Cathy Curtis

In the annals of publishing, certain editors have been rightly praised for their guidance on manuscripts that were too long, poorly organized, lacking credible situations, insufficiently researched, or carelessly written. Some editors are still working in this manner. But readers' attention spans have shrunk, and books have to compete with a plethora of other leisuretime pursuits. Because publishers—so many of them owned by conglomerates—have to make money, they are no longer welcoming books on worthy subjects that are unlikely to appeal to tens of thousands of readers.

 

As a result, it is increasingly difficult to publish a biography about someone who is neither a world leader nor a pop star, someone who may have done her important work decades ago and whose name is unfamiliar to people under fifty. To make such a book more palatable to younger readers, a writer might be urged to emphasize particularly relatable aspects of the life (even if they are tangential to the subject's importance), to employ ahistorical descriptions, or even to invent scenes and dialogue.

 

I recently read a new biography of a celebrated editor at Knopf. While aspects of her life and work are of interest, the writing often made me cringe. From the author's lengthy acknowledgements, it seems clear that she lacked confidence in her work and was uncritically grateful for the editorial assistance she received. Her editor's advice likely accounts for the formulaic way many chapters begin, with a brief description of the book's subject going about the banal activities of her life. Not only are these passages are laughably flat and cliched, but they exist only to pander to an audience with no particular interest in publishing or editing who are looking for a breezy read.

 

I had a similar experience with my previous trade book editor. Along with an account of Edna O'Brien's hugely eventful personal life, my biography discusses at length the often shockingly prejudiced reactions to her novels, her struggles to get her plays produced, and other matters dealing with her work. No doubt seeking to make the book more appealing to a broad readership, the editor wanted "more lifestyle," including the insertion of an anecdote about O'Brien's personal life at the start of each of the later chapters, after her career began. This editor also wanted me to dispense with my detailed accounts of the way O'Brien was treated by editors, interviewers, book critics, agents, film producers, theatre directors, and others—which demonstrate the extraordinary difficulties she had in trying to disseminate her work and having it fairly reviewed, and which account for all manner of personal and financial troubles.

 

I declined to revise my book, explaining that the real "throughline" is O'Brien's extraordinary body of work, and what she went through to produce it. It would be an injustice to this great writer if the biography were primarily focused on her troubled love life and other personal details. I believe in standing firm against the meddling of editors who are so bottom-line oriented that they distort the book you intended to write. You have to ask yourself: what is more important, that you remain true to your vision of your subject, or that you compromise your writerly integrity just to retain that book contract?

 

After I took my manuscript back, my incredulous agent ("No one does that!") dropped me. I eventually found a wonderful new agent who loved the manuscript. He worked diligently to find a new trade publisher for my book. But, although most editors praised the writing, they declined to sign me, citing contemporary readers' lack of interest in literary biography.

 

Ultimately, I chose to publish with a "hybrid" press, just one wobbly step above self-publishing. (A hybrid press is one that requires the author to pay for design, printing, and distribution.) The good news is that the author has complete control over such things as the cover design and flap copy. The bad news (besides the lack of an advance and the unexpected dent in the author's meager savings) is that there is a stigma attached to this manner of publishing. The cloud hovering over such books is, "Why wasn't this good enough for a trade or university press to snap it up?" (There actually was interest from the editor at Princeton University Press, but the peer reviewers, academics who are required to vet the manuscript, wanted me to drop my chronological approach—the only one I ever use, because it guides the reader properly through the life—in favor of a thematic organization.)

 

My book, FEARLESS: A BIOGRAPHY OF EDNA O'BRIEN, will be published in 2025 by Atmosphere Press. I think this is the best—the most carefully considered, atmospheric, and wide-ranging—of my five biographies. But the final judgment will rest with you.

 

(c) Cathy Curtis 2024

Catching up with the March 21 issue of The New York Review of Books, I read (in a review of the Penguin edition of the final volume of In Search of Lost Time) that Marcel Proust disagreed with Sainte-Beuve's biographical approach to literary criticism: "A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices."

 

In the same issue, the reviewer of William Egginton's book The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality has a bone to pick with the author's inclusion of biographical details along with the "drama of ideas" that illuminates this study. The reviewer approvingly quotes David Foster Wallace's negative remarks about a Borges biography that views his work in the light of his "emotional states and tragic love life." According to Wallace, this makes no sense because Borges was a Neoplatonist who believed that the self is an illusion.

 

But here's the thing: writers can hold all manner of arcane and complicated beliefs about the self, yet they cannot control the way their life experiences seep into their fiction. That's because writers are human beings, not intellectual automatons. Egginton suggests that Borges wondered if having accepted an invitation from the Chilean dictator August Pinochet made it impossible for him to receive the Nobel Prize—and that this thought about a road not taken influenced the short story "Garden of Forking Paths." To me this sounds eminently plausible.

 

I can't resist adding that reviewers who wrote that my biography of Elizabeth Hardwick did not accord her the full gravity of her intellectual position as a doyenne of American letters seemed not to realize that she was also a fallible and crisis-ridden human being, a woman who had to deal—for about one-third of her life—with an immensely gifted husband (the poet Robert Lowell) who was constantly falling prey to episodes of bipolar disorder that wreaked havoc with her attempt to lead a normal married life. And although she had remade herself as a model New Yorker, her personality was also formed by her Kentucky youth; most obviously, she never lost her Southern accent. These facts in no way detract from her accomplishments as a literary personage. But they must be taken into account in any truthful account of her life.  

 

Dilys Evans, a native of Wales who worked as a nurse at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York when she met my biographical subject Nell Blaine, has died at age eighty-eight. Nell had been stricken with polio during a sojourn in Greece, and was confined to an iron lung. Finally able to breathe on her own and move into an apartment, she was now a paraplegic who depended on Dilys for her daily needs. Nell's determination to travel to Europe and visit galleries and museums despite the difficulties inherent in being a wheelchair user gave Dilys her first exposure to the history of art. Formal study of drawing and painting followed. As the August 1 obituary in Publishers Weekly recounts, Dilys went on to become an illustrator, an art director at the children's magazine Cricket, an agent for children's book illustrators, a children's book packager, and the author of Show & Tell: Exploring the Fine Art of Children's Book Illustration (2008, Chronicle Books).

 

The PW article, by Shannon Maughan, offers a loving summary of key events in Dilys's life, incorporating interviews with people who worked with her. But one important fact was left out: Dilys and Nell were lovers. Their union was no secret to people in their circle, and it is treated forthrightly in my biography, ALIVE STILL. Perhaps Maughan was familiar only with a previously published monograph, Nell Blaine: Her life and work, which makes no mention of Nell's sexuality. I suppose it is also possible that such information was thought inappropriate to include in a celebration of the life of a person connected with children's literature. But in 2024 this omission seems overly cautious. After her relationship with Nell ended (badly, though there was a later reconciliation), Dilys had a much longer intimate partnership with another woman. Why not allow this dimension of her life to enter the historical record?

Have you ever been interviewed, either for a published article or in a live, videotaped setting? As someone who has endured both experiences and also watched other biographers being interviewed (mostly under the auspices of the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York), I have a lot to say about this subject.

 

I say "endured," because my experiences have run the gamut from annoying to downright frightening. As someone who thinks best with her fingers on a keyboard, I prefer being able to type my responses to questions rather than being quoted as I speak. Writing allows me to formulate my replies at leisure rather than suddenly have to deal with some topic I've never even considered.

 

Over time, I've learned to "manage" interview questions that I have no answer for, by swerving into a somewhat allied topic that better reflects my interests. But, although I have given talks about my books, my ordinary life does not involve lecturing (I'm not an academic) or otherwise addressing the public. So being interviewed is always stressful.

 

I think the problem mainly has to do with my interviewers' assumptions.

 

Because I've written about women, interviewers who apparently haven't read my books tend to assume that my subjects were staunch feminists. In fact, none of them were, which (inevitably to the annoyance of the interviewer) did not lead me to criticize them. It is axiomatic that people have diverse and often contradictory drives and personalities. Some accomplished women have acted with a sense of self-determination but shied away from identifying with a "sisterhood."

 

While I do point out obvious instances of patriarchal domination, I do not write from a theoretical standpoint. My interest is in the complicated tissue of a life, not in reducing it to a category.

 

Then there is the question of "greatness." In a live interview about my biography of Elaine de Kooning, my interlocutor asked me whether I thought Elaine was as great an artist as her husband Willem, one of the titans of twentieth-century art. I was taken aback. Of course she wasn't his equal as an artist, I replied, to the discomfort of my interviewer. Elaine was an interesting artist in terms of her range over various subjects and styles, and her portraits are her best work. But what fascinated me were the ways she made a career and life for herself apart from her famous husband.

 

I would not write about anyone whose work did not strike me as unique and worth considering, but I care nothing about "greatness," whereas I absolutely must be assured that a person's life was eventful and can be documented in personal as well professional detail.

 

With the bright-eyed demeanor of someone who has devised an amazingly creative question, interviewers are prone to ask what I didn't know about my subject when I began researching her. When I truthfully reply "everything," that does not go down well. Also inevitable is the question about the most surprising thing I learned, also a nonstarter. I start researching without any preconceived notion about my subject, so nothing I learn is particularly surprising. I guess another author might simply make up plausible answers to these questions, but I feel exasperated at their fatuity. These are lazy questions, people! Another space-filler is to ask about "my favorite" biographies, or artists, or writers. I balk at this; I'm not interested in providing lists.

 

So what do I want? If an interviewer hasn't read the book, how about open-ended, yet directed, questions like, "How do you choose your subjects?" or "Tell us about her early years," or "Tell us about how she coped with a difficult time in her life," or "How hard was it to find the documentation you needed?" If the interviewer has read the book, she should—rather than harping on tiny issues that are mostly intended to show how clever she is—consider how best to make the book's contents vivid to an audience who hasn't yet opened the cover.

 

My worst interview was about my biography of the novelist, short story writer, and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick. My interlocutor, whose nasty demeanor may have been colored by his recent firing from a major editing position, seemed hell bent on impaling my book on a skewer of his own devising. As a private and quiet person who is not accustomed to being in a public spotlight, I expected the normal sort of Q and A, not a mean spirited grilling.

 

On the other hand, the friendly back-and-forth style of interviewing can too easily devolve into a vapid mutual appreciation society. What I don't want is to see two good friends (author and interlocutor) exchanging fond compliments and giggling over great moments in a book the audience has not yet read. Nor do I want an interviewer who has covered a stack of papers with niggling questions that she seems determined to keep asking, regardless of the directions in which the interview is going. At the other extreme, interviewers who simply cede the floor to the author are also failing to do their job properly.

 

Ideally, the interviewer's goal is simply to have the author tell the audience about the book in the most accessible, lively way possible. "Tell us about the time when X" is a great question, allowing the author to present the anecdote.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2024

 

 

Reading Freya Johnston's London Review of Books review of The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson: Forms of Artistry and Thought, by Philip Smallwood, I was delighted to see the following:

 

"Johnson's creative instincts coincided with his critical attitudes in a deep-seated resistance to systems -- moral, philosophical, literary, historical -- and in a related awareness of the confusing variety of life, a sense of its arbitrariness and uncertainty, and of how little of it can ever by determined by our own plans. Hence, in part, his love of what he sometimes called 'secret history'. In the Rambler he argued that biography . . . . must be anecdotal so that we are able to understand its subjects as people close to ourselves; literary criticism, in turn, must remain close to biography so that we can understand its origins in human ambition and human fallibility . . ."

 

Academic critics, who are overwhelmingly and irritatingly wedded to systems and theories, fail to understand that "the confusing variety of life" and "human ambition and human fallibility" are the true concerns of biography. The urge to write reviews intended to showcase the writer's cleverness in theory creation is simply vanity, an intellectual pirouette that fails to illuminate the subject and often does a grave injustice to the author of the book.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2024

I am no stranger to published criticism, either as the author or subject of it. (I wrote art reviews for many years, and my books have been widely reviewed.) Hardly a day goes by when I'm not reading reviews in the New York Review of Books, the TLS, the London Review of Books, and other publications. My remarks in this blog post are the result of a lifetime of thinking about criticism—how it is generally practiced, what causes it to read the way it does, and why fair-mindedness is on the side of the angels.

 

Faced with a work of art or a book, a critic's impulse is generally to compare it—perhaps to the creator's previous work or to the works of others, or more dubiously, to a notion in the critic's mind. (I was often guilty of this in my youthful art reviews.)

 

Whether as a result of editorial pressure, the critic's personality, or both, the tone of reviews is often aggressive. Rather than addressing the value of the creator's actual work, the critic begins by complaining that it doesn't adhere to the critic's notion of the correct way of proceeding. Why did the sculptor work on such a small scale? Why didn't the biographer employ a thematic format?

 

Sadly, reviewing is widely regarded as a form of competitive sport. You don't get points for evenhandedness or effusiveness, or even for clarity. All too often it seems that the goal is to become a prosecuting attorney, to find the holes in the witness's testimony and demonstrate your superior wisdom. As you "prove" the weakness of the creator's "case," you pounce on the smallest error as proof that it indicates wholesale sloppiness.

 

The glory of this approach is that is allows the critic to propound a new theory, ever so much cleverer than the creator's, and thereby to demonstrate the critic's standing as a public intellectual. The creator's work thus becomes merely an elevator, a device that boosts the critic's own career. I find this approach highly objectionable.

 

A fair-minded critic begins by finding an aspect of the work to praise. Surely there is some quality that honestly can be said to be worthy, or at least valid. This critic also attempts to understand what the creator was trying to do, whether or not it appears successful, and grants that there are many ways to achieve significant results—not necessarily the one the critic might have chosen.

 

The fair-minded book critic devotes ample space to discussing the contents of the actual work and does not appear to present information gleaned from the text as if it were prior knowledge on the critic's part. Rather than pursuing a "gotcha" vendetta against the author for any factual or interpretive errors, the critic aims to enlarge the knowledge base of readers of the review. By taking the high ground, a critic can write even a largely negative review in such a way that she neither glorifies her own acuity nor disparages the intelligence of the author, while providing readers with information that enlarges their view of the world.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2024

I keep thinking about the gulf between what the academy deems appropriate in a biography and what I care about as a biographer.

 

Academics follow a certain protocol. Just as scientists peering through a microscope literally look down on the material on the slide, academics always retain a superior position to the subject under dissection, determining the value of a subject's work by slotting it into specific categories. That's why academics value only biographies organized thematically, so that this structure—imposed in response to currently fashionable theories—can be seen as more important than the messy factuality of the life. Academics also believe it is their job to state an opinion about every facet of the work and to vigorously question any autobiographical remark of the subject that does not fit with their own sense of likely and unlikely events.

 

I approach my subjects in a completely different way. I seek to know what it was like to be them—to think their thoughts (as related in letters and journal entries) and to understand how their upbringing and subsequent life events shaped their view of the world and influenced their work. As far as I am concerned, the best way to organize a biography is to emphasize the narrative of the life, which generally means moving in a chronological direction. Of course that does not mean including dull or inconsequential details; a biographer needs to exercise a shaping hand in determining what facts are important.

 

But I am not writing to prove something about my subjects, or to demonstrate how cleverly I can refute their claims or dismiss some of their efforts. In other words: it's not about me. I do not stand above my subjects; I try to stand alongside them. I am aware that a subject's memory can be colored by emotion and stress, and still be true to the person's experience. I express my own opinions only when I feel strongly about them. (Because I am writing the first, or first comprehensive, life of this person, I have no need to quarrel with previous biographers; I relegate any disagreements with other published sources to the endnotes, where I know only specialists will see them.)

 

It's a question of humility, really. I am writing about this life because it is compelling and because it belongs to someone whose work I admire. My goal is to introduce others to this person and her work. I try to accomplish this goal as gracefully as I can, but in the end, what matters is readers' ability to connect with my subject—to appreciate her, to understand her world, and to close the book with a sense of how complicated a creative life can be.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2024

 

 

 

The other day, trying to catch up with a backlog of London Review of Books issues, I noticed an ad for Hermione Lee's Lorna Sage Memorial Lecture last summer, "Giving Oneself Away: Biographical Experiences." Hoping that it had been videotaped, I searched online but couldn't find a trace of it. Still, Dame Hermione's topic called out to me.

 

When I was a journalist, one of the cardinal rules was never to become the subject of your stories. You were there to observe and question others, not as a participant in the published piece. The New Journalism —pursued primarily in magazines — had removed this straitjacket decades earlier, but daily newspapers remained overwhelmingly true to the original stipulation.

 

Similarly, among the few rules widely followed in biography is the injunction never to become a character in your own book and to make only the most sparing use of the first person pronoun. This always made sense to me. The only time I made a brief entrance, in my biography of Grace Hartigan, was the brief description of my interview with her decades earlier. It would have seemed too coy to hide behind the words "a journalist" and consign my identity to an endnote.

 

Of course, every biographer's "I" is imprinted all over her book in the details she has chosen and the point of view she expresses. But there is no need to trot out the first person. In a sentence like "This was proof of her tendency to overrate the people she loved," it's obvious that the opinion is the author's. Biographies written by academics are more apt to include first-person statements to underline a remark (e.g., "I believe this version was in fact not submitted for publication"). I think this is a function of the way academics view biography as a means of promulgating their own thesis about the subject rather than simply as a narrative of the life.

 

In recent years there has been a movement toward biographies that resemble fiction, with invented episodes and even invented dialogue — two inadmissible features of standard biography. I realize that it is very difficult to write about people who have left no written record, whether because their lives predated written records or because they were enslaved or otherwise denied the ability to speak up for themselves. But I still feel that the author either must find another workaround for such lives or write historical fiction instead.

 

Another newly popular wrinkle is the biographical approach that mingles aspects of the writer's own life with that of her subject. It's one thing to explain (in a note or preface) how you came to write your book; such information can help create a bond with readers. But I believe in a clearcut distinction between biography and memoir. Yoking your (usually, unhappy) personal history to the life of a well-known person is generally little more than an attempt to evoke sympathy. The genre of memoirs by the children of famous people exists in a liminal space that so often tells us too much about the author and not enough about the Famous Person without whom there likely would have been no publisher's contract.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2024

 

The competitive spirit can emerge in unexpected places. Writing the life of a noteworthy author or artist has spurred some biographers to attempt to meet their subjects on their own turf by trying to imitate their distinctive style or intellectual approach, or by wallowing in a kind of fake poetry intended to evoke the experience of seeing the work. Some critics even fault biographers whose writing (in the critic's opinion) fails to reflect the lofty standards of their subjects.

 

I believe that these attempts on the part of biographers are misplaced—awkward or misleading at best, laughable at worst. They not only fail to help readers understand the work but also make a poor case for our own writerly strengths. As biographers we belong to the world of nonfiction, approaching our task as intelligent and observant handmaidens to history as we follow the trajectory of a life and describe the work in order to clarify its significant features.

 

Restraint is the better part of valor in biography. We do best to adopt a clear and unshowy writing style reflecting our own considered approach to the material, the better to allow the virtues of our subjects' work to emerge. This requires a certain balance between self-effacement and personal engagement. We are not trying to prove that we are as clever as our subjects. Rather, we leave our mark in the choices we've made in choosing and organizing the material to retain readers' interest and in the discernment that allows us to form a reasonably charitable opinion of our subject's virtues and faults, both as human beings and as creative individuals.

 

We are not novelists, philosophers, pundits, or poets. But we operate in our own special world of documented truths, which require no small amount of skill to discover, describe, and evaluate in a nuanced way. Let us be celebrated for that.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2023

 

I recently spoke with a friend of the artist Nell Blaine, whose biography I wrote. Kindly loaned to me, the friend's letters from Nell had offered a valuable indication of her temperament and the stresses of her daily life at that time. The friend, whom I will call C., mentioned that she had come across additional letters from Nell. Although this cache was discovered too late to help me write my book, I suggested that she might donate the letters to one of Nell's archives, at Harvard and the Archives of American Art.

 

C., who is herself an artist, said that she didn't see the point of doing that, because the letters are not about Nell's art. I tried to explain that a letter doesn't need to be about a subject's work to be valuable. As a biographer, I know that there is so much more to be fathomed from the correspondence and journals of a creative person than simply how the work was conceived and made. Biographies (as opposed to critical studies) are necessarily about the whole person, not only about the nature of their accomplishments. Any piece of reliable information about the person's life — including her expectations, disappointments, worries, loves, jealousies, prejudices, political views, and financial affairs — is important when you are trying to deduce the complex network of forces that led her to produce a particular body of work while dealing with the rest of her life. But C. was adament; she would probably throw out all of this correspondence.

 

I suppose there will always be a huge gap between people (including many academics) who want to learn only about the work and those who also wonder about the inner life of the person who made it.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2023