A Brilliant Paternal Study, ‘Twice Born’

‘Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography’ By Hester KaplanCatapult, 256 pagesIt turns out that Justin Kaplan, acclaimed biographer of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, is a more devious and mysterious subject for his daughter than his own biographical subjects were for him. Even worse, she gets little help from her novelist mother, Anne Bernays, who serves as a kind of bulwark against her prying biographer-daughter.Husband and wife formed the kind of alliance that rebuffed most inquiries into a union that reminds me of what Anthony West said about his mother, Rebecca West. Discussing her affair with H. G. Wells, tacitly tolerated by his wife Jane, West declared his mother was simply no match for the “marching strength of a married couple.”How does a daughter proceed to write about a father who would not allow her to call him father or dad or anything but the name he preferred: Joe. She asked why. He never explained. He presented himself as an orphan, brought up by a black woman who served his family loyally. Yet he never allowed his daughter to get to know this second mother, and Ms. Kaplan was later surprised to learn that he did indeed have family — cousins and other relatives — with whom he rarely had any contact.Justin Kaplan was a twice born man — writing biography serving as that second life, pursued mainly in his study that for the most part was off limits to his resentful children. He was kind and forbearing but not forthcoming. He was so aloof that Ms. Kaplan admits that she did not read his work until after he died.Other than his marriage, Kaplan gave his all to his books, and that is where his daughter seeks to find him — in the margins — as she find parallels between Twain’s own early loss of a father and his reaction to his celebrated life that Kaplan later experienced after the phenomenal success in 1966 of “Mr. Clemons and Mark Twain,” winning both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.Although I knew that Justin Kaplan is considered one of America’s great biographers, I was surprised to learn how revered he became in the literary community, inspiring the admiration of novelists like Bernard Malamud, who may well have had Kaplan in mind when he published his novel about a biographer, “Dubin’s Lives.”Ms. Kaplan nurses some understandable grievances against withholding parents even as she comes to terms with how obsessive working on a biography can become. She scours her father’s papers, imagines how he would bridle at the invasion of his privacy, even though, of course, that is what he did as a biographer.Justin Kaplan and family. InstagramUnlike what you get in most biographies, in “Twice Born” the biographer allows her subject to talk back to her, to engage in conversations they never had, but that are based on her reading of her father’s character. These are some of the most moving moments in this biography/memoir, when Ms. Kaplan gives her father the words he never actually spoke to her. It is like reading a biographical novel that is especially authoritative.This is not a work of self-absorption. Ms. Kaplan provides many wonderful scenes when writers visit the Kaplan home and sometimes misbehave, occasioning, afterwards, fascinating analyses by her parents of a self-regarding literary world in which so many of the successful and unsuccessful worry about where their next words will come from and whether or not they will measure up to the quality of their distinguished company.Justin Kaplan enunciated certain principles of biography that his daughter sometimes honors in the breach. Just as she almost gets carried away in invented scenes, she hears his cautionary voice, telling her that she cannot make up stuff in the service of a good story. Ms. Kaplan is quite open about her frustrations but also respectful, in the end, of what her father did not want her to know. What eludes her, she concludes, was part of his essential self, what he wanted kept for himself.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography.”

A Brilliant Paternal Study, ‘Twice Born’

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