ACTIVIST DOROTHY DAY WAS THE ‘DISSENTING VOICE OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY’
A new biography shines a light on the under-discussed author
Sometimes, the only requirement for a good biography is a subject whose life has intersected with epic events. Other biographies succeed largely because the scientific, artistic or social breakthrough authored by the subject is simply too dramatic for a biographer to screw up. There’s also those special biographers who turn the genre into a kind of art; via heroic archival research or new analysis, they make some ordinary or overexposed figure suddenly radiate with new meaning.
Madison Smartt Bell’s new biography of the American novelist Robert Stone checks every box you can throw at it. “Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone” is an absolute joy for Stone acolytes like myself, and it will hopefully serve as a reason for the uninitiated to discover the most under-discussed major American novelist of the past century.
As a biographical subject, Stone certainly meets the requirement for having lived an eventful, epic life. He spent time in an orphanage, then the Navy. When his mother re-appeared to help with Stone’s newborn child, she wound up giving birth to Stone’s brother Tim four months later. Stone was “briefly jailed for vagrancy in the Carolinas,” he needed brain surgery during an era when the tools for this procedure seemed to be a butter knife and hope, and he was also a Merry Prankster along with his friend Ken Kesey, about whom Stone once said: “Kesey goes for life, but I’m going for art.”
Mr. Bell’s biography tracks how Stone and Kesey went for each other’s wives, too, although the whole arrangement is portrayed by all parties with a very hippie shrug. So, if Robert Stone never wrote a novel, he’d still be a great subject for a biography.
Here’s the thing: Robert Stone did write novels. I am hard-pressed to think of any
American novelist whose first three works are as startlingly great. In “A Hall of Mirrors,” which takes place in a truly frightening version of New Orleans, Stone identified “America as my subject, and all my quarrels with America went into it.” “Dog Soldiers” is the best Vietnam novel ever written. “A Flag for Sunrise” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and, more importantly, features my favorite rendering of a nun (I speak from experience; I have a Sister in the family).
Mr. Bell argues that when it comes to Robert Stone’s catalog, there’s “nothing quite like it in the American canon.” Mr. Bell nails the essence of Stone’s style, observing that his “moral nausea sometimes leaked through his lightly satirical tone.” He also presents a delightfully never-ending list of Stone-related assessments from critics and peers, my favorite being: “Hemingway with a conscience and a sense of humor.”
A tweak of that line works, too: Hemingway, but not taught. Stone novels have pretty breezy plots, but they’re too weirdly ambiguous to extract simple symbols from them. Even the best high school English teacher would need special training (and therapy) to introduce 16year-olds to a Stone death scene, which are unmatched in their representation of psychological unraveling.
Mr. Bell knows that Hicks’ death in “Dog Soldiers” requires special attention. He also knows Stone — knew him, anyway — and refers to him as Bob throughout the biography. Perhaps more serious scholars and readers will blanch at this friendly gesture, but it doesn’t prohibit Mr. Bell from performing an essential task for any biographer: forcing the subject’s fans to confront the worst parts of their idol. I’m profoundly unbothered by Stone’s substance abuse, but teachers abusing their stations of power has always been a particularly unforgivable act to me, and I grimaced when, in the late ’70s, Stone is reported to have been “interrupted by a security guard while embracing a student on the floor of his Amherst office.”
“Embracing” is no doubt an overly generous description on Mr. Bell’s part. I was prepared to say the same about the way in which he quotes so liberally from Stone’s unpublished memoir, essentially allowing his subject to author large portions of the biography, but eventually, I found it to be a moving show of respect from one accomplished writer to another. If Stone is a writer’s writer, Mr. Bell is a writer’s biographer.
Should you read some Robert Stone before reading the biography? Absolutely, although I should mention that nobody ever ends up well-rested and content at the end of these books. Mr. Bell accurately pinpoints Stone’s true subject: “the man of compassion and goodwill stymied by a corrupt and monolithic system, and sinking into unwilling resignation.”