Good evening!
I’ve been very busy this week trying to push one of my PhD chapters over its finish line, which I’ve almost done. I’ve been writing about (surprise, surprise) Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Madame Defarge’s knitting in relation to ideas of idealised and monstrous femininities. It’s been quite nice revisiting and editing this section because I do like this novel, and the analysis is a bit more straightforward than in the last section I was editing (Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, which is a very odd novel).
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I finished Ingrid Bergman’s biography My Story (1980), which was written with Alan Burgess. This is a physically huge and textually expansive book so it did take slightly longer than usual for me to finish a book of this page length, but it didn’t at any point feel like it was dragging on. It’s an extremely interesting book, both because of its contents and because of how it is written; I think I mentioned last week that there are excerpts from her diaries, written passages from Bergman herself, as well as overviews and documents as set out by Burgess. This could have made it awkward to read, but it’s a testament to Burgess’ skill that it flows extremely nicely and is actually quite satisfying in its structure.
It’s always funny reading a book that centres on a real person as someone who reads a lot of fiction. I’m not really one to have the ‘likeability’ of a character impede whether or not I like the text, because I think that is quite a juvenile approach to consuming media. (Sidenote, I keep using ‘juvenile’ as a kind of withering criticism recently and I find it soooo funny). However, when I read something that is based on someone’s actual life, whether that be a novelisation or an auto/biography, it does seem that the implicit undertaking is to make you feel something towards that person. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000), for example, is a project dedicated to making you imagine what it was like to be Marilyn Monroe, and what it was like to possess the combined sexuality and naivety that gave her her trademark edge, but also how that operated on a day-to-day basis. Although it is a novelisation of her life, with made up scenarios and people, extracting Monroe as a character from the real life person is, I think, intentionally difficult. This is a conception, by Oates, of someone who really lived (and lived an unusual life). When we feel sympathy for her as a character, this transplants as sympathy onto the real deal.
An autobiography is, depending on how you look at it, slightly more or slightly less complex. Here is a person who has taken the time to write about their life and their experiences -- this is arguably more complex than a novelisation because it is filled with that person’s biases, and so as a text it could be difficult to excavate the ‘real’ story. But it is also less complex because this is how we mainly encounter storytelling in the everyday -- a person telling us what happened to them, and how they reacted to it, and how they felt about it all. Of course, the storyteller will try and put themselves into the best light possible, even if they are claiming responsibility for something -- an admittance of guilt will come with reasonings and justifications. Biographies are a different kettle of fish altogether, in that it isn’t a fiction but it also isn’t entirely fact, because you have an outsider looking in, who will bring in their own biases and objectives for their text.
I’m not sure it’s fair to read autobiographies and novelisations of lives together, as they are different categories of texts. However, I do think there is an element of having different means to similar ends -- that is, making you feel something towards the person being spoken about. I think, also, that the nature of fame comes into both of these genres. For someone to write an autobiography, biography or novelisation, there needs to be an element of interest in the person, which almost always means that they are famous. Fame removes us from people as they go about their lives, and the above mentioned texts are all mediated through it. There is, to me, always a level of removal, even if a person is writing candidly about their experiences, because the average person will never know what it is like to be famous, and the famous person will never be able to fully transmit that.
What got me thinking about this is how Bergman sets out at the beginning how she would like to tell her side of things, especially concerning her second marriage to Roberto Rossellini. For the late 40s/early 50s, her relationship with him was incredibly scandalous; they were both married with children when they met, and they got together while filming Stromboli, essentially cut off from society on a remote island. The focus of this period in her life is how difficult her first husband Petter was towards her seeing their child Pia, despite her trying to leave him before and them essentially remaining in a loveless marriage ahead of her meeting Rossellini. What Bergman takes a lot of time to stress is how difficult moving around was for her, because the paparazzi hounded her and the gossip columnists made her the main story for months. In conservative America, a senator made a statement basically calling her a harlot who had taken advantage of the fame she had found in America after they had ‘welcomed’ her from her native Sweden. This meant that reentry into America after leaving to film Stromboli would be impossible without being literally chased, and her first husband did not want to bring their daughter to Italy because he hated Rossellini. Rossellini also was extremely jealous and did not want her to go to Sweden unaccompanied to meet Petter. All of this is hashed out and rehashed out through a variety of means to justify something that clearly hung on Bergman’s conscious for all of her life -- she did not see her daughter Pia for seven years.
What much of My Story seems to want to do is to justify the things that Bergman was made to feel guilty for, as well as the things that she really did feel guilty for. Instead of spending time on how she had a great love affair that led to her second marriage, she tries to mediate her decisions and reasonings through the nature of fame. Much of her concern is with her children, rather than the romantic relationships that the gossip columnists focused on -- these actually seem more like background happenings rather than things that defined her life in any way. She doesn’t say it in so many words, but what I got from her book is that Ingrid Bergman is a woman who loves acting, but she loves her children more -- and she couldn’t often marry the two together because of who she was.
Books on my radar
I think, after such a large tome of non-fiction, I’d like to read a novel next. But which one, I don’t know! There’s too many!