I'm a sucker for a good biography...

...as I'm sure I've mentioned here before. I guess not everybody feels that the circumstances of a artist's life are relevant to an understanding of their work, and I agree that the poems (or novels or paintings or whatever) are the main thing.* But their stories are sometimes interesting, whether laid out in thorough detail by a biographer (I can hardly wait for Lisa Jarnot's Duncan book) or related by the authors themselves. In other words, in some cases I'm just as interested in the poets as I am the poems.

Another bias: I'm not so charmed by the modern memoir trend though--the idea that everybody has a story--in which the subject is noteworthy merely as his own subject, and the autobiographical book itself (or ugh, series of books) make up the extent of the writer's work. I'm more interested in reading biographies or autobiographies of figures I already appreciate in another context, so I generally prefer to read about writers or other artists, occasionally a historical figure, as a kind of supplement to their work. Collections of letters too. A couple of weeks ago I read Ceci n'est pas Keith. Ceci n'est pas Rosmarie. by Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop.

Like Ron Silliman's Under Albany, (which I have not read yet, but soon soon), the Waldrop's memoirs were originally written for the Gale Research Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series.** For such a short book (under 100 pp.), it contains heaps upon heaps: we get the highlights of their childhoods, his in Kansas and South Carolina, hers in Germany; the story of their courtship and of Rosmarie coming to the US on the Hopwood Award prize money Keith's "old seminar paper" won at the University of Michigan; a litany of hilarious theatrical pranks staged by Keith, XJ Kennedy, and other friends, which eventually cost Keith a job; the events that led to the founding of Burning Deck magazine and press; a moving account of the Waldrops' friendship with Edmond and Arlette Jabès; and insight into how each of them wrote several of their books and translations. Lots more about their theater activities in Providence, and other friends in New York and San Francisco. Keith's version of things comes first, then Rosmarie's, in distinct halves, each episodic, sketchy, overlapping. Some of my favorite passages:

KW:

My first love was theatre. In Kindergarten I played Peter Rabbit--chosen for the part, I should add, because I was the smallest child in the class, the one who could most easily get under a screen representing the fence around Farmer Smith's garden."

[immediately followed by]

I have always despised the pompous sound of

And death shall have no dominion

along with its silly message.

[and later, about Rosmarie's coming from Germany:]

To marry Rosmarie, I was first required to send her astrologer father exact coordinates of my birth: day, hour, latitude, longitude.

For something so momentous, and so personal, he did not trust himself to cast the horoscope, but sent the appropriate details--of my birth and of hers--to a master astrologer whom he revered.

We never learned what revelations he received.

Except the lucky conclusion. It is all right, said Herr Sebald, after consulting the documents. We might marry.

Rosmarie's ship was a day late because of storms on the Atlantic. When she did arrive, it was with three large wooden crates. The customs officials glanced at her, at the crates, began to stamp them without ceremony.

Then I became visible.

They reconsidered, made her open everything, went over it all with a geiger counter.

[and a little later, about their first house together in Ann Arbor:]

The walls of every room we lined with books, all but kitchen and bathroom--for fear of grease and steam.

Between grease and steam, steam seemed the less dangerous and, when the volumes reached too great an overflow, we decided to put up shelves in the bathroom.

So what books should go there?

Books we decided, with something in the title or author to suggest that locus.

We began. Ubu Roi, of course.

The Golden Pot.

Anything by Adelaide Crapsey.

The search gained momentum. The Sitwells. The Brownings. The Golden Ass. Privy Seal. Free Fall.

Let It Come Down.

Finally it was hopeless, any word at all doubling its meaning with an excremental shadow.

Howard's End.

Gone with the Wind.

And from RW:

WAR, A SURFACE TO LIVE ON

All men are old. Shoes always too small. Cold oozed up through the holes. Uniforms moved with great speed. Mother thrust her chin forward with a new violence. Examined ration cards and missed coffee. At night the town gave in to the dark as if electricity had never been invented. So many things I did not understand. War as sufficient explanation. Balked in my simulation of childhood. Mother, I cried, extremely. At home in winter, wool pulled over my eyes. At the sound of the siren everybody ran into the cellar.

[Later, after:]

NOT JUST POSTWAR FOCUS,
BUT DEEP AND FETID.

I dreamed I was human, but not sure it was possible. The naked part of morning had disappeared. Natural space lost to mirrors on the wall.

Things settled down to "normal." The quarrels, the silences. My sister Dorle married and became my refuge. Mother cleared my throat. Every few weeks she moved all the furniture. Father retreated into his astral body, quoting Goethe and working the Rühmkorff pendulum. I barricaded myself behind books.

[And later, in Paris:]

Work was going well. We were happy to be alone with each other and did not try to meet anybody. In January 1971, George Tysh, who had been Keith's student at Wayne, found us. He had been working in a Paris gallery for some time. He arranged a poetry reading of David Rosenberg and the French Canadian Robert Hébert in our living room.

Claude Royet-Journoud and Anne-Marie Albiach were there. Claude noticed Edmond Jabè's Livres des questions in our bookcase and asked if we had just bought it. "No," Keith said, "we brought it along because Rosmarie has started translating it." At this Claude shot across the room:

"I MUST KISS YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE
TRANSLATING JABÈS."

[One more:]

COLLAGE, THE SPLICE OF LIFE
is one of my main methods. No text has one single author in any case. The blank page is not blank. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we always write on top of a palimpsest. Like many writers, I have foregrounded this awareness of the palimpsest as a method: using, trans-forming, "translating" parts of other works. It is not a question of linear "influence" and not just a tradition. It is a way of getting out of myself. Into what? An interaction, a dialog with language, with a whole net of earlier and concurrent texts. Relation. Between.

I once wrote: "I need a book to say I love you." The distance of another's words to say what touches me most. Or is it that it needs to remain masked? Hofmannsthal: "We must hid what is deep. Where? On the surface."

One of the best reasons to read this book is to learn from the Waldrops why they founded the press and what working as publishers, editors, book artists, and translators has meant to them. Rosmarie refers to an image from Don Quixote comparing translation to working on a tapestry: "you sit behind the canvas..." and the scenes of the tapesty, which were designed by someone else, appear on the right side of the fabric. It's an apt image to describe editing too, I think.

I'm also reading RW's Split Infinities. Might get to write about that here too. (Never enough time to get to everything I'd like to. I'd have half as much time to read and less to say.)

* Aside to note that I like my life-facts tempered in the poems themselves: I love the name-dropping and intimacy of the NY School but am not as drawn to the (pick your favorite) confessional poets, for instance. I've joked that I could write a daddy poem to out-Plath Sylvia, but I'm not interested in going there.

** I used to write for the related Contemporary Authors Biography Series, and wrote about 100 essays for it in the late 90s when I first started freelancing. The pay wasn't so hot and because they are reference books my prose had to be pretty buttoned-up, but I got hooked on the process of organizing the various source materials (which were provided for me) into a coherent picture of a writer's life in work in less than however many words.

I was going to say I don't remember reading many biographies before that time, and so this is probably when I picked up the habit. But now I remember Virginia Woolf's & Anais Nin's zillion diaries and Henry & June, plus Henry Miller's biography of Rimbaud (as well as several of his novels and memoirs, which tend to blur the line). And biographies of Alfred Stieglitz & Geogia O'Keefe, which led me to a book whose title and author I forget about artist couples like Sonia and Robert Delaunay. So I dunno, I guess my gateway must have been Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (well, it's partially a personal history) in about 1990 or so and on from there. I'd like to write one. Of somebody else. Sometime.