“Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist” was my first serious* publication, when the Georgia Review picked it up in 2007**. It remains my greatest hit–insofar as literary essays can be said to enjoy anything resembling popularity. This one has been anthologized, awarded a prize, and included in college course syllabi. That’s not popularity, exactly, but it’s as close as I’d ever dreamed an essay of mine might come. But when I’ve tried to explain to people what it is, I’ve always had a hard time. It’s part biography of a formerly-popular-but-now-forgotten British author named Charles Garvice, and part personal narrative about my own aspirations as a writer. It’s about learning the importance of plot, and (unlike most of the things I’d written before) it actually has a plot: in this case, it’s about literary sleuthing. It’s about a journey. It’s about obsession. It contains passing references to pirates and a puppy. What more can I say?
Had it occurred to me, I could have simply explained my essay by situating it in the tradition of biographical quests. I’d never really thought of this as a genre in it’s own right–I’d thought of books and essays in this vein as subversions of genre–or at least hybrids of some kind. This changed, recently, after my essay was discovered by A Biographer in Perth. The author of this blog, Nathan Hobby, is at work on a biography of the Australian writer Katharine Susannah Prichard. (As it happens, she got her literary break by winning a competition sponsored by the publishers Hodder and Stoughton and judged by none other than Garvice himself. Hence the connection.) In addition to his work on Prichard, Hobby has also written more generally on the biographical quest, and it was he who pointed out that my essay can be classified as a example of the genre.
Other well-known examples of the form include The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), by Rebecca Skloot, which I read and adored and tried to convince my fellow sophomore English teachers to adopt as a required summer reading text a few years ago (I was vetoed because some colleagues were squeamish about discussing cervical cancer with fifteen-year-old boys***); and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence (1997), which I read quickly and carelessly when I was in graduate school. (I hadn’t yet figured out how to balance teaching and writing and required reading, so usually short-changed the latter. It went onto the stack of books that I want to read–or in this case, re-read attentively–when opportunity allows.) Some of A.S. Byatt’s books are closely related–most notably her beloved novel Possession and her less beloved novel The Biographer’s Tale–though these are fiction, of course. Hobby also drew my attention to a book that I had never heard of before, though it is, apparently, the grand-daddy of the genre: The Quest for Corvo (1934) by A.J.A. Symons.
I reached for Corvo, thinking to add it to the stack with Dyer et al, but on the strength of the first paragraph, was immediately immersed. Joseph Epstein’s 2001 review gives an erudite account of it, and since I’m presently only on chapter 6, I leave the reviewing to him, for now. But this much I can say, on the strength of the first five chapters: Symon’s book makes wonderful reading for anyone who ever thought of writing a biography, in quest form or not.
This all feels so pertinent and inspiring to me at the moment, because I am once again in the throes of a biographical quest. This time, I’m pursuing the great American pipe organ builder Charles Fisk. I’m about one year into my research, now, and at times have wavered in my own sense of purpose, wondering if I can ever possibly get to the bottom of a life other than my own, and wondering if what I’m doing is ever going to be as interesting to anyone else as it is so urgently to me. (It didn’t help, when I went to the memorial service of Fisk’s sister a couple of weeks ago, and his own nephew pointedly asked of my proposed book: “Who do you think is going to read it?”) But I’m heartened by these recent reminders that the desire to understand another person and make sense of his life is, if not universal, then at least not unique. And the journey may be a story worth telling in its own right.
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* Once, prior to this, I had published a satirical sonnet about flossing in the newsletter of a dental practice in New Jersey.
** Fun fact: this essay initially received a cursory rejection from the editors of Creative Nonfiction, to whom I submitted it at the same time I sent it to the Georgia Review and a couple of other places. When I got the small, thin envelope from CNF, I just assumed they simply weren’t interested in it. But apparently, after seeing it in print elsewhere, these same editors decided they wanted all 6000+ words of it; they selected it for inclusion in the Best Creative Nonfiction anthology the following year. I never did ask them why the rejected it initially. I knew that the draft I sent was a bit longer than their stated limit of 4500 words, and in retrospect, I assume they didn’t even look at it before rejecting it the first time. Maybe there’s a moral here for aspiring writers. You decide.
*** It’s not like sophomores don’t read Romeo & Juliet, which is practically just one long series of penis jokes.
Laura Sewell Matter 
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