My encounter with the famous E. L. Doctorow provided great entertainment. He argued for the importance of story. He noted the cultural importance of Homer’s stories and how boring factual depictions would be. Realities result from Jesus’ virgin birth. And, in contrast to scientists’ big bang, he championed author’s little bangs – creation in the form of a sentence.
I told him that as a historian, I was a bit offended. Did my research mean nothing? Is there no virtue in trying as best as possible to uncover the past on its own terms? Though we ultimately interpret, shouldn’t we historians strive to be as faithful to the past as possible? And, for good measure, I asked him if storytellers were central to culture, why is writing better than TV?
First he asked me to rephrase the question while “he thought up an answer.” I returned to the microphone and repeated the question. He then answered, “If you’re asking how much research I do, the answer is ‘as little as possible.’” Someone from the audience shouted, “That wasn’t the question!” He retorted, “Well that’s the question I wanted to answer!” Wow! Fun!!
During the body of Doctorow’s speech he said that the fictional and real person had nothing to do with each other. That was a relief. I have often wondered if Frances Kellor would punch me for distorting her if she came back from the grave. Doctorow essentially said, “Don’t worry about it. All is fiction. The real person and the fictional character we create based on them have nothing to do with each other. Invent.” I am not sure I am comfortable with that answer.
Still my portrait of Kellor is a portrait that locates her in the debates happening between today’s scholars. Specifically, these scholars discuss progressive intellectuals’ search for progressive democracy in the era of mass Federal programs. And while this question resonates in our time of apathy and disconnect from political elections, it also resonated with progressive activists.
A gossip-ladened session looked into biographies of the singers Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett and asked what people you write about would think of your depiction. In writing about Tony Bennett, David Evanier even has to worry about what a living subject would think of his biography. Though safely dead and without relatives or mafia ties, I often ask, "What would Kellor think of my depiction of her as a transgender lesbian?"
Kellor might have a beef with me for discussing her lesbianism publically. But, in today’s world she’d likely get married to Mary Dreier. And, though the term had not been invented, she might chafe at the emphasis I put on her being “transgender.” But if you asked her about the import of women being masculine and acting like men, she’d go on for hours. She clearly thought women should be more masculine and dressed the part.
Kellor might have a beef with me for discussing her lesbianism publically. But, in today’s world she’d likely get married to Mary Dreier. And, though the term had not been invented, she might chafe at the emphasis I put on her being “transgender.” But if you asked her about the import of women being masculine and acting like men, she’d go on for hours. She clearly thought women should be more masculine and dressed the part.
I think Kellor would not totally disavow my depiction of her as trasngender. And, that is important to me.
I asked Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the biography of John Nash, upon whom the Academy Award winning film ‘A Beautiful Mind’ was based, about whether personal life and public life intersected. If not, why was Nash’s bisexuality an issue?
Nasar’s argument about Nash’s difficulty with personal relations feeding into his facility with abstractions sort of worked for me. And, I have written about the contrast between Kellor’s public emphasis on gender and her not discussing sexuality. But her insistence on sticking to policy publicly seems like a very masculine thing to do. Her stance asks the reader to value public issues over private issues. Subtlety, her public issue orientation can be read as a manifestation of a desire to live in the closet and still honestly say a lot about her personal values.
This gets us to the fractal labyrinth of Margo Jefferson’s biography of Michael Jackson and back to E. L. Doctorow. Michael Jackson’s public image distorted his “real self” to the extent that no “real self” existed. Is Kellor her public image? In some respects. She would want it that way. Did she have bizarre subconscious dreams as Michael did? Did she reflect our public as he did? I think inclusion as a lesbian transgender woman fed her passion for including immigrants. And she framed issues in ways that spoke to public opinion.
Like Michael Jackson, Kellor’s private and the public image, the real person and the performer, became a part of a simultaneously created life based in imagination.
All-in-all, I ended up feeling great about my Frances Kellor project.
Brad Gooch spoke of not always liking his subject Flannery O’Connor. As I love Kellor, that problem only challenged me in terms of my tendency to ignore critics. Debby Applegate has written about a Madam who ran a prostitution ring. Kellor brought the question of “white slavery” while the Madam lived. Making connections with other scholar’s work is important. And, James Kaplan wrote that he had to find an “edge” to justify his writing the umpteenth biography of Frank Sinatra. Kellor’s amazing contributions to creating the modern world have gone unnoticed and obviously deserve recognition.
All-in-all, it was a wonderful conference. I got a book to a person who knew an agent. And, again, more than 100 people now have heard of Frances Alice Kellor who previously had not. But, I mostly enjoyed this brush with academics reminding me of the eternal unanswerable questions upon which any conscious biographer must dwell.
www.franceskellor.com
