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Autobiography, Biography, and Memoir to be discussed by masters of all three

By Eric McHenry

Partisan Review's conference on Autobiography, Biography, and Memoir, October 6 and 7 in the George Sherman Union, arrives at a time when all three genres are enjoying a popular boom. But that, says Edith Kurzweil, is just a coincidence.

	Saul Bellow will join Jeffrey Meyers, Michael Govrin, and André Aciman in addressing the uestion "How True to Life is Biography?" at the Partisan Review conference Autobiography, Biography, and Memoir. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

"I'd rather not be timely," she confesses, "insofar as being timely means going along with the trends."

Kurzweil, editor of Partisan Review, says her enthusiasm for biographical and autobiographical writing has little in common with that of the publishing industry.

"Let's face it: publishers do, and have to, look to the bottom line," she says. "So if there's public interest in autobiographies and in memoirs, they'll publish these works. And if they find that there's too much of it out there, they'll stop.

"We did not want to bring to our conference writers of sensationalist autobiographies -- about how I was abused by my father or teacher or somebody else," she says. "We wanted panelists who have thought seriously about the various ways of writing about oneself."

Kurzweil will join BU President Jon Westling in introducing the two-day conference, whose remarkable roster of participants includes, among others, UNI Professor and Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow, literary critic and memoirist Denis Donoghue, Marquis de Sade and Simone Weil biographer Francine Du Plessix Gray, and Israeli writer and theater director Michal Govrin. Bellow will join a panel dedicated to the topic How True to Life Is Biography? -- a question he has already indirectly addressed in his acclaimed semibiographical novel Ravelstein (Viking, 2000). The book, editor and critic Wendy Lesser writes in The New York Observer, "suggest[s] that there is finally no important difference between the most fully imagined biographies and the most truthful works of fiction."

The conference's three other panels -- Ways of Writing About Oneself, How to Recapture Selective Memories, and Facts and Fictions in All Three Genres ‹ seem just as likely to provoke discussion of where, between the genres, the lines may lie. That, Kurzweil says, is one of the questions that prompted her to organize the conference. At a meeting of the magazine's advisory board, she realized there was no consensus as to what, beyond the most superficial characteristics, made the forms distinct.

"This is a group of extraordinarily intelligent people," she says of the board. "When they don't agree on an answer, then I know the public doesn't either."

It's a question to which Kurzweil herself has given a good deal of thought. For the past six years, she has been writing a memoir of her childhood in Vienna, her escape from the Nazis on a children's transport, and her adolescence in the United States. The manuscript, she says, is nonlinear and digressive -- qualities that are not common to the traditional autobiography, but which are true to her emotional experience in ways that a strictly chronological account couldn't be.

Unlike most scholarly and literary journals, Partisan Review regularly hosts conferences such as this one, publishing transcripts of the panel discussions in subsequent issues. In recent years, symposia topics have included The Culture of the University, Knowledge and Information Technology, and Is There a Cure for Anti-Semitism? Kurzweil says the real-life exchanges between scholars tend to be livelier than those conducted through the mail.

"Panelists like the interchange with others," she says. "They tend to spur one another on, and the result often leads to new insights. We also find that we get good material for the magazine that way. Our conferences have worked out well, as a way of enlightening all of us."

Other panelists will include Jeffrey Meyers, André Aciman, Norman Manea, Leonard Michaels, Jay Martin, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Geoffrey Hartman, and Hilary Spurling. Funded by the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Foundation, the conference is free and open to the public. For more information, call 617-353-4260, or visit the Partisan Review website.

A distinctive voice The novelist, cultural critic, and jazz drummer Stanley Crouch, who will take part in the Ways of Writing About Oneself panel, has enlivened past Partisan Review conferences with his virtuosic riffs: "We find ourselves looking at a terrain on which Louis Farrakhan comes close to draining all political, social, and moral seriousness from Afro-American affairs. . . ." Crouch said at a 1996 symposium called Beyond the Twilight of Reason. "At the other end of the field, but actually right next to Farrakhan, is Patrick J. Buchanan, who is trying to become the Tom Watson of his time, a vulgar populist whose appeal is to every veiled and unveiled form of xenophobia troubling the soul of our country. . . . Great googamooga: we have a hard way to go." Crouch, who is working on a biography of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, says that writing a memoir has never even crossed his mind. "My life is so public anyway," he says, "I don't see the point of me adding any more to it." But he has thought deeply about the form, and places several memoirs among the best works of recent American literature. His remarks at the conference, he says, will juxtapose Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Richard Wright's Black Boy/American Hunger, Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place, and Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage. "All of them are set during formative years in the lives of the authors," Crouch says. "Hemingway is writing about the Paris of the '20s, from his perspective. Richard Wright is writing about growing up in Mississippi, then coming north and finding out that it wasn't paradise either. Albert Murray gives us a portrait of black college life in the '30s, which we haven't had before. He lets us see that southern life was not just one degradation and humiliation after another. And Anatole Broyard is writing about the New York of the '50s. In each case, it's the individual trying to find a way for himself. And each of them went on to become a writer." Crouch, a self-styled intellectual "mercenary," has been known to delight and infuriate the cultural right and left on an equal-opportunity basis. "He's a very interesting person," says Edith Kurzweil. "He doesn't mind going against the grain. And that's really what Partisan Review is about." -EM

3 October 2000
Boston University
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