HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
51
Jeffrey Meyers :
I'd like
to
say a word about writing about a biographi–
cal subject and writing about yourself. When you're writing about a
biographical subject, you have
to
try
to
identify with the person. When
[ did
The Enemy:
A
Biography of Wyndham Lewis,
a friend said,
"You'll never finish this book, because you'll get
to
hate him so much
that you'll just drop it." In fact, in some perverse way I then began
to
identify strongly with Wyndham Lewis, and found that I liked writing
about nasty people much better than nice people, that writers most of
the time aren't very nice, and that Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence and
Lewis and Edmund Wilson appeal
to
me a lot more than somebody like,
say, Archibald MacLeish, who's nice but may be dull.
I published a memoir a couple of weeks ago called
Priuileged
Moments,
which is a Proustian term, and has to do with law and with
priesthood and with the friendships I had with eight contemporary writ–
ers. The problem was not how
to
present them, but how
to
present
myself. Some people might say: "Well who are you to be friends with
the great, and how did you worm your way into their confidence and
their homes and their correspondence and to their dining-room tables?"
So you have to be, on the one hand, somewhat modest and self-effacing,
and on the other really honest and show what kind of person you are
and what it was that attracted Iris Murdoch or
V.
S. Naipaul or
J.
F.
Powers or Arthur Miller or Allen Ginsberg or James Dickey
to
develop
a friendship with you.
So I really had to write the separate chapters before
J
realized it was
a book. Some chapters weren't as strong as others, so
J
took them out
of the book. Then I tried
to
see what the themes were, looking back at
the eight chapters I had left. Some of them had to do with a sort of
paternal-filial relation I had with most of these writers who, on the
whole, were twenty years older than
I.
Another thing that happened accidentally between the time I finished
the book and published it was that three of these writers died-Jim
Powers, Iris Murdoch, and Ed Dorn. This gives the book a kind of ele–
giac feeling I didn't originally intend. I hadn't seen Dorn since I left my
last teaching position in
1992,
and I didn't even know that he was ill
until somebody told me. I called him up and we had one last conversa–
tion. So writing about yourself means looking at the self you've created
in your own writing, and seeing what sort of self that is, whether it's a
true self and whether it's you.
Most readers don't realize there's a great deal of work to be done by
the author
after
the book is written. It used to take nine months
to
bring
our a book, but in our high-tech age W. W. Norton needed sixteen
