To Edit a Life

BY PETER DAVISON

FOR FORTY YEARS, AT THE RATE OF ABOUT ONE a year, I have been editing biographies and autobiographies, large and small, light and heavy, but usually reputable. The biographies range in subject matter from Enrico Caruso (my first) and Katharine Cornell to Anne Sexton, from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ezra Found to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (my current project); and the autobiographies from Farley Mowat’s numerous books about his adventures to Louis Kroncnberger’s elegant memoirs, titled No Whippings, No Gold Watches, and the adoring rhapsody, Discretions, of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. I even wrote, in 1972, my own autobiography, titled Half Remembered, and then, nearly twenty years later, revised and enlarged the book for paperback, although I still could not remember the other half.

In the years since I wrote that book, the arts of biography and autobiography have altered profoundly, for reasons not only social and literary but also economic, psychological, and legal. As biography became at least apparently more lucrative, journalists turned their attention to writing the lives of the great, and publishers encouraged them with larger and larger advances. The devices of investigative reporting and tabloid journalism became valuable tools for the biographer who wanted his or her book underwritten before starting to write. Meanwhile, public figures during these past few decades have lost the means to protect themselves as a result of such landmark libel cases as New York Times v. Sullivan (1964). Literary estates and living artists have been handed a weapon to protect access to people’s lives by making it possible to enjoin a biographer’s use, in any form, of the subject’s unpublished writings (Random House v. Salinger [1987]). These forces have combined to affect biography for the worse, fostering, even in seriously intended works, the growth of what Joyce Carol Oates once labeled “pathography”—the investigation of a subject’s failings, sins, illnesses, and vices.

I happen to have no experience in editing “celebrity” biographies, like the fourteen extant “lives” of Marilyn Monroe, or in editing that particular breed of book which is now baldly labeled, in a sort of relay race with the libel lawyers, “unauthorized”—as if to suggest to the public that it contains everything the celebrity would have given his or her eyeteeth for you not to find out. It’s a dangerous game, requiring chutzpah in the highest and ill will toward its subject. But books like this are proliferating far more rapidly than serious biographies, which require the author’s time, attention, scholarship, and fidelity to the truth or what can be discovered of the truth.

THE FRENCH CRITIC ROLAND BARTHES ONCE called biography “a novel that dare not speak its name.” The same applies even more keenly to autobiography, since memoirs (like most first novels) have a tendency to paint self-portraits in those colors the author deems most flattering, whether or not they fall into the truly self-revelatory category shared by the Confessions of Saint Augustine and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Most autobiographies treat the self as an example, or as a victim, or as a source of wisdom, or as the butt of humor. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written not exclusively by Malcolm X but also by Alex Haley, erected an idol. The living autobiographer, after all, still has to look the living reader in the eye; and his or her editor, first and foremost, must determine what attitude the author intends to take toward the tale.

The editor is responsible for understanding the person and the story well enough to help the author choose a posture. But what if 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, like General Norman Schwarzkopf’s, or the book would not have exerted sufficient public appeal for the publisher to have commissioned it in the first place. (We need not dwell on what is these days the unusual instance of a notable person who actually writes his memoirs and then seeks a publisher: in the era of competitive publishing corporations and the literary agent, it happens the other way around.) I have worked with autobiographers who want to tell too much about themselves, but more often I encounter those who do not want to tell enough, who cannot imagine presenting themselves in a bad light—or in what the author’s adoring, or divorced, spouse (the spouse holds the hole card in every autobiography) regards as his or her bad light.

The editor’s approach to the autobiographer has to involve a certain amount of parental tenderness, even though parental strictness may also be called for to keep the memoir believable. Nobody wants to reveal everything about himself except the randiest exhibitionists, some of whom do in fact write great autobiographies—as did Henry Miller, whose books are for some reason called novels. A worse problem still is revealing everything about somebody else, which is the bane of the editor’s—and the author’s— lawyers.

Should the autobiographer, like the White Rabbit, plan to begin at the beginning, go on till he comes to the end, and then stop? Usually not: the exit from the womb, except in cases like Julius Caesar’s, takes pretty much the same course for all of us, lies beyond the author’s memory, and is of principal interest only to obstetricians. If the autobiographer can settle on a later, essentially formative scene, or on an episode, in childhood or adulthood, that somehow opens the door to the style and tilt of the whole book, the story stands a good chance of telling itself from start to finish in such a way as to cast revealing angles of light over its events. Agnes de Mille, who has written half a dozen volumes of memoirs and, in her eighties, a notable biography of Martha Graham, never began at the beginning in any of her books. Her first, Dance to the Piper, begins with her discovery, at ten, of Hollywood, where she moved when her father gave up directing plays and undertook the direction of movies. This was well 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’s masterly biography of Mark Twain begins when his subject is 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 rear the two wards in Chancery, Bertie and his older brother, Frank, in high palatial splendor. Being set apart from other children would make Russell for more than ninety years yearn to sympathize with others—with all mankind! Few people, his childhood told him, would sympathize with a lonely and precocious orphan on a grand estate, but the boy early and often found ways of consoling himself with philosophy, protecting his tender feelings with his brilliant intelligence, and attracting constant attention by expressing opinions on everything.

Autobiography depends not only on the nature of the subject but also 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-thescenes 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 Midwest, 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 youth. My own, I fear, falls at the weaker end of the spectrum.” When he returned to his native land after decades of foreign service, the rural simplicities of Wisconsin had long since forsaken him. 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 expressed with pursed lips.

Autobiography, like any true art, requires 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 Bound and Olga Rudge, begins by exulting in the peasant upbringing that her foster parents provided 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. The editor’s task was to encourage 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 one of the best— and most infrequent. 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—spouse, 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 unforgettable flourishes of contemporary autobiography, as Conroy’s car skids, at fifty miles an hour, sideways across an English town square: “But the front wheel caught a low curb and the car spun around the fountain like a baton around a cheerleader’s wrist. . . . The side of the car bumped very gently against the fountain, inches away from my face. Then, with a slight lurch, everything stopped. . . .”

TURNING TO BIOGRAPHY, I DISTINGUISH BETWEEN two entirely different problems: the life of the safely dead, and the life of the recently dead. The first kind of book depends for its existence on the discovery of papers and sources, and the second usually depends on the good will of living people: widows or widowers or literary executors. The two varieties require different approaches, and different kinds of help from an editor.

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. Why? Because the chances are that the biographer will have to live with this subject for at least five and sometimes more than ten years, and will discover things he or she never imagined possible. The biographer of Thomas Hardy discovered that the young Hardy was sexually excited by the sight and sound of the hangings of criminals and later enthusiastically 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 had not in fact got on at all well. George Orwell’s biographers have learned that, despite his deep sympathy for the lower classes of mankind, Orwell was in person a surly and unpleasant friend. The biographer of Josephine Herbst revealed to the world—and to the biographer of Katherine Anne Porter—that Porter denounced 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; and though he was the easiest of all subjects for a biographer to live with, he was one of the most difficult to understand.

If the biographer chooses to dwell on a subject’s shortcomings, it may take twice as long as expected to write the book, because it is difficult for an author to write with sympathy about someone whose actions he or she detests. The classic case is Mark Schorer’s Sinclair Lewis. No woman, and certainly not his widow, has yet, to my knowledge, written objectively about randy, lewd, drunken, selfdestructive Dylan Thomas, though in his life protective women flocked to his bed. But Thomas died young, barely thirty-nine. A man who lives to ninety will unavoidably have left a long, long paper trail awinding, a trail it may take many years to follow. Will author, will editor, survive till the end arrives? Scott Donaldson, the experienced and professional biographer of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, and Winfield Townley Scott, found that his scrupulously calculated deadlines went glimmering when he tackled the very long, presumedly successful, and highly eventful life of Archibald MacLeish. Despite Donaldson’s original intentions and a body of research already gathered for him by Roy Winnick, the book outgrew several editors as well as Donaldson’s expectations for it. The editor’s task is to know, and to persuade the author, when enough is enough. Sometimes the text may he shortened; sometimes it will do to shorten the apparatus—the bibliography or the notes.

A cautionary question regarding 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 until a hundred and fifty years after his death—they were on the precincts of Malahide Castle, in Ireland, where no one would have expected them to surface.

Another form of assistance the editor can provide such a biography is to encourage the re-evaluation of the protagonist in terms valid in contemporary life. Carolyn Heilbrun, in her cogent and discerning book Writing a Woman’s Life, raises a number of challenging questions about the way biographers, male and female, write the lives of women. Because so many biographers these days are discovering the unwritten lives of women, Heilbrun’s ideas are worth testing for any biography that contains women, in whatever role.

THE SECOND VARIETY OF BIOGRAPHY IS SURELY the more difficult: the life of the recently dead, evidence of whom resides in the cupboards and diaries and heads of the still living, who tend to have a particular interest in seeing that the life of the beloved (or detested) 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 Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide at thirty, leaving her literary effects to the care of her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, who in turn named his sister agent for her estate. As a result, every would-be biographer since Plath’s death, in 1963 (I can count at least nine, only five of whom actually published their books), has had either to clear permission from the Plath estate for every line of poetry quoted (in which case the estate required the biographer to submit the text of the book for inspection) or to refrain from quoting the very poetry that made Plath famous. The process of approving the text was complicated by the estate’s desire to defend itself, collectively and individually, against defamation or invasions of privacy, of which more below. Biographers of T. S. Eliot have had similar problems, though in this instance the cost of the permissions has been more fiscal than censorial.

I was a friend of Sylvia Plath’s and am still, I hope, a friend of her husband’s, and I had been interviewed by nearly everyone who wanted to write about her life, but it was not until twenty-four years after her death that Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister, approached me to bring out the American edition of a biography of Plath by Anne Stevenson, an Anglo-American poet and critic whose work I much admired. Stevenson created version after version in order to fulfill the estate’s requirements for correctness (and self-defense), and eventually reached an impasse. Finally, at the urging of all parties, the manuscript was remanded to me to adapt a text coherent with the author’s views and style which would also pass the strict construction of the estate. It was the most harrowing editorial task I have ever undertaken, because the estate had the legal right to prohibit quotation and Stevenson had the moral right to speak her mind. The editorial process lasted nearly two years after the book’s first draft was done. Essential to the endless negotiations was the advice of a talented publishing attorney. Happily, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, finished to the relative satisfaction of both sides, is still, to most of us who knew her, the most penetrating and eloquent life of a woman who was, at her reckless heart, a superb poet, even as she attempted in her daily life to be everything else as well— novelist, mother, journalist, housewife, cook, intellectual, amoureuse, beekeeper, everything but the feminist that many of her posthumous admirers imagined her to have been.

As an example of a different solution to a similar problem, take Anne Sexton: A Biography, by Diane Middlebrook. This biography, of another suicidal poet, seemed to take as long as Penelope’s web from its commission to its publication, and ran through four Houghton Mifflin editors before it saw print. Jonathan Galassi, with Anne Sexton’s elder daughter—who was also her literary executor—found Middlebrook, a professor at Stanford University, and offered her a modest contract to write the book; with the assistance of foundation grants and private funds, Middlebrook wove her fabric of interviews, research, and documentation for more than five years. Only then did Sexton’s primary psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, come forward and agree to cooperate with the biographer. As a consequence, Middlebrook learned of the existence of audiotapes of some three hundred hours of psychiatric interviews. Although she had by this time already drafted much of her text, she asked the literary executor whether she might hear and use the material in this most private of documents. With the estate’s concurrence, she set aside her keyboard and spent most of a year listening to and annotating the interviews; then she rewrote her book with the sound of the analysand’s voice in her ears, discovering as she advanced how closely Anne Sexton’s poetry was related to the psychiatric process.

By this time I had become the fourth (and final) editor of the book. The first editor helped find the right author for the book; the second contributed patience and moral support; the third guided the author through the complex of libel, invasion of privacy, and defamation which hedged the life of a woman who had loved many men, who had persisted in a most unorthodox marriage, who had given much love to many friends, and who had sacrificed a lacerated life for a career that for a time preserved her tottering sanity. My job, with the counsel of the same attorney who had so admirably helped with Bitter Fame, and with the scrupulous cooperation and support of Anne Sexton’s daughter and her lawyer husband, was to advise Diane Middlebrook on the creation of the final text.

Every word of narrative was Diane Middlebrook’s own, but it had to avoid giving offense to family and friends while telling the searing truth. The direct quotations from Sexton’s letters and poetry—and from letters to her from friends and lovers—had to be cleared with husband, children, every friend, every lover, every colleague. The scrupulousness and professionalism with which Middlebrook carried out her biographical duties were staggering. My principal contribution, aside from line-by-line examination of her splendid text, and advice on how to keep the length of the book within tolerable limits, was, from my personal knowledge of Sexton’s surroundings, to steer Middlebrook to certain acquaintances of Sexton’s who might have more to tell or who might grant permission if approached this way rather than that.

After three years on the editorial job I was proud to see Middlebrook’s work at an end —only to find, to my astonishment, that Publishers Weekly had solicited the opinion of an expert on the ethics of psychiatry, who, without reading a word of the book, condemned the biographer’s use of the psychiatric tapes. The next thing we knew, we had a controversy on our hands, with articles in the London papers, on the front page of The New York Times, and throughout the press—all this months before the biography actually saw publication. We had expected exclamations over Anne Sexton’s life, and even over her psychiatric history (a second psychiatrist had in fact conducted a twoyear affair with his patient, writing love poems to her as he collected his professional fees); but the psychiatric profession preferred to avoid mention of this peccadillo. Thanks to wonderful reviews and a brilliant publicity campaign orchestrated by the publisher and doughtily performed by the author, Anne Sexton was a best seller— and it was a prizewinner as well.

In short, the biography of the literary lately dead presents challenges that do not apply to subjects who have been off the scene long enough for their printed works to be out of copyright. The law still requires the approval of the estate of a dead person to quote unpublished letters and other documents written by the protagonist, unless they are the public papers of a public person. Even now the courts, in the wake of the famous case in which J. D. Salinger prevented Ian Hamilton from quoting from his letters, or even paraphrasing them in a biography, are still wrangling over this subject. The editor of biographies has work to do in keeping up with the case law on the subject—or in keeping up with an attorney who knows it.

For this reason the editor of biographies needs to pay especial attention to the dreary particulars of permissions to quote, releases from persons depicted, and rights to reproduce the best photographs. In such wastelands as these the vulture of libel is always hovering overhead.

Yes, the publisher’s contract sets responsibility for clearance on the shoulders of the author, but today the publisher is asked to insure the author against damages, and so has to bear much of the load. An experienced editor, who has been involved with more biographies than most biographers, must lend a hand to make sure that the particulars are taken care of. The life of biography is in the details.

IF THERE WERE A PERFECT biographer, he or she would be the following: a real writer, one who understands how to construct and recount a labile and sensuous narrative; a master of research, in both documents and interviews; a person who is tactful in dealings with relatives, librarians, lovers, executors, children, parents, and editors; one who is so cannilv devoted to the personality of the biographical subject as to pursue every true lead and abandon every false one; one who cares so deeply about the precision of the text as to check every fact again and again, every document, every photograph, every rumor. But, beyond the conscientious practice of these skills, the biographer’s genius lies in having the sympathy and imagination to create the story of a life about which the subject’s ghost would say, “That’s as close to me as anybody else could be expected to get.”The biographer’s worst temptation is to transform the subject into someone preferable to the original.

Anne Stevenson, as she wrote her life of Sylvia Plath, grew in understanding of her subject and sympathized with Plath more deeply at the end than at the outset— perhaps more deeply than some of Plath’s own family did. Diane Middlebrook learned more about her subject than she had ever dreamed possible, and came to admire the way in which Sexton shored her poetry against the ruins of her life. Ronald Steel, in writing his biography of Walter Lippmann (“Walter Lippmann,” he began, “was brought up to be a gentleman”), began to find himself losing accord with Lippmann’s temperament, with Lippmann’s attitude toward his own and other people’s Judaism, and with other aspects of Lippmann’s life. Steel’s editor was the late, great Edward Weeks, who had himself been a close friend of Lippmann’s and had edited many of Lippmann’s books. Steel, after some years, cast about, seeking perhaps to find a newer, younger editor under the publisher’s roof who would show more sympathy to him and less to Lippmann, but none came forward, and time passed until the book had exceeded its delivery date by a decade. Weeks exercised the most potent weapon an editor can possess: patience. The sales department grew restive.

Lippmann was by this time long dead, though he had been alive and even vigorous when the task was begun, and some people could not imagine who would any longer be interested in reading his life.

The editorial moral here is Don’t always listen too carefully to the lamentations of sales departments, for as it turned out, every first-class reviewer in America chose to give close and admiring attention to Walter Lippmann and the American Century when it was published, in 1980. It sold fifty thousand copies and won the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Ronald Steel’s struggle with his subject ended in a publishing success, as did Diane Middlebrook’s. The story of Anne Stevenson and Sylvia Plath does not have quite so happy an ending. Stevenson’s life of Plath (1989) did not make its entrance until after two prior books, one deeply inaccurate (Edward Butscher’s, 1976) and the other simply obtuse (Linda Wagner-Martin’s, 1987), had appeared and Plath, for very peculiar reasons, had been elevated posthumously into an illusory martyrdom of the feminist movement. Stevenson’s book was laboriously faithful to the known facts and the poetry alike. Yet, because of the estate’s obvious influence on the book, it was attacked, misinterpreted, and harangued in England by ideologues or self-interested critics, and was relatively ignored by the American public. Walter Lippmann and Anne Sexton became best sellers; Bitter Fame did not.

It is important for the sake of truth and history to have produced the best biography of your subject, but it can be more lucrative to be first on the scene. John Malcolm Brinnin’s agonized and agonizing personal memoir, Dylan Thomas in America (1955), the first portrait, has outstripped in popularity the half-dozen full-scale biographies of Thomas published since. Brinnin’s book was also made into a play that has showered both the author and the estate with royalties. If you hope to create a legend, try to do it quickly.

Most lamentable of all is the case of Robert Frost, who had the misfortune to choose his own biographer, a Princeton librarian named Lawrance Thompson, and to live for twenty-four years beyond the appointment, by which time Thompson not only had gathered up all the materials for a three-volume biography (which even Thompson did not live to finish unaided; he enlisted his former student Roy Winnick) but also had developed an attitude toward his subject that may prove as incurably poisonous to Frost’s reputation as Rufus Griswold’s disapproving life of Edgar Allan Poe was to Poe’s. No major American figure more desperately needs a rehabilitative biography than Robert Frost, and none is less likely to get his deserts until a new generation of disinterested executors takes charge. The “friends of Marse Robert,” as Allen Tate once called them, gathered around the poet’s posthumous reputation like the Achaeans surrounding the body of Patroclus, in their attempt to preserve the conventional image of the hayseed sage. The only American poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration, a poet who produced a body of the wittiest, most beautiful, and most heartbreaking poetry in our literary history, is the one least likely to receive an adequate biography. He lived too long, authorized his own biographer—the wrong one—too early, and for whatever reason earned that biographer’s secret enmity. For this fate no editor has a remedy.