Tag Archives: biography

Dickens is 200, and I ramble

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Happy 200th, Charlie!

I feel immersed in Charles Dickens’s world and awed at how productive he was because I am reading the new biography Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. Always short of money the first half of his life, Dickens took on an enormous amount of work writing and editing for newspapers and monthly serials with ever-looming deadlines. It makes me feel that one ought to just produce, produce, produce  without fretting too much over perfection. Sure, the deadlines, strain, and constant labor created some bad melodrama but also some wonderful characters. (What are the chances this could work for my writing?)

Dickens wasn’t all genius and light. Despite becoming a moral crusader publicly, I’m just getting to the scandalous part  of the biography when his personal life shows him as his worst: bullying, sacrosanct, and cruel. I have great sympathy with his wife between the constant pregnancies for over a decade and then being summonarily put aside and made fun of as fat to friends while Dickens took up with an actress. Of course, he died at 58 less than 10 years later, which shows what happens when you take up with actresses. The biography itself is excellent, but if you are feeling lazy, as I often do when staring at 400+ pages, may I recommend:

Also, I’m inspired to try a Dicken’s novel as it was meant to be read originally- in serial form. Or close to it. I could sit down every week and read one chapter of Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend or maybe The Pickwick Club! Any recommendations on which would be best?

For more blathering about Dickens:

Savage Beauty: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Life

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To be a biographer must be a great thing, I for one find the lives of the writers and artists whose work I love as interesting as their work. I’ve been deep into Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like other poets I love, she difficult, demanding, calculating, celebrity-mongering, brilliant poet of love affairs and bohemianism and addictions. I swear I loved her for writing before I knew she had a place between Baudelaire and Byron in the annals of poete maudit.

I followed the poet from girlhood, where she was an ambitious poet, to adulthood, when she remained an ambitious child in an aging shell. The fairy tale Millay helped create of herself, as the little girl poet from Maine who gives voice to a generation of Jazz babies, a seductive whip of a girl sleeping with anybody whose anybody, falls apart.

Let the rest of us, she grows old. She doesn’t take it well. Chronic drinking develops into addiction rather than lifestyle, and a habit for morphine steals her middle age. She becomes a hollowed out thing who could no longer write. And this she records in a notebook even as she stops writing all else. What time she wakes up, what she consumes, everything until she goes to bed.

A fascinating blog called Daily Routines pieces together how various distinguished people past and present lived. Gerard Richter woke up at 6:15 am to fix his family breakfast before starting work in his studio at 8 am. The writer Haruki Murakami for example runs marathons after working all morning. Millay in her early 50s was quite the opposite:

Chart
Miss Millay
Dec. 31, 1940

Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day.
7:35- Urinated- no difficulty or distress
7:40- 3/8 gr. M.S. hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm…
7:45-8- smoked cigarette (Egyptian) mouth burns from excessive smoking
8:15- Thirsty, went to the ice box for a glass of water, but no water there. Take can of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude…
8:20- cigarette (Egyptian)
9:00- “
9:30- Gin Rickey (cigarette)
11:15- Gin Rickey
12:15- Martini (4 cigarettes)
12:45- 1/4 grain M.S. & cigarette
1.- Pain bad and also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

(M.S. is a morphine shot.)

Her devoted and charming husband Eugene took care of her like she was a little child through all this, even developing his own morphine addiction to see what she was going through by attempting to quit. After he died of lung cancer in his 50s, Edna was left alone and she kicked her morphine habit, although she continued to use prodigious amounts of alcohol and other pills. Yet she was finally beginning to write poetry again. Then, a year and half after Eugen died, she fell down the stairs of her home and broke her neck.

Resistance and Success: Career Portraitist Le Brun

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Self-portrait, Paris, 1782 (27 years old)

Resistance and success came in tandem to Le Brun as a female painter in French fin de siecle society. The daughter of a portraitist, Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun (1755- 1842) was painting portraits professionally in her early teens from her parent’s home. As this was illegal without a license, Le Brun had to publicly apply for license and the French Academy (unwillingly) had to display her works as part of the process. This was in 1774, when Le Brun was 19 and a year before she married a painter and art dealer who would help her rise. Soon Le Brun found more success than resistance, as Marie Antoinette invited her to court to paint her portrait. The Queen’s invitation laid the foundation for Le Brun’s great success as the portrait painter of her day.

Self-Portrait with Daughter, Paris, 1789 (34 years old)


Le Brun’s skilled, Rococo style and personal warmth pleased the Queen so much that Le Brun was commissioned to paint many at the royal court. In 1783, Le Brun and another woman were both admitted as members of the French Academy (although only through the political pressures of the Queen).

Self-Portrait, Russia, 1800 (45 years old)


The French revolution upset all social order, and Le Brun fled the country. She spent years painting the heads of state of Italy, Russia, and Austria. Then, Napoleon welcomed her back to France, and Le Brun remained an active painter well into her older years, painted over 800 paintings and wrote memoirs that provide a glimpse into how artist’s were trained. She lived to be 87 years old, and is as remarkable for steady production of work as well as her rise and fall with the tides of national fortune. All the more remarkable for doing it as a woman.

Self-Portrait, 1808, Paris, 56 years old