A Life in Letters
I enjoy biographies and non-fiction works greatly, in fact, I probably have read more about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, their wives, friends and lovers than I have works by these celebrated authors. (This is saying a lot about how much I’ve read, considering that my BA in English is concentrated on works 1900 to the present, with a great focus on Fitzgerald and Hemingway, among other classic American novelists. Obviously my interests continue...)
Want to know about Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley? Second, Pauline? Martha? Mary? About their legendary friends and other American ex-patriots, such as the Murphy’s? I’ve read it all, with great relish. It’s the history of our current literary landscape. How about the founders of the Algonquin Roundtable? Dorothy Parker? Fascinating people to read about, they led life for their own interests and passions, certainly, at times, with great cost to themselves and others. I don’t like gossip, but rather enjoy hearing about life as they led it, in another time. What is was like to be there, what they lived through.
Some of the biographies about these literary icons were written when these people were living, or by those close to them – endorsed and backed by first hand knowledge and accounts. I’m sure not everyone included in these portrayals was very happy about how the were depicted – they led raucous lives and it wasn’t called The Jazz Age for nothing. Others were written well after all involved have since passed on. Much of the information for these posthumous works is drawn from extensive firsthand documentation, often written by the party portrayed. Prior to the advent of fax machines, FedEx, email and other “instant” information systems, most of which are never preserved due to sheer volume, the habits of keeping diaries, journals and writing letters (often several per day), which many literary figures and entertainers maintained until death and beyond, created an indisputable “legend”. These papers offer us a literal map of sorts, from which details, first-hand accounts, and often intimate emotions, are still being drawn from today.
This past week, I read an article in Vanity Fair Magazine about Augusten Burroughs, an author most notably known for his memoir Running With Scissors, also a major motion picture. The focus of the current media scrutiny on Burroughs is a lawsuit filed by the family Burroughs chronicles in detail (though not by their true names) in Running With Scissors. To put in mildly, they are quite unhappy by the way they are portrayed in Scissors (Burroughs' mentally unstable mother entrusted him to live with her psychiatrist and his family), an account painted in great, and sometimes painful, detail by Burroughs. I say painful (I’ve read the book) because it is Burrough’s reconstruction of a very (to put it mildly) unhappy part of his youth, while he was involved with them.
Though the family is identified fictitiously, there are a number of not-so-flattering specific details about their lives and the locale which they claim makes them easily recognizable to anyone in their community. Again, though Burroughs never identified them, he (according to Vanity Fair) once told a reporter, in what sounds like frustration after being badgered to out them, that anyone with a little ingenuity could readily find the family by searching for stories in the locale described in the book, focusing on details he describes in the book. This would hold true for any people with colorful lives in any community, I suppose. One wouldn’t have to know who they are, but you could find out if you knew the stories and locale – especially in today’s age of instant information – celebrity or not.
My real interest in the Vanity Fair article is the idea of what accountability an author has when writing about other people, especially in a memoir. At what point is an author responsible for letting his or her subject(s) know they are being written about, particularly if they are not identified by their real names? Ironically, though Burroughs hadn’t “named” the family, if it weren’t for the lawsuit they filed; they would never have been “outed” for who they really are, which they fully admit. And they never thought the book would be a hit, but were upset when it became one. So they decided to go public. And sue. Hmmm. They are also upset that Burroughs never told them he was writing a book about his time living with them, though again, he never named them so what obligation did he have? How could he have forecast the book’s success? If not for the article in Vanity Fair, the Boston Globe and other outlets, which the family chose to do, I would never have known who the family really was. That was their personal choice to pursue – to go public. At what point is the author accountable? Could that point have anything to do with the bestseller lists?
*****
Want to know about Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley? Second, Pauline? Martha? Mary? About their legendary friends and other American ex-patriots, such as the Murphy’s? I’ve read it all, with great relish. It’s the history of our current literary landscape. How about the founders of the Algonquin Roundtable? Dorothy Parker? Fascinating people to read about, they led life for their own interests and passions, certainly, at times, with great cost to themselves and others. I don’t like gossip, but rather enjoy hearing about life as they led it, in another time. What is was like to be there, what they lived through.
Some of the biographies about these literary icons were written when these people were living, or by those close to them – endorsed and backed by first hand knowledge and accounts. I’m sure not everyone included in these portrayals was very happy about how the were depicted – they led raucous lives and it wasn’t called The Jazz Age for nothing. Others were written well after all involved have since passed on. Much of the information for these posthumous works is drawn from extensive firsthand documentation, often written by the party portrayed. Prior to the advent of fax machines, FedEx, email and other “instant” information systems, most of which are never preserved due to sheer volume, the habits of keeping diaries, journals and writing letters (often several per day), which many literary figures and entertainers maintained until death and beyond, created an indisputable “legend”. These papers offer us a literal map of sorts, from which details, first-hand accounts, and often intimate emotions, are still being drawn from today.
This past week, I read an article in Vanity Fair Magazine about Augusten Burroughs, an author most notably known for his memoir Running With Scissors, also a major motion picture. The focus of the current media scrutiny on Burroughs is a lawsuit filed by the family Burroughs chronicles in detail (though not by their true names) in Running With Scissors. To put in mildly, they are quite unhappy by the way they are portrayed in Scissors (Burroughs' mentally unstable mother entrusted him to live with her psychiatrist and his family), an account painted in great, and sometimes painful, detail by Burroughs. I say painful (I’ve read the book) because it is Burrough’s reconstruction of a very (to put it mildly) unhappy part of his youth, while he was involved with them.
Though the family is identified fictitiously, there are a number of not-so-flattering specific details about their lives and the locale which they claim makes them easily recognizable to anyone in their community. Again, though Burroughs never identified them, he (according to Vanity Fair) once told a reporter, in what sounds like frustration after being badgered to out them, that anyone with a little ingenuity could readily find the family by searching for stories in the locale described in the book, focusing on details he describes in the book. This would hold true for any people with colorful lives in any community, I suppose. One wouldn’t have to know who they are, but you could find out if you knew the stories and locale – especially in today’s age of instant information – celebrity or not.
My real interest in the Vanity Fair article is the idea of what accountability an author has when writing about other people, especially in a memoir. At what point is an author responsible for letting his or her subject(s) know they are being written about, particularly if they are not identified by their real names? Ironically, though Burroughs hadn’t “named” the family, if it weren’t for the lawsuit they filed; they would never have been “outed” for who they really are, which they fully admit. And they never thought the book would be a hit, but were upset when it became one. So they decided to go public. And sue. Hmmm. They are also upset that Burroughs never told them he was writing a book about his time living with them, though again, he never named them so what obligation did he have? How could he have forecast the book’s success? If not for the article in Vanity Fair, the Boston Globe and other outlets, which the family chose to do, I would never have known who the family really was. That was their personal choice to pursue – to go public. At what point is the author accountable? Could that point have anything to do with the bestseller lists?
*****
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