I have to warn you that these thoughts are as much about me as about Madison Bell’s biography of Robert Stone and offer as many questions as answers. In several ways I'm not a very good person to comment on it. First, I'm not a reader of biographies. I can remember reading only four others in my long life: a biography of Duke Ellington for a high school paper; a biography of Mahatma Gandhi by Erik Erickson because of the time I was seeing therapist trained by Erickson; Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven for a short story I was writing; Earnest Jones’ stately tome on Freud (which was stolen from me in a laundromat in Manhattan Beach). I’ve read hundreds possibly thousands of novels for each biography.
The Ellington biography as best I can remember was a dutiful grind. I hated the Gandhi biography because at the time I hated Erickson’s thesis that people's lives divided into developmental stages (like Shakespeare's seven ages of man). In reading Solomon I wanted to get a feeling of what it would be like to know Beethoven. It worked for that, and much of his lore has stayed with me to enrich my listening. But there is something in me that wants to concentrate on what people offer us rather than what they do.
Second, I was a long-time friend of Bob's and have my own ideas and feelings about who he was and its relation to his books. In full disclosure I read small parts of this biography in draft and corrected a few factual details.
This biography embodies extensive study of sources also depends on personal knowledge. Bell was a good friend of Stone’s in his later years and travelled with him. Among other things, Bell reports his own feelings about various matters Stone was involved in in real time, which lends vividness to perspective. Bell has also had detailed support from conversations and written material by Bob's wife Janice who is also a friend of Bell's and of mine. Indeed there is a way this is the Bob and Janice story.
What if we had biographies of, say, Tolstoy or Hemingway, some written with substantial cooperation of the authors wife(s)? I guess they would be very interesting to compare. Maybe we do; I don’t know. If we had a biography of Shakespeare based on interviews by séance with Anne Hathaway, it would be wonderfully informative and widely read, but would not be the last word on Shakespeare. That is an unfair comparison because William and Anne lived largely apart while Robert and Janice were constantly enmeshed.
Bell provides great detail about Bob's relations with various people he knew and their effect on his work both in a practical way and as source for his plots and characters; about his publishing contracts, which he tended to fall behind; about the interventions of his agents, but not so much by his editors; about where he travelled and whom with, and Bob travelled a lot; and about where he lived — Janice and Bob had a great many dwellings, sometimes two and even three at once. Bell keeps before the reader Bob's use of alcohol and other drugs. He recounts who went to bed with whom and to a certain extent Bob's thoughts and experiences relative to the Catholic Church and religion in general. Lots of information. As a friend more than I’m interested in. As a reader I feel there is more than enriches the experience, but I’m not quite sure what I would want to omit. For future scholars this is a gold mine.
Travel is important to Bell’s image of Bob. The most fulsome accounts of his personal encounters with Bob come from time he spent traveling with him, and he always sees Bob as a potential traveller rather than someone who lived somewhere and occasionally travels.
Bob’s childhood is hard to describe briefly, but it involved a close but intermittent relationship with his schizophrenic mother, no involvement whatever with his father, and years in an orphanage. Bell carefully unpacks influences in Bob's childhood and adolescence, his mother's religion and his stint in a Marist high school, as sources for his interest in religion (see below). Bell also considers Bob as a commentator, almost a public intellectual, on the state of US culture in his lifetime. That's a little odd considering much of the action of his novels is set outside the United States. Indeed I remember Bob telling me a little before he wrote his last novel, which is set in the US, that he was tired of being considered an expert on countries he had spent a few weeks in. But Bell does not cite people as a source of Bob's perspective on the US. That fits his observation and mine that Bob was an autodidact. He knew a lot about literature and society, but not from studying under X or Y, but through reading and observing with intelligent, passionate attention.
The narrative is a straight ahead time line. Bell provides a useful analytical summary of each of his novels in turn and reports the circumstances they were written in. He points out relationships between Bob’s interests and events in his life and events in the novel or even structural and technical issues in the novel.
One thing Bell points out is that, with one exception, Bob's novels have a river structure. That is, he begins writing about several characters with separate lives who gradually flow together in plot lines until all are involved with one another at the end. Reading the bio made me wonder why that was. I have a vague feeling some connection exists among his scattered dwellings, persistent travels, and diverse friendships, and the scattered plot lines that inevitably pull together, but I can’t put it in words. His endings, I want to add, are almost always bang up. By ‘bang up’ I mean violent, rapid, physical action often including gunfire and explosions. From my perspective these endings are the weakest part of his work. Carefully and deeply developed characters go up in smoke.
Reading this biography made me wonder what it was about Bob's personality or goals as a writer led to this kind of endings.
Bell devotes a lot of attention to Bob's ambivalent rumination about religion, Roman Catholicism in particular, certainly front and centre in Damascus Gate, set in Jerusalem and peopled with a variety of religious fanatics, and A Flag for Sunrise, set in (unnamed) El Salvador with important priests, nuns, and a protestant fanatic. I’m not sure it is as important as Bell suggests, but Stone told Bell and told me that he tended to talk about religion mostly with people who are particularly interested in religion. I am not one, so perhaps I am in no position to comment.
In trying to understand my feelings about this biography I reconsidered two long autobiographical novels I’ve enjoyed recently by/about writers. One is Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. Like Child of Light, it is full of details, but they are details of a different kind. They are mostly accounts of things he did, like the ~ 150 pages it devotes to hiding a case of beer as a young teenager so he can sneak it to a party. It is also highly selective. Knausgård devotes thousands of pages to his relations with his second wife and children and barely mentions his first wife, for instance. Is selectivity what makes it a novel rather than an autobiography? Is it what makes it more interesting to me?
The other is The Diaries of Emilio Renzi by Ricardo Piglia. I’ve read only the first of three volumes. It is a semi-true diary of a young man trying to be a writer in the lively intellectual and treacherous political world of 1960’s Argentina. Bell, appropriately, precedes in a serious and workmanlike spirit. Bell patiently builds his case; Piglia is free to scatter our thoughts. It has touches of magical realism; there are events that could not have occurred. (More than a hint of magic realism appears in Stone’s novel Bay of Souls, but neither Stone nor Bell really commits as to whether it is magic or delusion.) Why do I find it more fun and more stimulating than reading Child of Light? For one thing, I learn more because it is set in a different country. Although painful at times, overall it stirs a sense of joy. Renzi is constantly at play even when hard up to pay the utilities, betraying his lover, or, briefly, in jail. His feelings about reading and writing blend with those of real life — not something you see in Bell’s account of Bob. Is that a reason I find in more stimulating?
Both Knausgård and Renzi were deeply involved in painful struggles with their fathers, something denied to Bob.
As Bell explains, many of Bob’s characters are prey to demons. They're crazed, haunted, uneducated, men and some women, who are at best thoughtless toward other people and toward their universe and at worst sadistic. Bob was a caring, warm friend and a thoughtful, well informed evaluator of the world. Of course you saw the shadows of his own demons through his drug use, peripatetic life, as well as through his creations, and he was not shy of acknowledging them. Perhaps they have something to do with the convergent and explosive endings. He exorcised them. Bob once told me that his favourite of his novels was Outerbridge Reach because the protagonist, a straight-arrow Annapolis graduate, is least like himself. He was proud of being able to create such a character. That book ends quietly with a drifting empty boat after the protagonist’s suicide.
