Trust, Draft 4, And Tulips

 Ida Partenza has been hired by Andrew Bevel in Hernan Diaz' Trust to write down his autobiography as he dictates.  But she's also supposed to put it in order, clean it up, and embellish where necessary.  At their second session, when she gives Bevel what she's written, he's not satisfied.  

"You do take faithful notes.  The facts are, in essence, there.  A few things ought to be emended.  We'll get to that.  The problem is that this doesn't reflect me."

She's not sure what to do.  She decides to read autobiographies of some great men to see what they 'sound' like. 

"If Bevel's own voice, transcribed without embellishment or modification, was not enough, I would make a new one for him out of all those other voices. . . Because thanks to my wild and uncompromisingly disorganized approach, the books started to merge into one another.  What was individual about each man - Carnegie's self serving sanctimoniousness, Grant's essential decency, Ford's matter-of-fact pragmatism, Coolidge's rhetorical thrift and so on - yielded what I thought at the time, they all had in common:  they all believed, without any sort of doubt that they deserved to be heard, that their words ought to be heard, that the narratives of their faultless lives must be heard.  They all had the same unwavering certainty my father had.  And I understood this was the certainty that Bevel wants on the page."

We probably have a few too many politicians like this.  

My book club's next book

The discussion of how to organize the anecdotes Bevel's was telling her also reminded me of the chapter I'd read yesterday in John McPhee's Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process where he discusses the difficulties he's had starting out on long articles about individuals.   

"To prepare a profile of an individual, the reporting endeavor looks something like this:

 

           o

   o               o 

o         x          o

   o               o

           o

 

"The x is the person you are principally going to talk to, spend tie with, observe, and write about.  The o's  represent peripheral interviews with people who can shed light on the life and career of x - her friends, or his mother, old teachers, teammates, colleagues, employees, enemies, anybody at all, the more the better.  Cumulatively, the o's provide triangulation - a way of checking facts one against another, and of eliminating apocrypha." 

I miss not writing more posts like this.  We've had three young sisters staying with us this week.  They grew up in Alaska and moved out of state about five years ago and this has been their first trip back.  What fun we've had.  

I'm almost up to 200 km for this summer's biking.  And enjoying all the green stuff that's pushing out of the earth.  

By the way, Trust, is one of two fiction Pulitzer Prize winners this year.  The other one, Barbara Kingsolver's Deadly Copperfield is the book club's August pick.