JANE RIDLEY TALK (28th September 2000)
CAN BIOGRAPHY BE TAUGHT?
A writer comes for psychotherapy – let’s call her Sarah. Sarah reports feeling a certain blankness, which isn’t quite depression – but it’s not quite living either. Sarah’s parents are both powerful people who exist in a sort of mutual admiration society. Sarah grew up not just within a family but within a life that had already been mapped out for her. If she strayed beyond the parameters of that life – by showing aggression perhaps or developing her own politics or taking up with an unsuitable boyfriend - there was no criticism or reproach just ...nothing. She was ignored and when Sarah ceased to exist in her parents’ eyes, she ceased to exist at all. In a nightmare, Sarah looks in the mirror; there’s no-one there.
Only in her writing can Sarah come alive. I say to her something like, this question of who is entitled to write a person’s story – to be the author, in effect, of another’s life – has preoccupied her for a long time. Perhaps it’s related to her choice of career. I start to muse out loud about the different reasons people might have for wanting to shape and write other people’s stories.
She interrupts me to say very vehemently ‘There’s one reason...revenge!’
Sarah has split herself in two. Despite the blankness in her personal life, she is able to write, and in her writing she comes alive. Poor Virginia Woolf had to wait for her father (the eminent Victorian biographer Leslie Stephen) to die, before she could do the same. Years later, Virginia described her relief at Leslie’s death, when she was 22: ‘His life would have entirely ended mine’ wrote Virginia. ‘What would have happened? No writing, no books; inconceivable’. Virginia could not be the author of her own life while her father lived. Leslie, so to speak, held the rights. But writing is after all an immensely powerful tool. We may grow up, like Sarah and Virginia, living within our parents’ projects for ourselves. But when we write we can take the power, in our turn, to shape others’ lives according to our projects.
You may say, this might be true of novelists – but not biographers, who are bound by facts. I think this would be naive. Biographers don’t just listen and record any more than psychoanalysts do. To read different biographies of the same life back to back, as you’ll know if you’ve done it, is to be awed by the capacity of human minds to create utterly different stories from the same set of facts. It’s an eye-opener, but perhaps it’s not surprising. After all, biographers – like psychoanalysts – generally have two aims: to excavate the truth but also to shape a coherent story that will gain the interest of your readers enough to keep them reading (if you’re a biographer) or (if you’re a therapist) that will interest your patients enough to make them want to keep investing in the therapy.
It’s a knife edge: if we uncover facts but fail to make a story, we lose direction and, plodding on under a mass of shapeless boring detail, risk losing our fellow-travellers, our readers – or our patients - in the process. On the other hand, the thrill of shaping a story to our own agenda (and let’s admit, it can be quite a thrill) can make us cavalier with the truth. Seduced by our own lovely theories about what was going on in someone else’s mind, our need to believe: it was like this, we gloss over inconvenient facts. Then the creative possibilities of the dialogue are lost. Useful imaginative reconstruction slides into wild conjecture, or wild analysis. We risk losing our professional integrity; and people can get hurt.
In establishing truths, a therapy session does have some advantages. You can say hold on – you said you had a happy childhood but now you’re telling me your father was a drunken bully who beat you senseless every Friday night and your mother ran off with the milkman when you were five.....You can stop your patient and ask – why did you make that choice, what was in your mind? (not that you’ll always get an answer). In biography you can’t, usually, but you can always compare with other sources and check your facts. And stop when you like, to mull it all over.
Following on from these opening comments, I’d like to go on if I may to say something briefly about why I think fathers and daughters is such an interesting and rich topic to write about and end by saying something about ways of reading material psychoanalytically, which I find useful as a writer.
Fathers and daughters
There are historical and psychological reasons why the father-daughter relationship hasn’t in the past got the attention it deserves – a fascinating subject in itself, but beyond the ambit of this talk. In therapy too, fathers (or their absence) usually emerge as much more important than women let on initially. Partly it’s the fault of therapy which has allowed itself to become too much of a ‘mothering’ enterprise – we lose sight of how both boys and girls need fathering too, and how fathering might be different from mothering. As a society too, moving out of patriarchal ways of relating (and patriarchy, remember means the rule not of men but of fathers) we have ended up very confused about what fathering could be.
Fathers are crucial in a girl’s life – to initiate her into a world beyond mothers and mothering. While her relationship with mother draws her back to the Body, her relationship with father draws her forward to the Word. It’s interesting how many women who’ve lived by the word – as writers (Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath) or as politicians (Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Margaret Jay, Aung San Suu Kyi) have had relationships with their fathers that have been absolutely central in their lives.
From the father’s perspective, a daughter may be a sometimes unacknowledged inspiration (Darwin and Freud were both loving fathers who were led into important new areas of thought through their efforts to mourn the premature deaths of their favourite daughters); or a redemptive force (theme of the last plays of Shakespeare, also the father of daughters, and of stories from Heidi to Annie); or a threat (the fathers of Clara Schumann and Elizabeth B Browning encouraged their daughters’ outstanding early achievements but cut them off in a vindictive rage when they had the temerity to assert their independence and turn to other men. Interesting parallels here perhaps with the fathers of some of today’s great women tennis players, from Suzanne Lenglen to Monica Seles, Steffi Graf and Jennifer Capriati). Some fathers glory in their daughters’ achievements but only to the extent they see them as extensions of themselves and this (apart from anything else) has implications for their daughters’ sexual development.
My own particular interest is in how the influence of fathers both helps and hinder their daughters’ creative achievement and how this relationship changes through a life – typically, how men’s initial pride in their little princesses comes into conflict, as the girls grow up, with archaic male fear of being engulfed or surpassed by powerful women, triggered if the daughter starts getting too successful, too independent, too sexual. The sometimes, in later years, there may be a rapprochement. Obviously daughters can end up getting very mixed messages from their fathers about achievement, not to mention sexual and emotional fulfilment. Themes like this are encountered over and over - which led me to the thought: if you can write a biography of a city or a year, why not of a generic relationship?
Partly, we like reading biographies because they teach us how others think and why they make the choices they make and have the lives they do. When we immerse ourselves in someone else’s life story we make what analysts call a trial identification with them. We compare ourselves with them and perhaps we come to see the possibilities of our own lives differently. I also think father-daughter relationships have a particular significance for the times we’re living in, which is no doubt why it’s emerged as an important theme among the book buying public in recent years – Jane Smiley’s 1000 Acres, Germaine Greer’s Daddy I Hardly Knew You, Dava Sobell’s Galileo’s Daughter. Just in the last couple of years, we’ve had Annie’s Box by Randal Keynes, Clara by Janice Galloway and Penny Junor’s Home Truths, Life around my Father. The study of father-daughter relationships raises important and very topical questions for women about how much as women we feel bound by our love of men and our need of men. How much, taking that first relationship with the first man in our live as our template, have we grown up believing that what we have to say must be shaped to please male authority, to please the fathers we love but whose attention we may never have had enough of and who have, unwittingly or deliberately, censored or repressed us? Today we are aware of the extent to which a child’s need for her father as an attachment figure (and an early erotic figure) makes her tune into and become very sensitive to her father’s needs. A daughter may be willing to do or be almost anything to make her father want to stay with her, and the less his presence can be taken for granted, the harder she’ll try – one reason why girls try so much harder to please their scarce fathers than their usually more available mothers. And of course we learn to internalise our early parental relationships as ‘voices’ or programmes telling us what we can and can’t be, well into our adult lives. Today we’re also beginning to understand how some of these ways of relating are transmitted intergenerationally down families (the Royal family or the Spencers are interesting here as the generations are on record in a way they aren’t in most of our families, and from a different perspective, the families of Holocaust survivors also).
As a therapist, there are three sorts of communication I’m especially interested in: the first is sexual fantasy (which people don’t like to tell you about unless they have an ulterior motive, usually the obvious one) the second is dream (people usually don’t mind giving you at least an edited version of one) and early memory (which for some reason people are usually delighted to be asked about), and which I’ll say a bit more about.
What is your first memory?
Why do we remember one particular early memory over another? Perhaps, because it’s overlaid with particular emotional significance – perhaps it’s emblematic, in some way, of a central theme which will unfold through that person’s life. Such episodes may set the tone for the work to be done, returned to over and over as they are more deeply understood.
Princess Diana described an early memory of sitting at the bottom of some cold stone steps while her father loaded suitcases and her mother walked across gravel, got into the car and left the family home for good. We can distil from this memory: a sense of events of great significance happening close to her but out of her control; of people close to her pursuing their own agendas, apparently heedless of their effect on her; a sense of coldness, isolation, of being visible but yet not being really seen or noticed; a sense of being abandoned by maternal warmth, left surrounded by men in suits. We can see, in other words an uncanny foreshadowing of the major themes not just of her life, but of her death – when Diana herself would, of course, get into a car and drive off, leaving those who loved her forever.
The first memory of Indira Gandhi (Nehru as was) was when her wealthy family came out in opposition to the British Raj, and arranged a ceremonial bonfire of their English clothes in the grounds of their mansion. The bonfire was to be lit at night, Indira was three and her parents said she couldn’t stay up – so she appealed to her grandfather (who doted on her) and arrived triumphantly at the bonfire in his arms. Here we have Indira the politician presenting to us her credentials as a patriot, reminding us that she was there at the birth of her nation’s independence with the powerful men who brought it into being. But we might be more interested in the appeal to grandfather - inadvertently we learn not just about Indira the young patriot but Indira the little minx who manipulates her family connections to get her own way. Perhaps we might also read into the story a secret hostility to her father’s integrity and a desire to subvert it, to get one up on him? Again, we see themes of her later life foreshadowed.
Sometimes memories, as Freud said, are not remembered but repeated by being acted out. Sylvia Plath’s father died when she was seven because he had diabetes, denied his illness, had his leg amputated and died, quite unnecessarily of an embolism. In an account of the last months of Sylvia’s life, we read that after she’d left Ted that she cut her finger badly on a tin, neglected it until it became infected and told a friend she expected it would need to be amputated. In Sylvia’s last days she may have been acting out a drama in which she was abandoned one again by the powerful father, this time in the guise of Ted. But the story also suggests how powerful was her own identification with the father who neglects his health and becomes the abandoner - like her father, Sylvia left two small children behind at her death.
As a biography unfolds, as a psychotherapy unfolds, we see a person’s life unfolding, the repeat of themes, identifications, compulsions and influences acted out in many different ways. But at the same time, often we see a person stop and reinvent their life in ways that take everyone by surprise. In both psychotherapy and biography we should never take anything for granted.
