thing she discovered about him. In my work with her I encouraged her to play up her adoration and play down his anti-Semitism: not everyone who knew Ezra Pound found him so adorable.

Autobiographies have a lot of trouble ending themselves, because the hero or heroine by definition is still alive as the final words are written. The choices are all unsatisfactory: leave ’em laughing is probably the best—and most infrequent—choice. Marry (usually for the second or third time) and live happily ever after is a very frequent and unconvincing terminus. To conclude with the death of a loved one—wife, parent, or child—can be deeply touching, but it cannot help raising the question of the author’s motive in telling us all this. The editor may well be able to suggest something remarkable. Frank Conroy’s
Stop-Time
ends with one of the great unforgettable flourishes in contemporary autobiography, as his car skids, at ninety, across an English road: “But the front wheel caught a low curb and the car spun around the fountain like a baton around a cheerleader’s wrist. … Then, with a slight lurch, everything stopped. …”

Turning to biography, I would like to distinguish between two entirely different problems: the life of the safely dead, and the life of the recently dead. The first depends for its existence on the discovery of papers and sources; the second usually depends on the good will of living people: widows or widowers or literary executors, or—God save the mark—attorneys. The two varieties require different approaches, and different kinds of help from their editor. But in either category the first thing an editor should do is to make absolutely certain that the writer has the deepest possible admiration for and identification with the subject under discussion. Why? Because the chances are that the biographer will have to live with this subject for at least five and sometimes longer than ten years—longer than most American marriages—and will discover things he or she never imagined possible. The biographer of Thomas Hardy discovers that Hardy was sexually excited by the sight and sound of the hangings of criminals and mourned his dead wife (very publicly and beautifully) in a long sequence of
poems that did his second marriage no good, even though the first couple did not in fact get on well at all. Orwell’s biographer learns that, despite his deep sympathies for the lower classes of mankind, Orwell was in person a surly and unpleasant friend. The biographer of Josephine Herbst revealed to the biographer of Katherine Anne Porter that Porter turned in Josie, her closest friend, to the FBI. Of the biographical subjects I have encountered, only Anton Chekhov seems to have been without serious fault or flaw, the easiest of all subjects for a biographer to live with, though one of the most elusive to understand.

If the biographer chooses a subject for exposure, knowing the subject’s shortcomings, there is a chance that it may take twice as long as expected to write the book, for it is difficult for an author to force himself to write with sympathy about someone whose actions he or she detests. No woman except his widow has yet, to my knowledge, written objectively about randy, lewd, drunken, self-destructive Dylan Thomas, though in his life protective women flocked to his bed. But Thomas died young, at thirty-nine: a man who lives to ninety will unavoidably have left a long, long paper trail a-winding, a trail it may take years and years to follow. Will author, will editor, survive till the end comes? Scott Donaldson, the experienced and professional biographer of Hemingway, Cheever, Winfield Townley Scott, and others, found his scrupulously calculated deadlines went glimmering when he tackled the very long and highly eventful life of Archibald Mac-Leish; and, despite his original intentions, the book outgrew his expectations for it. The editor’s task is to know, and to persuade the author, that enough is enough. Sometimes the text may be shortened; sometimes it will do to shorten the apparatus, the bibliography or notes. From a commercial point of view, buyers will pay a certain price to read the life of an admired person, but every story has a ceiling.

The second cautionary question for the safely dead is: Where are the papers? Who controls them? May they be quoted from? This can supersede any question of the passage of time: the Boswell papers, after all, did not turn up for 150 years after his death, on the precincts of Malahide Castle, where no one would have expected them to surface—and then ownership had to be established.

The third thing the editor can do to help the author of such a biography is to encourage the reevaluation of the figure of the protagonist in contemporary terms. Carolyn Heilbrun, in her cogent and discerning little book,
Writing a Woman’s Life
, raises a number of challenging questions about the way biographers, male or female, write the lives of women; and since so many biographers these days are discovering the unwritten lives of women, her values are worth testing for any biography that contains women, in whatever role.

…

The second variety of biography is perhaps the most difficult: the life of the recently dead, whose papers and whose memories reside in the cupboards and the diaries and heads of the still living, most of whom have a particular interest in seeing that the life of the beloved (or nonbeloved) is written “accurately.” No biographer needs more tact than one whose subject died young, mourned by some and unmourned by others, and whose papers reside, copyrighted, in the charge of a suspicious executor. The most striking recent example of this is poor Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide at thirty, leaving her literary effects to the care of the husband whom she had not yet divorced. As a result, every would-be biographer since her death in 1963 (I can count up to at least nine, only five of whom actually completed their books) has had either to clear permission for every line of poetry quoted from the Plath estate, in which case the estate required the biographer to submit the text of the book for inspection; or to omit quotations from the very poetry that had made Plath famous in order to avoid the necessity for the estate’s approval of the text. (The approval of the text included the estate’s defending itself against invasions of privacy or defamation, of which more below.) Biographers of T. S. Eliot have had similar problems, though in that instance the cost of the permissions was fiscal rather than censorial.