Mariner
Review by David Starkey
Megan Marshall, a writing professor at Emerson College, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. However, in After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart—which consists primarily of six loosely related chapters on the topic—the book that seems closest to her heart is the one she toiled on for twenty years while raising her family, the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005).
The opening chapter, “After Lives,” begins where The Peabody Sisters ends, with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, née Peabody, giving birth to Una Hawthorne. Due to the success of her biography, Marshall was allowed to examine Una’s remains when they were transferred from London back to New England: “a few fragments of bone, slim and white, like worn-down bars of soap; the remnant of a pale blue knit stocking; a tarnished silver Maltese cross. And two full heads of hair, each culminating in a long, thick ropelike braid.” Sophia’s is “salt-and-pepper-gray,” but Una’s is auburn, which upends what Marshall has read about Una’s death: her hair, according to several contemporary accounts, was said to have turned white before she died. Despite the fact that she was a spritely child, reportedly the inspiration for Pearl in The Scarlet Letter,Una’s life was a difficult one. She suffered from mental illness, was hospitalized several times, embraced what sounds like a sort of religious mania, and likely died of suicide. Yet Marshall finds Una’s life worth remembering and memorializing. As she says in a later chapter, one of the most important lessons she has learned as a biographer is “do not judge a woman, even a woman of ambition and capability, by her accomplishments.”
In “Free for a While,” which may be the most intensely personal chapter, Marshall recounts growing up in Pasadena in the 1960s, an upbringing shadowed by her “father’s disabling mood swings.” She suffers the usual slings and arrows of teenagerhood—awkwardness among her peers, poor romantic choices—but the chapter’s focus is on her classmate, Jonathan Jackson, younger brother of George Jackson, author of the bestselling prison memoir Soledad Brother. The tragedy culminates when 17 year old Jonathan, armed with “a sack of weapons and a rifle concealed beneath his trench coat,” storms a courtroom where his brother’s friends are on trial, demanding the release of George and several other inmates. The gambit ends horrifically: “In the ensuing melee, the judge and two of the San Quentin prisoners were killed; the assistant DA was paralyzed.” Jonathan too was dead, “sprayed with bullets in the front seat of the van” he planned to drive to the airport where he would board a plane to meet Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. Of course, there were “no public school bereavement counselors in 1970,” leaving Marshall to make sense of Jonathan’s death all these years later in a detailed and sensitive essay.
Woven through After Lives are references to the passing of Marshall’s beloved partner, Scott, and in an oblique way, her autobiographical reminiscences are a tribute to this kind-hearted and encouraging man. The chapter entitled “Without,” for instance, begins with the author taking walks around her neighborhood during the height of COVID “confined…in a dizzying aloneness, extreme bereavement.” Fortunately, she feels somewhat prepared for this solitary experience after having spent a semester as a visiting professor of American literature at Kyoto University. Her living quarters were on the campus’s neglected south campus. Mostly devoid of companionship, she became interested in the Heian period poet Kamo no Chōmei, who, eight hundred years earlier, had left his position in the court and retreated to a mountainside hut. Marshall compares Chōmei favorably to Thoreau, another famous refugee from the rat race. Yet Walden Pond is only a couple of miles from Concord, close enough for Thoreau to have had his washing done by his mother. Even then, Thoreau only lasted two years in his one-room cabin, while Chōmei stayed on in his retreat in relative discomfort: “Thoreau had his bed, desk, and famous three chairs—‘one for solitude, two for friends, three for society.’ Chōmei’s bed was a heap of dried bracken on the floor.” As a visiting academic in a civilization renowned for its intelligence and good manners, Marshall is hardly “roughing it,” even in comparison with Thoreau, but she does encounter some of the same loneliness of her two predecessors, and that sense of dis-ease, compounded with the heartbreak of Scott’s dying, gives the chapter a lingering poignance.
“Left-handed” begins as a sympathetic account of the indignities faced by the author’s southpaw mother and grandmother and their “tribe” (Marshall herself is right-handed): “One never studies to get a ‘left’ answer on a test or hopes to be ‘found in the left’—even as one might be left out, left behind, or make a solitary dinner of leftovers. An idea that comes out of left field is unexpected, if not unwelcome, and a left-handed compliment can hurt.” But the chapters in After Lives are least as much essayistic as biographical in nature, so Marshall touches on debunked right-brain, left-brain theories and the uncertain causes of left-handedness before veering off into discussions of biographies of women “whose proximity to famous men, either as wives or friends, had ensured” that they were not forgotten. These women, Marshall suggests, are like people who are left-handed, excluded without much thought by those who ignore the extra time and energy they must devote to perform the same set of activities. Ultimately, the chapter circles back to celebrate the artistic prowess of Marshall’s mother, who set aside her considerable talents for many years to raise Marshall and her siblings and prop up her perpetually faltering husband. Her mother’s “left-handed life unfurls” not only in her painting but in her ultimate refusal to give up her art.
“We are all biographers from childhood,” Marshall concludes her book. “Life is short, the ancient doctor Hippocrates warned, and art is long; the pursuit of a craft, and the lasting creation itself. So, too, is the art we make of lives.” Having addressed the numerous loose ends in her own life story, she now feels ready to once more address the lives of others. “It was time to start again,” she writes, and I can’t wait to see to whom she turns her attention next.
