Biographies

I've been doing research on Maxfield Parrish at the moment, and the whole process of compiling even the shortest of biographies is astounding. First of all, inaccuracies are rampant - not just for Parrish, but for everyone profiled. Was in '85 or '86? Were the problems health or financial? So many small details, crucial to the person living the life, just get jumbled up in a pile, mislabeled, misattributed, misinterpreted.

Of course, it's either hubris or ignorance that would lead anyone to believe the complexities of someone's life could be translated into a biography of any length, but especially a short artist's biography. And when looking back with no assistance to interpret a canceled meeting or a failed marriage, we draw the most ridiculous of assumptions from the smallest of inferences. It reminds me of high school, sitting around with girlfriends and trying to extract every possible ounce of meaning from something as mundane as "I'll call you later." Was he looking at you when he said it? Did he say "I'll call you later" or "I'll call you later tonight"? Again, hubris or ignorance to believe that so much could be mined from so little.

And, of course, we oversimplify, even as we over-complicate. So often, when we make plans, the end result is attributable to a dozen different factors - we're tired, we've had a cold, there's laundry that needs to be done, we don't like the people inviting us as much as we might, we've had a frustrating week at work, we don't have the extra funds for dinner out, etc. But historically, when we interpret people's lives, we just seem to give them only one motive. So few decisions boil down to just one pure reason, and it's this simplification that allows people like Jefferson and Lincoln to be depressive and selfish in the hands of one person while the same set of events with a different treatment makes them introspective and caring in the hands of another.

But in the end, my frustration with biographies is that they are frustratingly limited, perhaps inherently limited, in insight. Small details are left hanging everywhere! If you're going to make me believe that you can tie up someone's entire life in a biography, you have to chase down every loose end. Parrish had a long-term relationship with a woman, moving out of the main house, where his wife and children remained, to live with an "assistant" in his studio. After 50 years together, after the death of his wife, whom he never divorced, his mistress, now in her early 70s, left him to marry another man. A basic Google search for Parrish will reveal these details, but not a word about the late-date breakup. How can anyone not need to know what brought this about?

Perhaps that's the point, that the questions that determine our lives aren't even ones we recognize at the time or even see coming. In the moment, it's all so obvious that explanation is unnecessary, and to recreate a life in retrospect must require chaos theory. After all, we can barely know the people in front of us.

Weddings

I cry like a sap at weddings. Maybe it's because weddings are at the juncture of my inner cynic and my inner romantic, and the whole thing just wrenches me at that connecting point. So much of what is said at weddings is meaningless - not, of course, on the part of the couple, but in the larger sense. All those phrases like "till death do we part" and "let no man put asunder" just don't mean anything, even if we want them to. The small cynical voice in my head often adlibs a voiceover track - "unless that man is a divorce lawyer," etc. When people stand there saying the words, they may not want to get out, but in today's world, they know they can, and that makes things feel different. We pretend that marriage is permanent, we hope that it is, but in our hearts, we know very little in life is permanent or at least that very little has to be.

I think I cry because it's all so hopeful. All those hopes, all that faith in what you've told each other and what you hope for from each other, all that belief in the benevolence of an unpredictable future. There's hope in frightening qualities, and I think it only hits me harder as I grow older, because along the road in life, you see more and more of the damage people can do to each other. A wedding is, in some senses, an entrance ramp to a very dangerous highway, and after you've driven the highway for awhile, you witness carnage that you wouldn't have imagined, in places that you wouldn't have expected it. But a wedding is like watching people you love pull out onto that highway. You feel love and hope and fearful concern, you wish them all the luck in the world, and you're horrified by what they're going to see as they travel together. Unlike a wedding, a marriage never really has a happy ending - if you aren't separated by choice, eventually you'll be separated by circumstance.

May in Review

May was a bad month! Only three books, including one that I didn't really care for. (Also, apologies to my lovely fine-free library, because the spring publishing rush backed me up! No need to send bills - I'm returning them....)

Finally got around to Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy which has been lying around here since January. I always enjoy her books, aside from the ridiculously awkward attempts she makes at interjecting sex scenes, because she delves into the history of a different aspect of New York each time. And this time, it was the New York Public Library! And, as a bonus, map and print collectors. As always, I tend to wish I remembered as much about her plots as I remember about the institutions or locations she focuses on, but it's not a perfect world. Nice beach material at worst.

Laurie King's The Language of Bees was more enjoyable. Occasionally a little lighter on historic material than Fairstein, or at least less hard history in terms of dates and places, but much better for plot and atmosphere. I wish social clubs were still in vogue. (And I wish that people I'd actually find interesting would be members, if they were....) I did have the pleasure of dinner at the Queen City Club in Cincinnati while I was reading this, and the big paneled rooms filled with art and bookshelves, watching it rain while munching on macaroons (I would consider membership just for them alone), gave me a nice framework for the imagination during some of The Language of Bees. Also some great accounts of the challenges faced in the early days of flight. Flying over the crags of Scotland in bad weather in the 1920s - not for the faint of heart! I enjoy Mary Russell far more than Kate Martinelli for some reason; it may not be just me, as the two series feel so completely different that it seems they must have been written by two separate authors.

And after that, for reasons known only to Entertainment Weekly's best of 2008 list, I subjected myself to Disquiet by Julia Leigh, which was, at least, short. I hate it when I come away from a book thinking, "I just don't get it," but that's exactly what happened here. Not to fault her prose, which had lovely moments, but I'm not a fan of literature that feels obtuse just for the sake of being obtuse. I suppose at my heart, I believe that writing is about communicating, and I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would choose to communicate confusion or be praised for communicating vagueness. I think this comes back to Nancy's Pearl discussion about how readers enter books; people enter through four "doorways": language, plot, character or setting. All books, of course, have these doorways, but most books have much "larger" doorways in one area or another. And the great works of fiction - The Hobbit, Gone With the Wind, Huckleberry Finn - those books have large doorways across the board. I've found that of the four, language is least likely to induce me, at least without the accompaniment of one of the other three, and that was the case with Disquiet. Yet another example of good writing that does not necessarily make for good reading.

June is already much more promising with four titles polished off already, and two new gifts from the library!

Promise

So, last weekend, I went home, back to my old high school, and watched my nephew graduate. Weird in itself that I've been out of high school long enough for someone to be born and go all the way through high school, but more than that somehow. There are places and events that are so richly filled with memory that the thin membrane that is time becomes even thinner, and you can step back and see your old self.

I found myself sitting next to the me that I was at 17, at the senior awards assembly with a lap full of awards for academic achievements, national writing contests, and scholarships. (I'd had a good year - my brother, the chronic underachiever in high school, came home and told my grandmother she really should have come to the Hollie and a Few Other People Awards Ceremony....) I had (I think everyone does, really) all these ideas about who I was, who I would be, what the adult world was like. And they were, of course, all wrong. Thankfully, in some cases....

Perhaps this is all one of those issues of cosmic timing. I'd been reading Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz, an insightful novel regarding both the Ivy League admissions process and the expectations we have for life. Each year, exceptional kids rise through the ranks to apply for college, full of insight and idealism (and, in many cases, bullshit), positive that their feet are on the path to enlightenment and wealth and fame. We're also so convicted at that age in the belief that that path is the one, the only, the one true way, and anything else is destined to be disastrous.

Where, in the end, are all these exceptional people? That's the cruelest lesson for the overachiever - the reality that at the end of the day, even the most promising of students usually ends up married, living in the suburbs, overworked, semi-satisfied with marriage and career, underpaid, void of intellectual curiosity, and crafting in their children the same desire, the same search for exceptionality.

And so we question ourselves. How did we get here? Was it all because we chose one college instead of another? Should we have picked a different major? Should we not have changed our majors in our sophomore year? Could we have tried harder, taken more difficult courses? What was all that for anyway? Do we still contain that promise unrealized or did we just fool everyone around us into believe that we had any promise to begin with?

Graduations, I think, are more poignant than weddings. There's so much hope, so palpable and so many expectations that will morph into other things, if they survive at all. At a wedding, the hope is hope you place in another person - the hope that they will be all they say they will be, that they remain who you think they are. In some ways, it isn't as serious, because realistically, we all know that people will disappoint, will change, will require us to adjust or reshape our vision. At a graduation, that hope is for yourself - that you will be all you say you will be, that you will remain who you think you are, and when the adjustment to that vision comes, it is, by nature, much more personal.

Exceptional is rare, and for most, unsustainable. Some of us "peak early," achieving more noteworthy things in our junior year of high school than in the rest of our lives, while some of us just arc delicately through the rarified air of "exceptional," only to find ourselves at some point wafting down into mediocrity. Some of us achieve exceptional in our professional lives, but barely get off the ground in our personal lives as human beings. Some of us just burn up on reentry. As they sit there in caps and gowns, hot and excited, bored with everything around them but so aware, we wonder who is who. Will we ever know? Will they?