Cathy Curtis

The other day, while reading a short story collection, I found myself turning to the back cover of the paperback, which has brief descriptions of the themes of three of the stories. For some inexplicable reason I tried to match up these descriptions with the stories I had already read. Only one of the summaries sounded familiar.

 

These stories are not mysterious, and their themes were apparent to me as I read. But some peculiar need for validation led me to find out what they were "supposed" to be about. Or, let's face it, what someone in the publisher's publicity department decided they were about.

 

After reading the last two stories, I felt that at least one of them didn't quite fit with its supposed theme. Paging back through the rest of the book, I tried to see if that theme described a different story. But that didn't seem to be the case.

 

Readers are accustomed to learning from another source (a review or the flap copy) what a book is about before actually turning to page 1. Of course, the flap copy is meant to interest a potential book buyer. But what if we already own the book and are still in thrall to the content of those brief paragraphs?

 

They give us certain expectations—of a particular style, of the particular trajectory the plot will take, and the type of characters we will encounter. If we fail to find these elements as we read, we will feel deceived. Might we feel that the problem is ours—that we don't understand what the author is doing? In the case of experimental work, this may well be the case. Otherwise, the fault is the hype machine of publishing.

 

Imagine a scenario in which someone gives us a new book with an unrevealing title that was published without any descriptive information on its cover—a book whose author is also unfamiliar. What would we do? Read the first paragraph? See if the chapters have titles? Check to see how long it is? Surely we would be strangely at sea with no guidance about what's between the covers. Yet our experience as readers would be akin to that of a nineteenth-century explorer venturing upon an uncharted land. The experience might be upsetting or disappointing or captivating, but we would have no one with whom to compare notes. Entirely on our own, we would have to judge the writing purely for itself.

 

Many of us know the subversive thrill of finding a mistake in the writing of an esteemed author—a fact we know and the author did not. Book reviewers naturally feel obliged to report such findings to the world at large. But there is a substantial difference between correcting a few lapses in the course of discussing larger aspects of the book and harping on occasional errors as "proof" of the author's unworthiness to write about the subject.

 

Anyone who has written a substantial book that draws on multiple sources and incorporates thousands of pieces of information knows that there are very likely errors of one sort or another. These may range from errors of omission (why didn't the author mention X about Y?) and small errors of fact (Z didn't live at that address; Q was born too late to take advantage of W) to confusion about well-documented historical events.

 

Errors can arise as a result of the author's carelessness or honest confusion. Some errors may be the result of the author's lack of expertise in areas tangential to the subject's life—a matter of failing to know what you don't know. Given the pressures inherent in publishing a contracted book, some aspects of a life inevitably will be dealt with summarily. Compounding the problem, there are no fact-checkers at trade publishing houses. A biographer writing for general readers is unlikely to engage more than superficially with scholarly literature published on the subject, which may provide hitherto unknown significant facts along with a big helping of impenetrable theoretical material.

 

There is an elderly biographer who has made it his business to write book reviews couched as irritable screeds about even the smallest errors and omissions. Such obsessive scrutiny would do a prosecuting attorney proud; in a book reviewer, however, it becomes the work of a crank. I couldn't help a twinge of schadenfreude when I learned that his own recent biography—as the subject's widow told me— is studded with misinformation.

 

It seems to me that a balanced, spite-free outlook—a realization that writers, like biographical subjects, are fallible—is the wisest tack to take when weighing the value of a book.

 

(c) Cathy Curtis 2024

I keep thinking about the differences between what the academy deems appropriate in a biography (a genre still considered somewhat questionable) and what the rest of us write. Academics follow a certain protocol. Just as scientists peering through a microscope literally look down on the material on the slide, academics always remain superior to the subject under dissection, determining the value of the subject's work by slotting it into specific categories. That's why academics value only biographies organized thematically; this structure—imposed in response to currently fashionable theories—is seen as more worthy of intellectual effort 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.

 

As a non-academic biographer, 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 conveyed by their journals, letters, and other written materials), and to understand how their upbringing and subsequent life events shaped their view of the world and influenced their work. To do this, I rely on archival sources dating as close as possible to the event in question, while also presenting some of the inevitable memory slips and embroideries that recreate these events years later. As far as I am concerned, the best way to organize a biography is to emphasize the narrative, which generally involves moving chronologically through the life. 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 (insofar as possible) inside them, or at least alongside them. I express my own opinions only when I feel strongly about them.(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 it as gracefully as I can, but in the end, what matters is readers' ability to connect with my subject—to appreciate her, understand her world, and close the book with a sense of how complicated a creative life can be.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2024

 

I've been reading a lot of fiction lately, partly to take a break from the looming election. Something that I've come to realize is that it can take awhile to feel comfortable with a novel's cast of characters and the author's writing style. The most basic problem is sorting out who's who. I think it is a mistake for novelists to introduce a group of characters too quickly; this involves a lot of tedious paging back and forth when I fail to recall whether X is the brother, the uncle, or Z's husband. I prefer to meet these people one or two at a time, the way I would in real life. I want to see what the author does with them, how she describes their interior lives and how she manages to give each of them a different way of speaking.

 

In fiction, I look for freshly minted observations of the way people think and behave and a sense that the author has created a unique world with parallels to the one I inhabit. Whenever I encounter generic descriptions, unbelievable dialogue, or trendy writerly mannerisms, I don't bother reading further. Conversely, after finishing an outstanding novel, my expectations become more demanding. Recently, when I turned from the Irish novelist Sally Rooney's brilliant Intermezzo to two recent and much-praised novels by leading American women writers, they seemed disappointingly humdrum and sentimental. American readers are famous for preferring stories with a therapeutic upbeat resolution and for condemning deeply tragic narratives as "too sad." Yet a tragic sense of life is perhaps the most important characteristic of great writers.

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 a major publishing house. 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 her remarkable perseverance in the face of daunting rejection. 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. The editor even failed to show interest in O'Brien's fascinating eye-level account of her travels in Cuba in 1968. It was as if her career was too annoyingly diffuse to fit neatly into a book about a woman best known for her first novel.

 

In response, I wrote that the book my editor had in mind was not the one I intended to write, 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 have spent years researching and writing. 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 back my manuscript, 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 an 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. Still, I benefited greatly from several factual corrections to my accounts of Irish history.)

 

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, richly sourced, 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