Sweating Through Space and Time: On Catherine Lacey’s “Biography of X”
Catherine Lacey | Biography of X | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | May 2023 | 416 Pages
Describing a book as a fever dream is usually a lazy way of talking around whatever is bizarre or surreal about the text without having to be so precise. It’s a pet peeve of mine when I read reviews, and yet I found myself describing Catherine Lacey’s newest novel Biography of X exactly this way when talking to friends. Perhaps this is because Biography of X is a book within a book. The entirety of the novel is packaged as a biography with the same title by a writer named C.M. Lucca. The resulting story is an account of the biographer’s late wife, the enigmatic and polarizing interdisciplinary artist known simply as “X.”
The form itself is immersive, but what is so truly feverish about Biography of X is its slightly slanted world that imagines what the United States would look like if history played out in some alternative fashion. The novel is set in an America that divided into three parts in 1945—the Northern, Southern, and Western Territories. The Southern Territory has become a theocracy, divided from the Northern and Western Territories by a huge wall, which only comes down in 1996, just ten days before X’s own death. In this divided America, people we recognize appear in an uncanny fashion, out of place and weirdly different enough in politics or personality to give the world a slight sheen of confusion. Lacey reimagines Emma Goldman, the writer and anarchist who went unmentioned in most high school history texts, as one of the most pivotal figures in American politics, helping to usher in policies encouraging same-sex marriage, prison abolition, and immigant rights before being assassinated in 1945. Ronald Reagan runs as a Green Party candidate. Bernie Sanders becomes president in 1990 after a bitter campaign against Jesse Jackson.
X is part of the fabric of this world. She is either a genius or grifter, or both: born Caroline Luanna Walker in the Southern Territory in 1945, she escaped from the region and a traditional marriage, spending the rest of her life adopting various identities and careers, disappearing and reappearing at will. Readers learn through Lucca’s biographical research that she’s also novelist Clyde Hill, who publishes a critically acclaimed novel with New Directions, and also Clydelle, bartender at an East Village dive bar. She is Bee Converse, who worked with David Bowie and Tom Waits, and Martina Riggio, collaborator with Carla Lonzi and founder of a feminist press. She’s Yarrow Hall and Vera and Cassandra Edwards—a web of different masks that X turns into an art show called The Human Subject, displaying all her personas in a kind of practical joke. She rises to international acclaim, though X maintains that she is “not at all acting parts in these portraits,” since as an artist: “I am a representation.” For this reason, X insists that no biography of her be written after her death. She doesn’t want to be a “historical object;” her work will speak for itself.
Lucca writes her biography of the late X in response to an acclaimed—but apparently inaccurate—biography by a writer named Theodore Smith, called A Woman Without History. Lucca does occasionally quote from the book, whose passages turn out to be citations, largely from versions of Benjamin Moser’s biographies of Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector, which are edited to be about X instead. These webs of references and quotes seem to indicate that the world of Lucca and X could almost, but not quite, be our own. There’s a citation for a review by Merve Emre of Smith’s biography, which in reality is a doctored quote from Emre’s review of Moser’s Sontag, even though Sontag does exist (and is friends with X) in this universe. An excerpt from X’s journal turns out to be from Kathy Acker’s, quoted originally in Chris Kraus’ biography. If you look closely at the book’s endnotes, you will find or maybe recognize Renata Adler’s reviews, letters from Denis Johnson, even Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew’s book Black Futures, though in this world it is published in 1998, not 2020. Time has collapsed such that artists and writers from a range of eras come to overlap in one.
This is perhaps why reading Biography of X is so paranoia-inducing. It’s not just that the world is one of paranoia—notably, the narrator finds herself on the edge of several political schemes, including in her venture down to the Southern Territory where many of the people she interviews, including defectors, end up killed or missing. The slight dystopia bleeds into these false citations, making so much of the text feel like déjà vu. At the end of the novel, there’s a line I recognized, hauntingly: Lucca writes, “I wonder if I had hallucinated the whole event. Either that or I was feeling, as X wrote in The Missing, the ‘sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.’” The only footnote for this line gives the fake archival reference (“box 56a, item 1, TXA”) for The Missing, an “unpublished manuscript.” When I finished the book and read through the references, I recognized the citation as an exact quote from Toni Morrison’s Sula. It had been repackaged as a line from X’s unpublished manuscript: “the sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.” In fact, much of X’s work is borrowed from others, even Lacey’s previous novels.
Nothing feels like it can be trusted in Biography of X: the quotes, the packaging of the narrative, even C.M. Lucca herself. The form seems more fallible than not: as the book draws closer to the event of X’s death, its characteristic longform pacing gets shorter and more erratic. The closer Lucca gets to the moments and stories that she herself is part of, the less clear the narrative gets; threads are left loose. This, of course, makes the novel’s own point—that any telling of a story betrays much more about the narrator than the subject.
Lacey, and her proxy Lucca, are far from the first writers to take the inaccuracy of writing a biography as their subject. See Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan, an account of her tenuous relationship with Susan Sontag, or better yet, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, where Stein writes the life of her lover, Alice B. Toklas. Nonfiction promises reality and truth, a mask for the writer and her investments. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is both a subtle parody of the domestic memoir and a sincere portrait of the women’s lives in Paris. In Stein’s narrative, Tolkas adopts the figure of demure, admiring wife while Stein is portrayed as a more masculine-coded genius. In Biography of X, too, Lucca comes to realize that she has been slotted into this wifely role—X pushes her to quit her reporter job, yet tells her she will need distracting hobbies for when X disappears randomly without communication. Lucca’s full-time job is to admire X, whose cruelties are constantly forgiven on the grounds of genius and artistic experimentation. But in her own biography of X, Lucca has a chance to speak for herself, not ventriloquized.
Lucca’s record of X is a resistance to hagiography: she writes that “it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.” But Lucca (or Lucca-as-Lacey) is really writing about herself through this biography. It’s a journey to find her purpose, to distill why this monumental task, “of having to interpret this, X’s final work,” is what she takes on. Her ambition, her trauma, and her intense fascination with not only X’s life but also what has become of her own, motivates her writing.
After seeing X’s final artwork, a shocking and cruel installation that demonstrates the intense manipulation X used in her relationship with Lucca, she writes that “I stalked down the road as if I had been physically beaten, stepping unevenly… I have no choice to put it here, to put it somewhere, to translate it into language so it won’t hang around my neck like a locket filled with poison.” In the end, this is the most accurate description of Biography of X we could have. The book feels like a translation of a dreadful feeling, the second-guesses of the narrative toying with its reader like X does with Lucca. It’s a book, ultimately, that was written to be read quickly and swiftly forgotten.