By MARGO RABB
Recently, I picked up “Letters to a Young Poet,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, to read for the second time. I had fallen in love with the book when I was 17 and daydreamed about meeting the author, whom I imagined to be a kind, prophetic soul. Realizing now how little I knew about Rilke’s life, I Googled him.
I wish I hadn’t. A line from John Berryman’s poem “Dream Song 3” popped up: “Rilke was a jerk.” I clicked on a link to a Washington Post review of “Life of a Poet,” a biography of Rilke by Ralph Freedman. “On page after page it portrays one of the most repugnant human beings in literary history,” the critic Michael Dirda wrote.
How could the kind prophet whose lengthy passages I’d copied into my teenage diary be a selfish, sycophantic, womanizing rat?
“One unexpected development of becoming a writer is meeting literary heroes,” Justin Torres, author of “We the Animals,” told me. “Unfortunately, sometimes they turn out to be asses, or they hit on you.” The novelist Jennifer Haigh agreed; she once had a famous poet invite her to sit on his lap. Haigh finds reading biographies equally disquieting; though she loved Blake Bailey’s biography of Richard Yates, she was saddened to find out how deeply troubled he was. “Learning about a writer’s life changes your relationship with him. It sort of destroys the fantasy,” she said. Laurie Halse Anderson, the author of “Speak,” also feels that biographies can make authors lose their luster. “A book is like sausage,” she told me. “You love the end product, but you don’t really want to know how it’s made.”
Falling in love with a book is a unique and sometimes strange experience; it’s not hard to make the leap from adoring a novel to adoring its creator. The writer Justin Cronin compares it to a celebrity crush: “When you read a book, you spend hours in intimate contact with the mind of another person — it’s an intense, but one-sided relationship. If any reader knew who we really were, it’s guaranteed they’d find us disappointing. The experience of a book is so much better than the experience of a person.” The author Elizabeth Gilbert agreed. “When I meet readers, I feel a responsibility not to disappoint them. But how do you not disappoint someone who’s invented you?” She said she avoids meeting some of her favorite authors. “I love Martin Amis, but I probably shouldn’t hang out with him. And I don’t think he wants to hang out with me either, and talk about our ‘Aha! moments’ and what we’re doing to become healthier, better people.”
Despite having been on both sides of the author-reader relationship, Cronin admitted that he falls into the trap of making the relationship out to be more than it is. “When there’s a writer whose work I really like and I’ve read all of their books, I feel like they’re my friend and I know them. I have to remind myself that I don’t.” In the early 1980s, after a night of revelry, Cronin and a friend once attempted to phone John Cheever — an event he describes as a “drunken literary booty call.” Allison Amend, author of “A Nearly Perfect Copy,” had an odd experience when she met a writer she admired. “Over fried okra at a conference, he asked me, ‘How about later you show me your tattoo and I lick it?’ ” The encounter colored her view of meeting her idols. “When you see the man behind the curtain, you no longer believe in the puppet show,” she said.
But some writers enjoy discovering the darker sides of their favorite authors. “I’m always comforted when writers and artists I admire have terrible problems in their lives, as I did,” the novelist Kate Christensen told me. “I like reading about their struggles and misbehavior.” The poet and memoirist Mary Karr is also forgiving of flaws. “Tolstoy I’m sure was an incredible jackass, but I still love him. I still love Stevens, I still love Pound. If we didn’t read people who were bastards, we’d never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.”
Thankfully, some writers exceed expectations. The author Margot Livesey once arranged a blind friend-date with the novelist Sara Paretsky. “One of the things I cherished about our meeting was that sometimes with fellow writers, a lot of the chat becomes about money and business. With Sara we didn’t talk about those things. We talked about books and ideas and politics and the world. It was the sort of conversation you fantasize having with a writer you admire, but in my experience seldom do.”
One of my favorite novels is Tobias Wolff’s “Old School,” which captures the yearning of a young man to meet his literary idols — particularly Ernest Hemingway, the author’s own boyhood hero. Wolff told me that his appreciation of Hemingway has grown over the years. “As you get older you understand how complicated were the lives of people you looked up to, and imagined were living untroubled and confident lives. So my feeling for Hemingway increased over the years because I no longer see him as just a legend or an icon, but as a deeply flawed, struggling human being. And I’m all the more in awe of what he managed to do with his talent, considering what he needed to get through every day to give it full rein.”
When I was an M.F.A. student studying fiction writing, we often critiqued a story by deciding whether it had “heart,” but what gives a piece heart is more than technical mastery. “You can read Mailer or Hemingway and see — or at least I do — that what separated them from greater writers (like Chekhov, say) was a certain failing of kindness or compassion or gentleness — an interest in the little guy, i.e., the nonglamorous little guy, a willingness and ability to look at all of their characters with love,” the writer George Saunders told me via e-mail.
Tobias Wolff was a literary hero to Saunders. “Toby was the first great writer I ever met and what the meeting did for me was disabuse me of the idea that a writer had to be a dysfunctional crazy person,” Saunders said. “Toby was loving, gentle, funny, kind, wise — yet he was producing these works of great (sometimes dark) genius. It was invigorating to be reminded that great writing was (1) mysterious and (2) not linked, in any reductive, linear way, to the way one lived: wild writing could come from a life that was beautifully under control. Watching him, I felt: O.K., nurture the positive human parts of yourself and hope they get into your work, eventually.”
Writers and their books will always be inextricably connected, but the relationship between them isn’t simple. As Saunders told me, “A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.”
Maybe, as a reader, that is what I keep falling in love with — not the author, but the art of reaching.
