Vol. 68 No. 1 2001 - page 91

Session III: How to Recapture Selective Memories
Jeffrey Meyers:
The first speaker is Jay Martin, who presently has the title
of the Dai Ho Chun Distinguished Visiting Chair of Wisdom at the Uni–
versity of Hawaii. He is a biographer of Henry Miller, Nathanael West,
and is now completing a biography of John Dewey. He has just finished
JOIlrney to Heavenly Mountain,
a memoir of his experiences in China as
a Buddhist monk. He will speak on "(Re)constructing Biography."
Jay Martin :
Thank you. Last weekend I c losed the red spiral notebook
in which I was writing my biography of John Dewey, removed it from
the middle of my desk, and placed a black spiral notebook in the cen–
ter, proposing in that notebook to tell you about how I have been
engaged in writing a biography of John Dewey, transforming some mil–
lion pages of personal manuscripts, including fourteen thousand letters,
into a narrative of meaningful remembrance that would become
my
life
of
his
life. But when I opened this fresh black notebook, its blank pages
refused to be filled with John Dewey. Instead, an entirely different lec–
ture on biography started to write itself, with its own choice of length
and a new title. So settle in and listen to this other talk entitled "Biog–
raphers with Blue Guitars: How to Remember a Political Leader-Two
Exemplary Spectacles."
We are now in the midst of an election, and so we are being sub–
jected, daily, to the most intense possible display of imaginative fictions,
exuberant creations (and re-creations) of fictive autobiographies and
biogra ph ies, a nd the customary sensa tiona I construction of politica I
life-spectacles. Even as we sit here trying to make headway in under–
standing the nature of life-writing, its "truthfulness" or ficticity as
expressed through various genres, we have but to step outside this hall,
glance at a newspaper, click "Power" on our TV remote, or snap on the
radio, to find that we are being engulfed by an astonishing, massive dis–
play of political life-invention that has as one of its main objects to mud–
dle our every effort at clarity.
The history of biography started with lives of statesmen. Today, biog–
raphy has returned with full force to political life as its main source.
Samuel Johnson quipped long ago that the Fleet Street biographers had
added a new terror to the grave. Today, the person who makes even his
or her first political speech must wish to look over his or her shoulder
to
see if a biographer, like Poe's raven, is sitting on the podium, taking
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