Against a backdrop of images of such disparate female luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Frida Kahlo, an esteemed group of biographers, editors, and historians spent two days in Austin last week discussing their various experiences with the complexities of writing about nonfictional women. The occasion was the fourth Flair Symposium, a bi-annual event that honors Fleur Cowles and Flair, the revolutionary magazine that she edited in the 1950s. Each conference focuses on a different theme with this year’s being “Writing the Lives of Women.” It featured such panelists as Bonnie Angelo, the first female international bureau chief for Time magazine, and Diane Middlebrook, an English professor at Stanford, speaking on issues ranging from the representation of women in Hollywood to the willful mothers who reared modern American presidents. Many of the speakers had a sharp wit that brought welcome levity to the potentially weighty subject, and the tone of the conference managed to avoid female exaltation and male denouncement. In fact, the series of panel discussions often focused as much on the act of writing as on the issue of women as literary subjects. Many of the best offerings from Brenda Maddox, biographer of Nora Joyce (wife of James), were rather keen bits of advice for nonfiction writers: “The first sign you’re onto a good story is someone telling you there’s no story, and the way to start such a story is not to approach an expert in the field.” (In her case, Joyce experts knew diddly-squat about Nora.)
The female subjects at the heart of the discussions included the little-known (Nora Joyce), the glamorous (Joan Crawford), the powerful (Rose Kennedy), and the literary (Anne Sexton and Jane Austen). Several of the panelists were what might be perceived as peddlers of other people’s closeted skeletons — the dreaded biographer — but this gathering proved that they are simply writers who found exceptional and noteworthy stories in people who happen to not be men.
Although, as Angelo noted: “It’s difficult when writing about the lives of women not to take into account the people who happen to be men.” Indeed, in almost every discussion there was time given to the men in the subjects’ lives. In Angelo’s dialogue on modern “First Mothers,” she often mentioned the “First Fathers,” who were either “failures, feckless, or never present.” Maddox discussed her difficulty in exploring the life of Nora Joyce because few of her letters were saved, since she was “insignificant” compared to James.
Diane Middlebrook, Maddox’s co-panelist on the topic of “Whispers and Secrets: 20th-Century Women Discovered,” had another view on the biographer’s role. “Biographers are burglars, readers receive the stolen goods,” Middlebrook said, pointing out the simultaneous outrage at Kenneth Starr and skyrocketing sales of his report, one of the day’s many jabs at the current political climate. Middlebrook knows well the implications of the so-called biographical burglar, having faced fierce criticism for her use of notes from Anne Sexton’s therapist in her biography of the troubled poet.
Amidst the anecdotes, warnings, and debates of the day, almost every speaker took a moment to acknowledge UT’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and its veritable bounty of priceless records, letters, and manuscripts, which several of the attending orators used in researching their books. At the end of the final day of the conference, frail-bodied but strong-minded Fleur Cowles herself took to the podium to discuss her authorized biography of … a man (Salvador Dali). Her ruminations about dealing with the outrageous artist brought the conference to a fitting end, since it was truly concerned with writing about humans, those who happen to be women and men.
This article appears in November 13 • 1998 and November 13 • 1998 (Cover).