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  • Editor’s Introduction: Life Writing
  • Daniel T. O’Hara

Histrion (1908)

No man hath dared to write this thing as yet, And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great At times pass athrough us, And we are melted into them, and are not Save reflexions of their souls. Thus am I Dante for a space and am One Francois Villon, ballad-lord and thief, Or am such holy ones I may not write Lest blasphemy be writ against my name; This for an instant and the flame is gone.

‘Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere Translucent, molten gold, that is the “I” And into this some form projects itself: Christus, or John, or eke the Florentine; And as the clear space is not if a form’s Imposed thereon, So cease we from all being for the time, And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on

— Ezra Pound (Collected Early Poems 54)

I am using this early poem by Ezra Pound to make a general point about both parts of this issue, which examine life writing and the literary celebrity (more than ably introduced by Guy Davidson): namely that such writing and such celebrity participate in the dialectical irony announced and performed by Pound’s poem. Writers of biography and autobiography, and those who also aspire to iconic cultural status, are caught in the moment of rueful vision when personality and impersonation, analysis of another and analysis of oneself, possess the imagination for better and for worse, equally, and too often are too hard to distinguish to the point of inducing despair. This critical ironic balance is precarious, not to say, precipitous. What each of the articles in this issue demonstrate, with each figure and text discussed and read, is the repeated fates of the modern writer in the world where neither religious nor secular verities prove effective, and where [End Page v] instead madness, suffering, and death prevail. As such, this issue testifies to the cost, the tragic expenditure of the modern writer, male, female, mature, old, successful, blasted by failure (personal as well as professional or commercial), whatever the case might be. If this issue were to be given an overarching title it could well be the last four words of this famous concluding passage from James’s story “The Middle Years”: “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art” (254).

Works Cited

James, Henry. Selected Tales. Ed. John Lyon. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.
Pound, Ezra. Collected Early Poems. Eds. Michael King and Louis Martz. New York: New Directions, 1976. Print. [End Page vi]
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