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The custodian of literary heritage has a difficult job. Go too loose with a dead writer’s copyright and you might end up with Arthur Rimbaud new elements; act too quickly to burn material, as Emily Dickinson’s sister and James Joyce’s grandson did, and you could distort a legacy. According to The GuardianIan Fleming’s estate has been the “gold standard” keeping the James Bond franchise happy and profitable since the author’s death in 1964. But in terms of its profitability and harmony, it is an outlier.
When it comes to biographers seeking permission to quote from work and from personal letters, performers must perform a delicate dance—in the silent woman In her book on the various biographies of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm called the letters “fossils of feeling”. Different heirs take different approaches: James Baldwin’s family continues to restrict access to these fossils, possibly because of discomfort with his sexuality. Conversely, John Cheever’s family made his love letters public.
my new book Also a poet, although primarily a memoir built around my shared love of my father and the poet Frank O’Hara, is also about my experience with the O’Hara estate, which did not support my father’s attempts to write an O’Hara biography 40 years ago. or mine now. Despite extensive work on the book, including taped interviews with O’Hara from the late 1970s, my father never finished it. By the time I figured out why, I was met with the same resistance.
The obstacles my father and I faced in trying to uncover the private life of a beloved, deceased literary figure are far from unique. These seven books shed light on the dramatic tension between literary estates and biographers, who, depending on your point of view, are either vultures picking at a corpse or heroes rescuing their subject from oblivion.
The Executioner: A Comedy of Letters, by Michael Krueger, translated by John Hargraves
A “helpless, ignorant executor” is put in charge of his old friend’s wild mansion, complete with rambunctious pets and a chaotic assortment of books and papers. Among the find, he expects to find a final novel, long promised, called The covenant, which was intended to be an “amazing shining meteor” of a final book, “the world’s last novel.” What he finds instead doesn’t make sense for a while, and he’s blindsided by documents he believes reflect poorly on the dead author. As he strives to protect his friend’s reputation, the executioner makes choices about what to preserve and what to suppress, which the final pages of the book reveal are less than ideal. In his entertaining novel, Krueger emphasizes that managing the aftermath of a dead man is difficult, and that even the most well-intentioned efforts to burnish a figure’s legacy can backfire.
The Aspern Papersby Henry James
Start working on a literary biography and someone is sure to mention this lively anti-biographical sample about an American editor who sneaks into a household hoping to gain access to the papers of a dead Romantic poet named Geoffrey Aspern. Under an assumed identity, the protagonist tries to intrigue with Aspern’s widow and daughter, and in the course of the ruse acts abominably. He seduces the daughter, “Miss Tina”, who shows her own capacity for bad behavior by using her influence to try to get him to marry her. James’s inspiration for the novella, according to his own 1908 preface, was a story he heard in Italy about attempts to retrieve letters sent by Percy Bysh Shelley to Clare Claremont, the half-sister of Percy’s wife, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron’s mistress. The book suggests that coveted literary properties can be as corrupting as Gollum’s ring—for biographers and executors alike.
My father is a bookby Jana Malamud Smith
When Smith’s father, the writer Bernard Malamud, died, she, her mother and her brother were stuck trying to figure out who owed what. In 1989 New York Times essay considering how much to share of his father’s personal papers, Smith noted that one of the reasons the novelists’ relatives were irritated by biographers’ requests was that they were probably already dealing with having their lives undermined to some extent. degree from the writer in their family. In 1997, Smith wrote a book further advocating for privacy, Personal Matters: In Protection of Privacy. But in 2006, after preventing others from writing biographies about him, she wrote her own book about her father. In it, she talks about his affair with a student, as well as her parents’ close and not quite monogamous marriage. In the preface of My father is a book, she wrote, “How do I justify my own change of heart? I’m not sure I can. Partly I have to laugh at myself: when I finally read the notebooks, I realized that their contents did not need my protection. She, her brother, and her mother later collaborated with writer Philip Davies on a formal biography. The story is a good reminder that, ultimately, the legacy in the hands of the author’s family is likely to be subject not only to the wishes of the deceased, but also to the conflicting motivations and emotions of their living relatives.
Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal Story on the Road and Off the Track, by Victor and Jacob Maymudes
Formally, this book is the closest to my book that I have come across. Jacob Maymudes found tapes recorded by his father, Victor, a friend of Bob Dylan (not the owner of a purely literary estate, although, of course, one was enough for the Nobel committee to award Dylan the 2016 prize for literature) and put together a hybrid memoir biography that avoids the need to quote from the central figure’s work. There is even, as in my book, a devastating house fire. Victor and Dylan met at the age of 20 in the village and bonded over music and politics. However, they fell out, and Dylan did not discuss Victor in depth in his own memoirs. But Jacob isn’t writing about Dylan; instead, he writes around it. Saving no doubt a small fortune in licensing fees, Jacob quotes not Dylan’s works but his own father’s verses, including “LSD”: “Well I rolled out of bed / I sat on my head / I didn’t know if I was alive or dead / I staggered to the door but fell to the floor. In what I found to be a poignant attempt to put a positive spin on the absence, Jacob says of his father’s poetry: “The text seems similar to the way Bob types his text.”
In Search of JD Salingerby Ian Hamilton
Ian Hamilton’s supposed biography of Salinger turned into an intermittently compelling, if bitter, account of the drive to write the book against the wishes of the still-living author, and then of the 1986 lawsuit Salinger brought—successfully— against him as a result. Hamilton wrestles with the ethics of his endeavor, setting ground rules for himself and rather annoyingly referring to his “biographical alter ego” in the third person. He asks, “At what point does decent curiosity become indecent?” And he admits he cares about the answer to that question, but he doesn’t too much: “This circular self-questioning … was real; I felt sincere. But that doesn’t seem to actually stop me from moving on to the next stage of the operation. Hamilton continued this work with Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, an anecdote-rich book about a dozen fraudulent properties, including those of John Donne and Robert Louis Stevenson. His attitude to what the writers leave behind is audacious, bordering on petulant, and reading about how he got his payback will benefit any bright-eyed scientist who’s sure a research project is going great.
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, by Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography of Sylvia Plath remains the most popular non-fiction book about the dueling motivations of biographers and descendants. She examines the levels of literary merit and invasiveness in various Plath biographies by interviewing her biographers and people associated with Plath. Malcolm’s consistent view of the writer as a bad actor appears in The silent woman: She compares the biographer to “the professional thief who breaks into a house, rummages through certain drawers which he has good reason to believe contain jewels and money, and triumphantly carries off the booty.” In a world defined by official demands and politics, Malcolm’s bombshell is refreshing. One update worth noting when it comes to Plath: There’s more booty out there than ever. Biographer Heather Clark, who wrote the 2020 thousand page biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Flaming Art of Sylvia Plath, said she was able to use material others did not have when control of the estate shifted from Plath’s sister-in-law, Oliun Hughes, who was known to be hostile to Plath, and was given to Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes. Clark’s was the first major book to use the archive under new management — and she mentioned in at least one podcast interview that Frieda liked it.
The shadow in the gardenby James Atlas
For a nuanced contrast to Malcolm’s cynicism, this Atlas book, published just a few years before he died in 2019 and praised by such legendary biographers as Ron Chernow, is an excellent option. Atlas examines the emotional toll of writing about the lives of others, including conflicted feelings about his own biography of Saul Bellow, who calls biographers “the shadow of the tombstone in the garden.” What may be the most poignant rebuttal of the biographer’s portrait of Malcolm as a “thief” is his account of trying to be fair and empathetic in his work. Gaining access to Delmore Schwartz’s papers (carefully managed by his old friend, the critic Dwight MacDonald), Atlas describes going through the pages, finding treasures by WH Auden and TS Eliot, among others, that would please any literary biographer. But as he leaves the library, what he most looks forward to, he writes, is spending “long days in the company of someone I’ve never met, but would get to know better than anyone else in the world.”
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