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Frances Donnelly on Alison Lurie, Slightly Foxed 78

The Benefits of Writing a Biography

There are writers I particularly love because they’ve guided me through adult life and helped me make sense of it. Alison Lurie, who died in 2020 at the age of 94, is one such and I owe her a debt of gratitude for elegantly and slyly interpreting the seismic cultural changes that occurred in Western life from the 1960s onwards. A Radcliffe scholar, she married early and had three children, but she didn’t let two rejected novels deter her, nor the husband who said: ‘Perhaps it’s for the best – you can spend more time with the children.’ She persevered. Her first published novel was Love and Friendship (1967), which is also the title of Jane Austen’s first completed novel (written when Jane was 14). Like the incomparable Jane, her chief aim was ‘a desire to laugh at life’ through the literary medium of witty and astute comedies of manners. And like Jane she enjoyed the company of men.

Unlike Polly Alter, the feminist heroine of The Truth about Lorin Jones (1989). The book’s opening statement is unambiguous: ‘Polly Alter liked men but she wasn’t sure if she trusted them anymore.’ At 39, Polly is a would-be artist and recently divorced. She has taken a sabbatical from her job as an art curator in New York to write a biography of Lorin Jones, a brilliant woman artist who died early, apparently let down by the men in her life and unappreciated by the art establishment.

Subject and biographer are a good fit as Polly is in a towering fury about the way the patriarchy diminishes and controls women’s lives. Take Tom, her former husband. Although hitherto a sympathetic and supportive partner, nonetheless, when offered a career-changing job in Denver he made a unilateral decision and accepted it without her agreement. Divorce follows, leaving Polly a lonely woman with the custody of Steve, her beloved 12-year-old whose upbringing has been heavy on gender-neutral toys. But Polly knows her anger towards men has an older s

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There are writers I particularly love because they’ve guided me through adult life and helped me make sense of it. Alison Lurie, who died in 2020 at the age of 94, is one such and I owe her a debt of gratitude for elegantly and slyly interpreting the seismic cultural changes that occurred in Western life from the 1960s onwards. A Radcliffe scholar, she married early and had three children, but she didn’t let two rejected novels deter her, nor the husband who said: ‘Perhaps it’s for the best – you can spend more time with the children.’ She persevered. Her first published novel was Love and Friendship (1967), which is also the title of Jane Austen’s first completed novel (written when Jane was 14). Like the incomparable Jane, her chief aim was ‘a desire to laugh at life’ through the literary medium of witty and astute comedies of manners. And like Jane she enjoyed the company of men.

Unlike Polly Alter, the feminist heroine of The Truth about Lorin Jones (1989). The book’s opening statement is unambiguous: ‘Polly Alter liked men but she wasn’t sure if she trusted them anymore.’ At 39, Polly is a would-be artist and recently divorced. She has taken a sabbatical from her job as an art curator in New York to write a biography of Lorin Jones, a brilliant woman artist who died early, apparently let down by the men in her life and unappreciated by the art establishment. Subject and biographer are a good fit as Polly is in a towering fury about the way the patriarchy diminishes and controls women’s lives. Take Tom, her former husband. Although hitherto a sympathetic and supportive partner, nonetheless, when offered a career-changing job in Denver he made a unilateral decision and accepted it without her agreement. Divorce follows, leaving Polly a lonely woman with the custody of Steve, her beloved 12-year-old whose upbringing has been heavy on gender-neutral toys. But Polly knows her anger towards men has an older source. The only child of a failed, young marriage, she blames her father profoundly for being such a lacklustre and absent parent. Polly is warmly supported in her negative views by her best friend Jeanne, a radicial feminist and lesbian. Jeanne has chosen to live in a world entirely populated by women. Only with their own sex, she feels, can women find respect, support and sexual fulfilment. Polly wonders if this may be her own future. Which brings its own particular problems as Polly begins to research her book. Most of the people she’ll be interviewing are the men who let Lorin down. She wants to get the best interview she can, she tells Jeanne, but how can she confront them whilst not antagonizing them? Jeanne does not believe in confrontation at all. She favours curls, ribbons and ruffled gingham aprons. In conversation she spells out words like C-R-A-P as if inquisitive younger ears are always present. She believes Polly’s interviewing technique should rely heavily on placatory statements like, ‘I never thought about it that way!’, or ‘You may be right’, while hoping the male chauvinist pigs will D-A-M-N themselves out of their own mouths. Polly is not at all sure that this disarming, non-confrontational approach is the one a modern feminist should be employing. There is something about Jeanne’s method, placatory and fundamentally dishonest, that sits badly with her. But how else is she going to discover the truth about Lorin Jones? It’s hard enough to understand our own friends, let alone someone you haven’t even met. A well-respected biographer, about to embark without much pleasure on a new subject, once confided to me that writing a biography, like bereavement, fell into four stages. Stage One was passionate over-identification with the subject. Stage Two was panic at the tsunami of conflicting material gathered. Stage Three was an actual dislike of your subject and a profound wish you’d chosen someone else. Stage Four was a glum acceptance that it’s impossible to know another human being. You can only present all the material in an unbiased way and let readers make up their own minds. These jaundiced observations certainly resemble Polly’s own journey to discover the truth about Lorin Jones. Her over-identification with her subject is apparent. But as the interviews stack up, the picture that emerges is complicated and not always flattering. The two certainties are that Lorin was beautiful and talented. Less attractive is the realization that she employed her beauty to facilitate her talent. When it came to making use of other people – usually men – Lorin could teach a master class. Her looks reeled them in, but once they were in place and taking care of her she absented herself mentally to get on with her painting. This is a damning indictment until one considers that this may be what male geniuses have always done. They’ve traditionally enjoyed the services of an uncomplaining someone who’ll have dinner on the table. Often this person is called A Wife. So should we really look askance at a woman artist who needs the same conditions to nurture her own talent? This is clearly an issue of interest to Alison Lurie who returns to it again in Truth and Consequences (2005). In this book we meet Delia Delaney, a minor literary celebrity and writer of darkly Gothic tales, usually referred to as ‘The American Angela Carter’. Delia is an almost cartoonish character, a siren with white bosoms and tumbled Titian hair. But the gorgeous physical attributes conceal a steely will. She makes use of everyone in a breathless, seductive and completely unapologetic way. Yet at the same time she utters some profound truths about the problem of trying to clear a space in which to create. Everyone, she says in justification, wants a piece of you. Everyone has an unpublished novel in their bedside drawer that they want you to read. To make your own space, you have to be ruthless. Lorin Jones would be nodding her beautiful head in emphatic agreement. Predictably, Polly reaches the Fourth Stage of Biography overwhelmed as to how to present Lorin’s story. Yes, Lorin Jones was a brilliant artist. But she damaged people and had a profoundly self-destructive streak. This has to be balanced against the fact that everyone interviewed had their own agenda and wanted to come out of the book looking good. How can all this contradictory evidence be presented fairly? Polly’s confusion is compounded by the fact that she has fallen in love with one of Lorin’s ex-partners, the very attractive Hugh Cameron, who lives in Key West. The lesbian sisterhood suddenly looks a whole lot less appealing and Polly and Jeanne have a fatal quarrel. Alone in her apartment the day after Christmas, paralysed as to how to start her book, Polly finds herself facing a few unpalatable truths about her own life. Could it be she’s played some part in the way men have treated her? She’s uncomfortably aware that, looking back, her father had actually made strenuous efforts to keep in touch with a very cross little daughter. And her husband, contrary to the way she’d been telling the story, had bent over backwards to accommodate her needs in the proposed move to Denver. She had refused point blank to even consider it. In this new mood of self-awareness she’s able to ask herself, grievances aside, what is it she really wants? If her book is a success she can have a career in the New York art world – a slightly bleak kind of success. It would be a future of affairs with ‘people whom she doesn’t really like or trust and who don’t much like or trust her’. The alternative is leaving New York with her son for Key West, putting her faith (again!) in one man, writing her book and starting again as an artist. When Truth and Consequences was published it attracted some hostility from the Radical Feminists who felt they’d been unfairly represented. But the book makes clear that what actually interests Alison Lurie is less sexual politics than the tensions within any group who claim to have created Utopia. Living on the moral high ground is both fraught and exhausting. What starts with the search for ideological truth so often ends in meltdown about who didn’t do the dishes. Selfishness, the Old Adam – or Eve in this case – always manifests itself. The examination of this behaviour – the dichotomy between what you claim to think and what you actually do – is of the keenest interest to both Alison Lurie and Jane Austen. And it’s what makes both these books so wonderfully entertaining.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 78 © Frances Donnelly 2023


About the contributor

Frances Donnelly lives on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, and is still in search of a rescue dog. Ideally small and easy-going, a GSOH essential.

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