Why I Read Biographies

 “I don’t read biographies of musical geniuses,” my father used to say. “The music may be sublime, but the composer usually isn’t.” He was probably thinking of Beethoven, who was notoriously difficult, Schumann, who went insane, or Mozart, who never really grew up (remember Amadeus?). Even the celestial J.S. Bach whined disappointingly about money in his letters—although with twenty children and a wife to support that may be understandable.

Unlike my father, I do sometimes read bios, mostly of writers. I read them in search of inspiration, consolation, and for entertainment not unmixed with  Schadenfreude. Clicking the page-turn on my Kindle, I remind myself that what I’m reading is just one fallible human being’s opinion of another fallible human being, that memory is unreliable, that language obscures rather than reveals the truth, and so on. 

Still, reading about the lives of writers shines a beam, however faint, on that nebulous interface between character and creativity. And one thing stands out in all these bios: no matter how diverse the writers, their temperaments, and their circumstances, they all worked astoundingly hard at their writing, which they found arduous, draining, frustrating, and only occasionally exhilarating. 

Their personal lives are often awe-inspiring in their disarray. The fifty-year-old Colette seduced her seventeen-year-old stepson. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, two of the most exalted philosophical minds of the last century, were emotional dunces, and nasty ones at that, when it came to managing their mutual love affair as well as their entanglements with the many “contingent” others. (See Tête- à-Tête, the lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley.) 

For the last week I’ve been knee-deep in Margot Peters’ biography of May Sarton. The feminist and lesbian icon comes off as a sometimes dangerous lunatic, careening from one disastrous love affair to another, alternately drowning in tears and alcohol, and never able to reconcile her thirst for solitude with the need to surround herself with admirers. 

What emerges for me out of this welter of dramas, disappointments, insecurities, envies, and betrayals? For one, I learn again what my father discovered in the composer bios: that one can be both a creative genius and emotionally challenged. As a writer, I find consolation in confronting how hard the craft is and how much discipline it demands of even the greatest. If Colette found it necessary to turn her desk to the wall to avoid being distracted by the view of the Mediterranean, shouldn’t I save my internet surfing for after I’m done writing? 

Another useful reminder: once the poem/novel/essay is finished, even gargantuan talent and effort don’t guarantee success. André Gide said non to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Madeleine L’Engle had to submit A Wrinkle in Time to twenty-seven publishers before one accepted it. The stories of rejected masterpieces could fill a book. 

Reading about May Sarton’s lifelong failure to balance solitude and society, I am more inclined to forgive myself for my own minor version of the dilemma. If she, with her talent, ambition, and dedication couldn’t figure it out, then maybe I shouldn’t beat myself up for longing to be with people and longing to get away from them, sometimes both at the same time. 

Alas, none of the writers I've read about, from the merely talented to the great geniuses, was particularly happy. In fact, many of them were mostly miserable. Critics scoffed; lovers betrayed or were betrayed; money was scarce; the Muse absconded; self-doubt persisted despite public acclaim. 

Yet it wasn’t all darkness and gnashing of teeth. Even the least happy of these geniuses experienced flashes of, if not unclouded joy, at least temporary ease—that blessed moment when, having toiled and agonized (Flaubert: “Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.”) one lays down the pen or turns off the computer and enjoys the inexpressible relief of having written. 

In this respect, I’m there with the best—nothing smooths my brow or makes me feel more at peace than having written. The feeling reminds me of the endorphin rush that used to engulf me after a five-mile run. Of course, the lovely sensation doesn’t last, and tomorrow I’ll have to do the equivalent of one of those runs again. But what is life if not an endless run around the same old track?

For those us who write, paint, sculpt, or make music amid the tragedies and absurdities of human existence, the guarantee of solace that comes from having written, painted, sculpted, or composed is not a trivial blessing. It is an echo of the Creator’s cosmic sigh of relief (“and He saw that it was good”) at the end of each day’s work.

Whiny Writers

Why are we writers such a whiny lot? And it's often the best writers who complain the most. E.B. White kvetched endlessly about having to write his weekly Talk of the Town piece for The New Yorker. He moved to a farm in Maine, where he hoped to be able to write more easily, only to discover that he would much rather farm than write. He lamented that, as he went about slopping the pig or gathering the eggs, he couldn’t “watch the show just for the fun of it,” but had to be constantly thinking how to write about it (see Scott Elledge, E.B. White).

Whenever Flaubert wasn’t writing, he was complaining about it to his friend, George Sand: “You don’t know what it’s like […] to spend an entire day with your head in your hand in order to find the right word[…] I spend my life gnawing at my heart and my brain.”

And here is the great Colette, at her peak, telling an interviewer, “I don’t like to write. Not only do I not like to write, but I especially like not writing […] I am so happy, so happy when I’m not writing, that it’s clear to me that I shouldn’t write…” Asked what she’d like to do instead, she answers: “Anything! Anything except writing! Carpentry, gardening, polishing the furniture …”

Colette in her eighties. Her right pinky was permanently bent from decades of writing.

Like Flaubert, she labored endlessly over every word. The appendices of the Pléiade edition of her works show that for every line of finished text there are often half a dozen lines of false starts, reversals, and erasures. So fond was she of not writing that at the height of her career she opened a cosmetology salon. Fortunately, it was a failure and she was forced to return to writing.

Me, I don’t like not writing, but I love having written. Even if I’m just writing about something cute that the cat has done, after I’ve poured my daily ration of words onto the screen I feel cleansed somehow, purged, at ease. It’s the way I imagine skilled meditators (of whom I am not one) must feel after their daily sitting.

There are times, of course, when I don’t like writing. These occur mostly when I haven’t written for a while. Then I find myself stumbling over prepositions, enmeshed in clauses, entrapped by tenses. The main thing I lose when I have been away from writing is the discipline of the first draft, which for me consists of shaking out whatever is in my head onto the screen, as if I were dumping out a waste basket.

At this point, if I allow myself the slightest backward glance over the piece, I always turn into a pillar of salt. The backward glances are the second stage. But by then I have something to work on. The page is no longer a trackless desert over which I must wander alone. There’s stuff—mostly stupid stuff, but stuff--already there. Now all I have to do is fix it, mostly by the enthusiastic use of the delete key.

When I was a sculptor I would start with a block of Indiana limestone and then make a head, or a cat, or a human figure by slowly chiseling off what didn’t belong. As a writer, I first have to produce the stone itself, by quarrying words out of my brain and hurling them onto the screen. Then I chip away until the mess starts to make sense, and becomes something that someone might want to read.

The Day I Buried My Youth

One of the puzzles about growing older is how much to give in versus how much to resist it.  By temperament and upbringing, I am in the camp of the resisters, but am considering a switch.

My mother, who was chronically young into her nineties,  used to say that it was foolish to try to look twenty years younger than you were--the thing to aim for was to look better than everybody else your age. This seems reasonable to me, so I work at it.  I believe in my bones that if I do everything right--if I eat, exercise, meditate and get enough exposure to sunlight--I will, if not avoid aging altogether, then at least do it in the slowest, most dignified possible way.

My age-defying efforts are on the low-tech end of the scale.  I don't dye my hair or inject foreign substances into my anatomy.  But between the walking and the yoga and the vitamins and the meditation--not to mention the growing and cooking of anti-oxidant-rich foods--this staving off of senescence is taking its toll.

I was lying on the sofa after another weary day of fending off the inevitable when I remembered something George Sand (the prolific 19th century French novelist who, like George Eliot, was a woman) wrote when she was sixty-two:  "The day I buried my youth I immediately felt twenty years younger."

And, judging by her letters and diaries, burying her youth worked.  Not only did she write novel after novel and run a large property, she traveled constantly and cultivated friendships with the literary luminaries of her time.  By far the brightest of these was her best buddy, Flaubert. She would visit him for a week at a time and the two would sit up talking about literature until four in the morning.  Despite all my vitamins and yoga, the thought of staying up until dawn talking about literature--with Flaubert no less--makes me feel deeply fatigued.  So maybe George S. was right.

But how does one bury one's youth?   In my childhood, the line of demarcation between young and old was pretty well defined:  old ladies of fifty and over wore black, cut their hair short and said the rosary a lot.  They did not lift weights in gyms or do downward dogs or go on gluten-free diets.

Today women of a certain age gel their hair into short spikes or grow it down to their hips, start on their third or fourth careers, and their prayers consist of reciting mantras while sitting in half lotus pose.  Is this a good thing, or is it bad?  Certainly our generation looks to be in better shape than our grandmothers', but some of us are nervous, exhausted wrecks.  Might there not have been some comfort in knowing exactly how to be old? 

In the twenty-first century, it's hard to figure out just what burying one's youth might entail.  But I intend to keep trying and see if, like it did George S., it makes me feel twenty years younger.