Echoes of Fact
Biographies can lie. Artists aren’t the glorified, complicated beings we imagine them to be — we portray them that way. Biographical perspectives can read like an objective account of artists’ scandalous lives, when in reality we are only presented with the cherry-picked, salacious details. The difficulty of constructing an interesting narrative can often blur the line between fact and fiction, especially when writers have to work within the constraints of the truth to find their freedom.
How does one understand the life of an artist? On Sept. 14, a panel of writers sought to answer that very question at a Windham-Campbell lecture titled “Portraying Artists,” at the Whitney Humanities Center. The Windham-Campbell Festival, centered around the Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes (established by Donald Windham at Yale in 2011), celebrates literary achievements in Fiction, Non Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. It strives to keep alive the tradition of discourse about the arts.
The panel was centered on the conflict between portraying the life and the work of an artist. It was moderated by professor Langdon Hammer, YC ’80, GRD ’89, Chair of the English Department and one of America’s most distinguished literary biographers, who spoke to Olivia Laing, John Keene, and Sarah Bakewell about how they addressed this issue in their own works. The panelists were impressive: Olivia Laing is the author of three nonfiction books, two of which were shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize; Sarah Bakewell has penned four books, one of which, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography as well as the Duff Cooper Prize for Nonfiction; and John Keene wrote Annotations and Counternarratives, works of experimental fiction. In Hammer’s own words, Keene’s Counternarratives is a visionary biography, a utopian recreation of the past. All three panelists had written at least one biography, which brought an interesting perspective on the objectivity and validity of non-fiction.
“Few stories are as compelling as those dealing with artists that inevitably confront the relationship between the life and work of the artist,” Hammer began, without preamble. He continued to say that at the same time, an accurate representation of an artist is hard to get right because of the struggle to find the right balance between the their life and work. The actual life of an artist could be too sensational, or too dull in contrast to their work.
The discussion thus began on a note that immediately induced a kind of self-reflection, both on the process of writing and the way we see the depiction of artists. It reminds us to consider the interactions between our lives and what we write as fiction, and how the two echo off each other while existing in their own spaces.
Bakewell brought up biographical movies. She discussed the struggle of depicting the process of a writer writing something — or, even worse, thinking — in an interesting manner. Continuing with the biographical perspective, Laing referred to her own work, centered around the English writer Virginia Woolf: “Biographies portray life in retrospect,” she said, and pointed out how this kind of storytelling is incompatible with real lives of individuals who move forwards, not backwards — in uncertainty, not knowing what to expect. Virginia Woolf’s life is described by other writers as heading towards her drowning conclusion, yet she herself did not live her life anticipating this to be the final scene.
Nathan Murphy, PC ’20, agreed with Laing, and responded to her comments by referring to the broader world of art and its proclivity for retrospective portrayal: “I think pop culture is so fascinated by the tragedies that surround death and the ‘suicidal artist,’ that the entire lives of artists are often depicted as a series of events leading to death or suicide.”
John Keene introduced what he called the “dream time” of artists. He coined this term to describe the time in which artists ‘dream’ before coming up with something. Keene discussed the difficulty of preserving this aspect in a work about an artist. When dreams are so subjective to an individual, how can we ever hope to recreate them in biographical work?
Does portraying artists have special value? The panelists seemed to think it does, because of the two-fold value of a biographer interpreting the life of an artist, and an artist interpreting and reflecting on their own life.
The talk was an intriguing meditation on negotiating the balance between truth and fiction, and on finding the writer’s’ own freedom to work within it. Alexis Teh, TD ’22, an audience member in the talk, said it made her think about the way personal bias could affect the construction of a narrative, because of how hard it is to objectively approach another person’s life and create a narrative out of it. Her statement highlights the difficulty and complexity of objectively understanding another person even in something as mundane as conversation. Our own bias is always at work in connecting dots that don’t exist, and creating a story out of unrelated events.
Overall, the discussion was a wonderful insight into the act of translating real life experiences into narratives. We often think of the works of artists exclusively, without considering the way they relate to their lives. Conversely, we forget the linearity we constantly impose on our own lives when thinking about events in hindsight. In discussing self-reflective artists, the talk brought to a forefront the widespread impact our lives have on what we do, and what it means to comprehend that.
