Postscripts

Frances Kiernan was a fiction editor at The New Yorker for 20 years. Then she was an editor at Houghton Mifflin, where an agent she knew called her one day and suggested that she should write a biography of Eudora Welty. "She's too private," Kiernan said, "but I could write a biography of Mary McCarthy," and that is how, in 1990, she "stumbled" into writing a biography of McCarthy, Seeing Mary Plain, which is quite a stumbling, as stumblings go (it's 845 pages long and wasn't published until 2000). On Monday afternoon, Kiernan spoke at the HRC to an audience of UT students and people interested in "the dark lady of American letters," as Kiernan called McCarthy. Kiernan chose McCarthy partly because she is nothing like her; McCarthy was more extroverted than introspective, and she didn't mind being in the spotlight. Editors, however, like to be sort of invisible. (Recently on Slate.com, Little, Brown Executive Editor Geoff Shandler wrote a diary in which he said, "Public mention is, for a book editor, like sunlight to a vampire. We don't want our names on the jackets. We don't want to go on television. If we've been noticed, we've failed. An editor is the shy girl in the back of the classroom. A writer is the shy girl with dyed green hair in the back of the classroom.") In Kiernan's proposal for writing Seeing Mary Plain, she made it clear that she didn't want to write a "stately literary biography"; she opted for an oral history, like Jean Stein's Edie: American Girl or George Plimpton's Truman. "I liked the idea of going out with my tape recorder," Kiernan said. "I also liked the idea that I wouldn't be doing a lot of writing," she quipped, even though it would take her two years to complete the more than 200 interviews with people who knew McCarthy and seven years to compile them all and write the book. Then Kiernan started talking about things that, for one reason or another, aren't talked about very often: why she let the various people she interviewed see the transcription of what they said before it went into the book and have approval over their text; that although she did her homework before she began interviewing, she didn't really have a monolithic set of questions to ask, preferring instead to let her subjects take the conversation where they wanted; that she made quite conscious decisions about what to wear to the various interviews (long skirt, short skirt, hair done up, hair down). She confessed that she couldn't even muster up the courage to ask art critic Clement Greenberg about his affair with McCarthy that took place near the end of McCarthy's marriage to Edmund Wilson. "I know why you're here," he finally said to her, and she blushed. (Clement Greenberg: short skirt.) After Kiernan interviewed an 80-year-old gentleman who knew McCarthy, he suggested that he and Kiernan and McCarthy should all go to dinner soon, with the slight inconvenience that McCarthy had already died. The irony of Kiernan's talk is that Seeing Mary Plain, which is nothing if not comprehensive, could easily be categorized as the work of an ace reporter.

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Upcoming

Dagoberto Gilb will be at BookPeople on Wednesday, March 7, at 7pm, to read from his new collection of stories, Woodcuts of Women.