THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA RESEARCH MAGAZINE : www.researchmagazine.uga.edu


BACK TO WEB VERSION

SUMMER/FALL 2003
Unsentimental Biographer
Hubert McAlexander chronicles the lives, times and works of
two Southern authors

by Kathleen Cason

Hubert McAlexander never set out to be a biographer.

For nearly as long as he could remember, he wanted to teach English. It was a logical choice for him, given the influence of a “splendid English teacher” in his hometown of Holly Springs, Miss. — a hamlet tucked between Memphis and Oxford, between the birthplace of the blues and the home of William Faulkner.

Becoming a biographer was just chance.

The idea took root when McAlexander was preparing a review for a scholarly journal. The UGA English professor discovered that biographical sketches of 19th century Southern writer Sherwood Bonner were meager and often erroneous.

On the one hand, he considered putting the record straight. On the other, he wondered how many biographies of this minor author the world really needed.

Certainly one good one, he decided.

The result was a page-turner — the story of a well-heeled Southern lady who came of age in Mississippi during the Civil War. Disappointed by marriage and motherhood, she deserted her husband, abandoned her infant daughter and fled to Boston to pursue a literary career. Moderately successful as a writer, her story includes a remarkable circle of friends, a stint as secretary to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a divorce, hints of an affair and death at a young age.

“I hate to say this but biography was what I was made to do,” McAlexander said.

And he was especially made to tell this particular story. McAlexander used his knowledge of Southern literature, his knack for crafting a good tale and a lifelong interest in history, family and culture to pen a gripping biography.

McAlexander is a scholar and teacher of American and Southern literature who, some say, even looks like Faulkner in his later years. Often described as “the epitome of the Southern gentleman,” he lives in historic Dominie House — a Scottish term for teacher — near a local Athens landmark, “The Tree that Owns Itself.” He has received nearly every honor the university bestows for teaching — Outstanding Honors Professor (four times), Sandy Beaver Teaching Professor (twice) and the Josiah Meigs Award, the highest UGA honor for teaching.

His research has garnered accolades as well. In 2002, he received the UGA Creative Research Medal, was nominated both for a Pulitzer Prize in biography and for Georgia Author of the Year in Creative Nonfiction and was named a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

“I think the passion that Hubert brings to his research is also the passion you see in his classroom,” said fellow UGA English professor Fran Teague.

And that passion, which spurred him to write Bonner’s life story, sustained a 20-year journey into researching and writing biographies. Ultimately, that journey would lead to the Pulitzer nomination, which McAlexander received for a biography of Southern author Peter Taylor.

Just as no two life stories are alike, the two biography projects were poles apart. McAlexander’s subjects — Sherwood Bonner and Peter Taylor — were both authors from the Mid-South, but the similarity ends there. Bonner remains obscure; Taylor widely praised. Bonner was a minor character in 19th century literature; Taylor a major player in 20th century American letters. And when it came to finding clues about their lives, the paper trail for Taylor was a feast, for Bonner a famine.

However, “in each case, I wrote about people who had decided social magnetism, both of them. You find that out in source after source,” he said.

And each biography lends new perspective on the literature and culture of the period.

A Mississippi lady

“Sherwood Bonner was just so dramatic and fascinating and so self-dramatizing and vain,” McAlexander said. “Her life was a much better story than anything she wrote.”

Although her writing left no indelible mark, McAlexander said her biography is valuable, in part, because what she wrote was widely representative of her time.

“Minor figures provide a wonderful index of an era, sometimes more than the major ones, because major people are often atypical,” he said.

McAlexander’s book, The Prodigal Daughter: A Biography of Sherwood Bonner, renders a sympathetic portrayal of an intellectual young woman’s struggle to realize her dream to be a writer. Her brief but dramatic life is a window on life in Mississippi and Brahmin Boston during and after the Civil War.

Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell was born in 1849 in McAlexander’s hometown of Holly Springs, Miss., at the time a prosperous town in the state’s leading cotton producing county. At age 13, Bonner’s father sent her to Montgomery, Ala., to escape the war. But after barely six months, she returned home to a town that was unrecognizable — razed buildings, toppled gravestones and defaced houses. McAlexander wrote that she traveled “a ruined countryside back to Holly Springs,” the last leg of the trip on a “handcar operated by a blind man, a cripple and two former slaves.”

Following the war, the 22-year-old Bonner married a dreamer who was never much of a husband. A year and a half into the marriage, he left Mississippi to seek his fortune in Texas. Bonner and their infant daughter joined him briefly but she soon decided she had had enough. She returned to Holly Springs, left her young daughter in her mother-in-law’s care and headed for Boston to pursue her education and a career as a writer — bold, scandalous behavior for the times.

She eked out a living by selling stories to various magazines and newspapers and by working as a secretary to temperance advocate and physician Dio Lewis and later to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She wrote in the grandiloquent style of the times and achieved only modest success.

McAlexander didn’t have much to go on for the Bonner biography. Only about a hundred letters remained and Bonner had been dead for more than a century. Many of her works were missing. No one who had known her was still alive.

“My art teacher had been in a Shakespeare class that Sherwood Bonner’s daughter gave for young children in the 1880s,” he said. “I almost touched her but not quite.”

So McAlexander had to be particularly ingenious in his research. He scoured archives, libraries and private collections for clues — diaries, correspondence, deeds, court proceedings, journals, obituaries, family Bibles, contracts, tuition bills, scrapbooks and even cancelled checks.

Rummaging through the collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenæum and Harvard’s Houghton Library, he unearthed Bonner’s first published work, which had been “lost” since 1898.

“She told people her first work was published when she was 15 years old. After looking at some diary entries, I was pretty sure that was not right,” he said. “I really thought she was published first when she was 20 and I knew it was in some Boston publication. So I went to Boston on this hunch. At the Boston Public Library I got hold of these obscure magazines way down in the sub-basement, just hidden away, and there her first story was.”

He uncovered other long-forgotten stories in the Memphis Avalanche. The editor was Bonner’s friend and published many of her articles — impressions of life in Boston and Europe, sketches of prominent Bostonians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Wendell Phillips, and events such as the funeral of abolitionist Charles Sumner and Boston’s centennial celebration. But a painstaking hunt through 10-year’s worth of the Avalanche turned up a bigger find — Bonner’s connection with social reformer Elizabeth Avery Meriwether.

Bonner most admired this “woman of intellect, force, and independence, who, at the same time displayed femininity and style,” McAlexander wrote. Meriwether, like many of Bonner’s female friends, possessed these qualities — intellect combined with femininity — that embodied emerging Southern feminism.

Hard-earned scraps of information surfaced in unexpected places. McAlexander discovered a draft of Bonner’s letter to her literary adviser, Nahum Capen, on the back of a manuscript in her grandnephew’s possession. In a previous letter to Capen, she divulged her plans to go to Boston; his reply voiced outrage that she would leave her child behind. This draft responded to his censure, defending her decision and her dreams.

“The draft was too haughty,” McAlexander wrote, “and she probably sent a much toned-down version, but she now realized that even literary people would not totally approve of what she wanted to do.”

The dearth of material about Bonner tested McAlexander’s resourcefulness. He relied on his own knowledge of Holly Springs, his connections there and the available history. And he probed the lives of people she had known.

Those included her life-long friend and admirer, Scottish-born James Redpath – an ardent abolitionist, a New York Tribune editor, participant in the Underground Railroad, advocate of women’s rights and labor reform, and biographer of John Brown. He established the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, which booked lecture tours for Frederick Douglass, Julia Ward Howe and Mark Twain, to name a few.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow also counted among her friends and admirers.

“He was infatuated with her. He loved younger women,” McAlexander said. “And she knew how to play him.”

Longfellow was 67 when Bonner requested an audience with the renowned American poet. McAlexander writes of their first meeting:

Indeed, as she stood in Longfellow’s study,
surrounded by the portraits of Sumner, Emerson, and Hawthorne,
and examining the inkwell which had belonged to Coleridge,
while this other great poet stood by her side,
she knew that at last she had entered the great world.
She intended to remain in it.

And then there was the mysterious General Colton Greene. The former Confederate general was 44 and Memphis’ most eligible bachelor when Bonner met him at the 1877 annual ball of the Mystic Society of the Memphi. She was 28.

McAlexander uncovered hints of the pair’s relationship. No letters remain, if they ever existed, but Greene appears as a character in a number of Bonner’s stories. Most telling was Greene’s attention to the welfare of Bonner’s daughter, Lilian. After Bonner’s death, he purchased the Bonner family home and deeded it to Lilian, paid for her studies in Paris and bequeathed her nearly his entire, considerable estate.

Earlier Bonner biographies contained so many factual errors that McAlexander couldn’t rely on their accounts. One listed daughter Lilian as a family friend. Others reported that Bonner never returned to Holly Springs following the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. Instead, McAlexander found that Bonner nursed her father and brother during the epidemic and returned months later to settle her father’s estate. And when her health began to fail at age 34, she returned to Holly Springs to die.

“The yellow fever epidemic is a big chapter in the history of my town. A lot of people have written about it, including her,” he said.

The epidemic reduced the town’s population by one-fifth. McAlexander pieced together a riveting account of the epidemic based on an article Bonner had published in Harper’s Weekly, her letters, a telegram from her to Longfellow and entries in Longfellow’s journal.

Bonner was living in Boston at the time the epidemic began to spread north from New Orleans, and she became concerned about the safety of her young daughter in Mississippi. She hopped a train to Holly Springs. Within two days of her arrival, the town’s former mayor became the epidemic’s first casualty. She managed to send her daughter to safety but within the week, the disease had claimed the lives of her father and brother. Within two weeks, she was back in Boston.

In writing this section of the book, “I had to move her through fast just as it happened,” McAlexander said, snapping his fingers to the rhythm of his words. “Move her through it, get the pace right, get her through it, get her back to Boston almost in shock.”

Elderly people in Holly Springs provided other materials. “Attics were searched, boxes of rat-chewed papers produced, interviews freely granted and confidences shared,” he wrote in the introduction to the paperback edition.

“The people in Holly Springs were great about sharing material,” he said. “They’re all dead now. I got that material at the last minute. I don’t know where some of it is now.”

McAlexander donated the materials he used to the UGA Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The collection includes photocopies of: Bonner’s 1869 diary; letters to Longfellow, family and friends; census records; Colton Greene’s will; and an annotated copy of Bonner’s novel Like Unto Like that belonged to her friend Helen Craft Anderson.

The painstaking research on the Bonner book, which was published in 1981 and reprinted in paperback in 1999, was good preparation for McAlexander’s biography of author Peter Taylor.

Writing a writer’s life

The drama of Bonner’s life was notably lacking in Peter Taylor’s. And that presented challenges writing Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life.

“Taylor lived a private life. He mainly lived to teach and to write,” said Hugh Ruppersburg, UGA associate dean of arts and sciences and an acknowledged authority on Robert Penn Warren. “He didn’t do the kinds of things that would attract public attention.”

Critics regard Tennessee-born Taylor as one of the finest writers of short fiction in 20th century America. During a 52-year writing career that began in 1942, Taylor’s work won dozens of awards: Seven stories were chosen for the O. Henry Prize collection; 10 stories appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthologies; a novel won the Pulitzer Prize.

Taylor, compulsively social, knew nearly every important American writer during his lifetime: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter, to name a few. Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom were his mentors; Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Jean Stafford counted among his friends. But while divorce, mental breakdown, alcoholism and suicide punctuated his friends’ lives, Taylor wrote stories and taught college English.

“Peter Taylor really did not have a dramatic life. And that is what sells books,” McAlexander said. “It’s much better if your subject had been a drug addict or something.”

But Taylor was a straight arrow. He was married for 51 years to poet Eleanor Ross Taylor. He had a deep sense of family.

“His story was about a sensitive person and artist and someone who, it’s clear from his fiction, understood how hard it was to keep up the balancing act of life. He felt the inner dangers that many of us do feel,” McAlexander said. “His life is more like that of most people than are the self-destructive lives of some of the others.”

Taylor came to the University of Georgia as a visiting writer in 1984. Within 24 hours of meeting him, McAlexander decided to become his biographer.

“Many of Taylor’s short stories are set in the world where Hubert grew up, that West Tennessee/North Mississippi world,” said colleague Fran Teague. “I think Hubert recognized just how skillfully those stories represented that world.”

McAlexander has been teaching Taylor’s stories for almost three decades in his Southern literature classes. He edited a collection of Taylor interviews published in 1987 and a book of critical essays in 1991. By 1993, Taylor’s health was failing. Ruppersburg, McAlexander’s friend and head of the English department at the time, encouraged him to go forward with the biography. He helped McAlexander get funding and time off to work on the book.

“Throughout I was operating on a very tight budget. I had to be efficient and inventive about how I squeezed a dime,” McAlexander said.
McAlexander knew Taylor for the last 10 years of his life. That had advantages. Taylor pointed him to people to interview, provided addresses and explained references in the documents. The pair talked about Taylor’s fiction.

“One time I asked, ‘What did you really learn from Henry James?’” McAlexander said. “He said, ‘That’s a good question, much better than questions I’m used to answering. Well, what I think I really learned was how to get the most out of my material.’”

But the disadvantage was that Taylor didn’t always remember things correctly.

“You can’t rely just on your subject because we all remember things differently. I could see that he remembered certain things incorrectly but sometimes the way he remembered them was significant,” McAlexander said.

Taylor and his friends were self-archival. McAlexander combed mountains of documents in repositories around the country. He journeyed to Memphis, Nashville, Martha’s Vineyard, Virginia, Ohio. To Princeton, Harvard, Vanderbilt and Kenyon College. He probed libraries and mined memories, including some 220 interviews of 87 people in the book.

He interviewed one of Taylor’s college buddies in a New York bar.

“The fellow was an alcoholic. I interviewed him for three hours and he just kept drinking and drinking,” McAlexander said. “By the end of the three hours I thought, ‘How in the world am I going to get him home?’ About that time his wife appeared. Whew, was I happy.”

By the time Brad Edwards got involved, McAlexander had been working on the biography for three years and had drawers full of files.

“For my first project, he gave me a box of documents and said ‘I need you to organize these for me,’” said Edwards, a doctoral student in English and McAlexander’s research assistant from 1996 to 1999. “There was everything from Peter Taylor’s writing contracts from the ‘50s to a deed to a house that he had bought to letters from his editor and personal letters.”

The research was like a treasure hunt, Edwards said. As he scrolled through microfilm or paged through old newspapers, he was ready to call it quits for the day on more than one occasion. Then he’d suddenly stumble on a gem — a picture, a letter, an article — that would focus his attention on the search again.

“I got to know a lot of the reference librarians,” Edwards said. “They were often intrigued by the questions. ‘I’m trying to find the transcript of a speech given by Peter Taylor at this convention; is there any possible way we can find it?’”

Edwards’ assignments were sometimes specific, sometimes vague. “Find an article on this author. So-and-so died around this time; see if you can find an obituary,” he recalled.

At age 19, Taylor and a friend worked their way to Europe on a cotton ship. “In his diary, Taylor mentions that he can see this port in Cuba from the boat,” Edwards said. “Well, where is this port? Is it significant?” Edwards was assigned to find out.

What surprised Edwards most was the volume of information that went into the book — the file drawers full of folders, the interviews — assimilated and then distilled by McAlexander.

“A five-hour interview might be condensed to two lines,” Edwards said.
McAlexander had to balance accurate biography, considering what was germane to Taylor’s life as a writer, against the confidences people had shared with him, avoiding unnecessary pain to the living.

The decisions a biographer makes — what to emphasize, what to include, what to leave out — makes no two biographies even of the same person alike, said Paula Backscheider, an Auburn University English professor and author of Reflections on Biography.

“The biographer is explorer, inquirer, hypothesizer, compiler, researcher, selector and writer,” she wrote. “None of these is a neutral act.”

“I know there are things in the book that irritate people,” McAlexander said. “But I wanted to be true to him — not to make him a saint”

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 Lowell’s 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 Publisher’s 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.

Biography Rules

"There are three rules for writing a biography, but, unfortunately,
no one knows what they are."

biographer Meryle Secrest in a twist on Somerset Maugham’s 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 — 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.”


THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA RESEARCH MAGAZINE
:
www.researchmagazine.uga.edu