Writing a Life
Two biographies occupy my reading this month, beginning with the Flyer Book Club’s June selection, Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (University of Oklahoma 2003) by Ron Padgett. He blends his memories of his father, Wayne Padgett, with oral narratives of family members and friends. Wayne Padgett lived from 1921-1991, a period that encompasses Prohibition, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, Tulsa’s oil boom and eventual bust, and the establishment of the aviation industry in Tulsa. As the book’s title announces, he made bootlegging his livelihood, which expanded into other criminal pursuits as the social and legal environment changed over time. He eventually became a key figure in the so-called Dixie Mafia.
I have also been reading Virginia Woolf (Vintage 1999), Hermione Lee’s magisterial biography of my favorite author. Comprehensively researched, meticulously documented, and clearly written, Lee’s biography sifts the writing Virginia Woolf left behind, including her voluminous published works and a massive trove of letters, notebooks, and diaries, as well as published and private writings of her family and friends. I would be lying to claim it’s an easy read, at 893 pages and 2 ¼ inches thick in paperback, with very small type. I strongly suspect Random House shrank the typeface so the book wouldn’t exceed 1,000 pages.
These biographies exhibit two vastly different lives and ways of writing a life story. Oklahoma Tough shows me a dimension of Tulsa I don’t want to see, although I have smelled whiffs of it during the 44 years I’ve lived here. My residency in Tulsa overlapped Wayne Padgett’s for nearly a decade, previously unbeknownst to me. Padgett’s biography causes me to look differently at my neighborhood and to reckon with periods of lawlessness and corruption when the city’s infrastructure was first being built. I must now recognize that the story of a criminal who lived and worked a few blocks from my house still affects me and the city of Tulsa.
Oklahoma Tough raises concerns that range beyond the morality of Wayne Padgett’s actions. His criminal activity provided generously for his family and community through opportunities made available by a corrupt environment; available, that is, to a white man. No doubt the story would have taken different turns had Wayne Padgett been Black or Native. Not only would he have spent quite a bit more time in jail but his son’s life would surely have included more hardship. I suspect it’s easier to accept wrongdoing when sheltered from its consequences, which was the case for Ron Padgett. I can only speculate about the outcome had Wayne Padgett’s criminality encountered less acceptance than he enjoyed in a town that often looked the other way in favor of the benefits that flowed from his activities.
Ron Padgett’s account amounts to more than a collection of memories. It depicts a mixed situation where good and evil remain inextricable—in other words, the place where we all live. Ron Padgett’s acceptance of his father partially redeems a lawless life; acceptance, not forgiveness. He never minimizes the illegality of his father’s behavior, nor does he apologize for it. Instead, he accepts his father for who he was and finds a path toward gratitude.
Ron Padgett never explicitly considers his father’s life’s significance. He simply stays with the story, which he tells with sympathy and compassion. By contrast, Hermione Lee’s biography chronicles every known feature of Virginia Woolf’s life, then shows how those events all point away from themselves toward her body of work. I’m still ploughing through the book but after 500 pages, Lee has convinced me that any prurient interest in Virginia Woolf’s sexuality, mental health, or Bloomsbury antics is just that: totally beside the point.
Although Virginia Woolf cultivated rich personal and literary relationships among family members and friends, her human connections failed to furnish the intimacies that seemed most real to her—those that register in words on the printed page. Her critical essays betray extraordinary intimacy with what she read and wrote. She admits to mistakenly calling the friend on whom she based the character of Rezia in Mrs. Dalloway by that character’s name, instead of by her friend’s correct name. And although it’s framed as fiction, A Room of One’s Own lives on as Virginia Woolf’s personal manifesto. It’s as though her physical existence was the necessary evil that made her writing possible.
Writing was how Virginia Woolf survived. Throughout the book, Lee shows how life events break into her writing, not as autobiography but as the raw material enabling her to forever transform the the novel. Virginia Woolf once stated that To the Lighthouse, her best and most autobiographical novel, is as close as she ever came to undergoing psychoanalysis. In writing it, she finally resolved deeply problematic relationships with her parents and troubling issues from a fraught childhood. The drive to write sustained her through persistent self-doubt and physical fragility. Mrs. Dalloway registers her deep-seated anger over incompetent medical care, her disdain for political posturing, her condemnation of war, and her sensitivity to post-war trauma. Virginia Woolf’s novels and essays do not merely reflect her intended impact; they are the permanent change she effected in literature and the world.
I come away from my June reading with new appreciation for a life’s intended and unintended consequences. I don’t think Wayne Padgett set out to be a criminal; it just turned out that way.
In a loosely governed society, his personal charisma allowed him to support his family and community through criminal activity. Padgett harbored no apparent ambition to influence the future. Yet Tulsa bears his legacy, whether its inhabitants realize it or not. Virginia Woolf, too, made a permanent impact. But unlike Padgett, her legacy is intentional and visible, clearly stamped with her name. She accomplished what she set out to do: she changed the novel and leveled a stinging and lasting critique of her Victorian, imperial, war-torn, misogynist environment.
This month’s foray into biography illuminates the writing of lives as much as the lives themselves. What motivated these biographies? Neither book supports the cynical views that Ron Padgett aimed to make a yee-haw folk hero out of his father or that Lee set her sights on completing some literary Ironman. We’re on safer ground to trust the apparent motives: Ron Padgett, himself a poet, responds to an urge to tell without judgment the colorful story of a remarkable man, despite his flaws. Hermione Lee, an accomplished literary scholar, seeks to understand a complex, creative genius. Pursuing such aims requires taking stock of a life’s entire scope; no single moment explains itself.
