Wild Violet online literary magazine » literature

Biography Year

Margaret Montet — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 13:00:13 +0000

Twelve individuals were born in my mind last year. My project went like this: I read one biography each month—some from my pile of the unread, and some that I heard about during that year. The subjects of these biographies, living and dead, mingled in my mind and became defined by the people, places, and ideas that were important to them. They went from being two-dimensional faces with names attached, to characters with three-dimensional personalities. As I got to know them, they seemed to get to know each other, connecting on places and interests they shared. I mind-mapped each, and looked for trends and connections among them. The librarian part of me was hoping to put together a clever biography selection and reading guide, but mainly, I just wanted to explore the genre.

I use mind maps to organize and remember information. I learned about this technique from a member of my book club, and for a very long time, this is where I practiced mind mapping. I mapped details of the books we read so that I could more easily enter into discussion. Soon I realized that mind maps helped me find connections, threads, and hierarchies as well. One step further, I sometimes make a meta map to summarize findings from multiple sources on a topic (books, articles, radio shows, interviews, etc.). I use mind maps to organize my writing and speaking, too.

Mind map of Molly Brown

By mind mapping my biographies as I read them, I was able to observe trends, and became intrigued by the art of biography writing. Over the course of the Biography Year, certain questions reappeared for almost every individual.

What surprises surfaced about the subject? Was the biographer surprised by these, too?

The musical theater and film character “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” was based upon a real person named Margaret Brown who actually did survive the Titanic disaster and never went by the name “Molly.” The first pandas brought to the United States were captured and transported by a socialite widow named Ruth Harkness and her Chinese partner and guide. Beethoven worried a lot.

What places are important to the subject’s life, and did the subject become more familiar to me if I visited these places?

I happened to be in Denver recently and visited Margaret “Molly” Brown’s House of Lions. Having read the biography, this was a delightful experience, except I was disappointed at how much of Brown’s amazing life the tour guide left out. I understand that most people are intrigued by her surviving the Titanic disaster and that, if he had described all of her Denver civic accomplishments, the tour would have been three times longer.

Who were the major characters in the subject’s life? Were they collaborators or muses? Was the subject a rugged individualist? Did the biographer research these people?

Beethoven was a loner. Samuel de Champlain, Marco Polo, Bruce Springsteen, and Ruth Harkness often worked collaboratively, understanding that multiple minds offer multiple perspectives for a creative solution. Duke Ellington got ideas from other musicians, but took most of the credit.

What were the connections to the other eleven subjects?

(continued on page 2)

Automne Memoires en Provence

Larsen Bowker — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 22:03:44 +0000

He disappeared in the dead of winter… the brooks
all frozen and the airports almost deserted…
W.H. Auden

float across chilly October mornings in St. Remy,
singing your friendship out across the fields where
last summer’s Lavender and Sunflower blooms

chased the sun from horizon to horizon. Like Gypsy
singers they sing their bright sadness into stillness
coaxing leaves to desert their holy attachment to

another season on the branches of Van Gogh’s
delicate Olive trees and Avignon’s white Sycamores,
and join the great loneliness of orange moons sifting

through midnight silence of granite valleys, throbbing
with the dream songs you found in Modigliani and
Baudelaire, with the ‘City of Atlantis’ shining from

your face. The future waits in early morning light,
rising on the backs of leafless mountains arched into
the deep and endless blue of afternoon skies en

automne, while dutiful Cicada wheeze their madrigal
melancholy into stillness so large it doubles the loss
of your hungry eyes, always seeking how much of

God was in you, and in all that sang outside of you.
Like that ache in the singer’s voice trying to give
back to words the emotion they’ve lost to logic

and common sense, you took back from the vagaries
of memory’s iron wind, the spiritual grace of love
that doesn’t need to be earned or deserved.

for Edwin Clarke
(1962-1996)

I’m Psycho for this Book

Elizabeth Gormley — Fri, 21 May 2010 21:55:55 +0000

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of its publication. I think it’s just about the greatest book to come out the last half of the century, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. It was published in 1991, but I didn’t read it until ’94. I was a junior in high school when this divine novel graced my naughty, sweaty palms. I recall opening my new paperback at the start of my first and only Saturday detention, for skipping a class too much called Early Childhood Development, basically free daycare for parents in a certain network of neighborhoods near our school in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Three- to five-year-olds were to be “studied” during first period, and I cut the class because I couldn’t stomach incessant crying at 8 a.m. I had liked Ellis’s Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. I unwittingly began reading for the first time a book I would read dozens more, around other naughty kids and my freshman Spanish teacher, Mr. Cortez, who pulled the short straw that week in the faculty lounge, I imagined.

Saturday detention lasted four hours, but I was awestruck by the first bathroom break. I wouldn’t realize the relevance of the book’s opening quotes (Dostoevsky, Miss Manners, and the Talking Heads) until I was finished, but even these were brilliantly chosen. American Psycho is written in the present tense. Patrick Bateman seems so normal at first. It’s the late 1980s, and it seems everyone in Manhattan is extremely rich or extremely poor. Patrick Bateman and his friends are young, insincere Wall Street assholes. Like everyone else he knows, he is manically preoccupied with his tan, his stereo, his favorite trashy talk show, securing a good table at the newest good restaurant, scoring good coke, smoking good cigars, his clothes and other people’s clothes, and literally, his wallet — gazelle-skin —t hat he reminds the reader was $850 at Barney’s, again and again throughout the text. But Patrick Bateman also kills people. No one is spared for any particular reason. Nothing matters: age, race, class, gender (though most victims are women). And it is gruesome.

The violence in this book cost Ellis a publisher. Simon and Schuster dropped it, but Vintage picked it up. The violence is horrific. Tortures and mutilations are detailed for paragraphs, pages. As much as I love this book, even I can’t reread some sections. Once was enough. To be honest, once might have been too much. I’ve read interviews with Ellis, and writing these scenes was very difficult for him.

But it had to be done this way because everything in the book is meticulously detailed. Everything. It’s ridiculous, disturbing, and just so damn smart. People are cold. People are shallow. People are greedy. People are cruel. And believe it or not, it’s funny.

…the temptation to kill McDermott is replaced by this strange anticipation to have a good time, drink some champagne, flirt with a hardbody, find some blow, maybe even dance to some oldies or that new Janet Jackson song I like.

See? Funny.

Patrick Bateman’s thoughts are everywhere, and whose aren’t? One paragraph might go from his shoes to someone else’s shoes to bottled waters to Bon Jovi lyrics to what happened in the porn flick he watched that morning. The sex is also graphic in this book, but after the orgasm Patrick pulls out a nail gun or severs some limbs, so don’t get too… comfortable.

The man can string a sentence together. Ellis’s writing is exquisite, beautiful. I do like his other books, but nothing comes close to this. I think the rhythm of the language in this book might be the biggest influence in my own work. At the very least, it has taught me to take risks when telling a story. Art can happen without taking risks; great art can’t. American Psycho offends so many people, but so many people love it. I promise we’re not all harboring terrible fantasies. Not that I haven’t done some bad things in my life, like cutting class, but I served my time.

Class. I cut class, not people. Even though I kind of wanted to kill those little fuckers crying at 8 in the morning.

Joan Didion, the Memoir, and the Second Great Depression

Gwyn McVay — Fri, 21 May 2010 21:47:49 +0000

Let me begin by stating that Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, is almost unbearably brilliant. It won the National Book Award in November 2005 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In clipped, precise sentences, Didion describes the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the harrowing grief she endured in the following year — during much of which the couple’s only daughter was hospitalized with what would prove to be her own fatal illness. Intertwined with Didion’s own experience is a line attributed to Sir Gawain of King Arthur’s court, “I tell you I shall not live two days,” which becomes the book’s refrain; lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, and other poets bring additional focus to the reader’s shared experience of Didion’s grief. Anyone who has lost someone greatly loved will recognize part of herself in Didion’s thinking during this time, notably her inability to give away Dunne’s shoes — believing with powerful, irrational hope that he would return and need them.

So what bothered me about this account, on a second reading? I could not, until I neared the end of the book, say exactly why I felt disconcerted in a way different from simply reliving my own grief as I read about Didion’s. She names places, favorite restaurants, vacation trips taken, items of clothing with reportorial accuracy, no less so than in her previous prose works. How I felt about the book, I realized with anger and shame, had become colored by the fact that The Year of Magical Thinking is a distinctly privileged, indeed upper-class experience of illness and grief. John Gregory Dunne’s funeral took place in New York City, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the couple’s close friend Calvin Trillin, a New Yorker writer, spoke at the service. The scarf Dunne left draped over a chair was cashmere; Didion recounts extensive foreign travel and expensive restaurant meals; Dunne was pals, as Didion tells it, with one of the doormen at their apartment building, and had a running joke with him about whether Osama bin Laden might be hiding in the building’s penthouse, “maisonette” (whatever that is), or fitness room. Most tellingly, when Didion’s daughter collapses in California, Didion has the financial security to have her medevaced across the country, on a multi-legged journey, back to a neurology institute in New York.

Of course Didion did what any mother would, and should, have done: she used every means available to ensure that her daughter had the best possible care. No reader can fault her for this. But in between mentions of the hospital at UCLA and New York’s Rusk Institute, in between discussions with cardiology specialists at Beth Israel hospital, one wonders how radically these experiences would have differed had this been a more ordinary couple. What would a woman do if she and her husband were not both acclaimed authors, and there was no doorman’s log of entry and exit to reread obsessively in her attempt to understand her husband’s death? What if the daughter and her husband had had to remain in exile across the continent, without the money to transport the daughter anywhere, much less to a specialist institute? What if, indeed, any one of these parties had been without insurance — or belonged to an HMO that stipulated access to only certain doctors and treatment facilities?

In a destroyed economy that analysts are slowly beginning to acknowledge as a second great depression like the one before World War II, it may be increasingly difficult for the reader to relate fully to reportage of such immense privilege. That is not to say that Didion’s life, or accurate reporting of it, mars the book in any way; The Year of Magical Thinking will always remain an important book, one with such power that it has been adapted for the stage — Didion has been played variously by Vanessa Redgrave and Cate Blanchett. But who plays the single mother who works two jobs, neither of which provides insurance? Film portrayals like Julia Roberts’s Erin Brockovich, or Cher as the mother in Mask, have fallen out of fashion in the new century; instead we have comedies about the sexual problems of middle-aged white men, or movies like Sex and the City 2. I predict, without a dog in the fight, that the latter will have little lasting societal or artistic impact.

No memoir can be rightly condemned for the simple fact that its author enjoys privilege. Were this the case, John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, another classic of illness and grief, might be dismissed out of hand. John Gregory Dunne’s death is not less important, nor its impact on his loved ones less profound, because he graduated from Princeton in the same year as Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, The Year of Magical Thinking may be taken as useful evidence that not even white, heterosexual, cisgendered, upper-middle-class privilege insulates its author from the violence of grief. But recounting her actions later, Didion never stops to wonder, for example, what might have happened at UCLA had the mother been working poor, more daunted by authority, less willing to badger and harass doctors as Didion does over every detail of her daughter’s condition. Taking the book as sole evidence, one would never know the grieving woman was aware of a world outside her own, a New York other than hers, whose inhabitants might not have evenings in Paris to remember.

I will keep Didion’s book close to me and return to it again; I believe that she understands and articulates grief with unparalleled excellence, and my own magical thinking is that, thereby, she understands me. But I wish I could also read the stories of patients on Medicaid, of those without insurance at all, who go through similar ordeals. The single mother with the two jobs might be Virginia Woolf’s proverbial “Shakespeare’s sister”; she, too, might be able to illuminate human experience in haunting and important ways. Will she have time, I wonder, or the sense that her words count? The assurance of being heard is in itself a special type of privilege. Who now collects or considers the stories of those who are not already successful novelists? For the moment, the answer seems to lie with newspaper and newsmagazine bloggers, or with people who somehow find time, strength, and will to track their own journeys via Web 2.0. I will not stop hoping that the Shakespeare’s sisters of this millennium will be published in book form. Not either-or, but both-and: the excellence of polished prose writers like Didion, but also the unfiltered, often uncomfortable truths of that increasingly large category: the rest of us.