The Tricky Art of Triangulating Biography and Fiction

‘Happy Landings: Emilie Loren’s Life, Writing, and Wisdom’By Patti BenderCity Point Press, 637 pages University Press, 256 pages‘Orlando: A Graphic Novel’’By Susanne KuhlendahlHelvetiq, 207 pagesThat biography is the product of triangulation is not often addressed in biographies, which arise out of the interplay between biographer, subject, and the biography itself. Conversing with Michael Foot and Julie Hamilton, husband and daughter of my subject, Jill Craigie, about their different memories of certain key incidents, I joked that I would have to write my biography in two columns.Patti Bender has done just that in her biography of Emilie Baker Loring, whose adventure-mystery-romance novels sold more than 37 million copies. In one column we have the biographer explaining: “Emilie’s childhood was filled with romance, from comedic and melodramatic versions on stage, to countless versions in print, to her parents’ real-life love affair that made her father feel like ‘an ice-cream factory in full operation on one side, and a hot air furnace on the other.’”Across from this passage about Loring’s childhood in a righthand column is an excerpt from her novel, “Where Beauty Dwells” (1941): “Never marry, Di until the touch of a man’s shoulder against your cheek catches at your breath, the look in his eyes sets you afire to feel his lips on yours, turns you weak with desire to be in his arms.” Thus a character in a novel reveals how fictional dialogue arises out of the novelist’s experience without the biographer having to say so. In short, the reader of Ms. Bender’s book is situated beside the biographer, without the kind of intrusive finger pointing that sometimes bloats biographies.Another sort of triangulation is illustrated in Susanne Kuhlendahl’s graphic adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “gender fluidity” novel, to use Anna Snaith’s description that serves as a sort of prologue to the fictional biography of a figure who changes from male to female and lives on from the Elizabethan to the early modern period.The original 1928 edition of “Orlando” featured photographs of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover, the model for Orlando, inviting a biographical interpretation of a biographical novel, which Ms. Kuhlendahl then triangulates by situating Woolf herself on the page, first shown in modern dress dipping an Elizabethan pen into an ink jar, with books she relied on for research, including one on Constantinople where Orlando becomes a woman.Is it my imagination, or does Woolf have a sort of bemused look on her face? Other drawings show her wearing glasses, opening a huge illustrated book, resting (taking a break from composition?), opening another book, gesturing with her hands, walking in the country with her scarf furled out by the wind, even as the text describes “THE GREAT FROST OF 1608’ petrifying the countryside and causing an “EXTREMITY OF WANT” while “LONDON ENJOYED A CARNIVAL OF THE UTMOST BRILLIANCE” in an ice show on the Thames that stimulates in Orlando “IMAGES, METAPHORS OF THE MOST EXTREME AND EXTRAVAGANT AND TWINED AND TWISTED IN HIS MIND.”The extremes and extravagances, the twining and twisting of even one life is evoked in Orlando’s multiple identities, and in Woolf’s accompanying declaration: “For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have many thousand…and these selves of which we are built up, one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own. “The “elsewhere,” the “rights of their own,” emerge when the biographer is challenged, when two witnesses disagree, when someone objects that the biographer does not do justice to the subject known to the objector. One of Ms. Kuhlendahl’s concluding illustrations shows Orlando, now out of Elizabethan costume and dressed modishly, behind the wheel of a convertible, out for a drive passing a farm, with the caption: “Orlando . . . ?” Another caption follows: WE ALL BRING DIFFERENT SELVES FOR DIFFERENT OCCASIONS. WHEN YOU ARE SUDDENLY IN THE COUNTRY YOU NEED ANOTHER ONE.” The caps, different fonts, and bold lettering are yet another way to triangulate a biography. Mr. Rollyson is the author of “To Be A Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie,” “A Private Life of Michael Foot,” and writes about “Orlando” in “Biography: A User’s Guide.”

The Tricky Art of Triangulating Biography and Fiction

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