Session IV: Facts and Fictions in All Three Genres
Joanna S. Rose: I
am Joanna Rose, chairman of
Partisan Review's
advi–
sory board . I want to welcome you all to this fourth and final session of
the conference on "Autobiography, Biography
&
Memoir."
In
today's ses–
sion there are three speakers, Francine du Plessix Gray, Hilary Spurling,
and Denis Donoghue, who will perhaps go off into different but no less
interesting directions than the ones you heard earlier in the conference.
Our first speaker is francine du Plessix Gray, a fiction and nonfiction
writer and biographer. She has taught biography at Columbia, Brown,
Princeton, and Vassar. Her works include
Rage and Fire,
a life of
Flaubert's mistress Louise Colet, and
At Home with the Marquis de Sade:
A
Life.
Her tenth book, on the philosopher Simone Weil, will be pub–
lished in the coming year. Her subject today is "Mothers/Daughters."
Francine du Plessix Gray: I
have detected a lack of concern throughout
this wonderful conference for the manner in which the female half of the
planet has handled the autobiography, memoir, and biography form. So
to remedy the lacunae, I'm going
to
comment on a quintessentially
female theme, a theme that has seldom been explored-mothers writing
about their daughters. The reverse process, the chronicling of the mater–
nal bond by daughters, has obviously become a virtual industry in this
country, displayed in hundreds of memoirs with various degrees of
excellence and tawdriness for many decades. Mother as nurturer or
muse-from Colette to de Beauvoir and Jamaica Kincaid; mother as
abuser-Mommy Dearest, Mary Karl', Diane Middlebrook's book on
Anne Sexton; mother as brilliant, absent intellectual-Mary Catherine
Bateson's book on Margaret Mead. But the reverse process, mothers
writing about daughters, is rare indeed. There are obvious biological
reasons for the scarcity. Unless their child dies tragically young, as Sylvia
Plath did, few mothers live long enough to reflect on the entire span of
their relationships with their daughters.
Moreover, to complain about a disgraceful offspring, either in life or
in literature, is an admission of Illaternal failure, whereas to praise an
admirable child might be seen as ungainly bragging. The complexities of
the maternal bond, now recognized as the most pivotal one in a
woman's life, as a wellspring of most of our hopes, frustrations, obses–
sions, phobias, is seldom, if ever, discussed from the mother's point of
view, either in memoirs or, amazingly, in psychiatry. This paucity of
