“Each New Project is like Building the World Anew”

Carl Rollyson

Carl Rollyson makes his name to the Chinese academia via his studies of Susan Sontag: Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon （co-authored，2000）and Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work （2001）. The year 2009 witnessed the Chinese version of Rollyson's biography of Susan Sontag highly acclaimed for the translation as well as for the craftsmanship of biography. In the field of life writing studies Rollyson is even more well-known for his so many biographies and theories of life writing. In the email interview that took place in February，2016，Professor Carl Rollyson，the celebrated prolific biographer，shares his valuable experience of the practice with our editors. The following interview uses Q to stand for questions asked by our editor and CR for Carl Rollyson.

Q: Prof. Carl Rollyson，you've published many biographies as well as some life-writing studies. Would you please brief your own experience working in this field? What are your lessons from it?

CR: In thirty-five years of writing about biography，I have discovered that each new project is like building the world anew. Once again I will have to gather my resources，which means traveling to archives，looking for new documents，searching for people to interview，finding a publisher，and deciding what is the best way to tell a life. No one has ever commissioned one of my books. In other words，the world has never been waiting for what I write next. As a result，my biographies and studies of biography arise out of an urgent necessity: my own. Call my books an autobiography in process，which I have now revealed in Confessions of a Serial Biographer，which was published in March 2016.

Q:Would you please give us an overview of the life-writing development in the USA，or in the Anglosphere in recent years? What are the success and problems? Could you recommend one or two life writings published in recent years? What is the worth do you think?

CR: Biography has become more experimental，eschewing in some celebrated cases，the cradle to grave narrative. So we have accounts of Franklin in Paris，one year in Shakespeare's LIFE，and group biographies that，for example，recount what several significant couples did during the Spanish Civil War. Publishers now call for biographies that omit the boring bits. If there is a problem，this is it: how to be less trendy and to enliven biography as the story of a whole life. I still want to read about whole lives，as demonstrated recently in Ann Boyd Rioux's vibrant new biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Not that I'm opposed to innovation in biography. I greatly admire Jerome Charyn's A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the Twenty First Century，which canvases the way biographers and critics have written about Dickinson while also providing his own depiction，of a bolder，more worldly figure than is visible in earlier work about her.

Q:Would you please give us an overview of life-writing theories popular in recent years? What issues concern the life-writing theorists most in the USA? What do you think are the leading works in life-writing theories in recent years?

CR: I have to confess I do not concern myself at all with life writing theories or theorists，although I recommend two excellent recent books by Michael Benton on the poetics of biography and Zachary Leader's collection of essays written by biographers and memoirists.

Q:Are you satisfied with the life-writing theories people are mostly interested in recent years? Are they helpful to life writing? What issues do you think life-writing theories should explore?

CR: For me，if there is any theory of biography or of life-writing it is a theory or method that arises out of the writing of a life. As Michael Benton suggests，biography is too idiosyncratic to be codified in a theory.

Q:You addressed the issue “Fiction and Biography” in your Reading Biography （2004）. Indeed，fictitious elements are added into life writing in a great many works now. In some cases，even important characters or events are invented. Some biographer even made believe the stories that he befriended with the late biographical subject. Do you approve of this method? Is this the trend? How do you define auto/biographical truth?

CR:I suppose I am conservative in the sense that I do not make up stories about my subjects. I think the reader must have confidence that the biography is the product of verifiable sources. I do，however，think that fiction has a role to play in biography. In his biography of Charles Dickens，Peter Ackroyd introduces fictional scenes between real people who become his characters. But these parts of the book are in italics，which alert the reader to the biographer's innovative approach. I also understand why Edmund Morris introduced himself as a character in Dutch，his biography of Ronald Reagan，even though most critics condemned the biographer's resort to fiction. Morris was exposing the limits of nonfiction narrative，and not pretending to knowledge he did not have.

Q:The genre of life writing has long been controversial. The dispute centers on whether it is a branch of history or a branch of literature. Some also claim that it should be an independent genre. What is your opinion on this debate? How do you define your identity in writing a life?

CR:I think of biography as a interdisciplinary genre drawing on history，literature，and psychology. Depending on the biographer，the mix between the disciplines will be different，so that a historian writing a biography of Woodrow Wilson is likely to emphasize how events shape and are shaped by the biographical subject，and the literary critic or novelist might dwell much more on the quirks of personality，the vagaries of character. See the Wilson biographies by H.W.Brands and Louis Auchincloss as examples of what I mean.

Q:With the increase of memoirs，diaries，and oral history，these sub-genres exert greater influence than auto/biography. What is your comment on this phenomenon? Should they be included in biography or autobiography? Why?

CR:Biographers incorporate memoirs，diaries，and oral histories all the time，and sometimes even make these forms of life writing an integral part of their narratives—as I do in A Private Life of Michael Foot and Confessions of a Serial Biographer. Oral biographies of writers like Norman Mailer and Wallace Stevens，for instance，provide a sense of immediacy and yet also art in carefully edited transcripts of interviews.