Shakespeare's Opening Lines

Nicht Diese Tone... I've been doing a lot of posts on education and baseball lately, so here's something completely different.

How much can you tell from a play's opening line? Shakespeare, of course, is famous for, among other things, his attention-grabbing first scenes. I don't remember when I heard this, but I recall being told as a student that every single one of his plays promises romance, violence, or ghosts and other paranormal beings at the outset. The idea was that, though Shakespeare wrote for the well-educated and well-mannered of his time, he knew how to appeal to the masses as well.

Opening lines are a bit more limiting than opening scenes, and some in Shakespeare's plays are less engaging than others (Timon of Athens). Some, however, kick of incredible soliloquies of the kind you'd expect to hear far later in the play (Richard III). Some, of course, are delivered by witches (Macbeth), or welcome ghosts to the stage (Hamlet). If I had a goal, I would say that my goal here is to sort these opening lines into the mundane, the epic, the frivolous, and the provoking.

The Mundane:

There are actually quite a lot of opening lines in Shakespeare's plays that are not all that engrossing. While often these lead to famous - or at least effective - opening scenes, it is nevertheless the case that we often start with day-to-day business, rather than the more weighty business of the play.

Coriolanus
First Citizen: "Before we proceed any further, hear me speak."

Hamlet
Bernardo: "Who's there?"

Henry VI, Part II
Suffolk: "As by your high imperial majesty I had in charge at my depart for France..." (he drones on a bit)

Henry VI, Part III
Warwick: "I wonder how the king escaped our hands."

These two opening lines aren't so bad, but coming as they does at the opening of the second and third parts of the Henry VI series (which, in turn, comes somewhere in the midst of the other many Henry plays), they are not especially exciting. Really, they serves to connect the ending of the previous plays to the starts of their own, and thus barely count as opening lines at all.

King John
King John: "Now, say, Chatillon, what would France with us?"

Well, we do have the title character speaking, at least. But this opening seems more interesting to the Englishman in Shakespeare's time than to us now. Oh those conniving French! How dare they!... It's just not as stirring anymore.

King Lear
Kent: "I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall."

A psyche-out. King Lear is full of epic everything - especially from the mouth of Lear - so of course the opening itself is petty bantering between noble, courtly-types. Compare to Lear, shortly after his entrance: "Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester... Meantime we shall express our darker purpose." A perfect answer to the banal conversation of Kent and Gloucester.

Measure for Measure
Duke Vincentio: "Escalus."

"My lord," is the response. The Duke starts to unveil the plan that gets everyone in trouble in the rest of the play thereafter, but I wonder why Shakespeare didn't just straight into that? Is it, perhaps, the conspicuous name of this key player in the action, Escalus? Certainly beginning a play with a name is not exciting, but when that name is shared by one of the most famous playwrights of all time (the Greek Aeschylus), surely there's a reason.

The Merchant of Venice
Antonio: "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad."

Not interesting. The rest of his speech adds little. I suppose natural sympathy is somewhat awakened here, but I think the audience naturally looks down on Antonio with this opening as much as they are moved by it, especially once they find out he's sad because he's having problems with his riches-laden merchant ships. Poor guy.

The Merry Wives of Windsor
Shallow: "Sir Hugh, persuade me not; I will make a Star-Chamber matter of it: if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire."

Much Ado About Nothing
Leonato: "I learn in this letter than Don Peter of Arragon comes this night to Messina."

The Life and Death of Richard the Second
King Richard II: "Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster, hast thou, according to thy oath and band, brought hither Henry Hereford thy bold son, here to make good the boisterous late appeal, which then our leisure would not let us hear, against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray?"

Response: "I have, my liege."

The Tempest
Master: "Boatswain!"

To be fair, the play starts "of thunder and lightning heard," so there is a storm going on.

Timon of Athens
Poet: "Good day, sir."

An uneventful beginning to an awesome opening scene. The conversation is between a poet, a painter, a jeweller, and a merchant. You can imagine the fun, or go read it.

Troilus and Cressida
Prologue: "In Troy, there lies the scene."

Two Gentlemen of Verona
Valentine: "Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus: home-keeping youth have ever homely wits."

Not bad, but not terribly exciting either. A decent joke, but the essence of the speech is "get out of the house!" A good enough starting point for a plot.

The Winter's Tale
Archidamus: "If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on the like occasion..."

There's a lot of argument over whether this is one of Shakespeare's best plays or one of his worst. Regardless, the opening is uninspiring. The rest of the speech is, essentially, "man, Bohemia and Sicily are different, and if you came to visit, you'd see." Great. Anyway, from there the play is certainly much more... unusual. There's even a mysterious, sudden jump forward of about 20 years at one point.

The Frivolous:

I separate these from the mundane because many, while still not exciting, are at least quirky in a way that the mundane openings are not.

The Comedy of Errors
Aegeon: "Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall and by the doom of death end woes and all."

This has potential, but strikes the reader as being a bit over-the-top. The Duke's speech, which follows, indicates that Aegeon is overreacting a bit. Hence frivolous, not epic or even provocative.

Henry IV, Part II
Rumour: "Open your ears; for which of you will stop the vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, making the wind my post-horse, still unfold the acts commenced on this ball of earth."

It's always dangerous to start with "Rumor," or some such, and this opening is a little silly. "This ball of earth" leaves much to be desired, and the truism of Rumor's swift spread is far from news. Not a terrible opening, nonetheless, but really just a transition from the fist part of Henry IV to the second.

Henry VI, Part I
Bedford: "Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!"

Oh those hung heavens and their blackness, yielding day to night! Oh the poor, dead, Henry V! Not the best funeral ever.

Julius Caesar
Flavius: "Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home: is this a holiday?"

Macbeth
First Witch: "When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?"
Second Witch: "When the hurlyburly's done, when the battle's lost and won."

This one goes to show that silly can also be provocative. The mysterious witches here have many a strange and, I daresay, funny line. The hurlyburly trivializes what's going on, but the matters at hand end up being far from trivial.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Theseus: "Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace; four happy days bring in another moon: but, O, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!"

File this opening under the "conversation that would never happen" category. Clearly we've got some expository information that's useful for the audience, but what engaged couple sits there idle-y counting the days to their wedding in glowing verse? No, the real conversation goes like this: "Hippolyta, we only have four more days to get everything in order for the wedding! Oh crap!"

Othello
Roderigo: "Tush! never tell me; I take it much unkindly that thou, Iago, who hast had my purse as if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this."

Tush, indeed.

Taming of the Shrew
Sly: "I'll pheeze you, in faith."

Appropriately, this play starts with a drunken man in front of an alehouse. The exchange that follows is witty and fun, as the rest of the play is.

The Provocative:

These opening lines don't blow the reader (or viewer) away, but they certainly capture your attention.

All's Well That Ends Well
Countess: "In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband."

I don't know this play, but the opening certainly raises questions. What happened? How is this going to be a comedy, exactly?

Antony and Cleopatra
Philo: "Nay, but this dotage of our general's o'erflows the measure"

Spicy. Antony and Cleopatra enter shortly thereafter, displaying ever their mutual dotage. If you know the story, however, you know who's really in command in this relationship. Hint: it's not Antony.

As You Like It
Orlando: "As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns, and, as thou sayest, charged my brother, on his blessing, to breed me well: and there begins my sadness."

Not unlike the Merchant of Venice, but here the "sadness" has to do with the need to find a good wife. Knowing that this is a comedy - and one of my favorites - goes a long way towards promising the kind of absurdity that does indeed follow. As You Like It has more cross-dressing, more fools, and more hilariously bad puns than just about any other play you'll find.

Cymbeline
First Gentleman: "You do not meet a man but frowns: our bloods no more obey the heavens than our courtiers still seem as does the king."

Henry IV, Part I
King Henry IV: "So shaken as we are, so wan with care, find we a time for frighted peace to pant, and breathe short-winded accents of new broils to be commenced in strands afar remote."

Something exciting is going on. This is definitely the way to start a history.

Henry V
Chorus: "O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention, a kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, assume the port of Mars."

At Shakespeare's time, especially, it's easy to see why this would engage the audience. We know from the outset that we're going to follow kings to war and death, all in an almost mythological tone.

Henry VIII
Prologue: "I come no more to make you laugh: things now, that bear a weighty and a serious brow, sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, we now present."

Love's Labours Lost
Ferdinand: "Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, live register'd upon our brazen tombs and then grace us in the disgrace of death; when, spite of cormorant devouring Time, the endeavor of this present breath may buy that honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge and make us heirs of all eternity."

Pretty cool. Almost epic, if only the play were more well known. It's worth noting that the Ferdinand, King of Navarre, is talking of love already, as if it were a war.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Prologue: "To sing a song that old was sung, from ashes ancient Gower is come; assuming man's infirmities, to glad your ear, and please your eyes."

Titus Andronicus
Saturninus: "Noble patricians, patrons of my right, defend the justice of my cause with arms, and, countrymen, my loving followers, plead my successive title with your swords: I am his first-born son, that was the last that wore the imperial diadem of Rome; then let my father's honours live in me, nor wrong mine age with this indignity.

Sounds like there's a fight brewing.

The Epic:

There are not many truly "epic" openings in Shakespeare, but there are a few that, I expect, you'll recognize. Texts in full; no comments.

Richard III
Gloucester: "Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes."

Romeo and Juliet
Prologue: "Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend."

Twelfth Night
Duke Orsino: "If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical."

Writing Lives

I posted the opening section of this paper about Plutarch earlier today, but I figure I might as well just put up the whole thing. Usual warnings about length apply. Read at your peril.

Introduction

What is biography, and what does it try to accomplish? Recording the events of a life is hardly sufficient to describe the work of the biographer, who must not only chronicle, but must also explicate and strive to understand. For the reader, however, the project comes across differently; for the reader, there is an effort to come to terms with the lives of others, removed in time and space, but still somehow essentially human. There is, then, some relationship between history and biography, which tries also to bring to the present some semblance of understanding of the past, but there is also a profound difference. In this paper, I will begin by discussing the division of history and biography that began with Plutarch. This division will help to elucidate what I see as the essential questions of the biographical process, which will in turn be addressed by looking through the lens of Richard Holmes's Footsteps. Finally, I'll address Diane Middlebrook's Anne Sexton in order to evaluate the process that Holmes suggests. Throughout the paper, I hope to raise questions and provide, if not answers, at least a rough sketch of the direction in which a dialogue about biography might proceed.

The Project of Biography – Plutarch

The writing of histories was not uncommon in the ancient world. Among others, Livy, Herodotus, Tacitus, and Thucydides each tried to describe in broad terms the motions of nations and people, alternately capturing the origin and downfall of the Roman Empire, or the incredible wars of the Greek City-States. These stories have no shortage of heroes – no dearth of individual anecdotes to humanize the effort – and yet they remain histories, complete with the hierarchical understanding that humans make up a society, and that societies, after all, are what make up the narrative of the world.

What is the interest of biography, then? What can the individual life tell us that a history cannot? Of course, the individual is easier to comprehend, his or her travails and successes more obviously apply to our own lives. Is that alone enough to warrant biography?

Plutarch was the first known biographer. His humbly, but aptly, titled Lives were something of an experiment in the writing of history. He is at least partially responsible for the troubling “Great Man” theory of history with which we are all familiar. His project, however, does not seem to be the elevation of individuals into historical prominence, but rather something quite the opposite. At a time when histories were written which excused the sometimes awful shortcomings of societies because of the actions of the men who led them, Plutarch instead turned his eye upon those men, uncovering their weaknesses as well as their strengths, humanizing them for an audience that theretofore had simply worshiped.

The difficulty of his undertaking Plutarch recognized, and nowhere does he better express his philosophy of biography than in the opening of his Life of Alexander. “It being my purpose to write the lives of Alexander the king, and of Caesar, by whom Pompey was destroyed,” he writes (in John Dryden's translation):

"The multitude of their great actions affords so large a field that I were to blame if I should not by way of apology forewarn my reader that I have chosen rather to epitomise the most celebrated parts of their story, than to insist at large on every particular circumstance of it. It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue and vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression of jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavour by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated by others." (Plutarch, 139)

Plutarch's project is not a simple one, however tempting it is to regard this statement as straightforward. Often the subjects of his Lives are not only dead, but have been for hundreds of years. At a time when record keeping was even more tenuous than it is now, it is impossible to imagine that the very “matters of less moment” and “expression[s] of jest” that Plutarch is after were well preserved. Evidence was not paramount; the story was. The beauty and meaning of the well-painted portrait won the day.

Despite the troublesome issue of accuracy in Plutarch's accounts of Caesar, Antony, Cato, Alexander, Solon, and the countless other ancient luminaries towards whom he turned his gaze, few ancient works feel so timely today as the Lives. The foreignness of Greek and Roman culture and the gap of some two millennia are not enough to rob Plutarch's efforts of their relevance. Perhaps that is because we do not and cannot know the accuracy of his accounts, and therefore are free to understand his stories as complex and archetypal parables, somewhat like the myths that provided the content of Greek tragedies. That Alexander, for example, was real, and that the events described in Plutarch's account were more or less accurate merely sets the stage for a human drama all the more poignant for its unassuming, undramatic presentation. Alexander, in Plutarch, is human, regardless of whether Plutarch portrays the kind of human he was in reality.

I'm not convinced that Plutarch's fictionalized “humanization” provides a satisfying account of the purpose of biography. That biography is somehow different from history is certain, but that difference in genre raises more questions than it answers. The status of truth in even the writing of history is complicated, even though there is little question that, for that genre, truth is desirable. What of biography? Is truth desirable? What does truth look like? How can a lived life be translated from its sometimes spiritual, sometimes mundane essences into words? How can those words – like those Plutarch wrote about Alexander in the Lives – reach across generations and nations to reform into a meaningful, or at least entertaining, story?

Throughout this quarter, the project of biography has been an ever-present question in both our class discussions and in my own thinking. What is that project, after all? There are a great many things which biography can and does do, but it seems to me that Plutarch asks a fundamental question by separating himself from history: what are “the marks and indications of the souls of men?” This is the spirit of biography, to discover not what happened to a person or even why, but rather who that person was to whom such things happened. And why do we care so much? That, I cannot answer, except to say that empathy – even and especially for those long dead – connects us to our past more strongly than facts and dates ever can. History by itself may be interesting enough, but it finds its true relevance in biography.

A Coherent Framework – Holmes

Richard Holmes's Footsteps is not a biography or even an autobiography, but rather a story about what biography might mean. It is Plutarch's meta-biographical comment writ-large and expanded over the course of a series of stories about his own efforts to write biographies. I suspect Plutarch never would have thought there was an audience for writing about writing biographies, but there it is.

In the process of becoming a biographer, Holmes explores not only what biography is, but provides an opinion as to how the project of biography ought to be accomplished (or at least how he chooses to accomplish it). From his journeys, following the footsteps of his subjects, he creates a coherent framework, both for his own writing process, and out of the swirling chaos of the lives of his subjects.

There are two passages from Holmes that I wish to discuss, one from his 1964: Travels chapter, the other from his 1972: Exiles. The quotations are both complementary and contradictory, and thereby offer a kind of verbal frame for a discussion of what the project of biography is, whether that project is, indeed, possible, and why we readers invest so much of ourselves into lives long past.

The first passage runs contrary, but also (perhaps unwittingly) pays tribute, to Plutarch:

"The single subject of biography is in this sense a chimera, almost as much as the Noble Savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, living in splendid isolation. The truth is almost the reverse: that Stevenson existed very largely in, and through, his contact with other people: his books are written for his public; his letters for his friends; even his private journal is a way of giving social expression – externalising – his otherwise inarticulated thoughts. It is in this sense that all real biographical evidence is “third party” evidence; evidence that is witnessed. Just as the biographer cannot make up dialogue, if he is to avoid fiction; so he cannot really say that his subject “thought or “felt” a particular thing." (Holmes, 68)

This recognition that even the best remembered individuals existed in a social world is paramount to even Plutarch's Lives. What differs here is Holmes's conviction to “avoid fiction” by avoiding both dialogue and loaded words like “thought” and “felt.” The “third party evidence” upon which biography rests may allow for inference, but it hardly allows the writer to reconstruct and reanimate a subject in full. The modern biographer does not write lives.

Holmes does chase lives, however, and though he can never capture his subject, he can at least begin to recreate the world in which Robert Louis Stevenson or Percy Shelley lived. He is perhaps constrained to trace, in large part, “the most glorious exploits” that Plutarch avoided, but his efforts to follow Stevenson betray a deeper desire to capture, instead, the less monumental – or at least less visible – aspects of Stevenson's life. He seeks a romance, the feeling of a journey through France, and the gentle companionship of a mule for evidence about which he cannot write in good faith except in his own story. Why, then, pursue Stevenson? Why pursue Shelley? Why tear through France and Italy, seeking forgotten homes, crossing destroyed bridges, staring out at changed streets, and overlooking a different (so similar, but so essentially different) sea? In such moments one feels that time retreats, that Holmes somehow does accomplish his goal, finding a more intimate 'evidence.' What does this evidence amount to, the evidence of looking out from where Shelley's front door would have been, trying to imagine what he would have seen and thought and felt? In Plutarch's analogy of the biographer as a painter, I wonder whether Holmes details his subject's faces with his pursuits, or if instead he merely uses them to better shade the backgrounds. Is he a writer of fiction, a writer of history, or both?

The second of our passages from Footsteps speaks to the purpose of biography:

"The great appeal of biography seems to lie, in part, in its claim to a coherent and integral view of human affairs. It is based on the profoundly hopeful assumption that people really are responsible for their actions, and that there is a moral continuity between the inner and the outer man. The public and the private life do, in the end, make sense of each other; and the one is meaningless without the other. Its view of life is Greek: character expresses itself in action: and can be understood, if not necessarily justified." (Holmes, 175)

Contrary to the first passage, in which Holmes speaks to the essential impossibility of writing about the individual subject in a biography, instead preferring a socially and culturally situated portrait, this passage recognizes that the “appeal” of biography is somewhat different than the process. While the biographer may be constrained by the inferences and speculations afforded by third-hand evidence, the reader seeks something more coherent. The biographer's task is, in part, to turn a chaotic selection of cultural and personal artifacts into a narrative, to create order out of a collection of ideas, opinions, stories, and manuscripts ravaged by time and space, which may or may not suggest an order in themselves. Holmes's wanderings are not merely random attempts to paint a clearer picture, it seems, but rather a search for narrative. He claims to forge a fictionalized relationship with his subjects (Holmes, 66), suspending disbelief enough to buy into the reader's hopes and expectations for coherence.

“Character expresses itself in action.” What better hope for order is there than such a notion? Plutarch could not have gotten started without this prejudice. Indeed, he believed it so much that action gave way to the occasional embellished or fictionalized dialogue. If the character is correct, what does it matter if the speeches and conversations are recorded with fidelity? The actions are the same, the man or woman still present in even the most fictionalized account. The trouble, however, is that the “great appeal of biography” and the task of the biographer do not always work in concert. Holmes may be a romantic, but all the while he is beholden to some semblance of reason, to some sense that order cannot merely be constructed out of thin air to meet the needs of his own romantic whims. What is more chaotic, after all, than abandoning all hope of a true coherent narrative and adopting instead an unquestionably false one?

In Holmes, as in Plutarch, there is no clear line between what is the right and what is the wrong approach to biography. We may imagine extremes, wherein the writer presents only evidence, or only fabrication, but neither of those makes for compelling writing. “The great appeal of biography seems to lie,” but it doesn't necessarily lie, it merely “seems to.” Sometimes biography tells the truth, even when it offers “a coherent and integral view of human affairs.”

Is human life coherent and orderly? Is the universe? Those may be unsophisticated questions, too essential for scholarly work in an age of science, but biography was born out of such questions. To create order out of chaos is not so difficult for the playwright, who need only apply imagination when things get sticky. Likewise the philosopher, who, in taking order for granted, is free to manage his assumptions such that chaos is continually denied entry to the conversation. The biographer's job is trickier, creating order out of something far less antithetical and abstract, and thus far harder to combat, than pure chaos. The biographer, we might say, has gazed not only into the Platonic form of chaos, but into its living manifestation. The biographer has seen what happens when a human is reduced to a name and attendant actions: Alexander the Great, Anne Sexton, Robert Louis Stevenson. In staring into the abyss of those names and actions (the 'history' of the subject), in collecting what journals and letters and second-hand (and third-hand and fourth-hand and n-hand) accounts exist, the biographer becomes a chronicler of impossible questions about both the life of an individual and life in general, questions which, impossible though they be, demand a coherent answer if any writing is to be done.

This is no tragic task. Holmes, for his twinge of romantic melancholy, comes across as a fundamentally joyful fellow, gallivanting about with Le Brun. Perhaps his mad and slightly tardy pursuits across European countrysides and cityscapes help him to retain a healthy perspective. Perhaps his fictionalized relationships – which undoubtedly find their way into his portraits in one way or another – are a way to humanize for himself the mass of evidence upon which he depends, before he tries to humanize and situate that evidence for his readers. If we want to know who the person was – and not just the name or the oeuvre – to whom the events of a life happened, it might first be necessary to fictionalize, to humanize, to spin a fine silken string of order in a universe of chaos. Then, having spun the silk, we hold on, gaze back into the chaos, and hope that a tapestry might emerge.

The Life of Anne Sexton – Middlebrook

What does that tapestry look like, should it emerge? After all, not all biographers are blessed (or cursed) with the same amount of information, or with the same proximity to (or distance from) the subject. I suspect that Diane Middlebrook's Anne Sexton will not answer my questions, so much as raise more. Nevertheless, I wonder if a life as comparatively recent as Sexton's might give us a different perspective on the nature of biography. Surely Middlebrook, with her incredible wealth of evidence and a culture not far-removed from the one Sexton herself lived in, had more at her disposal than a fictionalized relationship. Surely it was not so hard for her to construct a “coherent and integral view of human affairs.”

Middlebrook's is a more systematic project than Holmes's. Armed with endless correspondence and several years worth of therapy tapes, the work of writing the story of Anne Sexton must have seemed more an effort of organization than an effort of creation. Plutarch's ideal of locating and situating telltale jests that inform the reader more than momentous occasions is realized throughout Middlebrook's biography. For example, Middlebrook highlights this quotation (which we have not quite first hand, but close) from Anne herself to Dr. Orne about her therapy: “I had been with you only a week when I got all the books on psychiatry. I read them to try to find out what kind of patient to be” (Middlebrook, 53). While there are a great many moments as intimate as this in the biography – and a great many intimate things about which we actually know very little, despite the overwhelming amount of material at Middlebrook's disposal – perhaps none speaks more directly to the complications of writing about a character like Anne Sexton. “I read them to try to find out what kind of patient to be” suggests an actress, not willing or able to be herself. If biography is to uncover the person to whom the events of a life happen, how can it succeed in uncovering a person so complicated as Sexton?

That Sexton had in mind her own legacy while she lived certainly complicates the task of writing and reading her biography, but it strikes me that any sufficiently famous figure – a figure about whom a biography is likely to be written – is unlikely to be oblivious to questions of self-presentation. Sexton may be a singularly extreme case of self-consciousness turned into self-disintegration, or at least self-dramatization, but is it not the case that the biographer is constrained to deal primarily with the dramatic self instead of the essential self? The appearance will always take precedence over the soul in an art where overt fiction is verboten. And for good reason, because else we venture into Plutarchian waters, where perhaps stories are well-told, but the lessons of personal history are also corrupted by blatant untruths.

Of course the issue is not so simple, but the point here is not to rehash the tenuous line between invention and reporting that goes on in biography (and history, and even journalism). Rather, the point is that abundance of evidence – even evidence which points to the kinds of subtle but profound moments that Plutarch held in such esteem – is no guarantee of a biography which can penetrate to the heart and soul of a man or woman. Middlebrook dissects Sexton's poems with skill, and organizes an enthralling narrative, and even gives the reader a sense of what Sexton was like, if not who she was. Indeed, hers is an exceptionally skillful biography, attaining as much as Holmes or Plutarch might hope to attain, even though she did not follow – a la Holmes – in Sexton's disturbed footsteps. Even so, Sexton remains a mystery, perhaps because that is what she sought to be. 'Enigmatic' is a difficult quality to create a coherent narrative around, 'insane' a difficult one to make orderly. The picture that arises of Sexton almost allows the reader to find her comprehensible, if it weren't for those moments – like her sexual abuse of her daughter – which unravel the entire sympathetic fabric.

On the edges of even this virtuoso performance in biographical writing lies the chaotic tongue of confused meanings and impossible-to-reconcile disagreements about who Sexton was, what she meant, and why she did what she did. “I have been her kind,” Sexton writes, as an ostensible way to let her audiences know who she was. But do we ever, can we ever know another human being, except by kind? Perhaps Sexton was right to paint herself in comparative hues, to clothe herself in Language instead of trying to be someone. Middlebrook, then, is stuck with the approximation of Sexton's Language, just as Holmes is stuck with approximation of place and Plutarch with an approximation of character. And yet, for Sexton, perhaps that is as telling a line in the face of the portrait as any.

Conclusion

“Language has nothing to do with rational thought,” (Middlebrook, 226) said Anne Sexton of her mysterious interaction with words. Though she appreciated the formalism of poetry – as opposed to journaling, for example – she was no beacon of reason and order. Where does she stand, then, where her biography in the constellation of biographies that make up our knowledge of lives gone past? Human beings are a species that loves order, and yet seems to suspect that this is a cruel, unrequited love. Plutarch's heroic efforts on behalf of Greek and Roman heroes amounts to an account – a logos – that compels a sense of ancient virtue, but also shows how thin, unto transparency, the veil between fiction and our sense of history are. Holmes, too, fights the battle of biography, winning a more romantic, but less heroic victory with words, constructing a narrative of beauty and humor. Middlebrook's more modern, more immediate, more honest picture lives somewhere more paradox. Her logos knows that language is rational thought, even if – and indeed because – language has nothing to do with rational thought.

References

Clough, A.H. (2001). Plutarch's Lives, (Ed., J. Dryden, Trans.). New York: The Modern Library. (Translation published 1683, original work published ca. 100 AD).

Holmes, R. (1985). Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. New York: Vintage Books.

Middlebrook, D.W. (1991). Anne Sexton: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books.

The Learning of Lucia Joyce

Another position paper from my biography class, this time on the professor's own book about Lucia Joyce. A fascinating and rewarding experience, reading an excellent book with its author.

What constitutes the “text” of a life like that of Lucia Joyce? Where does Carol Shloss turn her critical reader's eye, exactly, in the course of reading that text? So much of Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake rests upon secondary and tertiary sources, and there are so many interpretations of Lucia herself, that locating a coherent narrative – let alone a true one – is a daunting challenge for both author and reader alike.

What strikes me most, however, about the issue of coherence, and the attendant issue of reliability, is the inescapable desire to characterize the what and the who of a person, rather than the ever-present process of becoming. As a student of education, I cannot escape questions of learning. As a learner, born into a culture that purports to value “life-long learning,” I wonder how static the picture of any human being can really be. It is hard enough, I suppose, to explain who any given person is at any given time, and still harder to describe the developments and regressions that mark the narrative of all human lives. It is all but impossible to create that kind of narrative out of the wispy air of destroyed records and withheld information that Shloss had to contend with.

Even so, Shloss does not paint a static picture of Lucia. Rather, there are definitive moments of generation and regeneration in Lucia's adult-life, moments of crisis and moments of transition. She stops dancing. She takes drawing classes. She goes to Ireland. She is admitted to her first sanitarium. She is given protoformotherapy treatments. None of the events themselves tell us who Lucia is or what she thinks, but the combination allows for the construction of an external narrative, and the inference of an internal one. Above all, they paint the picture of a woman who's life was continually changing, resisting the formulaic, modern, and highly Apollonian tendency towards a static (and linguistic) categorization.

It is a fairly recent trend in learning theory (though not educational policy) to reject the kinds of narrow, behavioristic categories to which Lucia was subjected, both in her time, and in subsequent biographies of her contemporaries. Lucia, instead, fits comfortably into Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's theories in their 1991 work, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. The argument is, in essence, that we learn not through the transmission of decontextualized information, but that we instead are members of “communities of practice” wherein knowledge and understanding are co-constructed, and learning is embedded in the very environment in which it occurs. The implications of this insight go far beyond the classroom, spreading throughout the life of a learner, reclaiming and elevating the role of culture in the process of education. Lucia – as a cosmopolitan raised by cosmopolitans in a world still uneasy about cosmopolitanism – found herself dispersed among many “communities of practice,” and in some sense her dance through life strikes me as a fragmented journey of discontinuous learning.

“She would slip from English to French, and from French into Italian, in the course of going from one side of the room to the other” (Shloss, 222), wrote Joyce of his daughter. But what else was there for her to do? All of Lucia's cosmopolitan knowledge was meaningless to her, situated as it was in a limited and largely artificial world. Lave and Wenger write, “We have thus situated learning in the trajectories of participation in which it takes on meaning. These trajectories must themselves be situated in the social world” (L&W, 121). It is easy to imagine Lucia, then, constructing her own social world, or demanding one of her father. Joyce was not only a rare fellow member of her intellectual community, but in many ways he was the master to her “princeable” (Shloss, 304) artistic apprentice, a dynamic that was both a privilege and a curse.

In the absence of a meaningful social world that fit with her previous learning – especially after she stopped dancing and was increasingly taken from her father – Lucia learned to adopt the trajectories found within new social worlds. Learning dance was a communal experience, no doubt, but so was learning to be crazy. It is not that she willfully took on “schizophrenia,” a category so poorly defined that it would be hard to be an apprentice to it. Rather, the definitive seven months Lucia spent institutionalized were a new kind of apprenticeship. Shloss observes that, “After a certain point, it becomes difficult to distinguish the effects of the treatment from the symptoms of the supposed illness” (Shloss, 365), a fact undoubtedly true of both the experimental injections to which Shloss refers and to the experience of institutionalization. What kind of social world was Lucia repeatedly forced to enter? What kind of community of learners was she unwillingly and unwittingly made a part of?

These questions, rhetorical though they may be, point to the more difficult and genuine questions that, I suspect, are the source of the Joyce estate's resistance to Shloss's revisions of the Joyce family story. Why did Lucia stop dancing, really? How could James Joyce maintain such a paradoxically loving and yet unhelpful relationship with his daughter? Who thought that pairing Lucia with Jung was a good idea? Why did Giorgio resent his sister so much? It is far simpler to turn Lucia into an archetype, to deny her existence as a living, breathing, and developing human being. The label, “crazy,” is just that; it asserts that there is no growth or development, no membership in a community of intellectual or artistic practice. The insane are empty shells of disconnected and decontextualized cognition. The insane do not learn.

It is not clear to me whether the story Shloss tells of Lucia Joyce is a cautionary one, a literary one, a cultural one, or a moral one. Perhaps it is all of these, perhaps it is simply a reclamation of a girl abused both in her own time and by the whimsical history of the 'Great Man' that was her father. It seems to me, however, that the real reclamation of biography is a reclamation of a learning human being. Lucia was forced to learn a role that did not suit her, thanks to a mysterious family and a culture in which she was tragically anachronistic. But the important thing is that she did learn, or, we might say, she did breathe and love and laugh and dance. Biography may be accused, sometimes, of reducing the lives of its peripheral characters into the kinds of formulated phrases that Eliot's Prufrock so much despised, but it can also do the opposite, turning a static picture into the complicated and shared dance that is a life.

Leechfield, Texas

The following is a short "position paper" from my Biography and Life Writing class (about which I may say more, later). It's about Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, an excellent and disturbing true-story of a childhood in 1960's East Texas. I will warn that the paper may not make much sense if you haven't read the book, but perhaps it will serve as a motivation to that end.

At the top of the page: Texas, 1961; Colorado, 1963; Texas Again, 1980, as if those places and dates were sufficient to mark the events of The Liar's Club. The gruesome humor of a Leechfield afternoon, the irony of a Colorado mountain town standing in for New York... How else could these be described? Perhaps every book is, ultimately, the product of the culture – or the confluence of cultures – by which its author has been shaped, but it is at least somewhat surprising that the horrid Leechfield from which Mary Karr issues could be midwife to any literary impetus. It seems the stuff of stories, not the maker of them. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that there is no Leechfield, Texas on the map.

Recalling her grandmother's (celebrated, at the time) death, Karr writes, “Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn't miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world's order” (106). The death of a close relative is common enough for a girl of seven to confront, and this quotation is obviously the reflection of an older woman who understands the innate, chaotic frustration of such a death. But this seven year old witnesses, too, her mother's insanity – both as she nearly drives off a bridge during a hurricane, and as she “set fire to the whole world” (245) and threatens her daughters with a butcher knife – and is the victim of an unreported and, to her seven-year-old self, inexpressible, rape. Nevertheless, Grandma's death occupies so much retrospective narrative, whether as a way of explaining the bonfire to follow or on its own merit as another in a string of insupportable experiences.

Karr follows the above passage with this: “Leechfield itself would make you think that way – the landscape, I mean. You needed to watch out for the natural world down there, to defend yourself against it” (106). Of all the descriptions we have of Leechfield – as one of the certifiably ugliest places on Earth, as “one of the blackest squares on the world cancer map” (293), as the home, almost by necessity, of the Liar's Club – it is this Darwinian, animal reality that is most at the core of Karr's childhood. Almost all of what lives in Leechfield is poisonous, as if only the poisonous could survive. Losing trust in the world's order, as Karr puts it, is almost inevitable in a place so naturally disordered. When a gun is an essential part of life solely for protection from the litany of dangerous wildlife running about, it's a wonder there's not more Nervous going around. Add in muggy swamp heat and the odd hurricane, and one sees how out-of-place Karr's Yankee mother – who wants to identify herself above all as a New Yorker – was in such a home.

What is the role of culture in forming a personality, or – perhaps synonymously – a neurosis? For Karr, the East Texas twang, “fixing to” get things done, or lying as a matter of course becomes embedded into her self. The humor of awful she carries around like a stoic, and where anger does float to the surface of her narrative, it feels almost incidental to the mere fact of telling a story. That, it seems, is the essence of the Leechfield culture she is undeniably a member of. Though on the fringes of what is tenable for the nuclear family (even in Leechfield, the Karrs are Not Right), the conditions for insanity are an inescapable part of the Leechfield society, from the climate to the rubber-necking neighbors.

That Karr changes the name of her home is unsurprising, given her father-trained penchant for storytelling. Her words on the vignette she developed to describe her Grandma's death apply equally here, as throughout the book: “It's a clear case of language standing in for reality” (48). Leechfield, the very name, truly does “stand in” for the squalid reality of whatever her hometown actually was called. In some sense, Leechfield stands above whatever that real name is, being too perfect a descriptor to pass up. The stuff of stories.

What backwards fairy-tales, then, issue from Leechfield? If people are the product of their cultures, what culture acquired a young Mary Karr? A liar's culture, we might say, or a survivor's culture (certainly a quality her sister Lecia adopts). Or, perhaps encompassing both of those, a blue-collar, union-man culture. A culture of Nervous and Not Right, we might also say, or a culture of alcohol. Finally, we might very well call it a literary culture, not because it is the cradle of any Nabokovian eloquence – he would be more out-of-place than Mother by a long shot – but because it has an eloquence all its own, bordering on Homeric in emotion. Sing, Goddess, of the ate of Mother.

Yet this is no epic poem, no glorification of Fate and War and Death. There are capital letters here, still, to be sure, but they dot more mundane words. There is a rhythm to the language, too, but it is not the dramatic meter of poetry. One is tempted to call it more human, but that's an empty phrase, because the epic poem is also human. Rather, Karr's Liar's Club is unequivocally modern, and Texan. The catharsis here is not the archetypal vision of the fall of a social better, but rather it is the personal reflection turned into a liberation. One can only imagine writing in such vivid detail of Charlotte's Web turned to a pedophile's blow job.

It is the lies and the humor and the horror of Leechfield (a place the family can't help but carry with them to Colorado) that make it so story-worthy, so able to turn from whatever its dull Texas name really is into something more superlative. And why not? The ugly, swampy reality of such a place might not seem worthy of note, but that such cultures exist reaffirms the need for fiction in all its guises.