Writing lives

Something strange happened on my way to becoming a novelist (and no: despite two novels done and a third on the way, I’m not quite there yet) — I became a biographer, a writer of other people’s lives.

It all began some time in the late 1990s, when I was asked by a man who belonged to a remarkable family — the Lavas, middle-class intellectuals who joined and later led the Communist Party — to write their family’s story. Vicente “Buddy” Lava Jr. introduced me to his uncles, Jesus and Jose, and over the next couple of years we carried on some very interesting conversations with the brothers, their wives, and their old comrade Casto “GY” Alejandrino at their home on Malapantao Street in Mandaluyong.

Those were the days before digital recorders, so I used microcassettes and good, old-fashioned note-taking; sometimes the recordings were a blur, competing with the cackling of chickens in the yard and the roar of tricycles on the street, but I managed to take their story down, helped along by visits to the old Lava house and graveyard in Bulacan.

I didn’t make too much from that project, and I didn’t expect to — it was, after all, my first foray into biography — but in truth it was a job I would have done for next to nothing, because I was genuinely fascinated by the Lavas, whose story I’d had some idea of even before I wrote the fuller version.

As a teenage student activist imprisoned during martial law, I’d met Jesus Lava at Fort Bonifacio and even played basketball with him, even though back then (and I would later tell him this, with a grin) we young ‘uns routinely applied epithets such as “black bourgeois revisionist clique” to his group. In 1980, I wrote a full-length play, Pagsabog ng Liwanag, based very loosely on what I imagined to be the situation of the Lava brothers. In that sense, art preceded reality; 18 years later came the book The Lavas: A Filipino Family (Anvil Publishing, 1998).

Since then, I’ve written quite a number of personal biographies and corporate histories, although a few of them remain unpublished, awaiting the final green light from their subjects.

Probably the most successful and best known of them has been Wash: Only a Bookkeeper (SGV Foundation, 2009). When I got the contract to write Washington SyCip’s biography, I had to take a deep breath, not knowing what kind of subject Wash was going to be. You always worry, when you sit down with high achievers, how they are going to project themselves, to you and therefore to the public; some like to recite the speeches they’ve made hundreds of times, others dwell on old scores and old wounds.

Thankfully Wash proved to be the easiest, most relaxed person to deal with, gamely fielding questions, freely sharing jokes and confidences. He was a biographer’s delight in that he could remember the oddest details (like carrying a dressed duck on the New York subway to bring to a friend) while articulating a grand vision for the upliftment of Filipino society through education, microfinance, and health services for the poor.

It took the greater part of two years to do Wash’s book, which began with months of interviews with Wash, his family, and his friends and associates. In practice, the interviews are the easy part — although again, some interview subjects are easier to deal with than others. (The biographer’s nightmare is the subject who answers a question like “So did your visit to Rome change the way you looked at life and your own spirituality?” with a plain and terminal “Yes.”)

The real knot in the string is the transcription of all the interviews — as many as 50 hours of them for a single book — which I’ve long learned to delegate to a crew of sharp-eared assistants I call my “elves.” I recruit these elves — about four or five of them, at any one time — from my best and brightest students, some of whom have since gone on to write their own books and accept their own commissions. I pay them well — I’m a firm believer in keeping my crew happy — and am glad to be able to introduce young people to very intimate aspects of their country’s social history.

Now and then I’ve written books for and about people who, 30 years ago, I would never have imagined working with. One of them was Marcos crony Rudy Cuenca, the man responsible for the building of the North and South expressways, the San Juanico Bridge, and for the initial reclamation of Manila Bay. The thought of writing a book for a friend of the man responsible for my seven months in prison — and fates much worse for countless others — was anathema to me at first, but I had to admit that the more I listened to the cool and wryly ironic Rudy, the more interesting his story was — both as the personal account of a man who never finished college and yet accomplished so many engineering feats, and also as an insider’s view of Marcos’ Malacañang, perhaps the book’s best contribution to our political literature. Builder of Bridges: The Rudy Cuenca Story (Anvil Publishing, 2010), written with my former student Ton Reyes, was launched last year.

This year I’m looking forward to the publication, also by Anvil, of my latest biography, Rosa Rosal: A Call to Serve, about an icon of public service, Ms. Red Cross herself, whose early image as a screen vamp was the complete opposite of the indefatigable miracle worker she would become, and whose personal life has seen more drama than all her movies combined.

Inevitably, I’ve often been asked if I’m not indulging in hagiography, sanctifying my subjects by casting them in their best light. My answer is that while, as their commissioned biographer, I do and must take a sympathetic stance toward my subject, I endeavor to present them in all their complexity — including the presentation of ideas and positions I myself may disagree with. Such ideas I attribute to them in the first person. I do tell my subjects that I will not lawyer for them, but will let their lives and actions speak for themselves. I try to avoid editorializing. And while it’s in our human nature to explain if not exculpate ourselves, I leave that for my subjects to do, quoting them as faithfully as possible, and trusting that the intelligent reader (the only reader worth writing for) can come to his or her own judgment about what’s being said. I expect the professional historians and social scientists to interrogate and contextualize the material I’ve helped provide them.

This is why, despite writing about the lives of some prominent people, I’ve never dared to call myself a historian. Historians stand back, provide context, quarrel with their subjects, and weave theories of human and social behavior. I work more as a fictionist dealing with presented facts and perceptions, recreating intimate scenes. The Lava brothers may have been happier to discuss the nuances of coalition politics in the mid-1940s, but I kept interjecting questions like “What did you eat?” (answer: sardines, prompting a vivid memory of Ruth Lava describing the young Lava boys fighting over the sardines “like cats”); I enjoyed asking Wash SyCip questions like “What’s on your iPod? What’s your favorite song?” (answer: Lara’s Theme from Doctor Zhivago). Trivia, perhaps, but of such details are colorful lives made.

It’s truly been a privilege for me to step into these luminaries’ lives, and I look forward, time permitting, to doing more such biographies, which have indeed become my living. (My own personal dream project is a verbal account, from as many and as varied sources as possible, of the First Quarter Storm, while the principals are still alive.) My fiction, I say, is for the inarticulate and undistinguished characters whose stories also need to be told.

Invention, in the end, is always more challenging and yet in many ways also more rewarding than memory.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.