Where Did My Life Begin?

Some years ago, I wrote a short biography of Charles Dickens for a series. Long after I had finished it, I came across a similar work for an earlier series by English writer Angus Wilson. I read it attentively, and was amused to discover that Wilson had cherry-picked the voluminous Dickens information almost exactly as I had; he was struck by the same episodes, and even used some of the same quotes. But there was a difference: whereas I had almost unconsciously seen Dickens life as building toward his final novel, Our Mutual Friend, and his last amorous relationship, with Ellen Ternan (a relationship he kept secret during his life), Wilson had seen Dickens life as developing from his (also secret) childhood of economic and family chaos. The episodes in Dickens' work that Wilson preferred were those that recalled childhood. The ones that I preferred were those that testified to growth and self-awareness. I flatter myself by thinking that Dickens would have preferred my revelation of his secrets to Wilson's, but maybe not.

It is a truism of our age that by the time we were conscious and could store information and thoughts for later contemplation, we were already formed, and that any sense of growth we feel is an illusion. Once when I was teaching, I asked my junior-level students who among them felt that they had learned and grown since coming to college. They all raised their hands. I then asked who felt that their friends and roommates had learned and grown since coming to college. Almost no one raised a hand. So maybe all biography and all autobiography are doomed to differ on this score.

At any rate, here I am in Iowa City, Iowa, where I went to graduate school and lived between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two, and as I look around, I can't help feeling that here was where my life was formed, in spite of the fact that by the time I got here, I'd had not only a whole childhood and a college education, but also a first marriage and a wonderful and enlightening year hitchhiking around Europe. What happened here was that I started writing with a purpose.

My purpose was not to change the world but to make something. I had written a novel in college, and I got all the way to page two hundred, at which point the irritating girlfriend conveniently died (I don't remember how) and the irritated boyfriend breathed a guilty sigh of relief. At the Writers Workshop, though, I was exposed to the much more sophisticated works of my fellow students, and what they were trying for was an eloquence of language and an elegance of shape that had seemed out of my range, something in books, not in typescript. Some of my fellow students already had published books, and some already had publications in magazines, and so a link was formed in my mind between the primitive works I seemed to be drowning in and the cooler, more definite works I enjoyed in the library.

Thirty seems to be the age when most novelists wake up and start to have systematic thoughts, even Charles Dickens, who was published and popular in his mid-twenties, got better organized and more ambitious at around thirty. When I was twenty-nine, giving birth to my first child gave me my first compelling subject—who was she leading to, who am I leading to, who are we? The main character of my first novel (written around the same time) was an older woman, but she was a mother, and I think my act of imagination was to try to enter her head as a way of contemplating myself as a mother.

When I drive to the places where I once lived, I have the customary experience that most of the buildings are gone; the Workshop itself has grown and moved out of the English building. The shop where I bought dresses now sells climbing gear, and the bookshop has a new address. Two buildings do remain the same, the library where I wandered the stacks, and the bar where I met my second husband (though those motorcycles that used to be parked outside the door have been replaced by picnic tables). But that's enough—between them, those two spots symbolize my scholarly side and my adventurous side, the two sides that, as it turned out, shaped the life I have lived since. I think biographers do writers a disservice by underestimating the writers own self-awareness and treating them as if what they don't know about themselves is more important than what they do know. Yes, our times and our relatives and our circumstances are important, but what we set out to make of them is at least as interesting.

Be sure to check out Jane Smiley's other stories on FamilyGoesStrong.com: What's for Dinner, Who Would Wear This? and Do It Your Way.