On Putting Yourself in the Narrative
Some of the most lauded biographies of the past few years have brought the subject’s life story into conversation with that of the author. Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine, Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet, and Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers all insert authorial voice and experience into the narrative to different degrees. Similarly, I assume that we are all familiar with academic approaches that understand knowledge that arises from personal experience as foundational to meaning making, such as black feminist thought or auto-ethnography. Participant-observer ethnography serves as a starting point for a recent essay by Australian academic Kate Rossmanith, which appeared in Public Books under the title “On Not Asking ‘Should I Insert Myself in the Text?,’” the text which brought these thoughts to fruition.
I did this briefly in the conclusion to Imitation Artist, my biography of vaudeville performer, dancer, and producer Gertrude Hoffmann. Hoffmann was a mimic, one who made her name first performing celebrity impersonations and then, more controversially, by traveling to Europe, observing the popular and avant-garde performance there, and recreating it in her vaudeville act before the originals could make the transatlantic voyage to the US. I ended with a brief reflection that disavowed my impostor syndrome by claiming it as an identification with my subject:
“Biographers are mimics too, taking gestures and traces of another person and trying to bring them convincingly to life. So, I will end with my visit to her grave, imitating Alice Walker in search of Zora Neale Hurston perhaps, or Hermione Lee bringing a silk flower for Edith Wharton. I arrived at the cemetery and asked the attendant where to go. [He dubiously asked if I was family; no, a writer, I said. Her remains were inaccessible, kept below the mausoleum level in an area where visitors were prohibited. I circled the small memorial park twice: even though I did not have the exact coordinates, I knew I had passed somewhere near her.”
Returning to the archive that lives in my Dropbox, I note a document from June 2019 where the copy editor flagged this paragraph and added the following comment: "This is the only use of first person in the book, but it seems fine here. Just noting." Despite its understatement, I remember how this comment excited me. I made a rhetorical choice outside of my academic comfort zone, and the reader found it effective even if they suspected I may not have done it on purpose. I see myself in the position often taken by my students, asking "Can I say 'I'?": feeling the pull of the first-person pronoun, knowing it has been proscribed in the past, hardly realizing that I was already asserting my consciousness even in the process of asking permission.
The thrill of attraction and the pang of embarrassment that come with wanting to say I were both sentiments I felt very strongly at the prospect of writing a biography in the first place. Even after I found out about Hoffmann and found that she had an archive in driving distance, I planned to write about her in an academic monograph making an argument about the relationship between popular theater and modernist studies. But for a number of reasons, which I can discuss in conversation, I felt Hoffmann’s life and archive were better served by a biography. Reasons: diary and correspondence where she engaged in self-fashioning, appearance in scholarship as a practitioner of Salome and Ballets Russes imitations but considering these as isolated incidents, archive at a private institution with research funding and workstudy students to copy materials, imaginative relationship that I could forge between the two of us.
And yet I still felt embarrassed, or at least apologetic. I was trained by a theory-oriented dissertation director, and I didn’t have any immediate scholarly models for doing this work. When I discussed the plans with my chair he warily asked a question somewhat along the lines of “Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to be wrong?” referring, I think, to the facts and dates that make up a life and that resist the finessing of textual interpretation. I definitely added new, more historicist skills to my toolkit: analyzing birth certificates and censuses and ship manifests. Writing biography is a deeply interdisciplinary act, even when you’re writing about literary figures.
I knew there was a residual sense of biography as not what English professors do. And for this roundtable, I tried to identify at least one place where that idea may have come from. I work in modernism, so I could blame Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians or T.S. Eliot’s assertion in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that poetry was “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” But in this case, I blame Stanley Fish. He published a 1999 op-ed in the New York Times titled “Just Published: Minutiae Without Meaning.” In his polemic, Fish says that biography makes him “queasy” because it tries to assert causality where he sees only contingency. He writes: “The falseness of it all is overwhelming, and you begin to be embarrassed at the spectacle of a biographer who knows so much and is trying so hard, but who can deliver only transitions that creak and analyses that you don't believe for a minute.” This was a revelatory claim: entering into dialogue with a historical subject and trying to narrate their life exposes the biographer’s knowledge and effort. We make spectacles of ourselves.
As it so happens, I’ve been thinking about spectacle quite a lot lately. My current research project is a cultural history of the New York Hippodrome, the 5200-seat playhouse where massive popular spectacles were performed from 1905-1939. These shows involved everything from circus to Russian ballet, history pageants to vaudeville. These shows were excessive, over the top, and hard to imagine. Each show involved hundreds of people. As I think about my narrative structure, I want to end by sharing the questions I’m considering. With whom do I identify among the backstage and front of the house workers I’ve located in the archive? Who do I need to account for beyond those figures that seem immediately compelling or recognizable? How can I disperse the biography of a cultural institution across several people’s lives? What are my ethical obligations toward this material, and how will they inform the shape of my text? How do the spectacles of the Hippodrome relate to the spectacle of my voice telling the story? I’ll conclude here, with the more general version of these questions on the slide to inform further discussion. I look forward to hearing about when you all say I and why.