Secrets and Lies?

The life of the writer is perhaps the most and least mysterious part of writing. On the one hand, some writers’ lives are open books–over documented, if anything, and the lessons we’re likely to draw from those lives too apparently at hand. On the other hand, some lives are notoriously unavailable to us, ranging from the extremes of “Anonymous” to the Cheshire Cat-like William Shakespeare, whose nearly non-existent paper trail hasn’t stopped a crop of writers, old and new, from penning rather imaginative (because often mostly imagined) biographies that stretch the idea of what biography may be, such as Stephen Greenblatt’s popular Will in the World or James Shapiro’s A year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599. What is it, exactly, that we think the lives of writers will tell us that their writing won’t? Why, even after their deaths, can’t we stop snooping around in the closets and drawers of the dead, pilfering dust for insight (or even gossip)? Such are the questions Atar Hadari poses (and answers) in “Why the Dead Have Lives” in the summer issue of the KR. Ranging from Donne (the subject of a new biography published subsequent to Hadari’s essay) to Arnold to Hadari’s former teacher, Derek Walcott, the essay reflects on how personal the uses of the lives of others can be.One answer to the provocative question of Hadari’s title is that the dead have lives because we force them to. But our fascination with the lives of writers (dead or alive) often has little to do with the matter of their writings. To what use can we put the shape of an individual writer’s life? Hadari tells us he was looking for “guidance as to how the poetic enterprise ticks on once you are no longer bubbling along with a crowd of also-striving mini-bards.” If we’re all tempted to model or use the lives of poets for our own purposes (and certainly there’s nothing wrong with that) maybe it’s also true to say that as both readers and writers we seek balm for the pain of isolation inextricably tied to the joys of reading and writing. The act of reading is so often the search for ghostly companions. If writers look for lessons of craft they also look for friends. What indeed might it be to imagine the entire community of writers, living and dead, not as eminences or influences, saints or bastards, geniuses or savants, but, rather as kin or as a community of friends whose struggles are as our own: inimitable and elemental but deeply and necessarily shared.