At the beginning of his autobiography, “Speak, Memory,” Vladimir Nabokov, best known for his novel “Lolita,” tells an anecdote about one of his father’s friends, a war general, who visits their home and shows young Nabokov a trick using matches.
Fifteen years later, in the middle of World War I, Nabokov’s father is stopped by a man while crossing a bridge. The man, who looks like a peasant, asks him for a light. It turns out to be the same man who had visited their home years before and shown Nabokov the match trick; he has lost everything in the war.
Nabokov concludes the story with, “Those magic (matches) he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through. … The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”
I turn to biography this week after attending a reading and question and answer session with A. Scott Berg, biographer of Max Perkins, Samuel Goldwyn, Katherine Hepburn and more, at the UCLA Hammer Museum on Jan. 19. The event was set up by Mona Simpson, English professor and organizer of the “Some Favorite Writers” reading series at the Hammer Museum.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently enrolled in Simpson’s class, “Learning from Chekhov,” and our class attended the reading together. Other than “Speak, Memory” (which I have yet to get through), I’ve never picked up a biography before. I’ve repeatedly stood in the biography section of a bookstore wondering who reads them, specifically the biographies of people I didn’t know existed.
I’ve heard there are people out there who read biographies of people they hadn’t previously heard of, just out of interest in the genre. This was shocking to me. But Berg’s intriguing discussion and his biography of Max Perkins, the elusive book editor who discovered literary greats F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, convinced me I should give biography a second look.
In my dismissal of biography as a genre, I must admit I was oversimplifying Berg’s job. It turns out you can’t just write down the facts of someone’s life and expect the essence of their humanity to come through.
Berg suggests that his task is not that different from a novelist’s ““ his ultimate objective is still to tell a story. Yet there remains a disparity between a work of fiction and that of biography.
For one thing, there are a lot more restrictions when dealing with the story of a real person’s life. As Simpson pointed out to Berg, “Sometimes I think that life is packed with complications and contradictions that aren’t beautiful enough (to write about), but you must not believe that. You must think that there is a consistent order.”
This gets to why I’ve rejected biography in the past. While Michael Jackson’s life might be interesting, I didn’t imagine that reading about it could be as far-reaching and poetically engaging as a work of fiction.
In Peter Coates’ book “Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times,” he mentions that “whereas a piece of art is framed, nature is frameless and offers more scope for the individual imagination because it has not been deliberately created.”
If we consider biography as a part of this nature, Coates’ statement gives more value to the work of biography.
Maybe biography has the potential to be even more pertinent than the novels and short stories I so admire. Berg had a defense for this too, echoing Nabokov’s objective: “It’s not always as neat as some of the coincidences you find in “˜War and Peace,’ but sometimes it’s even more so, and when it is, it’s thrilling beyond belief. And they do happen. Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying on the same day, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Any good fiction editor would cross that out ““ say that’s no good.”
It’s funny how what’s cherished in the world of biography wouldn’t make for good fiction. In writing fiction we depend on a suspension of disbelief ““ but it doesn’t extend as far as the coincidences real life can provide ““ in fiction they just seem too convenient.
Though there is certainly a huge element of mimicry in fiction writing, in movies, in theater, the differences between biography and bildungsroman (a German term for a novel that follows the development of a young protagonist, like “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens) show us that the mimicry isn’t exact replication. As Simpson pointed out to our class a few weeks ago, you can’t simply transcribe a conversation and capture the essence of the interaction.
And this secret of translation is something that writers spend their lives trying to master. I’m hoping that “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius” may reveal this secret to me ““ perhaps it’s something Perkins shared with Fitzgerald or Hemingway in one of their correspondences.
Even if “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius” doesn’t turn me into the next Hemingway, I’m now confident there is something to be gained from reading it. As the biography begins, Berg mentions this quote Perkins is famous for saying: “There could be nothing so important as a book can be.”
“Can” here is the key word. A book has the potential to mean everything, but only if we let it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a biography, a collection of essays or the book so dear to my roommate and me ““ “How to Marry a Fabulous Man” by Pari Livermore ““ they all have the potential to change our lives.
Perhaps it will even show up later in life, when I actually am married to a fabulous man.
“The Written Word” runs every other Thursday. E-mail Bastien at jbastien@media.ucla.edu.