Diary: A Visit to Key West
On the day after my birthday I flew to Miami and then drove to Key West. The old town, where I stayed, reminded me a bit of Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard, as if that Yankee outpost (as I once knew it) had been transplanted to the semitropics. The Keys stretch out, forming a curve around a bay that's bordered on the north by the Everglades. Visible along the way are the ruins of the railroad that ran from Miami to Key West, meeting a P&O boat with daily service to Cuba, 90 miles away.
My purpose, along with thawing out, was to attend the second half of the Key West Literary Seminar, now in its 31st year. The theme was "Writers on Writers" - literary biography. The speakers, including Lyndall Gordon and Colm Toibin, attracted me. They were joined by many others, a richer fare than I'd expected: Alexandra Styron, Paul Mariani, Blake Bailey, Edmund White, Claire Harman, Geoff Dyer, Ann Napolitano, Brenda Wineapple, Brad Gooch, Kate Moses, Joyce Johnson, D.T. Max, Jennie Fields, Paul Alexander, Robert Richardson, and Billy Collins.
The opening "John Hersey Memorial Address" by Colm Toibin, "On Grief and Reason: Reading Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn," included a quote from Joseph Brodsky: "Grief and reason are poison for each other." Bishop and Gunn, both of whom lost their mothers to madness or death in childhood, became friends during the time when Bishop lived in San Francisco. Her proposed epitaph, Toibin said, was, "Awful, but cheerful." She didn't have much feeling for San Francisco poets, he recounted, but the English-born Gunn was the exception. One thing they shared was their grief, which they both wrote about in a characteristically plain way, unadorned by the kind of flamboyance that death sometimes attracts.
This was on Thursday evening, 17 January. The next three days consisted of talks and panels. Blake Bailey, biographer of John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Richard Yates, talked about the phenomenon of the depressed, alcoholic, or drug-addicted writer. This found an echo of sorts in D.T. Max's talk about David Foster Wallace and Alexandra Styron's on her father, William Styron. Ann Napolitano and Brad Gooch both discussed Flannery O'Connor, while Kate Moses and Paul Alexander paired up on Sylvia Plath. In each case, the women wrote novels about their subjects, while the men wrote biographies. (Geoff Dyer, uniquely, wrote a memoir about attempting to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence - a book that's said to be quite good on him. Dyer said later that he feels Lawrence is a far better travel writer, essayist, and critic than novelist. This could also be said of Lawrence Durrell.)
O'Connor is interesting for having led a life defined and constricted by illness - she had lupus, which caused her to retreat to her family's farm - yet also transcending it. She and Plath seemed aware of their powers and accomplishments, but Plath willed her destruction. O'Connor also resembles Emily Dickinson, as described by Lyndall Gordon in a talk that quoted her as saying that "you know a poem is good if it blows your head off." (Several people talked about Dickinson, so someone else may have quoted her.) Along with Plath, they exhibited "will" (in a Schopenhauer sense) in the face of obstacle or limitation, coupled with an abiding confidence in their work.
In her "writer's biography" of Virginia Woolf, Gordon asks what Woolf might have done next had she lived. It's a question that arises with Plath, too, whose early death in the wake of a self-seen masterpiece reminded me of the precocious photographer and suicide, Francesca Woodman. Woolf and O'Connor resemble each other in their remarkable self-discipline as writers, but Plath has this, too. The men fared worse. "An alcoholic," D.T. Max said, quoting someone from AA, "is a megalomaniac with an inferiority complex."
Max focused on Wallace's stint at Walden House, a halfway house to which Harvard remanded him after he said he might kill himself. (It was, Max said, partly a ploy to leave the philosophy department "with honor.") Wallace grew to appreciate the lives of the other residents and the plainspoken self-help advice offered by those ministering to them. Much of this found its way into the novel that was his breakthrough. (I remember reading a deeply negative review of his last, unfinished novel that wondered more or less openly if he died in the attempt to make it work. That was a definitely a theme with the men: their struggles and defeats, and the role or place of alcohol and drugs in this process. Malcolm Lowry, I once read, was only really lucid while writing, but that lucidity - for him and others - was tragically episodic.)
One of the questions raised continually in these sessions was how close, really, biography gets at the truth of the life. The novelists, the memoirists, and the biographers talked about their relationships to letters, journals, and the accounts of the writers' families and friends. The 50th anniversary of Plath's "Ariel" and her death was marked by argument among the proponents of Plath and her late husband, Ted Hughes. I learned that the "Ariel" that made Plath's name was not the manuscript she left, but an edit of it made by Hughes. He was her literary executor and heir. The "Ariel" that she left was only published in 2005. Her two missing journals may in fact be in a locked box in her archive, not yet authorized to be opened.
Someone, perhaps Claire Harman, said that biographers end up knowing their subjects better than they know themselves. But of course even the full trajectory of a life, as revealed by its traces, is a subjective journey for the biographer. Blake Bailey, commenting on a previous life of Cheever, said that the worst possibility is a biographer with a theory, intent on shaping the facts to fit the case and ignoring whatever fails to apply. He also mentioned how "the facts" vary, depending on the source, with objective evidence sometimes contradicting people's memories and those memories often in conflict. This is true in life, too, of course - how a person strikes others is immensely varied, contingent as it is, and our sense of self is equally so. Memoir is a dodgy thing, as Nabokov acknowledged (citing his sisters' presence in Nice, which he'd overlooked in the first edition of his memoir)
Alexandra Styron wrote a memoir of her father grounded partly in her own experience of him and partly in her immersion in his archive at Duke University. She said in passing that "everyone should have the opportunity to get to know their parents after they're gone." What she meant was the we need a corrective to our received opinions, whether it's acquired through time and reflection or by other means. Writing her memoir gave her back her father: like Nathaniel Kahn's film, "My Architect," a journey not so much of discovery as recovery.
My purpose, along with thawing out, was to attend the second half of the Key West Literary Seminar, now in its 31st year. The theme was "Writers on Writers" - literary biography. The speakers, including Lyndall Gordon and Colm Toibin, attracted me. They were joined by many others, a richer fare than I'd expected: Alexandra Styron, Paul Mariani, Blake Bailey, Edmund White, Claire Harman, Geoff Dyer, Ann Napolitano, Brenda Wineapple, Brad Gooch, Kate Moses, Joyce Johnson, D.T. Max, Jennie Fields, Paul Alexander, Robert Richardson, and Billy Collins.
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| Colm Toibin. |
This was on Thursday evening, 17 January. The next three days consisted of talks and panels. Blake Bailey, biographer of John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Richard Yates, talked about the phenomenon of the depressed, alcoholic, or drug-addicted writer. This found an echo of sorts in D.T. Max's talk about David Foster Wallace and Alexandra Styron's on her father, William Styron. Ann Napolitano and Brad Gooch both discussed Flannery O'Connor, while Kate Moses and Paul Alexander paired up on Sylvia Plath. In each case, the women wrote novels about their subjects, while the men wrote biographies. (Geoff Dyer, uniquely, wrote a memoir about attempting to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence - a book that's said to be quite good on him. Dyer said later that he feels Lawrence is a far better travel writer, essayist, and critic than novelist. This could also be said of Lawrence Durrell.)
O'Connor is interesting for having led a life defined and constricted by illness - she had lupus, which caused her to retreat to her family's farm - yet also transcending it. She and Plath seemed aware of their powers and accomplishments, but Plath willed her destruction. O'Connor also resembles Emily Dickinson, as described by Lyndall Gordon in a talk that quoted her as saying that "you know a poem is good if it blows your head off." (Several people talked about Dickinson, so someone else may have quoted her.) Along with Plath, they exhibited "will" (in a Schopenhauer sense) in the face of obstacle or limitation, coupled with an abiding confidence in their work.
In her "writer's biography" of Virginia Woolf, Gordon asks what Woolf might have done next had she lived. It's a question that arises with Plath, too, whose early death in the wake of a self-seen masterpiece reminded me of the precocious photographer and suicide, Francesca Woodman. Woolf and O'Connor resemble each other in their remarkable self-discipline as writers, but Plath has this, too. The men fared worse. "An alcoholic," D.T. Max said, quoting someone from AA, "is a megalomaniac with an inferiority complex."
Max focused on Wallace's stint at Walden House, a halfway house to which Harvard remanded him after he said he might kill himself. (It was, Max said, partly a ploy to leave the philosophy department "with honor.") Wallace grew to appreciate the lives of the other residents and the plainspoken self-help advice offered by those ministering to them. Much of this found its way into the novel that was his breakthrough. (I remember reading a deeply negative review of his last, unfinished novel that wondered more or less openly if he died in the attempt to make it work. That was a definitely a theme with the men: their struggles and defeats, and the role or place of alcohol and drugs in this process. Malcolm Lowry, I once read, was only really lucid while writing, but that lucidity - for him and others - was tragically episodic.)
One of the questions raised continually in these sessions was how close, really, biography gets at the truth of the life. The novelists, the memoirists, and the biographers talked about their relationships to letters, journals, and the accounts of the writers' families and friends. The 50th anniversary of Plath's "Ariel" and her death was marked by argument among the proponents of Plath and her late husband, Ted Hughes. I learned that the "Ariel" that made Plath's name was not the manuscript she left, but an edit of it made by Hughes. He was her literary executor and heir. The "Ariel" that she left was only published in 2005. Her two missing journals may in fact be in a locked box in her archive, not yet authorized to be opened.
Someone, perhaps Claire Harman, said that biographers end up knowing their subjects better than they know themselves. But of course even the full trajectory of a life, as revealed by its traces, is a subjective journey for the biographer. Blake Bailey, commenting on a previous life of Cheever, said that the worst possibility is a biographer with a theory, intent on shaping the facts to fit the case and ignoring whatever fails to apply. He also mentioned how "the facts" vary, depending on the source, with objective evidence sometimes contradicting people's memories and those memories often in conflict. This is true in life, too, of course - how a person strikes others is immensely varied, contingent as it is, and our sense of self is equally so. Memoir is a dodgy thing, as Nabokov acknowledged (citing his sisters' presence in Nice, which he'd overlooked in the first edition of his memoir)
Alexandra Styron wrote a memoir of her father grounded partly in her own experience of him and partly in her immersion in his archive at Duke University. She said in passing that "everyone should have the opportunity to get to know their parents after they're gone." What she meant was the we need a corrective to our received opinions, whether it's acquired through time and reflection or by other means. Writing her memoir gave her back her father: like Nathaniel Kahn's film, "My Architect," a journey not so much of discovery as recovery.
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| Blake Bailey and Alexandra Styron. |
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