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Exciting(?) News From the Past

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So, faithful readers (“reader”? anyone?) are dying to know: who IS the historically significant, hitherto unknown woman I mentioned in my last post? Actually, really faithful readers will find the revelation to be old news, since I’ve mentioned her before in this space.

Her name was Eliza Anderson — or, to be more complete, Eliza Crawford Anderson Godefroy, and she lived from 1780 to 1839. That she’s unknown is probably self-evident, unless you’re one of the handful of people who know about her. So, why is she historically significant? I think she may well have been the first woman to edit a magazine in the United States.

Perhaps this fact strikes you as something less than earth-shaking, and it surely won’t require the rewriting of high school textbooks. But if you read through secondary source after secondary source, and they all identify someone ELSE as the first female magazine editor — someone, that is, who came later — you can find this tidbit of knowledge pretty exciting. At least, I can!

It’s not just that Eliza was the first, of course. She edited her magazine in a pretty interesting way, and she had a pretty amazing — if ultimately sad — life. I’m currently working on a scholarly article about her, but it’s a safe bet that very few people will ever read it. So I thought I might add, marginally, to the number of people who know about Eliza Anderson by occasionally posting some snippets about her here. If you’re intrigued, please come back for more!

The Uses of Nonfiction

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Once again, it’s been quite a while since my last post — and every once in a while I get a reminder that someone is actually reading this blog, or trying to! At which point I feel guilty for not providing them with fresh material. So here goes … and, as I’ve been advised by more experienced bloggers, I’ll try to keep it light and breezy. And short.

So, what have I been doing since I last posted? Well, for one thing, I’ve written a 280-page novel, which I now have to figure out if I can possibly get published in the current dismal climate. (I’m hoping that a contemporary comic novel about mother-daughter relationships might be more marketable than a 450-page historical novel about two real women no one has ever heard of. But I might be wrong about that.)

I’ve also gone back, sort of, to the subject of the historical novel I WAS working on, before I took a break a few months ago to write the contemporary one. The only thing is, I’m not actually working on the novel. Instead, I’ve decided I need to write a nonfiction, scholarly historical article about one of the real women whose life I was going to fictionalize. Why? Because (1) I’ve discovered this woman was historically significant, and (2) no one knows about her. Fiction has its uses, but in this case the historical record needs to be corrected. And it seems the best way to do that is to put on my historian’s hat.

Stay tuned for more on this remarkable woman and why I think historians need to know about her.

Julie & Julia & Me

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Sometimes life throws you better plot twists than fiction.

The other day I saw the new movie “Julie & Julia,” which is about (among other things) writing and the satisfaction of having your writing efforts acknowledged. As most people probably know by now, it’s the dual story of Julia Child, the woman who brought French cuisine to a meat-loaf-and-jello-mold America in the early sixties, and Julie Powell, the aspiring writer who recently had the clever idea of blogging about her effort to spend a year making all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook.

In the course of her exhausting self-imposed mission, Julie comes to idolize Julia – as does any moviegoer who remembers “The French Chef” fondly and who sees her uncannily embodied by the amazing Meryl Streep. Julie conceives of her year of cooking as a kind of homage to Julia, finds inspiration in the older woman’s determination to overcome hurdles, and yearns to meet her. So it comes as something of a shock when Julie learns, through a reporter, that the aging Mrs. Child doesn’t actually think much of her endeavor.

My husband’s comment, after the movie, was that it would have been so much nicer if Julia had actually appreciated Julie’s project. Well, yes, it would have led to a heartwarming moment, perhaps even a teary-eyed meeting between the two women. And it certainly would have been more in line with our expectations as viewers.

But that’s the thing about real life: people don’t always act the way you’d expect them to. Who knows why Julia Child took a dislike to Julie Powell’s blog? Maybe she simply turned into a crotchety old lady – much as we’d like to avoid contemplating that possibility. It’s not clear, from the movie, that she’d actually even read the blog.

But one thing seems clear, at least to me: whatever else may have been fictionalized in the movie, this was one plot twist that wasn’t invented. It’s just too unsatisfying, too bizarre. (And, just having read one of Julie Powell’s blog posts — on this very site, no less –I’ve discovered I’m right about this.) But it leads to something of an epiphany. Once Julie gets over her disappointment and dismay, she realizes (with the help of her saintly husband) that she doesn’t actually need the real Julia Child, because she’s still got the Julia Child of her imagination in her head.

And that seems to me far more interesting than the tender scene that might have ensued had Julia embraced Julie as her disciple and spiritual heir. When you spend that much time thinking and writing about a real but remote figure, she inevitably becomes – at least to some extent – your own creation. She takes on two lives and two personalities: her own, and the one you’ve invented for her.

Once again, I’m led to contemplate the relative safety of writing about people who are dead and therefore unable to spout their scorn to reporters from the Christian Science Monitor. Although of course, writers do owe more respect and deference to the living, not only because they’re capable of complaining, but because they’re capable of being hurt. (Judging from the movie, though, there didn’t seem to be anything in Julie’s blog that Julia should have found hurtful or disrespectful – far from it.)

When I was in college, something spurred me to try to make Julia Child’s recipe for French bread. I waited 13 hours for the dough to rise. Sadly, it never did. But after we saw the movie, my husband urged me to go out and buy another copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and try the recipe for coq au vin (actually, he said HE would try it, but somehow I was the one who ended up doing it). The result was delicious (and why wouldn’t it be, with an entire bottle of red wine, a quarter of a cup of cognac, and a whole stick of butter in a recipe that served 4 or 5?). But I was completely frazzled and exhausted.

Julie and Julia, my hat is off to both of you.

Getting Beyond Chapter One

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Anyone who’s keeping track may notice a gap of several months between my last blog post and this one. I’d like to say it’s only because I’ve been so busy writing a novel these last few months, but that would only be partly true. Given that this blog is ostensibly devoted to the interchange between history and fiction, and given that the novel I’ve been working is distinctly non-historical, I haven’t really been in the mindset that would lead me into thoughts that fit the blog.

But that doesn’t mean I HAVEN’T been busy writing a novel. In fact, after starting one at the beginning of May, I’ve just finished a second draft of 275 pages. I didn’t quite make the “write a novel in a month” deadline, but I finished the first draft in about six weeks — which, if I say so myself, is pretty amazing. Not that it was a polished piece of work, but I suppose that wasn’t the point. What WAS the point, you may ask? Just to get words on paper, to get the creative juices flowing, I suppose. And to get to the end.

Like some other writers I know, I have a tendency to start every day’s writing session by going back over what I’ve written before, revising it, moving a comma here or there, second-guessing all my previous choices. Taken to an extreme, this can lead to writing the first chapter over and over and over again. So after a few months you might end up with a really good first chapter, but no second, third, fourth, etc. So I’d have to say that forcing myself to write a draft this quickly was a good discipline.

And did it lead to a good result? At this point it’s too early for me to tell. I did quite a bit of revising in the second draft, but I’m still at the stage where I’m not sure I have enough distance from what I’ve written to tell whether it’s working or not. For that I’ll be looking forward to the reactions of a few others, including the members of my invaluable writing group — which I’ve roused from its semi-dormancy for the occasion.

But even if I end up deciding that this novel is one for the recycling pile, at least I won’t have wasted years of my life on it — months, perhaps, but not years. And time spent writing may never be truly wasted. If I’ve made mistakes in writing this partiular manuscript, I hope I’ll be able to learn from them and not make the same mistakes next time around. In any event, I certainly enjoyed the experience of writing it (or most of it, anyway), and — as almost always happens when you really put your mind to writing something — I feel I gained a few new insights and made a few new connections between things along the way.

And now it’s time to try to get back to the early 19th century…. I’m afraid the next first draft may take me a little longer than six weeks, but let’s hope that after six weeks I’ll at least have moved beyond the first chapter.

Back to the Present

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Some time ago a friend told me about something called National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that participants set aside one month–the month of November–and try to crank out a 175-page novel.

My reaction was: you’ve got to be kidding. It took me eight years to write my first novel, a historical one. I’ve been researching and writing my second for at least a year and a half, and I’ve only got about 80 pages to show for it. How could anyone possibly write a novel in a month?

But about three weeks ago, I was feeling kind of bogged down in my novel-in-progress. It was becoming more of a chore than an artistic calling. Then I had a flash of inspiration for a completely different kind of novel: light, comic, and contemporary. Indeed, based on my own experience. I wouldn’t need to do any research, I was living it. But how could I abandon my work-in-progress after sinking all that work into it?

Then I remembered NaNoWriMo, as fans of National Novel Writing Month like to abbreviate it. What if I just took a month off and banged something out?

So it’s been about three weeks now and I’m on page 130. And I’m having a blast. For me, it’s been liberating not to have to constantly consult history books and documents to make sure I’m not making mistakes. And the luxury of being able to come up with cultural references without doing extensive background research! Plus there’s the satisfaction of turning one’s own sometimes painful experience into something that (I hope) will make others laugh. Regardless of what others think, though, it’s definitely helped me maintain a certain ironic distance from the real experience that is grist for my novelistic mill.

But, as I’ve always known, there are pitfalls involved in writing about things drawn from your own life–not least of which is the danger that other people will recognize themselves in your writing, or think they do. It is, of course, fiction. None of the characters in this novel is true to the real-life models I’ve based them on. I’ve exaggerated and invented freely. But I’ve also used some dialogue taken directly from conversations I’ve had or overheard, and there are certainly some details the real-life models would recognize. I can say it’s fiction until I’m blue in the face, and inevitably there will be some people whose feelings might well be hurt if they read it.

I don’t like hurting people’s feelings. That’s why I write about people who have been dead for a good long time–they’re not about to rise up and complain. But in this case I just couldn’t help myself. And I can always console myself with the thought that, given the state of the publishing industry, chances are this novel will never see the light of day.

And if it doesn’t, all I’ve lost is a month (or perhaps a bit more–I may allow myself to cheat). On the upside, I’ll have gained a certain amount of enjoyment–not to mention the retention of my sanity in the face of events that are enough to drive just about anyone off the deep end!

Ahead of Her Time

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There are some lives that don’t need to be turned into historical fiction because they already read like a novel, if not a movie. And there are some historical figures that are alluring to us because they seem … well, so modern.

Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), is a case in point. She was well ahead of her time, advocating things that don’t seem so radical to us now but which were practically unheard of in the 18th century: education for women that extended beyond drawing and music and the like; physical exercise for females; marriage based on mutual respect and companionship.

But Wollstonecraft didn’t just write about her principles, she lived them: she bore a child out of wedlock to a man she had fallen madly in love with–in the midst of the French Revolution, no less (she had traveled from her native England to Paris in order to write about the events transpiring there). True, when the object of her affection (an American cad named Gilbert Imlay) turned out to be a philanderer, she did what many women in similar circumstances have done, before and since: she tried to commit suicide. Twice.

But then she picked herself back up, wrote another book, and found herself another man–the philosopher William Godwin, who fell in love with her through reading that very book. They didn’t plan on getting married either, because they objected to the institution on principle. But when Wollstonecraft found herself pregnant again (thanks to their birth control method, which consisted of having sex as frequently as possible), they sacrificed their principles for the sake of their child: being born illegitimate was a substantial handicap.

Theirs was a very modern marriage: Godwin, needing his space, maintained separate quarters near Wollstonecraft’s home. In some ways they led independent lives. At the same time, though, they read each other’s work and encouraged each other’s literary endeavors and were generally pretty happy, despite their lack of funds. But it was not to last: Wollstonecraft (now Mrs. Godwin) died as a result of giving birth to their daughter, also named Mary. (She grew up to be Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.)

It’s hard for us, in the 21st century, to imagine how much courage it took to say the things that Mary Wollstonecraft said–and how much more courage it took to live her life the way she did. In an age when celebrities routinely have children out of wedlock (I remember seeing one headline in a celebrity magazine that said something like, “I want to get married BEFORE I have the baby,” says Jamie Lynn Spears”), it takes a leap of imagination to understand what it meant for an educated, upper middle class woman to choose to become what used to be called an unwed mother.

Actually, Wollstonecraft didn’t trumpet the details of her unconventional life when she was alive; she even called herself “Mrs. Imlay” before she married Godwin, to conceal the fact that she had had her first child out of wedlock. That cover was, of course, blown to some extent when she turned around and became Mrs. Godwin. But most of the details came out only after her death, when Godwin–in a supremely misguided attempt to pay tribute to his deceased wife–spilled all the beans in a memoir.

For the next hundred years or so, the name “Wollstonecraft” became synonymous with “immoral crackpot.” Even 19th-century feminists, building on her legacy, did their best to disassociate themselves from her.

And of course, in some ways she was a crackpot–or at least a weirdo. She was someone who simply didn’t care what people thought, or didn’t care that much. I sometimes wonder what I would have thought of Wollstonecraft had I been one of her contemporaries. I hope I would have admired and appreciated her, but I doubt I would have had the courage to be her.

And I wonder, sometimes, who today’s “Wollstonecrafts” are. Do I dismiss them as crackpots, or am I able to recognize that they’re the voice of the future?

I don’t know. But I do know who should play Mary Wollstonecraft in the movie: Claire Danes. Trust me on this!

Keeping It Real

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I’m a big fan of Jill Lepore’s articles for The New Yorker, and I was particularly intrigued by one she wrote back in March 2008, called “Just the Facts, Ma’am.” Lepore, who is a professor of history at Harvard, made a number of points that echoed my own thoughts, but what really struck me was her observation that fiction “can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people … the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.”

Right on, I thought (or would have thought, if I still thought in the idiom of the sixties). That’s what I was trying to do with my novel A More Obedient Wife, and what I’m currently trying to do with the novel I’m working on: taking obscure historical figures–and my main characters all happen to be women–and supplementing the fragmentary evidence with my imagination in order to bring them to some kind of life.

So when I heard that Lepore had collaborated with another historian of 18th-century America, Jane Kamensky–who teaches at Brandeis–on a historical novel set in the 1760’s called Blindspot, I was eager to read it. I’ll admit I was a little skeptical when I heard it was a collaboration–I can’t imagine writing a novel with another person (even another person who looks almost like my twin, as Lepore and Kamensky do, judging from the book jacket photo). And I became even more skeptical when a friend told me the book had been panned in Publisher’s Weekly. But other reviews have been pretty favorable, and I tried to approach it with an open mind.

There’s certainly much in the book to admire. The authors know their 18th-century stuff (they’re the kind of readers I dreaded for my own book–the kind who’d be likely to pick up immediately on any embarrassing errors), and the style is fairly authentic to the period, but not so authentic a modern reader will find it tough going.

Still, my basic reaction was disappointment. I found it hard to care about the characters as much as I wanted to–they didn’t seem quite real to me. Part of the problem may be that the authors are at great pains (perhaps too great pains) to create a bawdy romp in the earlier part of the book, and then, when things take a more serious turn, it’s hard for the reader to switch gears. Or it was for this reader, anyway.

But another problem may be that these characters just aren’t real, in the sense that they don’t seem to think and feel like the vast majority of people of their class and their era. Not only are they sexually uninhibited–a characteristic I imagine has existed among humans in all times and places, at least in private–but they write about their sexual adventures in graphic detail.

I was readier to believe this of the main male character, Stewart Jameson, a portrait painter who is something of a rake, apparently based loosely on the artist Gilbert Stuart. But I had a harder time with the female character, Fanny Easton, a well bred Boston damsel who has fallen into distress. Okay, so she’s been seduced and had a child out of wedlock; but still–given the strict standards of modesty with which she would have been inculcated–I find it hard to believe she’d enthusiastically record an episode of extramarital oral sex in her journal.

Not surprisingly, Jameson and Easton also hold rather modern views on the role of women and equality of the sexes (although, in the authors’ defense, this is partly explained by the fact that for most of the novel, Fanny is disguised as a boy–so by the time Jameson discovers her true identity, he’s already formed certain opinions about her).

And not only are they opposed to slavery, they both have strong relationships to black characters: Fanny considers a slave child fathered by her own father to be her sister, to whom she feels deep familial ties–an attitude I suspect even the most ardent abolitionists of the time would have shied away from. And Jameson’s best friend is an African who has been highly educated by scholars as an experiment on the capacities of the African race, then sold into slavery–an experience that has left him irritatingly, if understandably, embittered. (This is the second novel I’ve come across lately featuring a character in the Boston of the 1760’s who has been educated this way–the first being the title character in the intriguing young adult novel, The Astonishing Adventures of Octavian Nothing. How many of these Africans could there have been?)

I can’t say with authority that people who held these attitudes didn’t exist in the 1760’s, but having read pretty extensively in the correspondence of Americans who lived some 30 years later, I will say that I’m highly skeptical. I suspect that Lepore and Kamensky just endowed their fictional creations with 21st-century systems of ethics because–well, it’s a whole lot easier to write in the voices of people you basically identify with, And it’s a whole lot easier for readers to get behind them–at least, for those readers who haven’t spent years perusing correspondence between actual 18th-century people. And hey, perhaps you’ll say, what’s the big deal? After all, it’s fiction!

Yes, but. If, as Lepore said in her New Yorker piece, what fiction can do is tell the story of ordinary people, shouldn’t she make sure that her fictional 18th-century characters aren’t just 21st-century wolves in 18th-century sheep’s clothing? Otherwise, whose story is she telling?

In retrospect, I see that this was the advantage of my decision to incorporate into my novels letters to and from the historical figures my characters are based on. At times it’s something of a pain: there, in black and white, are these inconvenient statements I would prefer to ignore. I’m forced to deal with attitudes that are alien to me, and are most likely going to be alien to my readers. As reflected in the title–A More Obedient Wife–these people didn’t exactly see marriage the way we do. And some of my characters owned slaves. While it’s clear from the letters that some of them cared about the slaves’ welfare, and viewed them as something more than just a piece of property, the fact remains that they owned other human beings.

When I had one of my characters in A More Obedient Wife, Hannah Iredell, muse that it was easy to forget that her slaves had feelings just as she did, one of the members of my writing group objected: how could Hannah say such a thing, she demanded indignantly? But to my way of thinking, how could she not? How could Hannah own slaves unless she was able to convince herself that they were in some fundamental way different from herself?

In the book I’m working on now, set in the early 19th century, I have other problems: both of my upper-crust main characters, to different degrees, express opinions about “merchants” and their vulgarity that are archaic if not downright repugnant. One of them is starry-eyed about titled Europeans–any titled Europeans. The other holds fairly advanced opinions about the role of women, but even she buys into commonly held female stereotypes of the time–and also expresses horror when she finds that her estranged husband has been socializing with servants!

My objective, and my challenge, is to find common ground with my characters despite the radical difference in our views of the world, a kind of “nothing human is alien to me” approach. I feel it keeps my characters real, in the sense that they’re rooted in authentic voices of their period.

But beyond that, it forces me–and, I hope, my readers–to stretch a bit, to empathize with people who were in many ways quite different from ourselves. And that, it seems to me, is one thing fiction can do that–with any luck–will carry over into our daily lives. We all need to figure out how to put ourselves into the shoes, and inside the heads, of people who are definitely not “us.”

Fame and Obscurity

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When I stumbled across one of the two main characters in the novel I’m currently working on–Betsy Patterson Bonaparte–at an exhibit of Gilbert Stuart portraits some years back, I was intrigued. Here was a clearly fascinating historical character languishing in obscurity.

Yes, her beauty and her marriage to Napoleon’s youngest brother in 1803 had catapulted her to celebrity status in the 19th century–a collection of her letters published shortly after her death in 1879 referred to her as “one of the most famous women in America,” a statement that was to me a sadly ironic comment on the fleeting nature of fame. Sure, she was the subject of numerous biographies and historical novels into the early 20th century, and during the same era there were two silent films and a Broadway play based on her life. But who really remembered her now?

Well, apparently, a lot of people–at least in the environs of her native Baltimore. The other day I was at the Maryland Historical Society’s library in that city, putting in a request for a box of her correspondence. A man standing next to me, who turned out to be a Historical Society staff member, asked me what I was researching. When I told him, he informed me that he himself had done a lot of research on Betsy, and that if there was anything I needed to know I should just ask him.

Okay, maybe that’s not so surprising–after all, the MdHS is where Betsy’s papers are housed, along with various personal items. They’re even having something of a Betsy Bonaparte festival in the fall of 2010. But a little later, I was giving a luncheon talk at a club in Baltimore called the Hamilton Club (among those present were several people from my Baltimore childhood and adolescence, including my high school English teacher, who must now be approaching 90). The talk was primarily about my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, but when I mentioned my work-in-progress, I was surprised to find that virtually everyone in the room seemed to know all about Betsy.

“I must be the only person who grew up in Baltimore who’d never heard of Betsy Patterson,” I remarked. (Baltimoreans, true to their conservative nature, seem to prefer to call her by her maiden name). I’ve even discovered that a bakery in downtown Baltimore I liked to frequent when I was a child was called “Betsy Patterson’s.” Somehow, I’d never noticed the name.

Well, all right–maybe everyone in Baltimore has heard of her. But what about the rest of the country? I now live in Washington, D.C., a city that has a lot of its own history to deal with; Betsy made a number of appearances here in the early 19th century (including a very high-profile one when she appeared at a party wearing an apparently see-through dress), but in relative terms she must still be pretty obscure. Or so I thought.

Yesterday I toured an old plantation house called Riversdale located in what is now a Washington suburb. It belonged to a remarkable woman named Rosalie Stier Calvert, who left behind a lot of letters (published in a book called Mistress of Riversdale). In several of these letters she mentions Betsy, and I’m about to write a scene that places Betsy on a visit there. So I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the place.

It’s a beautiful house, lovingly restored, and I had an extremely knowledgeable and personable gentleman as my docent for what turned out to be a private tour (at only $3 per adult admission, this place is a bargain – I urge those living in or visiting the DC area to check it out). I kept hinting that I was primarily interested in what the house would have looked like in 1803 or 1804, without mentioning exactly why. But then I started to explain that I was working on a historical novel.

“Betsy!” muttered my docent, somewhat wearily.

How did he know? Does he routinely get visitors working on historical novels about Betsy Bonaparte? How many of us are out there? I was too taken aback to ask.

Of course, it’s possible that writing about someone who’s reasonably well known could actually be an advantage; maybe more people will be willing to buy and read a book about someone who’s not that obscure. But for me, part of the appeal of writing historical novels is precisely to rescue my (real) characters from obscurity, to make a “discovery.” Clearly, Betsy has already been discovered.

But I can console myself with the thought that I have another character up my sleeve, one that only a very few people know about–even in Baltimore, which was also her hometown. Her name was Eliza Anderson Godefroy. And if you’re interested in knowing more about her (as well as in finding out some things about Betsy that may not be so well known), you’ll need to read my next book. Of course, first I’ll need to write it!

My Dinner With Woody

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The novel I’m currently working on has led me to contemplate the phenomenon of celebrity: one of my characters, Betsy Bonaparte, was catapulted into the public eye after her marriage to Napoleon’s youngest brother in 1803. In a way, she was the Paris Hilton of the early 19th century: young, beautiful, fabulously wealthy, and famous for being famous. (She also had a formidable intellect, but that’s not what she was famous for.) Complete strangers felt free to speculate about her private life, and even to write raunchy poetry about her when she appeared in public in a scandalously flimsy dress–sort of a 19th-century version of the Paris Hilton pornographic video episode, if anyone remembers that at this point.

The other evening I had a brush with celebrity myself. Not with Paris Hilton, but with someone who’s figured far larger in my own psyche. On the way to a benefit performance and dinner at the Metropolitan Opera, my hostess–a relative of mine–casually mentioned that I would be seated next to Woody Allen at dinner. My husband would be next to his wife Soon Yi.

WHAT?? For the next five and a half hours–through the cocktail reception and the four and a half hour performance–I suffered low-level panic. What could I possibly say to him? How could I keep him entertained? I knew he was famously reclusive, and I had the feeling he wasn’t the type to suffer fools gladly.

What is it about the prospect of encountering a celebrity that frazzles us so (or me, at least)? Part of it, I think, is the disconcerting feeling of seeing someone who looks so familiar but whom you’ve never actually met in the flesh before. During the performance, seated right behind Woody and Soon Yi, I kept thinking that they looked exactly like themselves (although Woody’s hair is grayer than I remembered). It was eerie, like seeing a painting come to life.

The other thing is what I might call the knowledge imbalance: when you meet a celebrity like Woody Allen, he knows nothing about you, but you already know a lot about him. Or I did, anyway. I asked my 18-year-old daughter if she knew anything about Woody and Soon Yi, and she had no idea. But I remember vividly the shock of finding out about their relationship, back in 1992: how Woody’s companion of 12 years, Mia Farrow, had discovered nude pictures of her 22-year-old adopted daughter, Soon Yi, in Woody’s apartment; how he subsequently admitted to an affair; how, during the bitter custody battle that followed, Mia accused Woody of molesting their 7-year-old adopted daughter. The week the Soon Yi story broke was the one and only time I’ve actually purchased a copy of People magazine.

So I don’t usually follow these sorts of celebrity scandals–not closely, anyway (I’ll admit that I do on occasion leaf through People magazine in the supermarket checkout line). But this was personal. I grew up on Woody Allen. I felt like I knew him, maybe because he bears a resemblance to my Uncle Morris–and because his New York Jewish sensibility struck a chord. I haven’t loved all of his movies–some I’ve downright disliked–but there are concepts in life that I find I can only express through the prism of a Woody Allen movie (“Zelig-like,” is one adjective that comes to mind, along with the joke from Annie Hall about the guy whose brother thought he was a chicken–”We’d turn him in,” says the guy, “but we need the eggs”). I had a certain image of him, and it didn’t correspond with the reality of a 56-year-old man having an affair with a girl who was in effect, if not in the eyes of the law, his own stepdaughter.

This was obviously one topic I wasn’t going to bring up at dinner (when my husband asked what he should talk to Soon Yi about, I told him, “Just don’t ask her how they met”). But what made the knowledge imbalance even worse was that whether I brought it up or not, Woody would know that I knew. That awkwardness would hang in the air, as it always must when Woody Allen meets someone new (unless that someone was, like my daughter, still a baby when the scandal broke). It was implicit in the moment of introduction, when I said my name, and Woody said, unnecessarily, “Woody.”

After we were installed at our table, I was relieved when the woman sitting on the other side of Woody proceeded to engage him in a lengthy conversation. But eventually it was my turn. Actually, finding something to talk about was somewhat easier than I’d imagined. I asked him a few questions about his work, but he also talked about how much he’d liked Washington (where I live) when he came here to do standup in the sixties, and how he can’t go to the opera because he can’t stay up that late.

He was pleasant enough, but I had the distinct impression that he would have preferred to be elsewhere–probably in bed, asleep. Unlike some of the other celebrities in attendance, who had posed on the red carpet in their Yves St. Laurent outfits (the company was a sponsor of the event), Woody was there to see the opera–he’s a genuine fan. The other stuff–the paparazzi, the dinner conversation–was just something he had to put up with. He didn’t ask me anything about myself, but then, I didn’t expect him to. That’s part of the celebrity imbalance: I knew all about him (or thought I did), but he didn’t know anything about me, and didn’t particularly want to. My role, as I saw it, was to make his experience as painless as possible.

That weird false familiarity that surrounds a celebrity–the feeling that you already know this person even though you’ve never met–is heightened in Woody’s case because his off-screen persona is so similar to his on-screen one. At times I had the surreal feeling that Woody had either just stepped out of one of his movies, or I had just stepped into one (kind of like Mia Farrow’s character in The Purple Rose of Cairo, to use another Woody Allen metaphor). When our main course arrived–retro-comfort-food meat loaf with a hard-boiled egg in the middle–Woody stared at it glumly and then never touched it. A bit later the chair of the event took the podium and mentioned that she had chosen the menu to cut costs, in recognition of the economic crisis (never mind that it was described in the program as “Kobe Beef Meat Loaf”). Woody murmured, “So she’s the one I should complain to.” He could have been Alvy Singer, or Virgil Starkwell, or any of his other on-screen alter egos.

Throughout the conversation, I had a sort of double vision of him: he was–perhaps surprisingly–just an ordinary human being, doing ordinary things; but he was also a celebrity, someone whose life I knew way more about than I should have. When he mentioned that one reason he needed to get to bed early was that he took his daughters to school in the morning, I thought: how sweet, how normal. But at the same time I couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever done that for the three kids he’d had with Mia–one biological, two adopted. I doubted it. Hadn’t he refused to marry Mia, hadn’t he even maintained a separate apartment throughout their relationship? How did those three kids feel now about his apparently idyllic relationship with their sister, and the two little girls who were at the same time their half-sisters and their nieces?

But if you just looked at the two of them, Woody and Soon Yi, the way you’d look at any couple you’d just met, there seemed to be nothing odd about their relationship, apart from the 35-year age difference. When Woody decided it was time to go, I saw him give Soon Yi the same gesture–raised eyebrows, lowered chin–that my own husband has given me, for the same reason, on countless occasions. They seemed affectionate, companionable, happy. Who am I to judge them? Who am I to think I know all about them?

Some would say that celebrities have no right to complain about intrusions into their privacy. They’ve invited attention, the argument goes, and they have to take the bitter with the sweet. Certainly that’s true in some cases. Betsy Bonaparte, for example, could easily have worn more clothing and attracted less attention, and she chose not to. But in other situations it’s not so clear. Don’t celebrities have the right to fall in love–and act upon that feeling–without undergoing intense scrutiny, even when they violate society’s conventions? When Betsy’s marriage fell apart very publicly, did she deserve the scorn that some heaped upon her? Did Woody and Soon Yi?

But I guess it’s naive to expect that the public will ignore such goings on. After all, I didn’t exactly ignore the Soon Yi episode myself, and I’m writing a whole book about Betsy (although in my opinion the fact that she’s been dead for over 100 years absolves me of any responsibility to respect her privacy or refrain from judging her). Not to mention the fact that I’m writing this blog post now.

I guess the bottom line is that, while I continue to see Woody and Soon Yi as celebrities–and while I’m not about to forgot everything I’ve read about them–having had an actual brief encounter with them, I also can’t help but see them as human beings. Maybe it’s the fact that Soon Yi laughed at one of my jokes, or that Woody seemed genuinely interested in some of what I had to say; maybe I’m just flattered that they deigned to pay any attention to me at all. And maybe I’m impressed that, after enduring abuse that would send most people permanently underground, they’ve simply gotten on with their lives. I may never understand what happened between them, but I’m no longer feeling equipped to condemn it. Really, it’s none of my business.

[N.B. — Woody mentioned during dinner that the producers of the movie My Dinner With Andre originally wanted him to play the role ultimately played by Wallace Shawn–but he declined because he didn’t think he could memorize all those lines. Hence the title of this post.]

Plus Ca Change…

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“People don’t write letters any more!” When I go around speaking about my novel, A More Obedient Wife — which is based on letters written in the 18th century — I almost inevitably hear this comment. E-mail, cell phones, Facebook: they’ve all replaced good old-fashioned letter-writing, goes the lament.

I’m not saying people are wrong about this (although there’s something to be said for email, which theoretically can be printed out and preserved for posterity — and which, also theoretically, can actually be as finely crafted as a good old-fashioned letter). But what they may be wrong about is the assumption that there’s something modern about this complaint.

Proof (if any be necessary) that there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun came today as I was perusing a volume published in 1887. Entitled A Girl’s Life Eighty Years Ago, the book is a collection of letters by Eliza Southgate Bowne, a remarkable young woman and an apparently prolific correspondent. (In distinctly 21st-century fashion, I was perusing this volume online — Google Books is amazing!)

In any event, I began by reading the introduction, written by someone named Clarence Cook. Mr. Cook, after praising the quality of Eliza’s letters, embarks on a lament about modern life (again, this is 1887): “No doubt we have gained much,” Mr. Cook says, from modern inventions that have “reduced time and space to comparative insignificance.” But, of course, we’ve also lost some things — and “among these losses, that of letter-writing is perhaps the most serious. A whole world of innocent enjoyment for contemporaries and for posterity has been blotted out, and, so far as appears, nothing is taking its place.”

And Mr. Cook goes on, in words that sound strangely familiar: “Nowadays no one writes letters, and no one would have time to read them if they were written. Little notes fly back and forth, like swallows, between friend and friend, between parent and child, carrying the news of the day in small morsels easily digested; it is not worth while to tell the whole story with the pen, when it can be told in a few weeks, at the farthest, with the voice. For nobody now is more than a few weeks from anywhere.”

We can only speculate what paroxysms of despair Mr. Cook would suffer if he could be revived and plunked down in our midst, where “small morsels” of news do almost literally fly back and forth, and the few weeks of separation he marveled at has become no more than a few hours. He compares letters to the newly invented “toy, the phonograph,” which “will repeat what has been confided to it in the very voice of the speaker, with every tone and every inflection as clear as when first it spoke.” What, I wonder, would he make of Skype?

And yet, despite the decline of letter-writing bemoaned by Mr. Cook, historians have managed to find a fair amount of correspondence written after 1887. Perhaps letters got shorter (some of those early 19th-century letters were almost novella-length, having been composed over a period of days), but people continued to write them.

And no doubt one or two hundred years from now, historians of the future will find a way to unearth our own version of correspondence, even if it means digging up hard drives from landfills in order to retrieve our e-mails.