A young woman asked me during a reading, “Why did you write Eleanor of Aquitaine’s history as a memoir, rather than as a straight historical biography?”
The short answer is that there are already plenty of historical biographies. The honest answer is more elaborate, taking work to explain. A “straight” historical biography is as good as its author’s ability to gather research, to link known facts artfully, and to connect patterns established by intelligent observation. The biographer stands at a distance, limited by sources, resources, linguistic ability, available time and other commitments and constraints. The end-product is likely to be rational, and the real players in medieval Europe’s dynasties were about as far from rational as human affairs can get! (Believe me, I produced current affairs television for a few decades.)
On the other hand, writing a memoir of a person long dead strays past reason and steps into passion. The whole affaire between subject and author perforce touches passion or it sacrifices valuable qualities. In memoir, the known facts become guides, and the author must play two roles: first, as the principal actor in the subject’s life-long drama; second, as a venturer beyond one’s own mind and mental resources, tapping into a greater, eternal consciousness. In memoir, the author/actor must transcend what Eckhart Tolle describes in The Power of Now as an “opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship.” This screen of mind-busy-ness, Tolle writes, “creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” One forgets that “underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is.”
So, can we derive a clearer or more imaginative picture by channeling our subject’s memoirs as if we were interrogating her eternal soul? Twenty years ago I channeled Shakespeare’s English for four years in my play “Dark Sovereign.” The task was impossible at first, the strain never easing, but slowly the exhaustion became more bearable and the end more attainable. Pursuing a long-lost character is a similar chore. It’s a matter of spending twelve to fourteen hours a day with pen in hand, succumbing to the fatigue that eats away one’s mental constraints and restraint, replacing them with wholly intuitive inspiration that springs up free and unrestrained.
I learned the writer’s first lesson, endurance, the hard way, but still chose to write “Power of a Woman…” as a memoir. That meant venturing into rumor based upon historical fact to draw forth Eleanor’s persona, or, rather, to draw forth a persona worthy of Eleanor!
Here’s a perceptive observation by Julian Barnes (The New Yorker, 09/29/1997, p. 81): “Rumor, despite its mythical cloudiness, is really much sharper and clearer than fact. Fact is messy, doubtful, ambiguous, interpretable; rumor has a wonderful simplicity. It’s so much easier to worship rumor than fact.”
Memoir may be the better option for the story of a life, especially one that is long gone, in which facts are indeed “messy, doubtful” and much else that Barnes says about them. In Eleanor’s case, memoir comes as close to reality as the many slanted accounts written by her contemporary critics. Long live memoir! It blends intuitive rumour with lots of hard facts.