{"id":2997,"date":"2023-09-18T13:50:19","date_gmt":"2023-09-18T13:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=2997"},"modified":"2023-09-18T13:51:53","modified_gmt":"2023-09-18T13:51:53","slug":"reading-writers-biographies-the-elusive-essence-of-the-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2023\/09\/18\/reading-writers-biographies-the-elusive-essence-of-the-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"READING WRITERS\u2019 BIOGRAPHIES: THE ELUSIVE ESSENCE OF THE IMAGINATION"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I am currently reading Ruth Franklin\u2019s 2016 biography of American author Shirley Jackson, subtitled A Rather Haunted Life<\/em>, and I\u2019ve come across a couple of passages in Chapter One (\u201cFoundations: California 1916-1933\u201d) I would like to comment on. Franklin informs us that Samuel C. Bugbee, \u201cSan Francisco\u2019s first architect and Jackson\u2019s great-great-grandfather\u201d built in the 1870s the city\u2019s lavish \u201cmillionaires\u2019 palaces\u201d for the \u2018robber barons\u2019 who grew rich with their investments on the transcontinental American railroad, finished in 1869. \u201cNearly a century later\u201d, Franklin claims, Jackson would turn to these mansions \u201cfor inspiration when she needed a model for the haunted house in her most famous novel\u201d, The Haunting of Hill House<\/em> (1959).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            As Franklin informs a few pages later, since San Francisco\u2019s Nob Hill mansions were destroyed by the fire that followed the devastating 1906 earthquake, Jackson had only seen Bugbee\u2019s grand, extravagant buildings in pictures. In 1958, when she came up with the plot for The Haunting<\/em>, while living in Vermont, she asked her mother for those pictures, because, Jackson wrote, \u201cAll the old New England houses are the kind of square, classical type which wouldn\u2019t be haunted in a million years\u201d. This is quite funny, considering everyone assumes Hill House to a typical New England mansion (Jackson does not mention any location), totally unrelated to sunny California. The mother, Geraldine, Franklin continues, sent the daughter \u201cnewspaper clippings she identified as \u2018possible architectural orgies of my great-grandfather\u2019, including the Crocker House. \u2018Glad [it] didn\u2019t survive the earthquake\u2019, she commented later\u201d. The three-story Crocker House, designed in a Second-Empire style by Bugbee but finished after his death in 1877 by other hands, seems today hideous, as you can see<\/a>. Nonetheless, Aim\u00e9e Crocker informs that \u201cFeatured in the book and photographic album Artistic Homes of California<\/em>, originally published by the San Francisco Newsletter<\/em> in 1888, the Crocker House was proclaimed, \u2018one of the most beautiful architectural masterpieces to be found in any State in the Union\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The difference between the two passages I have cited is that whereas the first one suggests a sort of Freudian connection between Jackson\u2019s imagination and her ancestor\u2019s work, the second demonstrates how writers actually work. Jackson wanted to write a story about a haunted mansion and, being familiar with Bugbee\u2019s work, she asked her mother for documentation. Having no great-great-grandfather who built castles in Transylvania, Bram Stoker sought documentation in the British Library, though others claim he used Slains Castle, at Cruden Bay in Scotland, as his inspiration for Dracula\u2019s castle. Stoker\u2019s own biographer, David J. Skal, rejects in his volume Something in the Blood<\/em> (2016) that Slains, \u201cwhere Stoker spent holiday time while writing the novel\u201d, mattered at all because \u201cto anyone growing up in England or Ireland, real castles were just part of the ordinary landscape, and they had always been central to the virtual landscape of fairy tales. By the time Bram Stoker was in his forties, he hardly needed the poke of inspiration to realize a haunted castle might be a good location for a scary story\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Nor did Jackson, also in her forties when she wrote Haunting<\/em>. She knew that Gothic fiction had been using castles as a space of dread since Walpole\u2019s Castle of Otranto<\/em> (1764) and that, chagrined that the United States had no medieval castles, Edgar Allan Poe transferred that dread to an ancient mansion somewhere up North in \u201cThe Fall of the House of Usher\u201d (1839). Jackson\u2019s own mansion, Hill House, is in terms of the Gothic chronotope, very new, having been built only eighty years before the events she narrates (that is, in the 1870s). It was just luck that she happened to be Bugbee\u2019s descendant and that his ugly houses (by 1950s post-Victorian, Modernist standards) had been the seat of a variety of tragedies. Many other people had seen Bugbee\u2019s houses but nobody else had thought to write a ghost story set in one of them, just like many others were familiar with Transylvania but never thought of writing a vampire tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The two biographies by Franklin and Skal, then, attempt to do the impossible (namely, explain how the writer\u2019s imagination works), by piling up plenty of information which in the end feels superfluous. Or contrived. This method of dissecting the writer\u2019s biography in search of clues for this or that point in their fiction is particularly laughable if you consider authors of the fantastic or, more largely, of speculative fiction whose works stretch plausibility. Authors may explain now and then where they took their inspiration from, but this explains very little. Most famously, Mary Shelley claimed that Frankenstein<\/em> came from  a lucid dream in which she saw Victor leaning over his newly-made monster. Biographers have endlessly speculated whether this waking dream came from drugs or from anxieties caused by Mary\u2019s misfortunes as a young mother, but the fact is that not all women who take drugs or lose several babies write horror fiction. This is precisely the reason why the biographical approach to analysing fiction went out of fashion about one century ago with the rise of formalism, and, later in the 1940s, with American New Criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I do give brief biographical introductions in my subjects, but I always caution students against going too far in that direction. The truth is that nothing in Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s biography can explain Wuthering Heights<\/em>, and even if we had a complete list of all she read, we would still not know what mental processes led her to write her masterpiece. I have never written fiction, but whenever I read a writer\u2019s biography I play the game of thinking what kind of novels I would write, given my biographical background. I invite you to do the same, and you will immediately see how all biographical analysis of writers must fall flat. Supposing you are the kind of extremely self-conscious novelist who knows very well your own biography, you might still not want to use any of it for your work. This is just not automatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I personally prefer asking authors technical questions. I am currently in communication with Kim Stanley Robinson about Frank May, the main male character in The Ministry for the Future<\/em> (2020). Robinson has explained in diverse interviews that he has a penchant for using the name Frank frequently in his fiction. He has a Frank Chalmers (in Red Mars<\/em>), Frank Vanderwal (the Science in the Capital<\/em> trilogy), a Frank Churchill (\u201cA History of the Twentieth Century, With Illustrations\u201d<\/a>), a Frank January (\u201cThe Lucky Strike\u201d) and this Frank May. His explanation for that quirk is that \u201call of my liars are called Frank\u201d, though that explanation is useless in May\u2019s case (he\u2019s too frank, not a liar). A biographer would dig into Robinson\u2019s life to seek a double-faced great-uncle called Frank but I find that a waste of time. I am asking Robinson instead why he does not describe Frank as soon as we meet him, since this induces readers to visualize him incorrectly, and why May\u2019s biography leads him to a particular ending. Robinson puts May in an extremely singular friendship with Mary Murphy, a powerful woman whom he kidnaps for a few hours, and I very much want to know why Robinson had to limit that friendship (and make room for conventional romantic love with another man). Perhaps Robinson has had a very singular friendship with a woman and this is where Frank and Mary come from, but this is irrelevant. At least to me. I am more interested in the architecture of the novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Does this mean that we should not write or read biographies of authors? No, not at all. I prefer autobiographies and memoirs, but I understand the need for biographies, and the curiosity that writers elicit. My post is, rather, a critique of the impulse most writers\u2019 biographers feel to provide readers with by-the-numbers literary analysis, in a romantic biographical style now totally outmoded. I must clarify that I am reading Shirley Jackson\u2019s and Bram Stoker\u2019s biographies because I need to gather information (beyond Wikipedia!) to participate in a round table, but otherwise I tend to avoid writer\u2019s biographies, precisely for their shaky literary criticism. In any case, what I am finding more interesting in these two volumes are the details of the respective author\u2019s professional careers: when they started publishing, how many attempts it took, how their fame grew, how their career developed, how their posthumous reputation was built.             Stoker was a very secretive man, which I totally respect, but Jackson bared her soul as a working mother in her memoirs (Life Among the Savages<\/em> and Raising Demons<\/em>), both amazing pre-Betty Friedan books about a woman author\u2019s life in the 1950s. Franklin\u2019s biography, written from a feminist point of view, does a good job of vindicating Jackson as an unfairly overlooked author, but its agenda might not correspond to what the author really needs. Likewise, Skal\u2019s interest in presenting Stoker as a queer man is part of his own gender agenda, but not really how the author saw himself, which we will never know. I teach Dracula<\/em> as a queer text, which is in many ways inevitable in our days, but I do not speculate on the author\u2019s sexuality in my lectures. Quite another matter is approaching an author who wishes openly to be read as queer, black, post-colonial, an abuse victim\u2026 you name it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Returning to Jackson\u2019s inspiration for Hill House, Owen Hatherley comments in his fascinating article \u201c<\/a>Slashers, demons and head exploders: why horror revels in modern architecture<\/a>\u201d that \u201cThe reason why a \u2018haunted house\u2019 tends to be old and gothic isn\u2019t just the fact that its floorboards might have a satisfyingly eerie creek, but because there is so much unseen in a Victorian house\u201d, with all its nooks and crannies, and cloying decor. He proceeds then to examine the presence of post-1920s, post-Modernist, straight-line architecture in contemporary horror cinema, highlighting Candyman<\/em>\u2019s (1992) use of Chicago\u2019s derelict Cabrini Green estate as a major turning point. In literature, I would recommend Mark Z. Danielewski\u2019s highly experimental House of Leaves<\/em> (2000) as a particularly unnerving (long) tale about an ordinary house which contains a mysterious labyrinth inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            By the way, Stephen King has a note<\/a> in his website about how a nightmare he had in 1974 while staying with his wife Tabby at room 217 of The Stanley Hotel in the Rocky Mountains gave him the inspiration to write The Shining<\/em>: \u201cWe were the only guests as it turned out; the following day they were going to close the place down for the winter. Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect\u2014maybe the archetypical\u2014setting for a ghost story\u201d. Then he dreamed that his terrified 3-year-old son was chased by a fire-hose in the corridors. When he woke up from the nightmare, he says, \u201cI had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind\u201d. You can go the Freudian biographical way, and gossip about what kind of phallic father Stephen was to his son, now fellow novelist Joe Hill, or marvel that his brain connected the massive spaces of the hotel (built in 1909 and still in operation<\/a>) with the specific sub-genre of the ghost story. Or visit the place itself and see how it haunts you\u2026 Here\u2019s the bad news: you will not write The Shining<\/em>, no matter how awful your nightmares there can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am currently reading Ruth Franklin\u2019s 2016 biography of American author Shirley Jackson, subtitled A Rather Haunted Life, and I\u2019ve come across a couple of passages in Chapter One (\u201cFoundations: California 1916-1933\u201d) I would like to comment on. Franklin informs us that Samuel C. Bugbee, \u201cSan Francisco\u2019s first architect and Jackson\u2019s great-great-grandfather\u201d built in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,19,22],"tags":[99,975,977,982,985,976,974,983,978,986,984],"class_list":["post-2997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasy","category-gothic","category-literary-studies","tag-biography","tag-bram-stoker","tag-david-j-skal","tag-haunted-house","tag-kim-stanley-robinson","tag-ruth-franklin","tag-shirley-jackson","tag-stephen-king","tag-the-haunting-of-hill-house","tag-the-ministry-for-the-future","tag-the-shining"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2997"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2998,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997\/revisions\/2998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}