PSEUDOLOGIA FANTASTICA:
A CURIOUS NEED TO FALSIFY, DISGUISE, OR DESTROY THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE
Mark Twain supposedly observed that the older he got the more vivid the recollection of things that had not happened. But the cover-ups and peculiar pseudologias may begin at any age. They seem part of autobiography, maybe necessary to it. There seems indeed a curious need to falsify, disguise or destroy the story of your life.
That sexually and poetically precocious writer and political showman Gabriele d’Annunzio circulated tales that he was born aboard a ship (Tullian, 13). Eugène Delacroix spread the story that his unknown father may well have been the great French statesman Talleyrand (Wilson-Smith, 21). Jung’s legend was that he descended from one of Goethe’s illegitimate liaisons. John Wayne said his father owned a drugstore in Glendale, and an ice cream and a paint business. All coolly, cruelly, denied by a long time resident who knew the family and town well (Zolotow, 37).
When Lyndon’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson, was asked to fill out some of the president’s tales of boyhood, his brother refused. He couldn’t, he said, because they “never happened” (Caro, 218).
Fidel Castro had two report cards—one from school and one in which he put his own grades for his parents’ signatures (Szulc, 112). Georges Simenon who wrote probably more good readable books—mainly mystery novels—than anyone this century, rewrote his autobiography as fiction and then recast it again in further disguise. Disguise began for him on day one when his mother, spooked by the sinister implication of his birthday on a Friday the 13th, had her husband make the false declaration at the registry of February 12 (Raymond, 35). “The origin of [Isadora Duncan’s] first name has never been established. At her birth she was named Dora Angela” (Seroff, 14). She was billed in a theater production as Sara. Besides, she mislaid and lost her passports again and again, and her age changed with circumstances.
Leonard Bernstein had two different first names: Louis, legally and all through childhood, until at 16 when he officially adopted what he had all along been actually called, Leonard. Bernstein also said his father blocked him all the way, and that, “[his] childhood was one of complete poverty” (Peyser, 12). He insisted that the Boston Latin School to which he went from seventh to twelfth grade offered “absolutely no music at all” (idem). In fact, Bernstein was piano soloist with that school’s orchestra and sang in its glee club (idem). As for the poverty: Leonard grew up with maids, at times a chauffeur-butler, two family cars, and his father owned two houses, as well as paying for his son’s years at Harvard (idem).
The child Henry Ford took apart his first watch at age seven:
To judge from his own recollections in notebooks, and in the numerous second-hand accounts based on interviews in which the anecdotes had obviously flowed free, the infant Henry Ford was forever dismantling, investigating, and generally displaying his mechanical genius in all directions.
Henry told an oft-repeated tale that he would slip out of the house after dark to collect neighbors’ watches, and then bring them home to repair them. (Lacey, 10)
Other similar tales abound. Ford’s sister Margaret, however, says:
”I never knew of him going out at night to get watches.” She protested for years at Henry’s later restoration of their farm home. He had put into the re-done bedroom a little watchmaker’s bench and tools.
“There was never any such bench up there,” she insisted. (Lacey, 10)
Henry Kissinger, whose father lost his teaching job because he was Jewish, claimed in 1958, “My life in Fürth seems to have passed without leaving any lasting impressions” (Isaacson, 26). In 1971, Kissinger said again: “That part of my childhood is not a key to anything. I was not acutely aware of what was going on. For children, these things are not that serious” (idem). Yet, these were the years of persecutions and beatings, exclusions from schools and playgrounds, forbidden relations between Jews and non-Jews, and the abrogation of citizenship rights. Family and friends of Kissinger who lived side by side with Henry report the Jewish children were not allowed to play with others and had to stay shut up in the garden. They couldn’t attend dances, go to the public swimming pool, even the tea room. “Every day there were slurs in the street, anti-Semitic remarks, calling you filthy names” (Isaacson, 27). Henry’s mother “especially remembered her children’s pitiful fright and puzzlement when the Nazi youths would march by taunting the Jews” (Isaacson, 26). But Henry Kissinger says—“For children, these things are not that serious.” “That part of my childhood is not a key to anything.”
Writers especially resist biographies. Henry James burned his papers in a garden bonfire. Dickens did too. Sigmund Freud already burned his papers at age 29 (!), and is quoted as saying, “As for biographers, let them worry … I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.” And he destroyed, and tried to purchase from recipients, other of his papers, as he got older (Holroyd, 17). (Lyndon Johnson wrote “burn this” on the top of inconsequential letters he wrote from Washington to former students and friends back home.) Thackeray, T. S. Eliot, and Matthew Arnold wanted no biographies written of them. Leon Edel, a philosopher of biography and master of its art reports:
Some feel it (biography) to be a prying, peeping and even predatory process. Biography has been called “a disease of English literature” (George Eliot); professional biographers have been called “hyenas” (Edward Sackville-West). They also have been called “psycho-plagiarists” (Nabokov) and biography has been said to be “always superfluous” and “usually in bad taste” (Auden). (Edel, 20–21)
Some, like J. D. Salinger, will not even give interviews, and may threaten or pursue law-suits to prevent biography. Willa Cather wanted no one to examine her life, and Eudora Welty is “extremely private and won’t answer anything personal about herself or about friends” (Heilbrun, 14). Welty is accused by another philosopher of biography, Caroline Heilbrun, of having “camouflaged herself” in Welty’s memoirs, One Writer’s Beginnings, because “to have written a truthful autobiography would have defied every one of her (Welty’s) instincts for loyalty and privacy.” (Heilbrun herself published under the disguise of “Amanda Cross.”) Heilbrun’s notion of truth and camouflage differ from Welty’s whose truth is coherent with the tradition of writers against biography. They seem to be saying, whatever is personal about me, my very life, shall be closeted, even burned in a sacrificial conflagration, in order to keep the truth of my work. My life, as Auden says, is “superfluous.” The reason you want a biography of me is because of my work, so the “I” you are searching for is in my work.
Something in us doesn’t want to lay out the facts for fear they will be conceived as the truth, and the only truth. And that there is nothing but this only truth. Something in us doesn’t want biographers to pry too closely, to grasp too keenly the inspiration of a life’s work. Legends emerge and spin a veil. Something wants to protect the work from the life, the accomplishments in whatever realm they may occur, from the contexts in which they occurred. Ford’s sister and Johnson’s brother provide the context (unless they themselves have debunking, spiteful legends to fulfill), and many biographers feel obliged to counter the very autobiographies that are their first sources.
What is this “something”? The acorn, of course. It will not be reduced to human relationships, to influences, to fortuitous events, or to the domination of time: this followed that in the course of development, as if life could be encompassed by the formula “one thing led to another.” Or the sudden intervention of fortune. Therefore constructions and reconstructions (and de. constructions of what is already familiar), disguises, falsifications, denials by the subjects under scrutiny; these preserve the romantic vision by romancing the facts.
Biographical “falsifications” belong as much to the narrative as do the “facts.” Who knows best, Henry Ford or his sister Margaret or other contemporaries about what “really happened”? What is real is the legend of Henry Ford which exemplifies the power of invention at work in this inventor’s own story. As we live we are being invented, though the haphazard events of the day seem to hang on no coherent thread. Biographical recollection provides the thread. Childhood makes sense in retrospect. Then we see the acorn from retrospective perches in the many-branched oak. Is this “recollection of things that had not happened” (Twain) falsification or revelation?
Furthermore, why grant the biographer of Kissinger more authority than to Kissinger himself? Who, after all, is the author of this life? Walter Isaacson sees “denial” in Kissinger’s statement that the rampant anti-Semitism surrounding his early years did not bear significantly on his life. (Isaacson, 26) The biographer also makes a causal innuendo linking Kissinger’s later political character back to his early environment. Standard biographical detective work. Standard benchmark developmental theory. Standard psycho-history. Whether you like Kissinger or not, at least as subject of the biography he is more compelling than his biographer.
Mrs. Paula Kissinger, Henry’s mother, saw in her children “pitiful fright and puzzlement when the Nazi youths would march by.” But Henry Kissinger, National Security advisor and Secretary of State, geo-political power-man extraordinaire who could face down Senate inquiries, White House intrigue, Brezhnev and Mao, meet Nixon eyeball to eyeball, order wiretaps, and propose the massive bombing of “the enemy” in Southeast Asia, would hardly be menaced by a bunch of parading blonde kids in short pants. “For children these things are not that serious,” because, owing to the acorn, Henry was never only the child his mother saw.
The truth of the Kissinger “case” is not whether Nazism affected his personality, or to what degree and in which ways this childhood persecution then influences his political thought and action. The truth is Kissinger’s resistance to reduction. His resistance to being biographized is the reason for his “denial.” The genius of his plots and ploys of power resists reduction to the paranoia of persecution. When we imagine Henry Kissinger’s life as an exhibition of the acorn theory, then the world in which his life began in Fürth becomes a mere practice ground for the later career. Both are parts of the same agility, machinations and implacable mastery of political power that stays on top of circumstances by not yielding to them, (“stone-walling”; denial as policy) a denial of their ability to win out over him.
Not Kissinger, but autobiography itself, is essentially duplicitous because the auto and the bio may represent two distinct tales, that of the acorn and that of the life. There may even be a third person in the complot: the act of writing, the graph.
Writing, too, is a performance art. Somewhere down the line a public waits, if not always in the mind of the writer, at least in the eye of the publisher. Isadora Duncan, says her biographer and longtime friend Victor Seroff,
… told me that her publisher [of her memoir, My Life] was insisting that she describe in detail how she had felt while losing her virginity. Faced at that time with a truly desperate economic situation, Isadora felt that she had to comply. And since the episode had occurred many years earlier in Budapest, Isa-dora asked me to play one of List’s Hungarian rhapsodies to suggest the proper “Hungarian atmosphere.” (Seroff, 14) … or perhaps better still, “an aphrodisiac atmosphere,” while, reclining on the sofa, she wrote the details … She was merely pretending … it must have been too spicy even for her publishers, for the chapter was rewritten before publication. (Seroff, 50)
The scene may have been invented, the remembrance conjured by List-but the passionate erotics are altogether true to the pattern of her all-for-love life and belong to the authenticity of her character.
If we are following a pattern of disguises and inventions, then we can’t pin the pattern on quirks in each of the individual personalities. Rather we need to discern the purpose of the pattern itself which iterates in a variety of cases.
* * *
Psychiatry has a term, pseudologia fantastica, for the invention of tales that never happened (Twain) “in a manner intriguing to the listener” (DSM III.301.51). These belong to the category of Factitious Disorders, meaning behaviors not “real, genuine, or natural.” In extreme form they show “uncontrollable pathological lying.” When the disguises and inventions take on a predominately physical form of faked illnesses leading to unnecessary hospitalizations, then the disorder is named the Munchausen syndrome after the fictional Baron who told marvelous tales and appeared in many disguises with great dramatic flair. More familiar in everyone’s circle of acquaintances are long-time ordinary drunks, who, when suffering from Korsakov’s organic brain psychosis, fill the gaps in their memories with meandering confabulations. But even children with unfuzzed brains confabulate so that they are notoriously unserviceable witnesses for determining facts in courts of law. All these behaviors belong to a class of phenomena where two worlds collide: fact and fable. Psychiatry reads the fable as fictitious, factitious, pathological lying.
Fable clearly wants to dominate in these exemplary figures who tell tall tales, as if the biographical fictions, disguises and denials want to say: I am not your facts. I will not let what is strange in me, about me, my mystery, be put in a world of fact. I must invent a world that presents a truer illusion of who I am than the social, environmental, “realities.” Besides, I do not lie or invent: these confabulations occur spontaneously. I cannot be accused of lying, for the stories that come out of me about myself are not quite me speaking.
Freud once spoke with Oliver Daniel, who wrote a biography of the grandiose conductor, Leopold Stokowski:
I mentioned some names I was sure he would know, but Freud’s face remained immobile until I mentioned Stokowski, when, with a quizzical expression, he said, “Tell me about him.”
“The musician is fascinating,” I answered, “but the man is perplexing. He’s really two men.”
“Only two?” he asked in a surprised voice. “That’s very fortunate for a man with such an eruptive temperament.” (Daniel, xxxx)
Whether two or more, one is not enough. There is not just one story, or one life.
The Germans have a word for it: Doppelgänger. Someone walks the earth who is your twin, your alter-ego, your shadow. The other you, another likeness who sometimes seems to be close by your side and is your other self. When you talk to yourself, scold yourself, stop yourself up, perhaps this is your Doppelgänger, not out there like a twin in another city but within your own room.
The Inuit (Hultkrantz) have another way of speaking of another soul, whether internal and in the same body or an external one that comes and goes, alights and leaves, inhabits things and places and animals. Anthropologists who walk with Australian aborigines call this other one a bush-soul.
Fairytales, the poems of Rumi, and Zen stories say something about this doubledness, this strange duplicity of life. There are two birds in the tree, a mortal one and an immortal one, side by side. The first chirps and nests and flies about; the other watches. And they love each other.
The placenta must be carefully disposed of in many cultures for it is born with you and must not be allowed to enter the life you live. It must remain stillborn and return to the other world. Else your congenital twin may form a monstrous ghost.
Twins themselves are often considered ominous, as if a mistake occurred; the two birds, human and ghost, this world and that, both present in this world. Twins literalize the Doppelgänger, visible and invisible both displayed. So tales tell of the murder (sacrifice) of one twin for the sake of the other: Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus. The shadow, immortal, otherworldly one gives way so that the mortal can fully enter this life.
A milder form of the imaginary twin appears in the conventions of naming-middle names, double names, naming after a dead namesake, after a Biblical hero or heroine, a saint, a celebrity to catch the blessing of that invisible manna.
How many of us hate our names? Hate our parents because they named us as they did. “Who” feels this insult, only my ego; centric idea of myself, or the acorn? Kids have nicknames. So do ball players, jazz musicians, mobsters and gang members. Does the genius have one name and the person another? Is nicknaming a subtle recognition of the Doppelgänger, a mode of remembering that it is Fats who sits at the keyboard and Dizzie who blows the horn, nor Mr. Waller and Mr. Gillespie, who tie their shoes and eat their breakfasts.
The nickname contains some inner truth that may stick through life and be perceived before the genius shows in larger style. Nicknames are not mere tokens of affection to humanize shortcomings. This feeling interpretation likes to understand the nickname as a way of bringing the star down to human dimension, so that we can relate and not be overawed by genius. Feeling interpretations always want to make us comfortable, and so a nickname levels the ground. Herman Ruth is just the “Babe”; those most wanted killers Mr. Nelson and Mr. Floyd are “Baby-Face” and “Pretty-Boy,” and the five-star general and two-term president of the United States of America is just plain “Ike."
Suppose instead of this humanizing comfort that reduces the genius to pet turtles and pet rocks, we consider personality “Number Two,” as Jung called it, or the daimon, as Socrates called it, to be a distinct image which, having a life, also has or needs a name. And, this figure appears diminutive as part of its disguise and in order to be sheltered from humanization, and to protect its magic power from those prying, peeping and predatory (Edel) biographers. Diminutive nicknames, these euphemisms surrounding the magical potency of accomplishment, and the fear potency arouses, follow a pattern in myth and fairytale where “the little one” with a diminutive ending in Russian, French, German, etc. becomes the clever and magical savior. The little elf by the side of the path, the little cucullus under a hood, the smallest sister of twelve—these have the moxie to make things happen because they represent the otherworld in this one.
When we read in the World Almanac the name changes of the stars—Madonna Louise Ciccone (Madonna), Diana Fluck (Diana Dors), Cheryl Stoppelmoor (Cheryl Ladd), Roy Scherer, Jr. (Rock Hudon), Borge Rosenbaum (Victor Borge), Sophia Scicoloni (Sophia Loren), Thomas Mopother (Tom Cruise), James Stewart (Stewart Granger), Albert Einstein (Albert Brooks), Anna Maria Italiano (Anne Bancroft), George Alan O’Dowd (Boy George), Ramon Estevez (Martin Sheen), Annie Mae Bullock (Tina Turner)—and are told it’s for public acceptance and commercial success, we are being fed only the human side of the reason. The other side is: you can’t be both a mortal human and an immortal star. You need two names because the names reflect the two persons, an inherent duplicity operating between the acorn and its bearer.
Does each have its own name? When Barbara McClintock, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983 for her work in genetics, sat for a final exam in geology at Cornell, a strange thing happened.
They gave out these blue books, to write the exam in, and on the front page you put your own name. Well, I couldn’t be bothered with putting my name down; I wanted to see those questions. I started writing right away—I was delighted, I just enjoyed it immensely. Everything was fine, but when I got to write my name down, I couldn’t remember it. I couldn’t remember to save me, and I waited there. I was much too embarrassed to ask anybody what my name was, because I know they would think I was a screwball. I got more and more nervous, until finally it took about twenty minutes) my name came to me. I think it had to do with the body being a nuisance. What was going on, what I saw, what I was thinking about and what I enjoyed seeing and hearing was so much more important. (Keller, 36)
To forget your own name! Could this incident be testimony to the genius? Could her invisible genius have come through and done the job, and so the body of a college girl sitting there could not sign for what she had not done herself? McClintock attributes the strange lapse to her distance from the body, her being in the mind. “The body was something you dragged around … I always wished that I could be an objective observer and not what is known as ‘me’ …” (idem).
If the “other name” than the one on the civil records indicates “the other one,” then about whom is the biography? Is this the appeal of biography?—that it is the genre for connecting the two souls, called by biographers the life and the work, the human and the genius. Is that why we are fascinated by biographies? They expose the intricacies of the relation between the two names, and we, reading, might gain an insight into our own genius and how to live it by studying how others did so notoriously, successfully, and also their pitfalls, their tragedies.
for heroes and models or for escapes into other lives not our own, but to solve the fundamental mystery that we are each twice-born, born with a Doppelgänger, and if we cannot find this estranged angel by ourselves, we turn to biography for clues. These sorts of superstitious and to us obscure practices regarding the placenta and the elf, the Doppelgänger and a variety of souls and soul-names, seem to collect around a central theme: that we are not alone at the beginning. We come to the world with a magical or otherworldly counterpart that is not supposed to be around when and where we are.
Barbara McClintock, “(it took about twenty minutes) my name came to me.” Her different souls appeared as a “body me" and an “observer me.” Final exams, entrance exams, critical makeup exams on which all your “credit” hangs represent initiation rituals which in other societies are designed to provoke the appearance of other “me’s” with other names. Barbara McClintock was already a twice-born person in the sense that her name at birth was “Eleanor.” But at four months, “they soon decided that ‘Barbara’ would be more appropriate for a girl of such unusual fortitude” (Keller, 20).
For the Inuit, when you fall ill, your usual name leaves you, is “gone.” And you have another name. If you die, then it is that death-soul name who died and is the dead one; and if you recover, then your former name returns and the death-soul one “is gone.” We say: “He’s his old self again; the status quo ante has been re-stored.”
Besides on ritualized occasions like exams this other one may visit when we sleep or in altered states, while fasting or in solitary confinement, or at crisis times when death seems certainly imminent (“falling from the rock face, my whole life passed in review”). The eternal twin holds all at once because its life is not in time.
How else do these phenomena appear in our psychological culture? In several ways—mainly peripheral if not distorted. Pathologically, as drug-induced dissociations, multiple personality disorders, in illness as an autonomous visitor, “the sense of another presence co-occupying your body,” as John Updike refers to his psoriasis, or as others have spoken of their depressions, anxiety states, intrusive thoughts, and obsessive-compulsive pressures. And then more acceptably, in childhood as imaginary friends, in “para”-psychological phenomena, in therapeutic techniques as active imagination, in artistic productions as characters, personae. Then, too, in unexplained hypnogogic visions during surgery, seeing oneself from above the table …
These peculiar encounters say something about a culture that marginalizes the invisibles. If a culture’s philosophy of the cosmos does not allow enough place for the other, give credit to the invisible, then it must squeeze itself into our psychic system in distorted form. This suggests that some psychic dysfunctions would better be located in the dysfunctional world-view by which they are judged. For this cosmology is too exclusive of all the soul’s capacities, or better said, of all the souls.
* * *
As my last witness to autobiographical duplicity I call again on Leopold Stokowski, the most controversial, original, popular and “difficult” orchestra conductor of the twentieth century. A stream of writers with serious intent, good will and records of accomplishment tried to get Stokowski’s cooperation for biographies. To Victor Seroff he replied, “Do you prefer a sudden or a lingering death … I suggest practicing the harp for the few hours you still have on earth because that is the favorite instrument in heaven” (Daniel, xxiv). One after another he threw them out.
Of course, biographies have been printed, and they tell that Stokowski was not a native Pole, having been born in England of an English mother who was English Protestant on both sides, and a father born in London, whose mother, too, was English Protestant. Only Stokowski’s grandfather was Polish-born. Yet Stokowski, who had not been to Poland until a visit later in his life, spoke with an Eastern European accent.
The accent was only one disguise. “Anyone who tried to delve into his past had a hard time, for Stokowski thoroughly delighted in inventing” (Daniel, xxiv). “Interviewees asking about his past invariably ended up with fiction” (Daniel, xxv). The disguises and inventions then became contagious. The Oxford Companion to Music and Time magazine both reported he was probably Jewish or partly Jewish. Grove’s authoritative Dictionary of Music and Musicians stated his real name was Leo Stokes. As for written facts: Stokowski’s daughter said her father and mother had a “very definite agreement” that no letters or writings about him were to be released. Her mother “destroyed all their letters” (Daniel, xxiii). Implausible inconsistencies abound. Stokowski claimed Sir Charles Herbert Parry as one of his composition teachers. Parry stopped teaching two years before Stokowski entered the school.
One of the many marvelous tales told by the Maestro recounts how he got his first violin:
”I know how old I was because one night a man walked into that (Polish) club with a little something in his hand and began to do this. I said to my father, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘It’s a violin.’ And I said to my grandfather, ‘I want a violin’ … he did buy me—what’s it called—a quarter-size violin—and so I began at the age of seven playing the violin and that is still my favorite instrument …”
The first problem we encounter here is that his grandfather had died three years before Leopold was born. Secondly, his brother wrote, “Leo never went to Pomerania or Lublin (where the event supposedly took place) or anywhere else out of England until he was of age. He did not learn the violin when young, and not at all as far as I know.” (Daniel, 10)
Though his story of playing the violin reappears and he lists it as his instrument when joining the Musician’s Union in 1909, his biographer Oliver Daniel says that he never encountered one person who ever saw Stokowski play a violin.
Recollections, suppressions, confabulations—he was called an enigma and misterioso, despite his extravagant display of himself all through life. His own reasoning seems clear: “I think that one should cultivate memory … I think that one should also cultivate forgetfulness.” Stokowski’s entire life required a counter-life (Philip Roth’s phrase), the creation of a fantasy biography. And—let’s recall that choosing the scores and adapting them to a film was his most popularly celebrated single work and one he himself regarded as a triumph. The film? Disney’s Fantasia.
To make a long story short—not an easy task since Stokowski lived actively into his 96th year—“In his last days he burned most of the letters he had received from the great people, like Stravinsky. He didn’t want any record of himself” (Chasins, 148–49). (Except, of course, the extraordinary recordings of his conducting which he was making until his death.) This pattern that Stokowski fought so hard to preserve—inventing his origins, disguising his youth, falsifying dates, losing his memories—the Gods themselves seemed to favor and even continue. For after his death in England,
… paintings of Stoki … many drawings and paintings that Stokowski himself had done, notebooks, talisman, mementos, and many personal items that he had acquired during his long life were loaded into a huge container and sent to America. During a severe Atlantic storm, the container was washed overboard. (Daniel, 923)
The intense resistance to biography has been described by Michael Holroyd, a biographer and a thinker about the art. He draws a distinction between life and work and succinctly expresses the popular feeling:
Whenever … any man of imagination is made the subject of biography, his light may be extinguished. For, the argument goes, life is simply a shell, the kernel of which is creative work … [The biographer] has the Midas touch—but in reverse. Each piece of gold he touches turns to dross. If you value your work you must not let a biographer near you—that’s the popular feeling. (Holroyd, 18)
Holroyd defends the biographer’s trade against the anti-biographical tirade, but he stops short. He neglects its emotional truth. He seems to miss the archetypal conflict between work and life and the archetypal necessity of concealment. For it is the genius who is the anti-biographical factor, the genius who may be offended by life on earth, even though all its efforts seem expended down to touch earth and expanded out to reach widely into the world. Still, it never quite humanizes.
The enemy of the biographer is not only the subject and the family of the subject, the loyal friends with their private cache of letters and memories, the anal archivist, the sealed away documents as state secrets. The genius is the enemy of rational accounts that ipso facto explain it away. The great disguiser is the daimon. Somehow the descendants of the eminent continue to feel its hovering presence, monitoring is their ongoing protectionism years after the person in question has given up the ghost.
Writing biography becomes another “impossible profession,” like practicing psychoanalysis as Janet Malcolm named that profession in her biographical journal about a New York psychoanalyst. Impossible, because the person biography purports to be about is not altogether a person, as the case an analyst works with is the invisible psyche, brought in by a person. Biographers are ghost writers, even ghost busters, trying to seize the invisible ghosts in the visibilities of a life. A biography that sticks to the facts as closely as it can finds ever clearer traces of the invisible, those symptoms, serendipities and intrusive inventions that have led, or pursued, the life it is telling. Jung tried to make this apparent by presenting two personalities as the subjects of his biography. Like an old Eskimo, he included the dream soul even in its title.
A recent thinker about biography states that “Biography has never really had a generally accepted terminology and protocol, a poetics that could be upheld and resisted” (Epstein, 6) This uncertainty about what it is doing comes with the duplicity of the territory; and disillusionment is the biographer’s best reward. Not disillusionment with the person who is subject of the biography and expressed so often with fits of pique over dishonesties and concealments. Rather a bracing disillusion with the world of straight fact and which can convert the biographer to a more happy illusion: the reality of the daimon who prompts the life and the work—his or hers, too. This would then be the acorn theory’s contribution to biographical theory.
The relative weight of work and life, genius and person haunts a life with the feeling of never being able to size yourself up. There is a constant play between importance and humility, reflected in those states called mania and depression. Galleries give retrospectives; academies stage award ceremonies, testimonials, honorary degrees; critics estimate and evaluate, attempting to strike the right balance. This uncertainty about “size” is formulated by the Bella Coola people who say the soul-image is “small but of great power” (Hultkrantz, 383). “The heart-soul is likened to a kernel of corn” (San Juan people) (ibid., 141). The smallness of the kernel and the power are both felt by the subject and they appear also as one of the major conflicts in the biographers, who blow up their subjects and detract from them at the same time, filling in the genius with human shadow. One biography of D. H. Lawrence is called: Portrait of a Genius, But.
The smallness of the kernel does not imply reduction to all-too-human dimensions. Rather it suggests a sensitivity to the small ways in which the genius leaves its traces. When Ericson admits to disliking Gandhi (his subject), Jean Strous, her subject Alice James, and Binion tears into Lou Andreas-Salomé, ravaging her for dishonesty through pages and pages—their focus reverts to the person who may well be egocentric, despicable, even tediously boring. But what draws them to write in the first place and us to read? To catch sight of the genius, not Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Waller, but Dizzie and Fats.
When the daimon speaks it says: the stories I tell about watch-tinkering (Ford), about rising from poverty all on my own (Bernstein) are the facts. The fables I tell more truly tell who I am. I am telling the story that gives backing to what has happened. I am reading life backwards. I am telling the story of genius, not of little Lyndon, little Lenny, little Leopold. They are the figures whose image in the heart forced them forward, distorting their childhoods from the usual, and so I must tell a story of distortions to really tell the truth. The story must be adequate to the exceptionality of the genius. The ordinary lot of suburban Jewish meals (Lenny B.), of haying on father’s farm (Henry F.), of hill country squabbles and prayers (Lyndon J.) are simply not adequate and probably cause the angel great discomfort.
Stokowski was protecting his angel all through his life, preventing it from being written into the wrong tale, and perhaps killing it. And Freud, at 29, before he had made a single mark or hit upon a single one of his lasting ideas, already knew the art of disguise. What prompted that protective/destructive fire but prescience of what was to come? To protect the genius we must protect the story in which the genius can live, else it might take its invisibility literally, grow silent and disappear for fear of being reduced to mediocrity.
We need this same imagination that seeks the small corn kernel when we are annoyed by the confabulations of later childhood and adolescence. The disguises and boastings are not mere cover-ups, day-dreams and grandiose fantasies. They are fears of loss, fears of colonization, fears of slavery to a normalizing system that, by capturing my image in biography, might take over and walk away with my soul.
Of course, the biographer must pry and peep (Edel) since what is searched for is the invisible—but invisible not because of my concealment but because of the archetypal nature of the kernel itself. “Nature loves to hide,” said Heraclitus. The acorn of a human nature does too. It hides all through the visible, displaying itself in the very disguises in which it hides. Biographers get to the invisible by sorting through the disguises, but only if the eye that seeks is intent upon the invisible, bringing to its task that same love which nature has for hiding. Maybe it takes genius to see genius.
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Spring: An Annual of Archetype and Culture 58 (1995): 83–101
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