01-Feb-2007
WEBSITE: Dona Munker on WRITING BIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHICAL NONFICTION.
NEWSLETTER: IMAGINING A LIFE. The Craft of Biography and Biographical Nonfiction. ©
IN THIS ISSUE (No. 2: February 2007):
-- DEAR SUBSCRIBER: Thanks for persevering. The website gets a name change.
-- Article: GETTING MY CLOCK FIXED. The supreme importance of chronology in imagining the story of a life. Related excerpt: "Clarence Darrow Comes to Portland."
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CURRENTLY on the NEWSLETTER PAGE (http:www.storydriven.net/newsletter.htm):
In the Sidebar: A Storyteller's Definition of "Story." TO READ: Copy and paste this link into your Web browser: http://www.storydriven.net/newsletter.htm#SIDEBAR1.
In the Sidebar: You're Reorganizing Your Files *Again*? TO READ: Copy and paste this link into your Web browser: http://www.storydriven.net/newsletter.htm#SIDEBAR2.
CURRENTLY on the JOURNAL Page: "Making the Most of the Evidence" and "Clarence Darrow Comes to Portland" (September, 2006). TO READ: Copy and paste this link into your Web browser: http://www.storydriven.net/events.htm#CURRENTINTRO.
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DEAR SUBSCRIBER:
NEWSLETTER No. 2 comes to you six months after NEWSLETTER No. 1, a gap so spectacular that you were probably wondering if the first issue could have been a mirage. I'm discovering that my original plan of sending something once a month was, well, wishful thinking.
Since I can write a newsletter or post a new excerpt only when SARA AND ERSKINE, my biography of Sara Bard Field, gives me time to do so (which isn't often), I'm afraid the frequency will have to remain irregular for some time. However, if you had unsubscribed from the mailing list, you wouldn't be reading this. So even though I may not know who you are--or even if you haven't unsubscribed because you can no longer find where you stored the website address--I'd like to say thanks for still being there, and I hope to repay your patience by figuring out how to do this faster, or at least more regularly.
As of this NEWSLETTER, the website I refer to for short as "StoryDriven.Net" has undergone an official name change, from "Biography and Literary Imagination" to "Writing Biography and Biographical Nonfiction." The change affects only the search engine title (that is, the keywords Google searches for), not the URL (the website's address), which is still http://www.storydriven.net.
Nonetheless, an explanation seems in order, though no harm will come to you if you cut straight to "Getting My Clock Fixed," on researching a story's chronology.
The Explanation:
As you know from reading my first NEWSLETTER, I'm deeply interested in the workings of the biographer's imagination--that is, how biographers envision the reality that their research is uncovering, and how they bring that vision to readers in the form of a story.
To judge from all the courses that are given and all the books that are published every year on "creative writing" (I've always hated that term, but fighting it is too much work), a sizable segment of the educated public as well as the academic world shares my interest in the literary imagination. And yet, when I went looking not so long ago for information on the creative processes of what might be called "the nonfiction mind," I found almost nothing. Evidently it's never occurred to anyone to investigate why and how some writers feel drawn to constructing an artful tale about reality by getting reality itself down on the page, as opposed to inventing it. (Dissertation, anyone?)
I was hoping to use StoryDriven.Net to broach the subject myself. However, StoryDriven.Net's chief raison d'etre is to be of practical use to others who are writing, or thinking of writing, a biography or a work of biographical nonfiction,* and who therefore have an interest in finding out how others approach the craft--and, sometimes, the art--of writing a biographical narrative. So I've decided to emphasize instead the actual process of imagining a life: writing and researching it.
I confess that I had a small pang at relinquishing "Biography and Literary Imagination," a title that evoked visions of the Google Spider scampering across my website and being impressed by the word "literary" before tearing off in search of ever steeper algorithms. Still, if you signed on to read about the biographical imagination and are aghast to learn that I'm concentrating instead on how that imagination turns reality into narrative, don't worry: I'm as fixated on the creativity of the nonfiction mind as ever. I'm not dropping the subject, just taking it into the lab, where the light is better.
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* I use the term "biographical nonfiction" as well as "biography" in order to be able to include not only traditional, grandparents-to-funeral biography, but also any serious book-length work of nonfiction about someone else's life.
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ARTICLE: GETTING MY CLOCK FIXED. The supreme importance of chronology in tracking the story of a life.
(NOTICE OF COPYRIGHT: Copyright © 2007 by Dona Munker. Copying, altering, or reproducing this article in any form without written permission from the author is prohibited under the law and will be prosecuted regardless of the purpose or venue in which it was copied or reproduced.)
My first boss in publishing, Genevieve Young, was what is known as a Legendary Editor. This was due in some measure to her glamorous presence--she was tall, beautiful, hailed from Shanghai, and for a while had been married to the even more legendary Gordon Parks. Gene had published numerous bestsellers over the years, and her reputation as an editor included an implacable rigor with authors who violated the rules of good storytelling. One of her prime directives, which she drummed into both them and me, was, "Always stick to chronology." Truly egregious sloppiness always elicited this indignant response: "Never violate chronology!" Authors who violated chronology had their clocks fixed by Gene Young.
Getting the Clock Right.
"Chronology," in editor-talk, means the order or sequence in which events are presented in a narrative--the "when," as well as the what, who, and where. This has huge implications for biographers as well as journalists. First, the biographer has to know when an event took place: not only the date, but if possible--assuming that you're as compulsive as I am about chronology--the exact date, right down to the day of the week and even the time of day, if you can find it. (Think nobody cares whether something way back when took place before or after sunrise? Ask Marie Antoinette.)
Second, biography, like journalism, requires the writer to establish the event's position in relation to surrounding events. What was the date of the letter in which the subject first said he wanted to leave Ireland forever, and was it before or after the Easter Rising? When did the subject first realize that she couldn't stand her brother's faultfinding any longer: before he started dating her best friend, or after?
Third, by "events" I don't mean only exterior actions, like the Invasion of Normandy, or when the James boys finished breakfast and left to go and rob the train; I mean conversations, thoughts, and sometimes even feelings or ideas as well. The biographer has to have a firm grasp of the temporal position of all of these in the larger narrative, and also--just as importantly--in relation to each other.
Of course, establishing when an event took place isn't always possible. And even if you know when it took place, you may not have an exact enough date to figure out the relationship of a certain incident, conversation, or epiphany to other events. Nevertheless, chronology is where everything has to start, and to flout it is to remain vague and confused about what happened. Which means that when you eventually come to write about it, you will sound vague and confusing. Which means, in turn, that Gene Young will have to fix your clock for you. Worse than that, of course, is the possibility that you will promulgate false or misleading information.
On the other hand, in the course of giving chronology your best shot, you often find yourself uncovering the sort of detail that is likely to infuse the narrative with the authenticity of nonfiction and the psychological tension and surprise of a novel. Nailing down chronology puts you one step closer to being master of the universe, or at least of your narrative. And for a biographer, those two things are pretty much the same.
A Case in Point: Clarence Darrow's Dinner Party.
Establishing when the lawyer Clarence Darrow first visited Portland, Oregon in 1910 provides a good, if extreme, case demonstration. On that visit, Darrow threw a dinner party at a downtown restaurant at which he introduced the unhappy Sara Bard Field--then Mrs. (Rev.) Albert Ehrgott, the wife of a rigidly orthodox Baptist minister and the younger sister of Darrow's friend and mistress, Mary Field--to the dazzling Portland attorney, Charles Erskine Scott Wood.
Sara describes Darrow's arrival, the dinner party, and the fateful consequences it had for her in a massive oral history, SARA BARD FIELD: POET AND SUFFRAGIST.* In her account of the event, she says that, having met C.E.S. Wood, "I knew that I could no longer go on with the life I had lived as a minister's wife." The dinner party marked the beginning of a months-long journey in which Sara gradually but inexorably fell in love with a married man who, though much older and wealthier than she, proved, astonishingly, to be a soul mate for whom she would eventually divorce her husband and give up her children.
I wanted to follow the progress of this long, slow experience of falling in love with an intimacy that would make my reader feel almost present as the journey progressed. If the reader and I could empathize with and understand how the next months transformed Sara from a loveless wife into a love-ridden, impassioned woman, the evolution of her subsequent feelings and her relationship with Erskine would also become both sympathetic and understandable throughout all the comedy and tragedy of a long, turbulent love affair. But before I could explore how and when Sara fell in love with Wood, how and when she realized that she was in love, and how and when she finally let Erskine know, I had to feel secure when she began to fall in love in the first place.
(You can read Sara's description of Darrow's arrival and his dinner party by going to pp. 197-205 of her oral history. Click on or paste this link into your Web browser: http://content.cdlib.org/dynaxml/servlet/dynaXML?docId=kt1p3001n1. Click on "Ch. 13," then scroll down through the online text to "To Portland" and "Meeting with Colonel Wood.")
Why Chronology Matters.
Fixing an accurate time frame for a series of events is the beginning of understanding them, and it's one of the first things a nonfiction writer tries to do when starting to research a particular subject or event. Knowing the order in which events occurred--which means establishing, first, when they occurred--is the sine qua non of interpreting them to the reader. Especially in the psychology of love, timing is all.
Before Sara arrived in Portland in March of 1910, her unhappiness at being a minister's wife had been under control; then, over the course of her first year in Portland, it began to simmer, and finally to boil over. If, therefore, the dinner party took place within a few months of her arrival in her new home, the words, "I knew I could not go on with the life I had lived as a minister's wife" meant one thing; if her discontent with her marriage was already well advanced, they meant quite another. The only way of finding out the true emotional significance to her of Darrow's dinner party at the outset of this critical period was to establish when he had given it--exactly when, if possible.
At first, conflicting information made establishing even a roughly accurate time frame difficult. Both Wood's biographer and a biographer of Darrow's had placed the dinner party in October, 1910, when Darrow was in Portland for a widely publicized anti-prohibition lecture tour (Cowan, p. 133; Hamburger, p. 153).** However, Sara says in her oral history that Darrow arrived "not long" after the Ehrgotts moved to Portland ("I know we hadn't been there long"), and says that he appeared unexpectedly one day as she was working in her garden, whisking her and her husband off in a taxi to meet his other dinner guests.
I could, of course, simply accept the October date. After all, two writers before me had concluded from what appeared to be solid evidence that Wood and Sara had met in October, and Sara's account was pretty vague. Still, I didn't feel comfortable telling the reader that I knew the date before I had checked to see if anything else could corroborate, or disprove, her memory.
Finding Corroboration.
Luckily, as I progressed with researching other topics, I discovered a statement in which Albert himself remembered being introduced with his wife to C.E.S. Wood "in the spring of 1910." (Albert prided himself on his excellent memory. I guess I'd remember something like that, too.)
Spring of 1910! I had a general time frame, and decided to see if I could figure out the month. Sara's description of Darrow's arrival did give me one solid clue: she said that the road that day was muddy ("A taxi drove up through all that mud, and out got Clarence Darrow").
Weather reports can be helpful in fixing dates. Not long before, I had gone to Portland on a research trip and met Hilary Gripekoven, a talented amateur history buff, who generously volunteered to do research for me at the Oregon Historical Society. She was combing the local papers from April through June, 1910 for information about Darrow during those three months, so I asked her to search the daily weather reports as well and see whether there had been heavy precipitation that spring. Hilary found just the opposite: for most of April and May and almost until the middle of June, the weather had been so dry that at one point the town fathers ordered oil sprayed on the city streets to settle the dust. Between mid-April and the end of June, 1910, the only heavy rainfall was on Friday, June 10.
I was thrilled--until I remembered that there was also rain on April 12. It was quite possible that when Sara told her interviewer, "We hadn't been there long," she was thinking of five weeks, not three months.
This worried me until, a few weeks later, I got lucky again. While browsing in a collection of short stories by John Galsworthy that Darrow had brought along to read from to his guests after dinner, I suddenly hit on the idea of consulting the copyright page to see if it told me anything. Sure enough, it said, "First edition June, 1910." Eureka! In those days, a New York publisher like Galsworthy's shipped his books by train to the West Coast before shipping them to points closer to home--Darrow lived in Chicago--in order to insure that the book would be available at the same time all over the country when the reviews began appearing. Even if Darrow purchased the book in Chicago, he couldn't have gotten his hands on a copy much before June 1--certainly not as far back as mid-April. The rainstorm that ended the two-month drought and left Sara's suburban road a mass of mud had fallen the night of June 10.
Narrowing the Field.
Of course, now I was determined to get the brass ring--the exact date seemed almost within reach. (Think how much more money writers could earn if they channeled this kind of energy into getting onto "Jeopardy.") I considered the mud. From Saturday through Monday, it must still have been fairly soft: the weather reports said that temperatures that weekend were mild, not warm. But not damp, and surely by Tuesday, the road's surface would have been dry enough not to impede the cab's progress. The window was getting narrower.
I could rule out Sunday, June 12. I couldn't picture the pious, image-conscious Reverend Ehrgott going out to dinner with Clarence Darrow on a Sunday. Even before the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, Darrow's name was anathema to more Baptists than just the Ehrgotts' highly conservative board of elders, and anyway, on Sunday evening Albert had a 7:30 sermon to preach. It came down to either Saturday, June 11, or Monday, June 13.
Sara's account also mentioned that Albert had been unable to stay after the dinner to hear Darrow read because he had to go to a church event--"And my husband spoke up and said that that he had a meeting, but that I could stay (because I think I remember that it was a meeting of just men)." Albert had left and returned to pick up his wife not long after Darrow finished. I had read aloud the story I knew Darrow had to have chosen, and even a slow reading would have taken no more than forty-five minutes. Albert must have planned on returning in approximately an hour and a half.
I would have enjoyed finding out that the evening meeting he attended had been on the Saturday: after a two-month drought, the rain must have made a real mess of the dirt roads that surrounded large American cities in those days, and it was fun to imagine Darrow's taxi squelching through "all that mud." But I didn't think Albert would have gone to a church meeting on a Saturday evening; Saturday was the most stressful day of the week for ministers, who always had two sermons to prepare. The weekly schedule in the Ehrgotts' church newspaper for 1910-1911 verified that no meetings were scheduled on Saturday evenings. The church paper did, however, show that the men's club always held its business meeting at 8 PM on the second Monday of the month. In 1910, the second Monday was June 13, three days after the rainstorm. Moreover, Monday was the minister's day off, as well as the day when Sara was most likely to have been tending the garden when Darrow drove up.
Yet that still didn't seem conclusive. The Ehrgotts' church was in East Portland, a twenty-minute trolley ride from the restaurant. Albert could not have spent twenty minutes traveling, attended the business meeting, and been sure of getting back to reclaim his wife in anything less than two hours; in fact, a meeting urgent enough to make him leave a dinner party hosted by the most celebrated lawyer in America would probably have prevented him from going to dinner in the first place. If I based a claim for Monday on the men's club meeting, maybe not even a New Yorker magazine fact checker seemed likely to argue but I didn't believe it myself. Where had Albert gone during that reading?
The Solution at Last.
Then I remembered an article I had seen two years before in a Baptist weekly that had described an elaborate reception in June, 1910 at Portland's largest Baptist church. The reception had been the public debut of a charismatic English minister who, with much fanfare and at great expense, had just been hired away from a church in California (his salary was reported to be $5,000, not far below that of a bank manager). Every clergyman in the Portland area would have planned to attend, and Albert, like so many of his colleagues, was not only gregarious but a practiced cultivator of useful connections. Getting to that reception would have been a top priority.
I looked up my notes on the article. The reception had taken place at 8 o'clock on the evening of Monday, June 13. I checked an old Portland street map: the restaurant was within walking distance of the First Baptist Church. The Ehrgotts went to dinner with Darrow knowing that Albert could put in an appearance at the reception.
Monday it was, then. Though fixing the date had required months of work, I now knew that the evening of June 13, 1910 was when Clarence Darrow introduced Wood and Sara, and the day that her transforming journey began. I had taken the first step toward uncovering what Virginia Woolf called "that inner life of thought and emotion which meanders darkly and obscurely through the hidden channels of the soul."
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* SARA BARD FIELD: Poet and Suffragist. Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, 1979.
** Geoffrey Cowan, THE PEOPLE V. CLARENCE DARROW (New York: Times Books, 1993) and Robert Hamburger, TWO ROOMS: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
