Category: Writing Life

Mr. Rifftides has riffed on my rant from the beginning of this week. He is more dispassionate in a personal context, but passionate about the subject of journalism. Go here to read his thoughts.

There’s nothing more fun than discourse, whether in person or from afar, direct or indirect. Sometimes I tire of listening and prefer to just write, alone with my thoughts, but eventually I need the stimulation of interaction. Today, in visiting Terry Teachout’s blog I find a letter from one of his readers and his response. Their subject is how to appropriately subtitle a biography; should it be “A Life of so-and-so,” or “The Life of so-and-so.” We titled the video documentary of my dad “Jim Hall: A Life in Progress” so you might think I agree with with TT’s correspondent, but “the life in progress” clearly would not have been correct, it would have to have been “His Life In Progress,” but that sounds, quite frankly, rather boring. The logic, understood by both the correspondent and TT is that “the” makes it sound definitive while, in fact, TT’s work as well as dad’s video do not pretend to be exhaustive biographies covering every facet of the life in question.

What makes someone buy one biography instead of another? For me, it is my curiosity about that particular author’s perspective, his or her version of someone’s life as different from someone else’s, and what that life looks like at a particular moment in time — if the person is alive, where they are in the trajectory of their path, and if deceased then what the past looks like from today’s perspective. So yes, people do have many lives, not only as perceived by someone else but as perceived by oneself and other over time.

I hadn’t given this quandry any thought when I suggested that my Luther Henderson book (“a” work in progress) be titled “Seeking Harmony: The Life and Music of Luther Henderson.” Does that imply to you that it is a definitive, exhaustive, soup-to-nuts, heavy-weight tome? If so, I will need a new title. Or, if one believes that the writer can distill the essence of a person, then perhaps “the” is still correct; after all, we are not claiming “the one and only life of” whomever. Still it would only be my perspective of his essence.

But of course it is my perspective, I am the author. I know that and you readers know that. That is why our English teachers, and editors, told us to delete the words “I think” from our pieces. You know it is what I think because my name is on it. If someone else thought or said or wrote it I would have told you so — and if I didn’t, well that’s plaigerism and another story all together.

A DevraDoWrite reader, knowing of my interest in memoir, sent me word today with two references, one to a Wall Street Journal article and the other an NPR interview with my friend Bill Zinsser.

Writers are the custodians of memory, says Bill Zinsser. In the NPR piece On Memoir, Truth, and “Writing Well” Bill talks about the difference between memoir as therapy or retribution, “a debased form” usually written by whiners, and those works written as an act of healing by survivors who write well and often with humor. He believes in writing for oneself, whether or not a work gets published (agents and publishers don’t know what they want until they see it) and he views the writing of family histories as important work. Bill chooses his words as carefully in speech as he does when committing words to the page; I encourage you to listen to this 8 minute segment.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

…publishers plan to put out twice as many [memoirs] as last year…
This spring sees memoirs by a transvestite art director (buttoned-down nerd by day, drag queen by night), a tell-all from the Beatles’ publicist; a book about the year in the life of a Catholic seminarian; a cartoon memoir about surviving cancer; Helen “I Am Woman” Reddy on life as a feminist icon; and a memoir by “Maude” daughter and horror queen Adrienne Barbeau.

Clearly memoir is still “hot” as genres go, and the path is a lot smoother if you are already a well known author, a celebrity of any sort, involved with a celebrity, or have the inside scoop. Not really news to me, but the best part of the article for me was finding a new word — kerfuffle — used as follows: “Given the recent kerfuffle regarding Mr. Frey’s book, publishers say that they’re likely to scrutinize memoirs more closely before releasing them.”

Perhaps you know this word, but I don’t recall ever hearing it before. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says:

Etymology: alteration of carfuffle, from Scots car- (probably from Scottish Gaelic cearr wrong, awkward) + fuffle to become disheveled
chiefly British : DISTURBANCE, FUSS

And the World Wide Words site provides a little background:

KERFUFFLE
A commotion or fuss.
You will most commonly come across this wonderfully expressive word in Britain and the British Commonwealth countries (though the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer used it in January this year). It is rather informal, though it often appears in newspapers. One of the odder things about it is that it changed its first letter in quite recent times. Up to the 1960s, it was written in all sorts of ways—curfuffle, carfuffle, cafuffle, cafoufle, even gefuffle (a clear indication that its main means of transmission was in speech, being too rarely written down to have established a standard spelling). But in that decade it suddenly became much more popular and settled on the current kerfuffle. Lexicographers suspect the change came in response to the way that a number of imitative words were spelled, like kerplop and kerplunk.

I’m going to add kerfuffle to my vocabulary list.

As I get caught up in laying out the chronology of events and discovering details of Luther Henderson’s life, I must continually remind myself to pause and consider the big picture. Readers of biography want to get to know the subject — “okay,” I can hear the readers say, “so he wrote great music, worked with Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. But what was he like?

I recently read “Virginia Woolf’s Nose — Essays on biography” by Hermione Lee, and came across this quote:

“biographies appeal to readers is inseparable from the dream of possession of, and union with, the subject.” [Sutherland, Recreating Jane Austen, p. 17]

My job is to create a sense of the person through the sharing of revealing anecdotes and moments of intimacy. Finding such information requires voluminous research, and, of course, nothing can be accepted at face value. Here’s what Lee had to say:

Following the trail of the story and clearing away the rubbish that’s accrued to it through gossip and rumor, using written evidence to prove a point, drawing on whatever sources of information you can get, building up a “representation” of the character: these are the biographer’s jobs. These scenes invoke, too, the moral reservations so often attached to biography — dislike of gossip, distrust of “low” sources of information, squeamishness about reading private correspondence, suspecting witnesses of having a private agenda.

As I introduce other participants in the story, supporting characters, if you will, I must also examine their role in light of their own perceptions and motivations. Lee also suggests that literary biographers must “find a way of understanding the work’s relation to the life” — for some people, their work is their life, the very essence of who they are, or were; this seems most often to be the case with people in the arts.

Virginia Woolf’s Nose is collection of essays that suggests there can be no such thing as a definitive version of a life, and Lee’s last chapter, about endings, leaves us with more questions than answers.

There is also tricky questions for the biographer about tone of voice at the moment of the subject’s death. If you are coming to the end of the life you’ve spent a lot of time with, you will tend to be moved — if only by relief. Do you let these emotions for the page, hoping they will flood the reader, too? Do you restrain your emotions and give the death clinically Russian mark. If you are writing the life of a writer, do you allow yourself to describe their death as they might have done it in their fictions are poetry? Did you, in the tone you choose, and also in matters of structure and interpretation, tried to give the death meaning and derive from that some sense of a resolution of the life?

So much to think about when you’re holding someone’s life in your hands.

I often read columns on the Poynter Institute website, among them “Chip On My Shoulder: Inspiration & practical advice from Chip Scanlan, other writing coaches & fellow journalists” Chip’s latest column is about blogging and he has enumerated seven reasons why he does it. I, too, like the freedom and diversity. And yes, it is also a great marketing device. But I think one must resist the urge to sell too much, too often, too hard, especially with respect to one’s own wares. Connecting readers to the wares of others, however, is one of the best things about blogs, at least to me as a blog reader.

The pressure to post daily (at least weekdays) can be a bit intense, and it has proven to be a double-edged sword for me. The downside is the pressure itself, which sometimes seems to freeze my brain. But the upside wins out: I am writing more, composing faster, and seeing some improvement in my own skills. Chip’s point about lower standards is also well-taken, providing you read the whole paragraph; he’s not saying that freedom = immunity.

The scariest line in his piece is this:

“Like most writers, I harbor the dream that an agent or publisher may see commercial possibilities in my work.”

If he, who I look up to and believe to be “successful” already, is hoping to be discovered, what chance is there for me? I might as well hang it up, pack it in, and move on down the line. Not that I would (hang it up, that is), I’m way too stubborn.

P.S. Chip’s blog is called The Mechanic and The Muse.

From time to time writers discuss the veracity or reliability of quotes in books that were co-written or ghost-written, and even those in newspaper and magazine features. Did the subject actually say the words as printed on the page? What are the ethical considerations and boundaries for handling quotes. Academics and historians, in their quest for primary source material, find it shocking that some writers have no problem putting words in the mouths of their subjects. I know writers who will tell you that it is a common practice in the world of journalism. It is not a practice that I endorse, but there may be some murky areas. In light of the ongoing Frey fallout, my experience with the writing and publishing of “Men Women, and Girl Singers” seems timely all over again.

When wearing my journalist’s hat, my allegiance is to the reader. I will put quotation marks only around a subject’s actual words. Yes, I edit out the “ums,” but if they have trouble stringing a sentence together then I’m forced to paraphrase and weave in quotable descriptive clauses whenever possible. However, this is not the stance I took when writing John’s life story. Why? Because journalism and nonfiction are different entities; all journalism may be nonfiction (one hopes), but not all nonfiction meets the requirements of journalism. And ghost-writing is even further removed. If I were to stand in the shoes of a ghost-writer, I think my allegiance would have to be to the subject, using my skills to achieve his or her desired goals, provided those goals did not include an intentional distortion of the truth.

My experience writing John’s story is a little strange, in that I do not feel that it was ghosted in the usual way. Still, in the end, it is perceived to be John’s autobiography. In the early 1980s, after John and I first discussed the idea of a book, it became quickly apparent that he was not comfortable being interviewed, by me or anyone else. He is simply uncomfortable in the spotlight. I did make a few early tapes, getting him to reminisce with friends, but such talks yielded little. As any writer can tell you, lengthy passages of verbatim transcriptions of spoken prose don’t hold up in print.

I did do a lot of interviews with other people, and then the files sat in boxes for several years. By the time I came back to the project, John and I had been together for many years; I not only knew the stories, but I also knew and understood his thoughts and feelings about people and events. I decided to write the book “in John’s voice,” using first person point-of-view as a literary device. John read the manuscript when it was finished, and he requested a handful of changes and corrections. The cover page of the original manuscript read: “Men, Women, and Girl Singers: John Levy’s Life as a Musician Turned Talent Manager” by Devra Hall. It was a biography, not an autobiography.

For better or worse, the publisher accepted the manuscript on the condition that it be marketed as an autobiography. So together we added a one-page Preface in which John endorses the content, but says clearly that the words are not his. I know that this will not stop people from “quoting John,” and that bothers me, but only from an academic standpoint in that he did not actually “say” those words. On the other hand, and it may be ironic, the best compliments I received for this book were from people who really know John well, and say “it sounds just like him.”

As a reader, I prefer to judge each book in light of what I perceive to be the contract proffered by the author(s) — I appreciate prefaces or author’s notes that describe the process and explain what liberties, if any, were taken in creating work. A certain amount of responsibility then rests with the reader, who hopefully will be aided by knowledgeable reviewers and critics.

“The American public is incredibly demanding in the diversity of books it seeks. The big publishers couldn’t possibly fulfill those wishes, so the small presses collectively fuel the industry with their breadth and passion.”

So says George Gibson, president of Walker Books and consultant to the Mellon Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, in an article commissioned by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. In that same article (“Independent Presses and ‘Little’ Magazines in American Culture”) writer Gayle Feldman also quotes past NEA Director of Literature Cliff Becker:

“it becomes more and more important to American culture that there are these alternatives for literature, that there is a structure to combat the potential short-term myopia of the marketplace.”

Is it myopia or greed that drives the marketplace? My guess is greed-induced myopia.

I hope that the little guys — the alternatives — can stay afloat. I spent all day today working on a grant proposal, looking for some philanthropic funds to support worthy stories. I know I’m being a bit vague, but if and when I have some good news I promise to spill all the details.