Genre shows people’s humanity, goes beyond just simple reporting of the facts
Fifteen years later, in the middle of World War I, Nabokov’s father is stopped by a man while crossing a bridge. The man, who looks like a peasant, asks him for a light. It turns out to be the same man who had visited their home years before and shown Nabokov the match trick; he has lost everything in the war.
Nabokov concludes the story with, “Those magic (matches) he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through. ... The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”
I turn to biography this week after attending a reading and question and answer session with A. Scott Berg, biographer of Max Perkins, Samuel Goldwyn, Katherine Hepburn and more, at the UCLA Hammer Museum on Jan. 19. The event was set up by Mona Simpson, English professor and organizer of the “Some Favorite Writers” reading series at the Hammer Museum.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently enrolled in Simpson’s class, “Learning from Chekhov,” and our class attended the reading together. Other than “Speak, Memory” (which I have yet to get through), I’ve never picked up a biography before. I’ve repeatedly stood in the biography section of a bookstore wondering who reads them, specifically the biographies of people I didn’t know existed.