The first and definitive biography of one of the great American novelists of the postwar era, the author of Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, and a penetrating critic of American power, innocence, and corruptionRobert Stone (1937-2015), probably the only postwar American writer to draw favorable comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, and Joseph Conrad, lived a life rich in adventure, … lived a life rich in adventure, achievement, and inner turmoil. He grew up rough on the streets of New York, the son of a mentally troubled single mother. After his Navy service in the fifties, which brought him to such locales as pre-Castro Havana, the Suez Crisis, and Antarctica, he studied writing at Stanford, where he met Ken Kesey and became a core member of the gang of Merry Pranksters. The publication of his superb New Orleans novel, Hall of Mirrors (1967), initiated a succession of dark-humored novels that investigated the American experience in Vietnam (Dog Soldiers, 1974, which won the National Book Award), Central America (A Flag for Sunrise, 1981), and Jerusalem on the eve of the millennium (Damascus Gate, 1998).
An acclaimed novelist himself, Madison Smartt Bell was a close friend and longtime admirer of Robert Stone. His authorized and deeply researched biography is both intimate and objective, a rich and unsparing portrait of a complicated, charismatic, and haunted man and a sympathetic reading of his work that will help to secure Stone’s place in the pantheon of major American writers.
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Life imitating Art imitating Life
Read the full review here: https://www.jamesvictorjordan.com/child-of-light-by-madison-smartt-bell-reviewed-by-james-victor-jordan/
In the Poetics, circa 335 BCE, Aristotle famously promulgated his rules of art, each of which rests upon this foundation: art mimics life. 2,224 years later, in 1889, Oscar Wilde published “The Decay of Lying,” the principal essay (a Socratic dialog actually, as irony would have it) in his collection Intentions. In “Decay,” one of the characters, a boy named Vivian, launches a poignant assault on realistic fiction in general and on the novels of Henry James in particular. There is, Vivian says, an abundance of boredom in fiction that imitates life and little art, if any, in imitation.
The polar positions in this chicken-or-egg debate can be reduced to absurdity, banality, or irrelevance, but Aristotle and Wilde advanced them earnestly as fundamental and critically important. Aristotle used his rule adeptly to illustrate the necessity of imitating human behavior in tragedy and comedy to promote verisimilitude. Oscar Wilde professed that art enriches the human spirit when it springs from imagination but not when it rests on imitation.
Robert Stone (1937-2015) was said by leading literary critics of our time to be one of our most important novelists. Child of Light is Madison Smartt Bell’s recently published, thought provoking, beautifully told authorized biography of Stone. It is a tapestry of an artist’s life from which his art cannot be unwoven without unraveling the whole. Child delves so deeply, meaningfully, and artfully into Stone’s work and his life that it casts light on the art of writing literary fiction and an understanding of where to look for the act of artistic creation along the Aristotle-Wilde aesthetic divide.
In Child, we learn that among his many accomplishments, Bob Stone published eight novels and made promising progress on another, one that he ultimately abandoned: Arctutus. All but one of his novels were critically acclaimed: He won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and a Pen-Faulkner award. He taught creative writing to graduate and undergraduate students at U Mass Amherst, Johns Hopkins (where he had tenure), Yale, and other distinguished universities.
Bob Stone’s teaching career was especially impressive considering his limited formal education. By the time he was in high school “Bob had already acquired a good deal of knowledge about Western art history on his own, while lurking about New York museums as a smaller child. . ..” In his senior year at St. Ann’s (Catholic) high school, he had the highest score on the New York Regent’s exam, making him eligible for a four-year scholarship to NYU. He authored a story that was published, and he won writing awards. The New Yorker rejected a submission but asked to see more of his work. Notwithstanding these accomplishments, he was expelled from St. Ann’s for espousing “atheistic secular humanism.” “‘I felt like Martin Luther,’ he said, ‘. . . like a superhero.’” But without a high school diploma and hence decent job prospects, at 17 he joined the navy, where he ultimately earned a GED.
The derailment of Bob Stone’s formal education did not deter his pursuit of a self-education. In an article titled “Antarctica, 1958” published in the June 12, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, writing about one of his experiences in the navy when he was twenty, Bob Stone said: “When I went below to crash . . . I lay down to read with my pocket flashlight. I had “Ulysses” checked out of the Norfolk, Virginia, public library, and plenty of time to be patient with it. When we started sliding to port, I’d stay with Leopold Bloom for as long as I could tough it out . . .” In Child, we also learn of Bob Stone’s love and use of canonical poetry in his fiction, of his acting in and knowledge of William Shakespeare’s plays. Like Michael Faraday, like Abraham Lincoln, Robert Stone was an autodidact of the highest order.
Bob Stone was also an actor, a memoirist, a screenwriter. He was a reporter, the author of short fiction published in magazines such as The New Yorker. He received commissions from leading periodicals to write nonfiction articles and essays, including his memories of the 1960s and his travels to exotic locales. In short, as an author and a teacher, his was an amazing life of significant accomplishments and literary contributions. But he also suffered from, putting it mildly, a challenging childhood, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and chronic pain inflicted by gout and other lifelong ailments.
Child achieves its strengths by:
• Quoting Bob and Janice Stone, drawing quotes from a wealth of other authorities, and then interweaving these quotations with narrations, reflections, and commentary so that quotes and accompanying passages flow together as if originating from the same source;
• Telling the story of Bob Stone’s life and the writing of his novels in the distinct voices initially heard within the quotations;
• Structuring Child with sections that correlate with periods of Bob Stone’s life during which each of his novels was written; and
• Analyzing each novel by comparing episodes in Bob Stone’s life and one or more of his pertinent personality traits to the experiences and personality traits of his principal characters, presenting the reader with a unity of the artist and his art.
Referencing an entry in one of Janice Stone’s journals about her first visit to Bob’s living quarters, M. Bell writes: “Bob’s room ‘seemed to be about knee-deep with discarded newspapers and socks. And I thought, this guy could really use some organizing. And then I thought—me, I can do that.’ As it turned out, she would be organizing Bob Stone for the next five decades.”
This is but one of many instances in Child where a quotation and the adjoining narration flow unimpededly from one to the other. This is done with such finesse that, as if by legerdemain, the biographer vanishes from the text, leaving the reader on her own with Bob or Janice Stone, with their thoughts and feelings, or with their friends, companions, or colleagues.
Quoting from an essay written by Stone for a book on Catholicism, Child begins:
I was born in Brooklyn on President Street . . .”
The omission of an opening quotation mark is a clever use of punctuation license. Farther down the first page, quoting from another source, the story continues with this intimate quote: “My mother didn’t have an honest bone in her body, God Bless her. . .. But she did care about me.”
In addition to the usual materials from which biographies are often constructed, such as interviews and book reviews, M. Bell had access to the Holy Grail—a metaphor he used in a short essay published in the May 21, 2020 edition of Air Mail titled “Child’s Play”—interviews with Bob Stone and accompanying commentary with “a psychoanalytic tack” taken and annotated in the late ’70s by Anne Greif for her dissertation in psychology.
Of her interviews with Bob, Greif wrote: “At times, his recollection was indeed so vivid that he seemed to be reliving in part the earlier time, and anger, anxiety, affection, love, and fright could be felt in the room.” And of Greif’s interviews of Bob and her commentary, M. Bell wrote: “This revelation had a double layer. Not only did I get the childhood in Stone’s own telling, but I also got to watch him tell it as a man in his prime—that version of my lost friend, and most admired writer, I had never before seen with my own eyes.”
How did M. Bell infuse rich veins of first-person quotations throughout Child to foster, intermittently, the feel of an autobiography, or to otherwise forge the close bond between a reader and a book’s principal character usually reserved for first-person narrations? Between the title of the Air Mail essay and the byline, this sentence appears: “Robert Stone’s biographer pieced together the novelist’s life by delving into his early years.” “Pieced together” does injustice to the literary accomplishment of Child of Light.
In the acknowledgments in Child, M. Bell says of his editor Gerry Howard: the latter would cut, and the author would suture. “Suture” is better than “piece together” but still fails to capture the experience of fluency engendered when reading a biography that slips effortlessly into and out of the first person, transitions between events and literary analyses so as to unite Robert Stone’s life and his art.
While the quotations intertwined with narration in Child vividly illuminate the nexus of Robert Stone’s life and his fiction, it achieves more. The quotations came from a variety of sources as they would in most well-written-and-researched biographies. As one would expect, tonal variations can be heard in quotations from different sources. But hearing the various tones emanating from the quotes echo in the narration connecting the quotes or in closely following passages is unexpected as this requires skill beyond the ability of most writers.
For instance, in the opening passages and later the reader hears matter-of-fact reportage: “I was born in Brooklyn.” The modulation of voice becomes most apparent late in the book with the appearance of M. Bell in person or as a character as it were. We hear in these passages his unique chronicling-Haiti-and-Hattian-lore voice, an English-speaking voice that occasionally speaks words and phrases in Haitian French and Kreyol. The voice of this narrator will be recognized by readers of M. Bell’s trilogy of novels set in Haiti that commence with All Souls Rising. These novels tell of the revolts that emancipated Haiti’s slaves. It’s also a voice that is heard when reading M. Bell’s memoir Soul in a Bottle and his biography of Tousssaint Louverture.
Full review here
https://www.jamesvictorjordan.com/child-of-light-by-madison-smartt-bell-reviewed-by-james-victor-jordan/