Hester Kaplan, Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography (Catapult, 2025).
Justin Kaplan lived a good life, according to his daughter Hester’s biographical essay. After leaving his job as an editor at Simon and Schuster and relocating to Cambridge in 1959, he and his wife Anne Bernays (a Cambridge Day contributor) settled into a large house on Francis Avenue. There, grinding out words behind the closed door of his study, he wrote “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain,” “Lincoln Steffens” and “Walt Whitman,” biographies that won a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and American Book Award. Kaplan also wrote a social history of the Astor Family of New York and a joint memoir with Bernays, “Back Then: Two Literary Lives in 1950s New York.” Unlike many fellow writers, he didn’t gamble, fall to drink, or embarrass Hester or her two sisters with a scandal. His marriage lasted nearly sixty years. When he died, aged 88, Cambridge mourned him as one of our last unaffiliated men of letters.
A successful career and unimpeachable private life would seem unpromising fodder for an interrogation. “Twice Born,” by his middle daughter, zeroes in on Justin’s emotional disposition. “We never faced each other or found comfortable or honest footing because we were too alike: shy, cripplingly private,” she writes in sadness. He talked with her about stories. “I felt alone with my father, always nervous with him, even as we talked, because I wasn’t really sure if it was us we were discussing.” Her father never came out and uttered the words, “I love you.” She called him by his nickname, Joe.
The gravamen of the indictment centers on his deep past. By age thirteen, Justin Kaplan lost both parents to cancer. How did he cope with the catastrophe? What psychic formations crystallized as a result of the loss? Although he never kept his orphanhood a secret from his own family, he didn’t evince any interest in the details. He didn’t know where his parents are buried. Once, Hester reports, he forgot his mother’s maiden name when applying for a passport. That one of America’s most acclaimed biographers showed no interest in his own biography is a trivial irony in itself. But Hester holds it up as the key to their awkwardness. She wants him to have wanted a fully fledged origin story, for in turning away from his past he “avoided knowing his three daughters.”
“Twice Born” is tenderly composed, and when it peeks into the larger world, smartly observed. For approximately 15 years, the Kaplan-Bernays home on Francis Avenue served as a hub of literary culture in Cambridge. John Kenneth Galbraith lived a few doors down, Julia Child across the back fence. John Updike, Annie Dillard, Kurt Vonnegut and Bernard Malamud attended their parties. When the music died down and the writing resumed, a hush fell over the neighborhood. At Halloween, all the lights went down. As in Greg Bellow’s “Saul Bellow’s Heart” and Janna Malamud Smith’s “My Father is a Book,” “Twice Born” bears witness to an axiom of the scribbler’s vocation: all time away from the desk is stolen time.
The book never quite sticks its thesis. The dominant image of the author sees her crouching outside the closed door of her father’s study, wondering why she can’t enter. We don’t learn whether Hester’s sisters or mother nursed the same question, or whether they conceived Justin’s incuriosity toward his past as a problem at all. They seldom appear in these pages. Hester wishes he had been a different sort of father, one more emotionally expressive, more engaged with her inner needs. But we don’t know whether he himself recognized their “lack of connection and inability to speak to and about each other.” His friend of eight decades tells Hester he never discussed his dead parents with him either. “And I felt I shouldn’t ask,” the friend adds.
Do parents exist in order to be judged by their children? How much of their pasts do we deserve to know? Can any of us know the inner lives of other people? “Twice Born” collapses these hard questions into what the critic Parul Sehgal has called “the trauma plot.” The convention flattens character in order to impute a wound that explains all, exchanging mystery and uncertainty for a presumption of superiority. Hester charges her father with a failure of “courage” and “honesty” in confronting his “secret.” (What secret?) “He doesn’t know why he never looked back to discover how he weathered the deaths of his parents,” she writes. Perhaps orphanhood, prevalent in the 1930s, simply did not bear the same weight on his shoulders as Hester imagines it would have on hers. “I would not be like my father,” she swears when she becomes a writer despite herself. Whenever her children knock on her study, she assures us, she lets them in.
Reading her father’s great biographies after his death, she juxtaposes passages with feelings she imagines he must have inhabited as an orphaned boy. In this way, staging the conversation she never had with him, she “finds” her father “in the margins of biography,” as the subtitle claims. The catharsis is muted because the conflict is one-sided. She alights on therapeutic “acceptance,” rather than increased understanding.
“Twice Born” is a warmhearted lament that miscarries over the central illusion of biography. No matter how much detail they amass, no matter how many witnesses they interview, no matter how many conversations they may have with their subjects, biographers can transfigure only so much of time and character into cognizable history. Incorporate the methodological limitation, and the genre beguiles and humanizes in the same stroke. As the anthropologist David Graeber once argued, “the fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other. To recognize another person as human is to recognize the limits of one’s possible knowledge of them.”
Justin Kaplan didn’t know his parents because they died when he was a boy. Hester Kaplan didn’t know her father because he didn’t care to reveal all of himself. The yearning for more is human. So is the universal fact of human finitude.
A stronger
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