While reflecting on the notion of writing as work, as a job—of writers as being part of the workforce—I came across this comment. “Writers lead lives that are primarily interior. What they write is more important than who they are.” Some writers, however, are deeply interesting for who they are as well as what they write. Here are five such writers, as we learn from their biographies. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch
Flannery O’Connor first gained national attention for teaching a chicken to walk backward. “When I was 6, I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken, but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax.” Not true: Her book The Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972 and in a 2009 online poll was voted the best book to have won the award in the contest’s 60-year history. Her letters, collected in The Habit of Being, are indispensable reading for students of Southern writing and of theologically influenced fiction.
The details of O’Connor’s life are spare and rather sad. Only five years after attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that killed her father and would take her life at 39 after years of pain and debilitation. Her life was in many ways parallel to that of Emily Dickinson, except that ill health, not personality, dictated her isolation. American poet Allen Tate’s words about Dickinson are equally true of O’Connor: “All pity for [her] ‘starved life’ is misdirected. Her life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent.”
Iris Murdoch: A Life by Peter J. Conradi
Iris Murdoch was distinguished both as a notable among the 1940s Oxford female philosophers and also one of the era’s premier novelists, winning The Booker Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Golden PEN Award, among others. Where O’Connor drew on such theological sources as Aquinas and Teilhard de Chardin, Murdoch distilled aspects of Sartre, Wittgenstein, and others into novels that raised questions of the reality of other people, at first in straightforward ways in the 1950s (Under the Net, The Bell) and gradually becoming more complex in characterization and plot through the 1970s and after (An Accidental Man, A Fairly Honourable Defeat). She also wore her philosopher’s mantle for works on Plato, Sartre, and ethics. Her moral vision has been described as “unselfing”: the requirement to turn our attention outward to others. In one of her early novels, she inverts Sartre’s “Hell is other people” to “Hell is perpetual consciousness of self.” Unlike O’Connor, she had a long writing life, which also ended in debilitation and decline, in Alzheimer’s disease, surely one of the worst losses of self a writer might endure. Conradi visited her and her husband John Bayley just before her death and reports that she said, “in what was perhaps her last coherent sentence: ‘I wrote.’ ”
Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones and Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery
The next writers are inventors of their own genres: No one will mistake a Seuss book for a Gorey, or either for a Stoppard play. Each is marked by unmistakable characteristics, whether whimsical rhymes, macabre situations, or challenging intellectual play. Gorey and Seuss, though born decades apart, share biographical similarities. Both attended Ivy League colleges, added further education (Oxford or the Art Institute of Chicago), and made careers of “children’s writing” that broke the usual rules of that genre.
Their biographies form an oddly book-ended pair, though the nearest they came to each other was when People magazine labeled Gorey the “Charles Schulz of the macabre” after his sets for the Broadway production of Dracula. Jones reveals the complexity of Seuss, whose career and views moved through several American eras, from the racial stereotypes of books like And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street to his contributions to World War II propaganda to parables on discrimination in Horton Hears a Who! and the environment in The Lorax. Although Seuss’s life was complex and sometimes surprisingly dark, he was in many ways the epitome of his era.
Gorey, on the other hand, and his physical persona—multi-ringed fingers, fur coats, massive beard, and (usually) Keds sneakers—and years divided between rural Cape Cod and annual attendance, he claimed, at every performance of the New York City Ballet—were almost as distinctive as the creatures in his books, one of which “began as a hippopotamus; [but] morphed into an anxious-looking capybara, or maybe a tapir, or something in between.” His “normal” people included innumerable children who suffer horrific fates but nevertheless seem to have great popularity among the very children they gleefully massacre.
Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee
Tom Stoppard, the only living member of this quintet, followed the most unusual path. Born to Czech parents, he was taken to Singapore, then India, as World War II demanded. His formal education ended at 17, when he was graduated from the Pocklington School in England. Starting as a cub reporter for a local paper, he became the most erudite playwright of his era, drawing on Shakespeare, midcentury philosophy, Dada art, Russian political thought, contemporary Communism, 19th century mathematics, A. E. Housman’s life and poetry, quantum mechanics, the Holocaust, professional soccer, and more.
Stoppard combines a remarkable degree of extroversion and conviviality—for years he threw a London party that cost thousands of pounds and welcomed guests by the hundreds. These gatherings might include Mick Jagger, Harrison Ford, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Princess Margaret.
This extroversion is counterbalanced by an intense work ethic, including years of research for each play. For decades he wrote almost two works a year. He’s also part of the 20th century media world, writing not only 25 original stage plays and 10 translations and adaptations of continental playwrights, especially Chekhov, but 15 screenplays, 13 television shows, 11 radio plays, and three music librettos. If you’ve seen Shakespeare in Love, Empire of the Sun, The Human Factor, or Brazil, you have seen his work. His latest play, Leopoldstadt, an exploration of the Jewish ancestry he discovered late in life, had been open for one month last year before COVID-19 closed London’s theaters.
All this and a personal life that included well-known actresses might suggest a sensational and even scandalous life, but Dame Lee writes at the end of her book, “I’ve often asked people to sum him up with three words. … By far the most frequent adjectives have been: loyal, kind, considerate, glamorous, generous, and intelligent. … Nobody says cruel, proud, selfish, or inattentive. The people who are giving me these accounts of him are sincere: this is what they feel about him. But, also, they know that he will read their views of him in this book; they want to praise him.” This comes through in her writing, making Stoppard’s life a joy to read, all 1,027 pages—without an index.