A Book That Puts the Life Back Into Biography

When the critic Janet Malcolm set aside a biography of Sylvia Plath and began reading a memoir about the author instead, she felt as if she “had been freed from prison.” The writing in the biography, Bitter Fame, by Anne Stevenson, had been “by far the most intelligent” of the published Plath biographies at the time, but the conventions of the form, its “hushed cautiousness, the solemn weighing of ‘evidence,’” could stifle even the most effervescent talent. Stevenson’s pursuit of objectivity had required a sacrifice of style and of feeling.

It was 1994 when Malcolm published those words in The Silent Woman, her book-length investigation of Plath’s reputation, her work, and the people who tried to write about her. Since then, the number of biographical projects on Plath has more than doubled. Her short life and death by suicide provoke an unrelenting fascination. So does her writing, which trembles with feminine rage and aliveness. Some argue that Plath has been eulogized enough, but who’s to say when a subject has been exhausted? More than 30 biographies of Sigmund Freud exist; 50-plus on Winston Churchill. As the scholar Emily Van Duyne, the author of a new biography on Plath, wrote in 2020, “No one ever asks when we will be ‘done’ with the Beatles.”

A new biography of Audre Lorde by the poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs is only the second full-length text treatment of the author, who was born in 1934, 16 months after Plath, in Harlem. Taking its title from a passage in a draft of Lorde’s 1984 essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Gumbs’s layered and original Survival Is a Promise deeply engages with Lorde’s poetry and prose. It also takes a full accounting of her life, including aspects that another biographer might consider ephemeral. Major figures and events are held up for analysis alongside false starts, mistakes, words stricken from typewritten manuscripts. Gumbs finds meaning in the locks of shorn hair she discovers in Lorde’s archive and in the fauna of St. Croix, where the author drew her final breaths. Foregrounding the often-difficult conditions that shaped her, Gumbs’s book revels in Lorde’s lush multiplicity, moving through the ebbs and flows of her life with both precision and lyricism and expanding the limits of what a biography can be and hold and feel like.

Lorde was a prolific creator. In her 58 years, she wrote enough poetry to fill a dozen collections, many essays and speeches, and a memoir she called a biomythography; she also co-founded the historic feminist press Kitchen Table to promote women writers of color. She held a central belief in the liberatory possibility of language, which had been instilled in her early on by her Bajan book-collecting father and a Black librarian at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. (That branch is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.)

[Read: The brilliance in James Baldwin’s letters]

Lorde was an outcast in her family (because she was the darker-skinned daughter of a woman who sometimes passed for white) and at her elite high school (because she was Black). Perhaps to soothe these cuts to her soul, she pursued connections with chosen family, and equipped herself with knowledge of ancestors, spirits, nature, and the stars. Other poets were a guiding force. At Hunter College High School, Lorde worked on the literary magazine alongside the future Beat poet Diane di Prima. With a group of other outcast girls, the two held séances on the floor of a schoolroom, where they conjured the ghosts of dead Romantics such as Lord Byron and John Keats and called themselves “the Branded.” “The poetic lineage Lorde and the Branded claimed was compelling and visionary and bleak,” Gumbs writes. “They identified with the fallen.”

Gumbs calls Survival a “cosmic biography” because it accounts for the ways in which “the dynamic of the planet and the universe are never separate from the life of any being.” Natural wonders were deeply intertwined with Lorde’s life: The biographer devotes lyrical passages to eclipses, volcanoes, and especially hurricanes. In 1989, Lorde survived Hugo in St. Croix, a U.S. territory, and documented the government's militarized response. Her father had been an infant in 1898 when the Windward Islands hurricane killed more than 300 people in the eastern Caribbean. It displaced some 45,000 in Barbados alone, and destroyed its lucrative sugarcane crop, then the country’s chief export. Gumbs speculates that his eventual migration to Panama and then Grenada, where he met the woman who would become Lorde’s mother, could be traced to the storm’s many upheavals.

This episode also illustrates Gumbs’s remarkable approach to time. “Read this book in any order you want,” she instructs. Rather than a typical biography “linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave,” Survival Is a Promise is constructed out of 58 short, lyrical, often essayistic chapters, one for each year of Lorde’s life, that can also be read “like a collection of poems.”

The book begins with what would be a conventional ending. More than 20 years after her subject’s death, Gumbs sits with a trove of Lorde’s own hurricane-worn copies of her books. The next chapter evokes the dedication ceremony of the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center at Hunter College in 1985. (At this point, Lorde knew that her cancer, first diagnosed in 1977, had returned, and she and her community treated this event as something of a first funeral.) Only then do we propel backwards, to the circumstances of Lorde’s birth, her childhood, her teenage years, and beyond. Like a hurricane, the book rapidly covers enormous ground while also moving in multiple directions at once. The effect is associative and discursive.

Ultimately, Gumbs seems to want her undulating biography to feel like truth. Because Lorde’s words remain in the zeitgeist, her afterlife is detailed with just as much care. In the years since the publication of Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet, the first full-length biography of Lorde, popular movements for social justice have taken excerpts from the poet’s essays and speeches. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” the title of a 1979 talk on feminist organizing, became a slogan for a host of causes, including reimagining the role of the police. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence” has been used in social-media captions trumpeting spa days and vacations. Lorde wrote that sentence in the context of her struggle with breast cancer, which she’d learned had metastasized to her liver three years before.

Gumbs implores readers to dig beneath the shallow appropriations. “We need her survival poetics beyond the iconic version of her that has become useful for diversity-center walls and grant applications,” she writes. “We need the center of her life.” The book returns flesh to Lorde’s memory, painstakingly describing her lost school friends; her first crush; the honeybees she kept with her partner, Gloria Joseph; and her garden; it grounds her legacy in the stuff of her life.

A comprehensive biography accounts for a subject’s shortcomings, and Gumbs does not discuss Lorde’s in any depth. But she does acknowledge conflict. In a searching, tender timbre, she traces the rift between Lorde and the poet June Jordan. Also born in Harlem in the 1930s, Jordan met Lorde when they were instructors for the SEEK program at the City University of New York, which helped students from under-resourced backgrounds prepare for college. Their relationship became strained when Jordan refused to identify as a lesbian. Lorde believed that visibility could combat queer people’s marginalization; Jordan believed identity politics could devolve, creating community for some while excluding others.  

Later, Jordan became furious when her and Lorde’s mutual friend, the poet Adrienne Rich, publicly avowed her Zionism following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When Jordan wrote an open letter for the feminist newspaper WomaNews decrying Rich’s stance, a group of other feminists, including Lorde, signed a letter criticizing Jordan, whose letter was never published. Though the two continued to teach each other’s work, there is no record of a resolution.

[Read: The many lives of Adrienne Rich]

Gumbs lets her own musings fill in the blanks, imagining that the women still held each other in fondness, inquiring after each other through friends and colleagues. “There is no documentation, but that doesn’t mean I can’t imagine it,” she writes. This is just one of several unconventional choices that seem to address Janet Malcolm’s quibbles with biography. “The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination,” Malcolm wrote.

Gumbs has reported both the reality of her own imagination and the facts according to the available record. The result is a prismatic work of art that invites more questions. I hope it may also bring about more inventive considerations of other artists. For many of Lorde’s generation of esteemed sister-poets, major biographies have yet to be published. June Jordan is one of them. The still-living poet Sonia Sanchez is another; she was the last speaker at the podium of Lorde’s 1993 memorial at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.