Hesse, Thoreau, Musset, Gide, Barney, Stowe, Huxley, Pope, Agee

Since my last post, I've finished the biography of Hermann Hesse by Mileck, and I've read Lestringant's Musset, Pierre Lepage's Gide, Jean Chalon's Chere Natalie Barney, Hedrick's Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harding's Days of Henry Thoreau. I also read Bedford's life of Aldous Huxley, a biography of Alexander Pope, and a biography of james Agee.

I won't bore my few readers with everything I didn't know about this or that writer, that Aldous Huxley was visually impaired, to the point he learned Braille, that Thoreau's life was pretty mundane, that Musset died young, that Natalie Barney was independently wealthy. Bedford's biography petered out into quotations strung together, but I suppose we cannot be too harsh as the Huxley papers were lost in a brush fire at their home in California.

I suppose what I have now concluded is not just that writers must have examined their own life, but they also must have experienced very intense moments. This usually means pain and suffering. I have also concluded that they need to struggle for their art. When life is too easy, writing becomes difficult because there is no reason to try and survive. .

Hardy, Allen, Smart, Jonson, Miller, Hesse

Since my last post, I've read biographies of: Thomas Hardy, with many critical comments to his wife despite the fact that he was repeatedly and constantly unfaithful; Elizabeth Smart, a Canadian writer of affluent background -- her life certainly doesn't resemble anyone else's life, at least none of anyone I know who was alive in the thirties, for example; Ben Jonson, about whom I knew very little; Henry Miller, who used his sex life to write, but in a much more direct way than many before him -- was this pornography?; and the memoirs of Walter Allen, a British writer I didn't previously know about, and whose reminiscences were not all that illuminating for me.

I'm now in the middle of a Herman Hesse biography. Overall, I'm starting to think that all writers are hard on the people around them, and suffer money problems. Not a novel conclusion, of course, but there it is.