by Kathleen Cason

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Intro  |  A Mississippi lady  |  Writing a writer's life  |  
Patience and Fortitude

"There are three rules for writing a biography, but, unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— biographer Meryle Secrest in a twist on Somerset MaughamĖs rules for writing a novel.

McAlexander might disagree. He can name at least four.

1. First, he said, you have to like research.
   "Doing research of this sort — which means going through archival material — can be very tedious," he said. "For the Peter Taylor book I have three file drawers Û about 9 feet of material."
   

2. Next you have to be able to organize this great body of information, he said.
   "You also have to be as alert as possible all the time and that is very wearing. You're going through lots of dross to find the gold," McAlexander said. "When you're first starting out, you don't always know what's important and what's not. Sometimes a seemingly inconsequential piece of mail is later of value when you have other pieces of the puzzle together."
   

3. Third, you must recognize your subject's humanity.
   "You are not involved in hagiography, the lives of saints,"he said. "It's important to have some detachment, too. In fact, it's just crucial. It certainly helps to find your subject sympathetic even when deluded or vain or selfish."
   

4. Finally, biography is a great task of assimilation.
   "You have to understand the works, the relation of the works to the life, try to put the works in literary context outside the life," McAlexander said. "But it's so research heavy because it's based on getting as many documents as you can."
   

Patience and Fortitude

At the New York Public Library, the marble lions — Patience and Fortitude — that guard the main entrance were omens of what McAlexander would need inside.

As a librarian explained the set up — stacks are closed to the public, requests for materials must be in writing — McAlexander picked up several request slips.

"Before I even opened my mouth, I knew she hated me," he said.

"Oh, no, noooooo," she said, snatching the request slips out of his hand. "Not so many of our precious call slips."

He was at her mercy. She allowed him to request only a few items at a time and hours passed before even the first item was retrieved.

Despite the hassle, McAlexander found important correspondence between Taylor and his editors at the New Yorker, where many of Taylor's stories first appeared. The letters included editing suggestions, requests for cash advances and rejections of some of Taylor's best work, such as "Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,"which won the 1959 O. Henry Prize for the short story.

Other librarians were not so testy. At Vanderbilt University Library, which houses the biggest collection of Taylor's papers, McAlexander was allowed to sift through boxes and boxes of uncataloged letters and manuscripts, a collection of "what Peter used to say were his 'wastebaskets.'" University of Colorado librarians let him order Taylor's letters to Jean Stafford. The Princeton University Library actually assigned an aide for his studies of Allen Tate's and Caroline Gordon's papers.

Colleagues even pitched in. During a trip to her alma mater, Fran Teague went to the Ransom Library at the University of Texas at Austin on McAlexander's behalf. Robert LowellĖs papers were there but McAlexander didn't know what they contained.

"All it says in the catalog is letter, date, sender, recipient," Teague said. "You don't have any idea whether it's 'Thank you very much for the lovely cardigan you gave me for Christmas' or whether it's 'I've got to tell you about the wild party we had last night where so-and-so got drunk.'"

She discovered a collection of letters between Robert Lowell's mother and his psychiatrist describing an ill-fated college road trip made by Lowell and Taylor. This trip cemented "what would become a 40-year friendship between the man who was probably America's finest short story writer and one of America's finest poets," Teague said.

"That was one of the real finds. It was made for biography," McAlexander said.

Taylor's story, titled "1939," is based on the trip described in those letters. At the end of the story and in real life, Peter Taylor accidentally dropped his car keys in the snow and the two young men had to take the train back to college when they couldn't find them. In the letters, Mrs. Lowell and the psychiatrist speculated on the deeper psychological meaning of losing those keys.

"That story's the closest thing he did to autobiography," McAlexander said.

More often though, life experience appears in Taylor's fiction in an altered form.

"You don't just live life and then go write about it," McAlexander said. "There are complex transformations. You take an experience from way back — say 20 years — and the uses to which you put it are interesting and sometimes very significant."

In Taylor's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Summons to Memphis, the narrator recounts the time his father forced him to ride his pony to school. The pony is mean. It is stubborn and stalls. So the little boy's mother mounts her horse and accompanies him to school.

"Well, I had assumed that was pretty close to life," McAlexander said. "But no, Peter's mother was deathly afraid of horses. In a way it may show that Peter wanted his mother to be his savior but she could not be. Peter transformed this scene from his life experience."

When the research was finally done, McAlexander said the writing came as a relief. The project took six years; the average biography takes five to 15 years to complete.

Ultimately, the all-consuming effort paid off. Even scholars who had known the writer discovered new dimensions to Peter Taylor in McAlexander's book.

"When I met Peter Taylor, I met a nice social gentleman," Teague said. "I did not meet the truly gifted teacher, for example. I met someone who was being pleasant to a new acquaintance, but not the husband, the father, the teacher, the awkward kid, the person with the far-reaching family ties.

"People that you meet are always very cleaned up and pleasant," she said. "The person that Hubert wrote about was much more complex and much more human."

Once the writing was done, Louisiana State University Press fast-tracked the book's internal review so they could get it under contract quickly and beat out competing publishers, said the book's editor John Easterly. Of the 10,000 or so proposals LSU Press received that year, the Taylor biography was one of only 50 to 55 new books it published.

"When the book came out, we went out for martinis to celebrate," Edwards said.

There was good reason to celebrate. The Taylor biography garnered outstanding reviews in many publications, including PublisherĖs Weekly, The Washington Post Book World and The New York Times Book Review. Reviewers praised McAlexander's biography for the picture it paints of the literary world in the latter half of the 20th century and his ability to blend the personal and professional aspects of Taylor's life.

Washington Post critic Jonathon Yardley called it an unsentimental biography, an appraisal that pleased McAlexander.

For all the tedium and frustration he endured crafting the biographies of these Southern writers, future biographers may face an even greater challenge. Communication has become more ephemeral as phone calls and e-mail replace telegrams and letters.

"Most biographers are worried about two things: the dwindling of the paper trail and changes in intellectual property laws," said biographer Backscheider, who wrote a 761-page book about Daniel Defoe. "Courts used to decide that the papers of a famous person were of decided public interest and part of history. Now courts say that they are private property."

McAlexander witnessed firsthand how technology may affect future biographical research.

"I met Peter in 1984 and that's about the time that he started relying on the telephone," McAlexander said.

Letters — the underpinning of most biography — dwindled in number as Taylor aged and used the telephone more to keep in touch with friends. Luckily, McAlexander could interview people to find out what was discussed in phone conversations.

But in another 50 years, no one will be around to remember. And that evidence — just like the traces of Bonner's life — will be lost forever.

For more information contact Hubert McAlexander at hmcalexa@uga.edu.

Kathleen Cason is associate director of Research Communications at the University of Georgia.

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