Tag: biography

Dump Pickings

~ lsmatter ~ 6 Comments
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A postcard-perfect day at the entrance to the Rockport, MA dump.

It’s a dubious distinction to have the road to the town dump named for you. But that’s precisely what happened to Ann Fisk, (first wife of organ builder Charles Fisk, whose biography I am writing). To be fair, “Tin Can Annie” really earned the honor.

Back in the 1960s — long before recycling was a part of the zeitgeist — longer still before dumpster diving and freecycling were Things — Ann was a pioneer in these fields. Liberal ideals surely came into it, but there were more pragmatic reasons, too. Organ building is not a lucrative profession (in fact, you could do better financially waiting tables at the right sort of restaurant). For Ann, managing a household on what her husband brought home required a considerable measure of thrift. One of her strategies was to take the kids down to the dump on Saturday morning to see what was fresh on the pile. Some of their best finds were practical: clothes and shoes. Others were entertaining: her daughter Miranda once salvaged a dictionary so old that it defined a parachute as a safety device for evacuating a hot air balloon, and her son Si found a still-functional 8mm movie camera with just a slight defect in the mechanism for taking up the film.

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The Ann Fisk Swap Shop: sparing frugal Yankees the indignity of sifting through smelly trash to find the good stuff.

Later, as a Rockport selectman, Ann worked to institute a municipal recycling program — a precursor to the kind of system that now allows most of us to leave our empty milk jugs in plastic bins by the curb. But instead of plastic bins, Rockport in the late 60s had the Fisk children. Ann drove around town and made them hop out and dash onto the porches of the houses that put out bundled newspapers for her recycling drives. Later, she arranged for the construction of the Swap Shop — basically a shed on dump grounds where useable and fixable items could be deposited or collected. It made dump picking a little more dignified. It endures to this day.

On a Friday afternoon when I was visiting Rockport last month, I persuaded the Fisk “kids,” Si and Miranda (who are now old enough and solvent enough to buy their own shoes), to take me to the dump for old time’s sake. I envisioned a historical re-enactment in the name of research. That is, I thought it would be edifying to talk about the Fisk family with Miranda and Si while doing something characteristic that the family used to do: searching through cast-offs for something useful or fun.

We met at the house where I was staying, piled into Si’s car, and drove to Ann Fisk Way. Unfortunately, there was a sign indicating that the dump was closed that afternoon, without explanation. But if anyone had a right to go to that dump when they pleased, it was the living descendants of Tin Can Annie herself; we flouted the sign and drove in. Nobody confronted us, but we didn’t linger, either. Perhaps the “kids” were relieved to have an excuse not to dig in. For a moment, Si eyed a freestanding toilet paper holder that would fulfill a present household need, though ultimately he decided that it savored too strongly of Someone Else’s Bathroom*. He climbed back into the car, and we drove away.

After dinner that evening, we screened the old family videos shot by Si on his 8mm dump camera, which Miranda had digitized. It was a mash-up of childhood scenes: a dog runs in circles while one kid pounds on another in what appears to be fun, at least for the assailant; kids use a rowboat in an unsafe manner; old cars cruise by; matronly women wear hats and sip drinks in somebody’s yard; mailboxes open and shut in an experiment with stop motion animation. Then a younger version of Miranda leaps from the rowboat in a ruffled bathing suit. Young Si pulls on his courier bag to begin his paper route. I think I see fleeting glimpses of Charlie and Ann, in the scene where they’re shoveling off the surface of the frozen lake to play hockey, but it’s hard to tell for sure. Like many home movies of that era, the action seems to race, frame by frame, to outpace the clock; people do not move with the same fluidity they do in life. And whatever the auteur’s artistic sensibilities may have been, he was a kid with a damaged camera he found at the dump. The movie is, on one hand, nearly useless for telling me anything of significance about the family that they were. On the other hand, it is a revealing artifact unsurpassed in its authenticity, for all its inscrutable details.

It’s true, last month’s dump picking expedition was a bust. I came away literally empty handed. Fortunately, most of my “real” research has been more productive. And yet, dump picking seems like an apt metaphor for the experience of digging into a personal history to write this biography. The research process has been largely about sifting through dusty old stuff in search of what remains useful. There are items that stink and items whose original use I cannot decipher, amidst all the metaphorical tuna cans and banana peels** (remnants of daily life), and a few real treasures that make it all worth the effort. The best moments of research/dump picking afford a satisfaction beyond mere entertainment. I imagine Miranda’s wonder, as a child, the moment she understood the world view of the lexicographer who had to define “parachute” without knowing that one day there would be planes.

— Corrections —

* After I shared this post with Si, he wished to clarify that the reason the toilet paper dispenser was unacceptable was that the rust patterns at the base were strongly indicative of pee splash. It’s not like he’s just too good for other people’s bathroom fixtures, in general.

** As Miranda points out: her mother would insist that these two items technically belong in the recycling and compost bins, respectively–not on the trash heap.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Conferences

~ lsmatter ~ 2 Comments

The first time I attended a conference of a professional organization, it wasn’t exactly in my field. It was SIGGRAPH 2003–a convention on computer graphics and “interactive techniques” (which doesn’t mean what you might think–no social skills required). At the time, I was an aspiring novelist with a day job at Sony Computer Entertainment. I was the office administrator for the research and development group, which consisted of about 40 male and 3 female software engineers who were applying their vast brainpower to figuring out how to do more awesome shit with video games. Meanwhile, I was stocking the Post-It notes, booking travel, and devising innovative ways to monitor when the last pot of coffee had been brewed. They sent me to SIGGRAPH to help man an exhibition booth where my chief responsibility was showing people how to play games with the recently released EyeToy controller. Literally a five year old could do this, but this is an industry in which many of the exhibitors hire actual Booth Babes–you know, attractive yet approachable women just to stand around as nerd bait. (Remember this is also an industry which employs balding bachelors with stringy ponytails at a rate well above the national average.) It seems I confused people at the expo. One guy asked me a technical question that I couldn’t answer, so he followed up by asking condescendingly if I had ever been to college. I was apparently not knowledgeable enough to pass for an engineer and not hot enough to be a credible Booth Babe. I made myself feel better by reciting my CV to him. Then I decided to quit my job and apply to MFA programs.

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This is the sort of thing engineers talk about at their conferences. (credit: Nathaniel Matter)

The next conference I attended (i.e. crashed) was the annual meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 2006. My husband was giving a talk on the work he had done towards his PhD in electrical engineering, building a novel kind of MRI machine. I borrowed a badge from one of his colleagues so I could get in and see him standing on a stage in his suit, saying intelligent-sounding things that were not quite intelligible to me. All I can tell you is, his PowerPoint slides contained attractive graphs and tastefully arranged bullet points. This kind of conference is about a transfer of highly specialized knowledge. The people in that room (except me) were literally the only people in the world capable of understanding him, and they had an important stake in doing so, because his work could have a direct impact on their own. They all had a creditable reason for deciding to get together in Seattle for a week, beyond just drinking and visiting that market where they chuck the fish.

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If Oscar Wilde were alive today, would he fancy a trip to AWP?

Contrast with AWP. I’ve attended the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs twice. The first time, in 2008, I was mostly there to shill for Blue Mesa Review, the literary magazine of the University of New Mexico, for which I served as fiction editor at the time. When I wasn’t at our table handing out back issues and importuning passersby to submit, I went to readings and panels and parties and the like. I was struck by the fact that, well, transfer of knowledge isn’t really a thing at AWP. Among the aspiring writers who make up the bulk of the attendance, there’s a little bit of hero worship and a lot of shameless self promotion, all of which mostly serves as a prelude to other shenanigans, both colorful and banal. It seemed that everyone was hoping to capture someone else’s attention, not expecting to learn anything useful. Or they were simply going wild, having been released from the solitude of their writing desk for a few days. I wasn’t inclined to return the following year. But then I was invited to be on a panel, and I succumbed to flattery. The feeling I got from the other side of the panelist table was pretty much the same, though. Enough, I thought. I don’t need to fly to Denver to self-promote and swill beer with poets. (Don’t get me wrong, poets. I love you guys. But you’ve thrown up in the back seat of my car right here in Albuquerque. We don’t need AWP.)

In 2014, I attended the national convention of the American Guild of Organists for reasons related to writing, though it is blessedly not a writers’ conference. It was held in Boston, old stomping grounds of organ builder Charles Fisk, about whom I am now writing a biography. In addition to hearing performances on landmark instruments that Fisk built, I was able to stalk/network with some people who knew him. The experience was also revelatory for me in other ways. (Before the concert at which I saw a man in a purple velvet jacket greet a friend with a cheek kiss, I had somehow been oblivious to the fact that gay men occur in the population of organists at a rate even higher than balding ponytailed men occur in the population of software engineers.) The convention seemed to serve a purpose unlike either the ISMRM meeting or AWP. I suppose knowledge transfer and self-promotion both occurred, to a degree, but appreciation of live music was the focus. Especially with an instrument like the organ, where a live performance is a significantly different sensory experience than a recording, this makes sense. It’s a wonderful pretext for like-minded individuals to assemble.

I thought I would be done with writers’ conferences until, say, I have a book out that I am obliged to promote. Until then, I didn’t think I’d gain anything by going.  But then I heard about the conference of the Biographer’s International Organization, to be held in Washington DC next month. I perused the schedule, which consisted of diverse and interesting sessions–some of which  sounded genuinely practical and informative. I speculated that it could be downright useful for someone like me, who is trying to figure out how to frame and market a biography about a guy who is not exactly a household name, but who’s got an amazing story nonetheless. I’m sure there will still be plenty of self-promotion at the BIO conference; it’s a regrettable necessity for writers in this day and age. But there will also be an entire day of sessions devoted to library research–one of the nerdiest pleasures of the biographer’s job. I am optimistic that it will be time well spent.

I hope I will not be disabused of my impression that biographers are a breed apart from other kinds of writers. I know its silly to assume that just because one has chosen to apply his writing skills to telling other people’s stories, and has committed to doing some research rather than making stuff up or simply gazing into his own soul for inspiration, that this writer might posses worldliness or moral virtue that is lacking in, say, his memoirist cousin. It would therefore be naive to expect that the biographers’ conference will be a less solipsistic affair than AWP. But then again, we are talking about a gathering of people who cite external sources in their work. It sure as hell will be different, somehow.

Poets, I want to reiterate that I love you for who you are and for what you’ve given the world. I just tend to like you better on the page, or one-on-one, rather than amassed in a convention center. But to prove there are no hard feelings, the next round is on me when you’re in ABQ. I’m just not driving you home in my car.

Biographers, I’m looking forward to seeing some of you in D.C. next month. Don’t be outclassed by the poets, please.

The Biographical Quest – Part 3 of 3

~ lsmatter ~ 3 Comments

All research is a quest–a quest for knowledge. Granted, it may seem grandiose to apply the word “quest,” with its epic connotations, given the ways in which research is actually conducted. This is especially true in the humanities. (While there’s a modest amount of romance in, say, pipetting DNA samples into electrophoresis gels until thumb cramps strike–cramps being a more recognizable form of martyrdom than the pallid complexion one cultivates beneath the fluorescent lighting of the subterranean library stacks–with a few exceptions like space exploration, even scientific research is hardly the stuff of drama.) But it is indubitably thrilling to find out what you have long sought to know. wife of bath

It’s worth remembering that some of the classic chivalric quests of old were also quests for knowledge. Yes, those old knights errant did pursue their share of grails and monstrous adversaries, but in Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the dubious hero is sent to figure out “what thyng is it that wommen moost desiren”–in other words, what women want. The knight supplies a pretty reasonable answer in the end: personal sovereignty. (Meanwhile the Wife of Bath’s prologue implicitly provides a compelling alternative response: fresh action in the marital bed.) Even so, Chaucer’s canny tale failed to put the question to rest. It has continued to vex thinkers like Freud and inspire lame rom coms centuries later. I guess some questions just grab hold of us and don’t let us go until we’ve grappled with them for ourselves. That’s what makes them the stuff of stories.

As a biographer, I have to grapple with a lot of different questions. Over time, the questions evolve. One begins as a reporter (who? what? where? when?), and becomes a psychologist (or the Wife of Bath’s knight, parsing desire and motivation), and thereafter a poet (seeking symbol, significance, some way to express the universal truths that one life can illuminate), playing various other roles in between. In fact, it’s hardly a compartmentalized, linear progression. Though a poet, a psychologist, and a reporter could each take the same data and make of it a different story, somehow the biographer must speak simultaneously for all three.

Recently I have been most deeply immersed in the role of reporter, delving through documents, searching for specific facts, trying to fill in gaps in the story of who-what-where-when. Specifically: I’ve been reading letters. Hundreds of letters. Hundreds of boring, redundant letters, many scrawled in execrable cursive, which contain nuggets of valuable information mixed in with discussion of the price of pork chops and the possibility of rain.

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When my subject, Charles Fisk, was nineteen-going-on-twenty, in 1944-45, he lived and worked in Los Alamos, as a member of the Special Engineer Detachment on the Manhattan Project. His parents, back in Massachusetts, sent him letters several times a week. Occasionally he’d get mail from his younger sister, an old high school buddy or ex-girlfriend, or an aunt. He filed many of these letters in chronological order and then bundled them with wire. He then he went on to stuff them in a box for, it seems, the remainder of his life. In a letter Fisk wrote to his own son, in 1980, he complained about how boring all of his father’s letters had been. Though he cherished his father, he took no joy in receiving his letters during the war, rehashing the latest news he had read of the Tunisian campaign, or musing about the robins on the lawn. No wonder he never read them again.

That task, however, has now fallen to me.  These old bundled letters came into my custody in November when I visited Fisk’s daughter.  She loaned them to me quite generously–but also, I think, gratefully. She did not just throw open her attic the moment she met me. After hours of cautious conversation on the phone, she agreed to spend some time with me, from which she (fortunately) concluded that I was not a complete ogre or idiot. Thereupon she recognized an opportunity, as well. Coming from a family of paper-keepers and dutiful correspondents, she had reams of family letters. In a way, this was a blessing; in a way, a burden.  But here was someone (me) perversely willing to read through the hundreds upon hundreds of missives, figure out which ones were interesting and important, and create a digital archive of them all. I could fill her in on the juicy bits and spare her the price of pork.

That, then, is how I’ve been spending many hours over the last couple of months. If research is a quest, a grand picaresque journey, this particular leg  feels a bit like a long road trip across Kansas, where I do a little scavenger hunt each time I stop at a convenience store. Every once in a while, I find some interesting graffiti on the walls of the toilet stall, but little of that is of consequence. But then–then!–the answer to a question that has been aggravating me for months (like how Fisk came to be a regular guest of Mr. & Mrs. Gustave Baumann  during his New Mexico years) comes to light. Suddenly, forsooth, it feels less like a gas station in Kansas, more like I have just done battle, struck a blow for knowledge, vanquished a persistent foe.

The Biographical Quest – Part 2 of 3

~ lsmatter ~ 1 Comment

The world did not know that it needed a biography of Baron Corvo before A.J.A. Symons was gripped with the desire to write one. For that matter, I did not know I needed to read The Quest for Corvo before it was brought to my attention last month. Certainly, I did not pick it up because of an inherent interest in its subject: a little known British author of the early twentieth century whose novels I had neither read nor even heard of. The great achievement of Symon’s biography is that the reader can end up appreciating the book and even liking its author without caring for the subject at all. Symons himself becomes the self-effacing protagonist of Corvo’s biography; though he writes almost exclusively of Corvo and reveals scant detail about himself, it is his research that provides the dramatic tension that propels the story. In this way, it is more like a plot-driven novel than a traditional biographical chronicle. Symon’s desire to uncover the character and lost works of Baron Corvo parallels the reader’s desire to know whether Symons will succeed in his quest to know and see all. (SPOILER ALERT: All will be satisfied in the end!)

Symons begins his work as an ardent admirer of Corvo’s roman à clef, Hadrian the Seventh. In the course of his research, Symons discovers that his subject was not who he might have imagined at the outset. Indeed, his name was not even really Baron Corvo, but rather Frederick Rolfe, though that is among the least remarkable of the revelations. In spite of having written admirable works of literature, Rolfe himself was a disagreeable person. After failing to become a Roman Catholic priest (for reasons that seem entirely justified to all but Rolfe himself), he lived by sponging off a series of benefactors, wheedling them for money even as he heaped vitriolic abuses upon them, estranging himself from one after another. Rolfe was also, as it turns out, a pedophile. Without excusing his actual crimes and faults of character, Symons find a way to view them with sympathy. His love of Rolfe’s creations survives his discomfiting discoveries about their creator. Ultimately he celebrates the fact that he was able to recover several of Rolfe’s lost works in the course of his research. Symons concludes his book:

It was a deeper satisfaction still to know that every one of the works which had been left and lost in obscurity when Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe died suddenly and alone at Venice had been collected together by sympathetic hands, and that, alone of living men, I had read every line of every one. Nothing was left to be discovered; the Quest was ended. Hail, strange, tormented spirit, in whatever hell or heaven has been allotted for your everlasting rest!

This last paragraph reveals something crucial about the relationship between biographer and subject which I imagine must be nearly universal. That is: the relationship is essentially a personal one. Whatever scholarly detachment we might exercise in our research, some personal affinity drew each biographer to his subject. When Symons exults that he alone has read all of Rolfe’s creative work, he is celebrating his intimacy with his subject. Others have admired Rolfe’s work, but only Symons knows it comprehensively. There is, almost, possessiveness in this. Consider two meanings of “subject”: 1. the person or thing being described, 2. one placed under the authority or control of another, as a vassal. If Rolfe was Symons’ subject in the latter sense as well as the former–and arguably a writer is always in control of their subject–at least Symons was a benevolent ruler, who cast his subject in the most favorable light possible, given the life in question.

As a biographer myself, I have never consciously felt possessive of any of my subjects, but I have come to feel connected, at times protective, and yes–intimate–with the people being described. On my last trip to Massachusetts, for my current research into the life of Charles Fisk, one of my “sources” (whom I’ve gotten to know well enough that I’d really prefer to call him my “friend”) jokingly asked if my husband was getting jealous because of how seriously involved I was getting with Charlie. Fisk has been dead for over thirty years, so it’s not literally like that, you understand. But I have spent months now delving into his life, talking to so many of his family members, former work associates, friends, clients–even random acquaintances, when they’ve sought me out. I’ve read through hundreds of his letters, and begun working my way through all the other extant writings and recordings I can find about him. I really am getting in deep, at this point.

I sometimes think I may end up knowing Fisk in a way I don’t even know those closest to me. I have never interviewed my husband’s old friends, family members, business associates, or old acquaintances about seminal moments in their relationship, his achievements, his failings, or other aspects of his character. I don’t, as a rule, investigate my husband behind his back, and I have not trolled through all his correspondence. I grant him privacy when he wishes for it, and his thoughts are often his secrets, whatever they might be. On the one hand, I know him deeply from sixteen years of closely intertwined co-existence. On the other hand, I know him only from my own experiences with him, and not from the layered and textured array of sources that I have on Fisk. I don’t suppose I will ever know everything about my husband, any more than I will ever know everything about Charles Fisk. That’s what make’s my friend’s joke so painfully apt. No, my husband is not jealous of a dead guy, because it’s not his style. I should just feel grateful for that.

It is a strange sort of relationship–that of biographer and subject–which has few parallels in other aspects of human experience. It is a long-term commitment that is deep, hopefully enduring, and yet entirely without reciprocity. My husband and I each had a say in choosing each other. Fisk had no say in being chosen by me. He does not seem like someone who would have chosen to be the subject of a biography at all. If, hypothetically, he were able to express a preference from the next plane about who was to write his biography, I would not be his first choice. Conscious as I am of this, I am undeterred. “Don’t worry, Charlie,” I would say to him. “I am competent. I am kindly disposed towards you. I know the limits of my own knowledge, and I am constantly pushing at the edges of them. Relax.”

Having the cooperation and blessing of Fisk’s children and his professional successors seems to legitimize my efforts, even though I have moments when I wonder whether he doesn’t deserve the same kind of privacy that I afford my husband. I shake it off. I don the mantle of the biographer. I sally forth: to investigate, to analyze, even to pry.

Next time: Cutting the cords on Fisk’s old bundles of letters.

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The Biographical Quest – Part 1 of 3

~ lsmatter ~ 1 Comment

“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.

___

* 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.