10 PA RTISAN REVI EW
C lear ly, the country and the period of history a subject has lived in
are important factors in the writing and the life, as is their circle of
friends. Andre Aciman, who came
Out of Egypt,
finds that all writers
have a "hidden nerve" that "stirs their prose and ...makes it tick," a
nerve that they uncover when writing about themselves, even as they try
to disguise it, often even
from
themselves. Aciman does this by explor–
ing specific places, which then remind him of other places, events, and
history. Conor Cruise O'Brien, on the other hand, shows how his life
has been shaped by his involvement in his country's history. Denis
Donoghue, another Irishman, puts more stress on his early family life
and personal predispositions as determining the thrust of his career and
perceptions. C learly, those of our panelists who, due to the last century's
persecutions had to flee-as I did from Vienna to Belgium, France and
Portugal, as Geoffrey Hartman did, from Berlin to England-still retain
some residue of these traumatic experiences in their thinking and writ–
ing, a lthough they probably run less deep than Norman Manea's, who
could not possibly wipe away his childhood in a concentration camp.
Even writers whose main work is in other areas, such as Michal Gov–
rin's, who was born in Jerusalem to a German mother, at some point
have felt impelled to delve into their backgrounds-not just to tell to the
world, but to make sense of their own lives, to
see
themselves through
others' eyes.
Over the next two days we will li sten to our panelists and to their
debates and comments on each other. We will ask questions in order to
learn more about the pros and cons of writing fictionalized or so-called
realistic lives-their own, those of famous and not-so-famous subjects,
and episodic remembrances.
Each of the panelists will talk for about twenty minutes; then they
will have the opportunity to briefly respond to one another. After that,
the conversation will be turned over
to
the audience. I encourage you all
to ask questions and to offer relevant comments. As in the past, the
edited proceedings of this conference will be published in
Partisan
Review.
Thank you.
