 |
|
| PAGE | 1 | 2 | |
|
|
Is there a figure who comes to mind for you that you are surprised has not been the subject of a major biography? |
| HL: I might have replied to this with facility twenty or thirty years ago, but not today. Or perhaps I should say that all the conceivable biographies have been written — yet some would be worth improving on. |
|
|
Could you talk a bit about your interest in Vincent Carter, the late black American expatriate writer, for whom there seems to be increased interest here in the United States?
|
| HL: Vincent Carter is a long story — nearly half a century long. When I was still a very new Parisian, Vincent wrote to introduce himself to me from the small town that serves as its country's capital — Berne, Switzerland. He had gone there from Kansas City, via Paris; he first thought of actually settling in Paris, but found the noise level too great. Carter had a desperate need to write-but not about black power, which was then the only subject one expected of a black writer. He rather needed to explore himself, as so many other expatriates had done before him. The manuscript he sent me, The Bern Book, was a meandering reflection on being the only black man in town. It was more a kin to Robert Burton's 17th-century An Anatomy of Melancholy than to Jimmy Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (to mention one of the angry books that came out of France in those years). I tried without success to get Carter's manuscript published, and then wrote an essay on this author too far away from the madding crowd. After my essay appeared in a cultural quarterly a New York publisher decided to bring out The Bern Book after all-using my essay as the introduction. Curtain to the first act. |
|
| Later, nearly thirty years later, the publisher of a small press in New England came across a second-hand copy of The Bern Book, and contacted me to find the author. For in my original piece I had described another unpublished book by Carter, an astonishing story of growing up black in Kansas City, a novel both frank and tender — one of the most moving stories of a childhood I had ever read. I informed the inquiring publisher that unfortunately Carter had since died. He'd lived with a companion in Berne, but I couldn't even recall her last name or address, nor was I sure that she had the manuscript. I contacted a Swiss friend for help; he got in touch with one of his countrymen teaching in an American university, who in turn queried another Swiss then in Greece. The reply came in the same roundabout way, and at last we had located Liselotte, who possessed both the lost manuscript and publication rights. It will soon be published by Steerforth Press in Vermont. |
|
| By the way, I still don't think that I know enough about Vincent Carter to do his biography. But he certainly wrote a considerable portion of it himself. |
|
|
How do you feel about the issue of privacy? Are there facts that you discover about your subjects that you could disclose in your books but you won't for fear of unduly hurting someone? Is there a limit to what should be in a biography? Have you ever had trouble with an estate because of what your biography disclosed about its subject?
|
| HL: Writing about Camus, who died young leaving a wife and young children and many other women, would have been difficult anywhere; in France, where omertà overrides libel law, it was a tight-rope act. For example, I had tracked down a still young woman who had been Camus's last love; they were pledged to marry. But after talking to me she had second thoughts, for she had a husband, a new life ... So I removed her name from my manuscript, and described the relationship as best I could all the same, for the important thing was that Camus was about to take up a new life just before dying in a fatal automobile accident. Names didn't matter here. I think it made for a better book: All the essential truths were here, except certain details that might have prevented the book from reaching the public with these essential truths. That's not a bad barter for a biographer. |
|
| Of course the Camus estate tried to block my book, both for what I said about Camus's romantic adventures and his politics (he leaned toward Algerian independence; his heirs would have liked to portray him as an ardent advocate of French Algeria). Since these revelations were not sufficient to justify confiscation they tried another pretext — accusing me of making use of unpublished material, but my publisher's attorney proved that they had no case. |
|
Usually readers who are upset by what I write have simply misread their hero-or heroine. The preferred image of Colette is of a fairy-like creature caressing a kitten while tripping among the flowers; I showed a hard-working woman who had to write every day of her life in order to survive. Jules Verne was actually a stay-at-home with considerable imagination but no charm, little generosity of spirit; furthermore, some of the 100 books he boasted of writing weren't as good as his best. Verniens hate me for saying so |
|
|
Interviewed by Professor Gerald Early
|
| Gerald Early is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies, and Director of the International Writers Center. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, a master's degree from Cornell University in 1980, and a doctorate from Cornell in 1982, all in English literature. |
| P A G E | 1 | 2 | |
| back to top
|
|
