BIOGRAPHIES -- ??

Is writing a biography a way of keeping someone alive or a way of killing them all over again?  Probably both.  Though I've only written one biography, "Bronze Inside and Out," it was meant to preserve at least the memory and possibly the experience of Bob Scriver (to whom I was married in the Sixties).  But how does one do the latter from the outside?  I couldn't, so I ended up describing my own experience -- in some ways.  People thought this was not proper.

In fact, a lot of people had opinions about exactly what a biography had to be, according to their preferences. I didn't really understand this until it came to publication. No one edited, no one ordered the book.  I just wanted to make a record, including things about Bob's ancestors that inclined him to be the way he was. And I tried to make obvious things vivid, like the fact that growing up as a boy born in 1914, he spent a lot of time lying on his stomach poring over stories in the newspaper about the many war memorials going up after WWI. 

This was only possible because his family owned and ran the Browning Mercantile, a key store in the small town of Browning, Montana, which was the headquarters of the Blackfeet Reservation. I mean, there was not a lot of money for newspapers and not a lot of readers. I suspect Bob read old papers kept for wrapping.  I kept expecting to find a scrapbook of stories about the work of the classic Art Moderne bronzes by men who studied in Paris, the community that included Rodin and Malvina Hoffman, his student. But an even bigger influence was the Hall of Man by Hoffman at the Field Museum in Chicago where he attended the Vandercook School of Music, a first-class source of band teachers.  Ten years later I was also an admirer of Malvina Hoffman while I attended Northwestern University.  I knew the same sculptors because I grew up in Portland, Oregon, which is a city of monumental bronzes because it was so much influenced by Boston.

Most of the publishers to whom I wrote when the book was complete cared nothing at all about the above.  They just wanted to make money and improve their reputations by holding Bob up as an archetypal John Wayne sort of guy. They despised me and gradually became aware that I returned the emotion.  The University of Oklahoma Press would only publish this manuscript if I took out all the women (There is a strong strain of misogyny in the Western romantic trope.) and, Trump-style, put in praise for the officials of the press.

One man was hoping for rehabilitation because in an earlier job he had encouraged an attack on Bob when the latter sold his collection of NA artifacts to Edmonton's Provincial Museum.  This was a white man's decision to protect the money invested in them and (right-wing) keep the things away from the government.  I was gone by that time.  True enough, Bob didn't sell Bundle that was transferred to him, but these white men had no concept of that.  The Bundle disappeared.  No known person has it.

The ordering principle I finally adopted for the book was the actual process of making a bronze.  I concentrated on the sensory feeling of working with newly-mixed plaster or molten bronze.  I talked about "black tufy" flexible molds and steaming patinas onto hot metal.  No one expected that.  We had newly discovered classic Roman block bronze casting, and were enchanted by it, with no expectation that it would soon all be blown away by ceramic shell casting and 3-D printing.

When writing a biography, there is no set method in spite of your high school English teacher construction of boxed definitions.  High school English teachers are in disrepute these days, which makes it hard to know how to categorize when putting books on the shelf, but that's the point.  Why are you keeping books anyway?  Question yourself. 

There is in existence a CD video interview of Bob which is slightly bonkers, partly because it was made by novices with ungelled ideas about both what Western art was (besides being sale-able) and who Bob Scriver was.  Loud "Indian" music and Bob's inflated idea of who he was and what made him famous worked together to endorse a stereotype.  Closeups of his clay-smeared hands, complete with a ragged bandaid, seem an old man's deterioration.

The difficulties in understanding who someone is -- which I presume is the point of a biography -- are compounded by the publishing industry's obsession with profit.  One might say that it would be more honorable to be published by an academic house and "Bronze Inside and Out" was eventually put into print by the University of Calgary Press.  But honor had nothing to do with it.  A woman had signed a contract to provide suggestions for a series about important people in Alberta and she needed a name.  Except for the contract there was no profit either to the press or myself.  An employee of the press got a benevolent organization to pay the  cost of printing.  The press did list the book in their catalogue, but did little to promote it.  The U of O did more to put the book on a black list, which succeeded at suppression rather well with some Montana elements of the Cowboy Art Cartel, including the Montana Historical Society which ended up with Bob's estate.

If I had been who they thought I was, not a writer but rather a PR subsidiary of Bob Scriver whom they could "own," that would be the end of the story.  But I don't give a flip about them.  The tide of writing and the nature of persons are dynamic and moving always into new contexts, esp. when they dance together.  Readers must keep up, which might take some time and reflection, or they should just give up and go watch TV.  Maybe there's an old Western on.