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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith
by
Schenkar, Joan
rollyson2002
, October 01, 2012
Patricia Highsmith is best known for her "Ripliad" -- five novels featuring an engaging murderer, Tom Ripley. This criminally attractive man is the enemy of all things conventional, as was his creator. Moments before her death, Highsmith urged a visiting friend to leave, repeating, "Don't stay, don't stay." Highsmith wanted nothing more than to die alone, according to her biographer, who concludes, "Everything human was alien to her." Highsmith, a native Texan, was born restless, her mother said. The novelist kept moving to new venues all over Europe, acquiring and discarding female lovers and denouncing all of them. They were poor substitutes for the mother she loved and hated. This mother fixation was just one of the Highsmith passions that provoke biographer Joan Schenkar to eschew a chronological narrative. Instead, the chapters in "The Talented Miss Highsmith" (St. Martin's Press, $35) are organized around Highsmith's obsessions. The result of this unorthodox approach is an intricate, novel-like structure that suits Schenkar's own wit. Highsmith's mother, Mary, makes several entertaining entrances -- for example, arriving in London to see her daughter "with rather less warning than the Blitz." "Miss Highsmith" is full of wonderfully realized scenes, like the opening chapter describing with mesmerizing, miraculous detail exactly how Highsmith composed her work. She gripped her "favorite Parker fountain pen, hunched her shoulders over her roll-top desk -- her oddly jointed arms and enormous hands were long enough to reach the back of the roll while she was still seated." Highsmith's love life is described with loving specificity garnered from sources who do not wish to be identified by their real names. "In the delicate balance of competing truths that biography is always on the verge of upsetting, both the living and dead deserve a little protection from each other," Schenkar writes. This panoply of lovers is new material not to be found in other books, which also failed to unearth Highsmith's surprising seven-year career writing for comic books. For those who want the straight dope, there is a substantial appendix titled "Just the Facts." But Schenkar is at pains to reiterate that Highsmith did not develop over time; indeed, the biographer notes that Highsmith "forged chronologies to give order to her life, altering the record of her life and the purport of her writing to do so." You don't have to buy Schenkar's thesis. In "Beautiful Shadow," Andrew Wilson produced a rather good chronological biography of Highsmith. Nevertheless, Schenkar's methods and deep research into Highsmith's deceptive practices have yielded one of the year's best literary lives, which is also a bracing rebuke to the usual way we read biography.
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Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand
by
Benita Eisler
rollyson2002
, September 30, 2012
"Naked in the Marketplace" is Henry James's phrase for George Sand's parading of her affair with Alfred de Musset in her fiction. James, needless to say, preferred more discretion in his aesthetic. Sand shocked and titillated her contemporaries even more when she took up with Chopin, a liaison that lasted nearly nine years, during which the composer produced half his works of genius. Sand's fiction is not much read today, although her letters are now complete in 26 volumes, and yet her life is better recorded than that of any other woman in French history. So what does Benita Eisler have to add? Mainly a wry wit and a compact narrative ��" although I was a bit distracted by her penchant for the passive voice. Her book sometimes reads as if it has been translated from the French. Certain feminists have given Sand a hard time because she was, in Ms. Eisler's terms, an "exceptionalist" ��" meaning, in Sand's view, it was all right for her to act the part of a man, wearing pants and loving whom she pleased. But women in general ought to stay at home, she thought, and not bother about the right to vote. Sand got a divorce from Casimir Dudevant in 1844 but was against it for other women. But Sand was hardly alone in rejecting feminism as a movement. Like other exceptional women, she saw herself as sui generis, and "more intelligent, more honest, more self-respecting" than other women. Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft thought similarly, Ms. Eisler notes. "Only Sand's talent and success, trumped all the cards against her," she concludes. Why should Sand think that lesser, ordinary women could do the same? So Sand's fiction, even though it was autobiographical, never included a woman as protean as herself. On the contrary, these women were, like her eponymous heroine, Lélia, frigid ��" not because of some psychological disorder but because a woman caught in a terrible marriage with an abusive man could not achieve orgasm. Patriarchal power relationships were such that a woman could not freely love, and without that kind of spontaneity in her life, she could not climax. In an age when pregnancy was referred to by such euphemisms as "lying in," it is no wonder that Sand gave Henry James the vapors. The poor chap used to get enervated when Edith Wharton took him out for excursions in her driving machine. And Sand's contemporaries thought that she hastened Chopin's demise by her vampiric demands on his fragile libido. Stuff and nonsense, of course. Sand nursed and mothered the invalid Chopin. He was grateful, although he never quite got over his conventional notion that she was a naughty woman. Ms. Eisler's narrative proceeds so effortlessly that it was not until I had finished her book and began perusing her sparse notes that I began to feel a tad dissatisfied. Why did Sand write so much? Something like 90 novels (it is odd that different biographers come up with different counts), not to mention her memoirs, 20,000 letters, and copious journalism. Why did Sand write so rapidly? A typical day yielded 20 pages. And why didn't she revise? Ms. Eisler explains that Sand always spent more than she earned, so she was always taking on more writing assignments. And she didn't revise because she didn't really think of herself as an artist ��" you know, like her friend Flaubert, who agonized over every word, not to mention that finicky perfectionist Chopin, taking the measure of every note. Well, okay, but plenty of writers go into debt rather than chain themselves to their desks every night like Sand. And it is not only artists who feel the need to revise. And I was still left wondering why Sand always composed in a torrent. I began to suspect that Ms. Eisler is one of those biographers who does not want her flow interrupted by inconvenient, disturbing questions. Yet some biographers earn their authority by asking the right questions, even when they cannot give definitive answers. Now I have a confession to make: Many years ago I attended a brilliant talk about George Sand given by Elizabeth Harlan, then a member of a biography seminar at New York University. She published her "George Sand" in 2004 ��" a fact mentioned once in Ms. Eisler's note (the only one) to chapter 3: "We owe the reconstruction of Sand's discovery and subsequent suppression of evidence relating to her parentage to the archival labors of Elizabeth Harlan." In other words, although Ms. Eisler does not exactly acknowledge it, much of chapter 3 owes its existence to Ms. Harlan's groundbreaking work. And this "reconstruction," by the way, is not only a matter of research, but rather, in Ms. Harlan's words, a product of the "tug of war between information and intuition." Ms. Harlan had a hunch that Sand biographers had missed something: "What if, I came to wonder, an unverified but universally accepted assumption about George Sand's identity was placed in doubt?" In short, what if Sand's father was not the aristocrat Maurice Dupin but rather an unknown male who had coupled with Sand's mother Sophie during one of Maurice's absences? There is no space here to recount how Ms. Harlan proved that Sand knew but covered up the fact that Maurice Dupin was not her biological father. But I second Ms. Eisler's belief that Ms. Harlan has proven her case. And it matters, because the thrust of Sand's novels were about women who sought to legitimate themselves. At night, in a dreamlike reverie Sand would write these fables emanating from a deep inner hurt: Pages and pages would pour out, even though Sand often suffered pain in her writing arm and even experienced partial paralysis accompanied by periods of "near blindness," Ms. Harlan notes. Composing at night, alone, gave Sand access to feelings that she could not recall the next day without rereading what she had just written. What was happening to Sand? In a footnote, Ms. Harlan quotes Helen Deutsch's essay on Sand: "There are mental disturbances in which the patient falls into so-called twilight states, in which he experiences things that are normally cordoned off from his conscious life." Naked in the marketplace indeed! Fiction was not just thinly disguised autobiography for Sand. Fiction represented a kind of primal woman's story, an anchoring of the self in novels not governed by a Napoleonic code that gave women practically no rights. Where to funnel all that energy ��" so much that no man could satisfy Sand for long ��" except in writing, in the font of her own creativity? In "A New History of French Literature" (1989) Naomi Schor suggests that in "Lélia" Sand demonstrated that the "war between the sexes is culturally constructed." Where to escape that construction ��" even as she wrote about it ��" other than in her own prose? No wonder, as Ms. Schor argues, Sand rejected Balzac's realism in favor of her allegorical novels about the terrible choices women confronted. The end of James's line about Sand and de Musset is that the lovers "perform for the benefit of society." So it seems in Ms. Eisler's account. But it does not in Ms. Harlan's, where Sand, it seems to me, comes into her own.
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Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins
by
Amanda Vaill
rollyson2002
, September 29, 2012
Can there be too much of a good thing when it comes to biography? If there is someone Amanda Vaill did not interview, if there is a document she overlooked, if there is an archive or other source of information she could not access, it is news to me. I have to second Terry Teachout's claim, "I can't imagine a better book about Robbins ever being written." Of course there will be other books because, to quote Mr. Teachout again, "Jerome Robbins is the great subject of American theatrical biography." Others may demur, but certainly this magnificent choreographer (the term does not do justice to his many talents) is a great subject. Even for those who have already read earlier biographies by Greg Lawrence and Deborah Jowitt, there are rewards, because Ms. Vaill has used Robbins's own articulate writings (many of them unpublished) to provide an intimate portrait that bridges the gap between autobiography and biography. Every reviewer can only come to "Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins" (Broadway, 675 pages, $40) with a partial knowledge of Robbins. I know him mainly from work on musicals like "On the Town," "West Side Story," and "Fiddler on the Roof." Others know Robbins for his ballets and his collaborations with great artists such as Leonard Bernstein. Still others (an angry cohort) can't get over Robbins's naming names at his House Un-American Activities Committee hearing. Ms. Vaill slights none of these aspects of Robbins's career. If she is resolutely sympathetic toward Robbins, taking the edge off the caustic man who appears in other biographies, she not so much rebuts the work of others as simply presents what she obviously regards as a fuller portrait, a dramatic, incremental revelation of the kind we expect in novels of a high order. I suppose a reader less than committed to the arts, less than attuned to the politics of the New York stage during much of the 20th century, could weary of the detail that informs Ms. Vaill's narrative. Jerome Robbins deserves a lyrical biography, the equivalent of a dance with the reader, and Ms. Vaill obliges. If a better biography is ever written about Robbins, it will have catapulted off Ms. Vaill's strong work. But quite aside from the biographer's superb handling of Robbins's major achievements, the story of how he transformed himself from Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz to Jerome Robbins, how he negotiated his love life as a gay man who also loved women ��" and countless other aspects of his art and life ��" what entranced me was the discovery of how literate Robbins was. At a very early age he was reading Faulkner (always a good sign in my book) and the other greats. Robbins himself wrote very well and had an ear for music that often helped him to coalesce dance steps and movements into a form that resulted in extraordinary rapport with collaborators like Bernstein. Lest you think Ms. Vaill knows everything, I hasten to add that she cannot say if the Bernstein/Robbins partnership ever segued into the sexual. A few murky references in Robbins's diaries suggest as much, but they are not definitive. And Ms. Vaill does not push the matter. It is a matter of tact ��" biographer's tact ��" not to go beyond the evidence, or beyond (in this case) how Robbins or Bernstein may ultimately have understood their relationship. Beyond tact, there is Ms. Vaill's knack for finding the nub. Every biographer writing for a general audience has to supply a certain amount of background. How much, for example, should readers be told about the Group Theatre or the Actors Studio, which contributed significantly to Robbins's artistic development? Some readers, like me, already know quite a bit and will chafe at boilerplate. Here is how Ms. Vaill treats the work of Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis, two founders of the Actors Studio: "The cornerstones of Lewis and Kazan's teaching were Stanislavsky's twin principles of intention, or the importance of one's character's objective in a given scene, and work on oneself, or technique." This pithy statement neatly avoids the pitfalls of saying too much or too little. Believe me, there is a considerable margin of error. A less able biographer might introduce Actors Studio by referring to "the Method," or to the prickly personalities involved. But Ms. Vaill wants to show what Robbins got out of it. Even a reader well versed in the ins and outs of theatrical history will never bored by this fresh, concise explanation of a well-known institution. Ms. Vaill's biography does not so much supplant previous efforts as provide a broader and deeper context that can be used to assess them. And I take her own acknowledgment of previous biographers at face value: She is indeed "indebted" to them. How else could she write with such precision, knowing where her score needs a soft pedal or crescendo? There can be too much of a good thing in biography. Countless biographies have foundered on precisely the grounds Ms. Vaill stands on. Congested with too much detail, with too much good fortune in the way of access and archival sources, the biographer cannot resist parading how much she knows. Ms. Vaill, who once upon a time was a book editor and surely dealt with baggy monster biographies, knows what I mean all too well. But it is the rare biographer, let alone editor, who is capable of acting on her own acumen and producing such an exquisitely polished performance.
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Royal Affair
by
Stella Tillyard
rollyson2002
, September 28, 2012
"George III: America's Last King" (Yale University Press, 448 pages, $35) adds much to our knowledge of the monarch and his reign. I was intrigued to learn about George's reading and how much writing he produced. He was an earnest, if not very subtle thinker. The word often applied to him is stolid. The biographer's research is impressive, but I'd recommend that you clear your calendar and wear a pair of noise-canceling headphones whilst (as the Brits say) you attempt to decipher Jeremy Black's prose. There is a reason why some biographies are called "academic." In Chapter 19, "Reputation and Comparisons," Mr. Black states: The British monarchy, or the image of the monarchy, was reconstructed during the later years of George's reign. The strong patriotism of the war with France, and the king's less conspicuous role in day-to-day politics, combined fruitfully to facilitate the celebration less of the reality and more of the symbol of monarchy. In this, the precondition of the creation of a popular monarchy was (ironically but significantly) the perceived decline in the crown's political authority in a partisan sense, at least its use thus in a clear and frequent fashion. When I got as far as "in this," my eyes began to cross and the question of what to plant in my spring garden suddenly seemed of paramount concern. Is there any excuse for such writing? Do monarchy wonks thrive on it? The first two sentences quoted above, with their needless repetitions and plethora of prepositions are illustrative of the ponderous locutions that thud throughout this biography. Translation: As soon as George III stopped meddling in everyday politics the monarchy as a symbolic institution began to thrive. By doing less, George actually enhanced the authority of the monarchy, even though it seemed to partisans that he had weakened it. What more needs saying? Did I miss something? It is with considerable relief that I turned to Stella Tillyard's "A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings" (Random House, 384 pages, $26.95). The title may suggest that this book is historylite, but not a bit of it. In a delightful introduction, Ms. Tillyard describes how together with her assistant she conducted painstaking research in the Hanoverian archives, plowing through towering piles of metal boxes: "Across the faces of other researchers, as we passed, flitted expressions that mixed polite astonishment with just a hint of disdain." In Hanover, the court kept records of everything: When George II had his son inoculated for smallpox in 1724, "His English doctor wrote a daily report on his condition, recording the prince's mood and temperature and the number of spots on his skin." I can imagine the comic figure Ms. Tillyard cut among her fellow researchers: Was she really going to sift through all this detritus, and to what end? Already sympathetic to this scholar dredging through the past, I quickly grasped that a certain level of detail was essential to craft a narrative as compelling and colorful as that of a novel. But this is hardly all that Ms. Tillyard accomplishes. She is writing a group biography with George III at its center, and she shows that his overwhelming sense of responsibility for his siblings ��" most of whom had nothing much to do ��" is of a piece with his politics, in which the erring American colonists, for example, had to be brought into line in the same way a father disciplines his children or an older brother reads the riot act to the younguns. George III took himself very seriously as the father of his nation, the one figure who could rise above factions and self-serving institutions to represent and guide his people. But as one court observer noted, it was all very well if George III was on the side of right, but what if he mistook wrong for right? To whom does one appeal a father's decisions? Curiously, George III (sometimes accused of being a closet Jacobite!) came near to believing he ruled by divine right. By describing and assessing how the king dealt with his own family, Ms. Tillyard also makes her contribution to the genre of biography: Biography tends to be a vertical genre, going from parents to children, explaining its subjects by virtue of their childhoods and their relationships with their mothers and fathers. It rarely dwells for very long on brothers and sisters and the importance they can have in one another's lives. Perhaps because I am from a large family myself, my work had tended to go the other way, to be horizontal, seeking in the tangled web of brotherly and sisterly relations other clues to what makes us who we are. Has a biographer ever so elegantly conjoined in a compact paragraph the nature of biography, her research interests, and her own biography with the reader's interests? George III had one sister, Caroline Mathilde, who married a mad Danish king and suffered the horrible consequences of an affair with a radical young court doctor. George III's brothers led scandalous, dissolute lives on the royal dole. And yet he refused to give up on this family, just as he would not relinquish his claim on the American colonies. To do so would strike at the heart of his paternal values. George III's father, Prince Frederick, who died in his 30s (making his son George next in line to Frederick's father, George II), had suffered the neglect of both mother and father and thus decided that the future George III ("a serious boy," Ms. Tillyard calls him) would know what it meant to have a warm heart and would come to regard loving family relations as the basis for a ruler's values. Frederick, in fact, left specific instructions for his son, emphasizing: "Tis not out of vanity that I write this; it is out of love to You, and to the public. It is for your good, and for that of my family, and of the good people you are to govern, that I leave this to you." To speak of love and family and the nation, combining in such a tender way the personal and the political, surely marks a new development in British history. The monarch as person and symbol fused. But at what cost to George III, Ms. Tillyard shows. The burden of representing and unifying the British world was too much for one man ��" any man ��" who could no more keep his empire together than he could make peace among his own family.
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Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean
by
Gene D Phillips and Gene D. Phillips and Gene D. Phillips
rollyson2002
, September 27, 2012
David Lean began his career carrying tea to filmmakers and doing other menial tasks. He then graduated to film cutter, demonstrating he had a good eye and helping out directors who could not master the Moviola, a contraption that synchronized picture and sound. And before long Lean had become a superb editor. In principle, this should have qualified him to be a commanding director: Visuals, not the words, are what predominate in cinema. Get the montage right ��" as he did in "Pygmalion" (1938) ��" and you have a rush of nearly wordless scenes that reveal all you need to know about Eliza Doolittle and her professor. This technique of cutting to decisive moments nearly equals that epitome of editing, the sequence of scenes that shows the deterioration of Charles Foster Kane's marriage in Orson Welles's masterpiece. But Gene Phillips does not share Lean's editorial gifts. In "Beyond the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean" (University of Kentucky Press, 535 pages, $39.95), he spares a paragraph or two for how Lean put "Pygmalion" together, and then he rattles on for page after page explaining how George Bernard Shaw, Gabriel Pascal (the rapscallion producer), and the rest of the universe reacted to the film. Because Lean is awarded genius status, everything connected to him has to appear on Mr. Phillips's screen. Lean had six wives and behaved sort of like Henry VIII, so that the wives often appear somewhere in this celluloid life as outtakes, so to speak ��" ancillary to the true drama of the director's career. Lean did his best work as a director early on when he had scripts like "Great Expectations" (1946) and "Oliver Twist" (1948) to discipline his infatuation with the panoramic screen. Did he see himself in service of a genius like Dickens and then later regard himself as belonging in the same category? When that happens, the director becomes a law unto himself. I wasn't surprised to learn that Lean greeted the advent of sound with dismay. As the astringent David Thomson observes: "Lean became lost in the sense of his own pictorial grandeur." Alec Guinness, who had his share of battles with the lordly Lean, was surely right: It was a mercy that Lean did not live long enough to do his film of Conrad's "Nostromo." After recently viewing Lean's putative masterpiece, "Lawrence of Arabia," I could not fathom the point of the film other than to produce stunning visuals and provide footage for the God-like Peter O'Toole. In search of relief from the turgid Mr. Phillips, I took another peek at the Lean entry in Mr. Thomson's inimitable "Biographical Dictionary of Film": "It is hard to discern what ‘Lawrence' is about ��" it seems afflicted with very English intimations that the desert is a place for miracles." I'm not sure why Mr. Phillips decided to do this biography. To be sure, certain critics faulted his predecessor, Kevin Brownlow, for not including more film criticism in his biography of Lean. And Mr. Phillips, professor of film history and modern literature at Loyola University, does right by this aspect of Lean's achievement. But Mr. Brownlow had extraordinary access to Lean and is certainly the better writer. At crucial points, Mr. Phillips has to rely on Mr. Brownlow, who is generously acknowledged in "Beyond the Epic" as Lean's "definitive biographer." Mr. Phillips's elephantine effort is certainly worth close attention for film scholars ��" many of whom, including Mr. Brownlow, have praised his book. What they seem to be applauding, however, is primarily the scholar's energy and comprehensiveness. Of course, they also grant Lean his genius, which I am loath to do. At his best, in the magnificent "Oliver Twist," dominated by the incomparable Alec Guinness, Lean had the sense to meld his superb editing with a world-class performance of one of literature's great characters. "Oliver Twist" has pace and wit ��" the very qualities that later grandiose pictures like "Dr. Zhivago" lack. It ought to be the purpose of biography to explain what happened to Lean. Or as David Thomson concludes, "I challenge anyone to see ‘Oliver Twist' and ‘Dr. Zhivago' and not admit the loss. It will take a very good biography to explain that process." Well, I am still waiting.
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Toussaint Louverture: A Biography
by
Madison Smartt Bell
rollyson2002
, September 26, 2012
"Toussaint Louverture" (Pantheon, 333 pages, $27) is a beautifully composed discourse on a revolutionary world, a work in a class all its own. Madison Smart Bell's sentences seem suffused with the steamy intrigue and violence of Saint Domingue, the French name for 18th century Haiti. Click Image to Enlarge Reunion Des Musees Nationaux / Art Resource, NY Toussaint Louverture emerged as the hero from the Haitian Revolution, only to become a dictator, Carl Rollyson writes in a review of Madison Smart Bell’s ‘Toussaint Louverture’. Above, a detail of an engraving of Louverture by an anonymous artist. Toussaint Louverture (c. 1743��"1803) arose from the murk of events as mysteriously and as forcefully as Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen in "Absalom, Absalom!" Like the "demon" Sutpen, a refugee planter from the West Indies ruthlessly establishing his kingdom in southern Mississippi, Louverture was like a "voudou" spirit, exploding on the colonial scene: "Toussaint slept for no more than two hours a night, and his endurance, both in the saddle and in the office, was astounding to all who encountered it." Toussaint had the mind of an administrator but also the tactical skills of a great general. Toussaint, in Mr. Bell's prose, figures as a Nietzschean superman in a hurry. He was in his 50s when a half million Haitian slaves rose up against their oppressors in 1794. But Toussaint, a Creole, had already been free for a good decade before the mass revolt. He was built like a jockey, and seems to have made himself invaluable to his white owners because he was so good with horses and on horses. This skill served him well: He appeared, in his revolutionary heydey, to be everywhere at once. No one could pin him down. But Toussaint had owned slaves. He was not a nationalist. And it is not clear to Mr. Bell that Toussaint ever wanted independence for his land. So what did Toussaint want, and why did he, like Napoleon, emerge from the ranks of the revolution to become its dictator? He played one faction off another in Machiavellian fashion while at the same time demonstrating a strategic skill in deploying troops and negotiating victories without taking many casualties. Like Bonaparte, he believed he had to take charge among rivals that were tearing one another apart. To begin, Toussaint wanted to preserve a plantation system in which ex-slaves would return to their labors as free men reasonably compensated for their work. Mr. Bell does not say why Toussaint favored such a moderate solution, but I infer from the narrative that since Toussaint himself had prospered in the ancien régime, a political solution had to be found that did not destroy the economic basis of his civilization. But Toussaint also had to deal with a fragmented body politic that would have tested the wits of any political genius: a Byzantine color grid of 64 gradations of gens de couleur (colored people) that inevitably fomented rivalries that had Toussaint negotiating at his Machiavellian best; a rancorous relationship between the grande blancs and the petits blancs, "a population of merchants, artisans, sailors, international transients, and fortune seekers," and a French colonial administration that see-sawed between free-theblacks radicals and return-themto-slavery reactionaries. Still, I did not realize just how complicated Toussaint was until Mr. Bell's last chapter, where he deftly describes how earlier Toussaint biographies made Toussaint out to be a saint or devil. He is neither one in Mr. Bell's book. Instead, as in the progress of "Absalom, Absalom!," in which Sutpen and the circumstances he encountered become steadily more complex as more narrators interact with one another to tell his story, Toussaint becomes caught up in events that are partly the result of his own duplicity. Napoleon knew he had two choices: work with Toussaint and accept free labor as a consequence, or invade and restore the grande blancs to power. Against his better judgment (or so he claimed in retrospect), Napoleon acceded to the importunate grande blancs and sent General LeClerc to put down Toussaint and bring him back to a French prison. Toussaint resisted the invasion because the price of French hegemony meant a return to slavery. Mr. Bell suggests that the French forces were not overwhelming ��" another reason Toussaint saw no need to capitulate. Yet, in the end, Toussaint put himself into French custody, for reasons historians and biographers still debate and which Mr. Bell does not presume to settle. Judging by his letters, Toussaint thought he could cut a deal with the French. He also rightly believed that a French victory would only be temporary and that the roots of liberty in his land were already deep enough to survive his defeat and demise. If Toussaint's motivations remain something of an enigma in Mr. Bell's biography, this is all to the good. Like any great novelist, this biographer respects the inscrutability of human nature, thereby elevating the genre of biography to the highest level.
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Beatrix Potter
by
Linda Lear
rollyson2002
, September 25, 2012
What did children do before Disney? They read Beatrix Potter. They still do. Her Peter Rabbit, who first appeared in 1902, still has a world audience, and royalties from her other books and "licensing kingdom" (as Linda Lear's publisher puts it) earn something like $500 million a year. The new film about Potter's life, starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, will make that gross even more. Unlike Disney's Mickey Mouse & Co., Potter's Peter & Co. were set in "a real place and in real, rather than imagined, nature," observes Ms. Lear in her new biography "Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature" (St. Martin's Press, 554 pages, $30). This meant, for example, that Potter (an exquisite illustrator) dressed her rabbits in human clothes but pictured them in postures and positions these creatures habitually assume. My favorite illustration is of two rabbits in a potting shed. One is entering the building with a tray of flowers as another tends to a flowerpot. This pen-and-ink study vividly creates a gardening world, "replete with pelargoniums and fuchsias in claypots, with a collection of gardening tools ��" rakes, hoes, brooms, spades, forks and a large watering can." Potter outdoes Disney and other animated cartoonists in her romance of details at the intersection of the animal and human worlds. From childhood on, Potter lived with animals, making pets of mice and rabbits and all sorts of wild things. Potter did not become a children's book author until she was nearly 40. But her long apprenticeship as an observer and illustrator of the natural world served her well. She was an amateur scientist who put nature under her microscope and a conservationist who left a tract of land several times larger than New York City's Central Park. Born in 1866, Potter belonged to a socially ambitious and wealthy family that expected their daughter to marry upward. When she fell in love with her editor, the family rejected his proposal of marriage, since anyone in publishing was considered no better than "in trade." Potter thought her parents' pretensions were ridiculous, since the family fortune had been built on the cotton trade. But there is no snobbery quite like that of the nouveau riche, which places a premium on social climbing. But what of Potter before 40? Did she have no beaus? Ms. Lear takes her time explaining that Potter was shy and disliked the elaborateness of Victorian courting rituals. And by the 1890s she was too old to behave like one of those "new women" that H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw had so much fun writing about. Potter was quite willing to defy her parents when the right man came along, but her editor died a month after the announcement of their engagement. A devastated yet resilient Potter eventually found love again when she married her solicitor, another suitor whom her parents had rejected. Potter's attitude toward her family and marriage reminds me of Charlottes Brontë's. Both women wanted to be good daughters, but they had the independence of mind to seek happiness outside the patriarchal home when it was offered to them. Potter was fortunate in that her only two suitors were sensitive to her genius, and in that other men, too, did their best to promote her talent within the strictures of Victorian society. In Ms. Lear's account Potter emerges as a determined woman, yet one who was in no hurry to develop her talent, which began with copying pictures she liked, studying the anatomy of animals, and then adapting her knowledge to "picture-letters" she sent to children. The photographs, drawings, and watercolors in this biography require considerable study. There is a portrait, for example, of a sheep's head that is done with such gravity and care that it rivals any presidential portrait I've seen. "Her skill impressed her shepherds," Ms. Lear notes. Compare the photograph of a beaming Potter holding her Pekinese dogs, Tzusee and Chuleh, to one of her parents adopting dour poses for the camera. That the ebullient Potter could have emerged out of that rigid world to live on in such triumphant old age is surely a great achievement, one this biography superbly commemorates. Ms. Lear's ability to meld narrative and analysis is very impressive ��" so much so that whether you know much or little of Beatrix Potter, you will be enchanted by this story of a supremely gifted and ultimately happy human being. Potter's story has been told before, of course, and Ms. Lear gives due credit to her predecessors. But this book's level of detail and acuity makes it as nearly definitive as biography can be.
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Lover of Unreason Assia Wevill Sylvie Plaths Rival & Ted Hughes Doomed Love
by
Yehuda Koren, Sylvia Plath
rollyson2002
, September 24, 2012
Assia Wevill is the dark lady of the Plath/Hughes agon. As Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev put it in "Lover of Unreason" (Carroll & Graf, 268 pages, $27.95), "Assia was reduced to the role of a she-devil and an enchantress, the woman alleged to have severed the union of twentieth-century poetry's most celebrated couple." When Sylvia Plath and Assia first met, they liked each other. Assia, a part-Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, bore, in Plath's words, her "passport on her face." She had lived the suffering that Sylvia had imagined in poems like "Daddy." Plath was happy that Assia and her husband David, a fine poet, would occupy the flat she and Ted were relinquishing to pursue their passion for poetry and for each other in the Devon countryside. Then the Wevills were invited to Devon, and the world went terribly wrong. Later Ted Hughes would accuse Assia of being the "dark destructive force that destroyed Sylvia." Several biographers say Assia boasted to friends she was putting on her war paint to seduce Ted Hughes. She was on her third marriage and had a reputation as a femme fatale. But what exactly happened in Devon is hard to say. Even Olwyn Hughes, a staunch defender of her brother, could tell Anne Stevenson (commissioned by the Hughes Estate to write "Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath" [1989]), no more than what Assia told Olywn: There had been a "sexual current" between Assia and Ted that enraged Sylvia. In "Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath" (1991), Paul Alexander reports: "Strong-will and determined, Assia ��" apparently ��" made the first move with Ted." Diane Middlebrook in "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath ��" A Marriage" (2003) follows a similar line, suggesting Assia had Ted "under a spell." And yet Elaine Feinstein's "Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet" (2001) presents evidence that confirms the story in "Lover of Unreason": Ted Hughes was "a sexual stalker by nature" and no longer enraptured with Sylvia, who had become a housewife and mother ��" a "hag," as he called her in one of their arguments after the Wevill visit to Devon. According to Ms. Feinstein, Hughes eventually tired of Assia too because, in the words of William Congreve's "Way of the World," she had begun to "dwindle into a wife." Whatever the alluring Assia did or did not do during that fateful rendezvous in Devon, she became the vessel of Ted Hughes's desire to shuck off his domestic duties and seek some haven where he could recapture his poetic spirit. Assia did not make it easy for Hughes, since she still cared a great deal for David Wevill and continued to live with him off and on. Meanwhile, Hughes attempted to square himself with his disapproving parents and settle on some kind of domestic routine with the two young children Plath had been careful not to gas when she took her life on February 11, 1963. But if Assia was slow to forsake David ��" as David has made clear to several biographers ��" she could not have been simply the she-devil enchantress of legend. Perhaps the most telling part of "Lover of Unreason" concerns Hughes's search for a home that he and Assia could share. A man who had never previously had trouble making up his mind about where to live, Hughes repeatedly found fault with the houses he and Assia inspected. Indeed, he led her on, for during this house-hunting period he had several other women on the side ��" it was Hughes's practice to create the conditions that provoked women to leave him. No biographer would be willing to state that Ted Hughes was a very bad man, for to do so is to invite the biography to be read as an indictment. Ms. Feinstein feels the need to mitigate Hughes's appalling behavior ��" destroying some of Plath's work, essentially erasing the record of Assia's important role in his life, and in so many ways attempting to control the telling not only of his biography but those of Plath and Wevill. To Ms. Feinstein, Hughes had a "granite endurance" to go on writing after so many tragedies. Of his cover-ups, she suggests he took the "harsh road of a survivor." Yehuda Kore and Eilat Negev are careful not to condemn him, but they eschew such rationalizations. The worst of it is that on March 23, 1969, Assia Wevill took not only her life but also that of her 4-year-old daughter by Hughes. As her biographers show, such acts are not uncommon among single mothers in their 40s who are so disturbed at the horrible nature of the world that they cannot imagine a better one for their offspring. Except for a few periods and poems of self-blame, Hughes never could confront his culpable role in the lives of Plath and Wevill; instead, he issued his apologia in the form of a poetry collection, "Birthday Letters" (1998). So it is fortunate indeed to have "Lover of Unreason," an impressively researched and well-told biography that will occasion, I believe, yet another rewriting of the Plath/ Hughes agon.
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The Castle in the Forest
by
Mailer, Norman
rollyson2002
, September 23, 2012
There has always been something pre-Judeo-Christian about Norman Mailer's imagination. He has a Homeric sensibility that is also at home in ancient Egypt. Monotheism hardly appeals to the Manichean Mr. Mailer. So it does not surprise me that a devil masquerading as a member of the Nazi SS narrates Mr. Mailer's first novel in more than a decade, "The Castle in the Forest" (Random House, 496 pages, $27.95). Modern psychology, Mr. Mailer implies, cannot account for the rise of Adolf Hitler. He has a point. There are many explanations for Hitler's rise to power, but no interpretation dominates the field. Mr. Mailer knows as much because he has poured over the contemporary literature on the Führer. The novelist appends an extensive bibliography to his work, even marking with an asterisk those books he drew on for inspiration and data. But why the devil? Because no God-centered universe could possibly produce a Hitler, Mr. Mailer implies. Such evil is only conceivable in a divided cosmogony, in a contest between God and the E. O. (Mr. Mailer's acronym for the Evil One). For decades he has championed the idea of a seesaw conflict between the forces of good and evil. The devil in "The Castle in the Forest" is like one of those Ancient Greek gods who takes a special interest in a particular mortal and helps him out when it seems the human's strength of purpose may flag. So Adolf ��" enabled but also enervated by mother-love ��" needs a dose of the devil to enhance his prospects. Those who know Mr. Mailer's life story might think of Fanny Mailer, the maternal sentinel who presided over her son's rise to fame. Needless to say, Mr. Mailer is not equating his experience with Hitler's, but he seems to be pursuing a parallel. Remember that Mr. Mailer is also the author of "Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man" (1995), another work that attempts to fathom the origins of the artist's power. Indeed, Mr. Mailer is fond of analogizing: "Put an artist on an artist," he asserts by way of justifying his unique take on Marilyn Monroe, whom he portrayed as consumed with Napoleonic ambition in "Marilyn" (1973). To explain Mr. Mailer's choice of Hitler, the best source is Mr. Mailer's confession in "Advertisements for Myself" (1959): "The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." That kind of megalomania belies the ambition required to undertake "The Castle in the Forest." Norman Mailer's great contribution to American literature is his effort to encompass large subjects. His aspirations are so high that he is bound to fail by any conventional standards. As soon as the SS man explains he is a devil on assignment from the E. O., my interest in his story slackened. Making Hitler a product of evil, rather than an originator of same, is troubling ��" because it denies the force of evil any human agency. Much of the novel is third-person narration recast in the voice of the devil. Mr. Mailer has often found speaking in the third person inauthentic because he could never accept the authority of an omniscient narrator. In "The Castle in the Forest," the author has neatly solved the problem by making the narrator's voice supernatural. The biographer in me, though, rejects the devil and wants to know more about the devil's beard, the SS man. What happens among the congregation of the devils (it has to be kept vague, lest trade secrets become known) did not interest me ��" I felt I was due back on planet Earth. I responded with a virtual shrug, for example, to the secret that devils call angels "the cudgels." And yet the richly imagined terrestrial details ��" the depiction of Adolf's father, Alois, for example ��" marvelously re-create the Hapsburg world. The sex scenes involving Alois have the ribald verve that is vintage Mailer ��" and more humor than you would expect in the novelist's evocation of the petty despotisms of domestic life. Enjoy this novel for its deep learning and its well-wrought characters, if not for its factitious ontology.
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Locke: A Biography
by
Roger Woolhouse
rollyson2002
, September 22, 2012
Book Review Locke: A Biography by Roger Woolhouse The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) left behind not only "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) but also his laundry lists and many other records, documents, and correspondence ��" quite an abundant stock of material ��" that should enrich the work of his biographer. Roger Woolhouse draws deeply on this awesome archive, and yet to my biographer's mind, "Locke: A Biography" (Cambridge, 548 pages, $39.99) is a let-down. Following the well-established procedures of academia, Mr. Woolhouse presents Locke's life in strict chronological order, paying heed to every treatise, even when there is considerable overlap between these works resulting in tiresome repetitions. If this Locke scholar is obliged to be so rigidly faithful to the order of his subject's oeuvre, is there not a corresponding fealty to the demands of biography? Certainly, Mr. Woolhouse lays bare a good deal about his subject, but he never lingers to take the measure of the man who argued that government is founded on the consent of the governed, and that the individual begins life as a piece of "white paper" on which experience writes his ideas and values. In his early writings, for example, Locke was doubtful that there could be comity between different Christian denominations, let alone between different faiths. After traveling to Cleves in Germany and witnessing how a diverse community of Christians managed to live in harmony, he began to change his views, becoming, in the end, an outspoken champion of toleration. Why not write, then, a Lockean biography? Instead of giving every piece of the philosopher's writing equal weight, focus precisely on those experiences that gave rise to his treatises. And attach those experiences and works to the portrayal of a man with strikingly modern ideas about self-invention. When Locke rejected an opportunity to pursue a diplomatic post in Spain, he wrote in a letter: "Whether I have let slip the minute that they say everyone has once in his life to make himself, I cannot tell." Step aside, Andy Warhol, for the original philosopher of self-creation. Locke observed himself learning from experience, and consequently he launched a series of arguments against the notion of innate ideas. The mind expanded through the senses. God gave humankind a sensory apparatus for a purpose, Locke contended, even if not everything in creation can be comprehended through empirical investigation. All this can be gleaned from Mr. Woolhouse's very learned book, but it becomes rather a chore to assemble. And some aspects of Locke are never integrated into a whole view of the man. Why, for example, was Locke so interested in medicine and chemistry? Surely his fascination with the functioning of the human body is connected to his fixation on a corporeal self, where ideas result from physical sensations. Even more intriguing are Locke's chronic illnesses. He thought he had consumption (tuberculosis), although it now seems more probable that he suffered from asthma, bronchitis, and eventually emphysema from inhaling all that horrid coal smoke in London. He almost never visited the city without returning home to Oxford with a racking cough. Did Locke see in his own ailments ��" which interrupted but perhaps also stimulated his medical studies ��" proof of the way ideas and sensations mesh? Mr. Woolhouse might object that evidence is lacking for the answers to my questions. But surely it is duty of any biographer to pose questions that arise out of the patterns of a subject's life. Biography is not merely a matter of reporting what the biographer knows; it is also a work of interpretation seeking out the subject's motivations. For example, Mr. Woolhouse seems to think that Locke was rather cowardly when he disavowed the politics of his employer, the Earl of Shaftsbury, who was suspected of plotting against Charles II. Locke had been Shaftsbury's secretary and was certainly privy to, if not a full participant in, Shaftsbury's intrigues. Mr. Woolhouse quotes "someone who knew him [Locke] during his worrying years" as having a "peaceable temper, and rather fearful than courageous." He might here have pointed out that Locke's aim was to preserve his life as a thinker, even if it meant ��" to use Mr. Woolhouse's term ��" resorting to "disingenuity." Experience taught Locke to bide his time. In 1699, he returned to England from a six-year exile in Holland, understanding that his new sovereign, William, would look favorably on his work. Thus began Locke's triumphant years of publication. So Locke did not miss his minute, and it is unfortunate that Mr. Woolhouse's biography does not present his subject's grand return and triumph with the kind of fanfare it deserves.
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Amazing Grace
by
Eric Metaxas
rollyson2002
, September 19, 2012
Is there anyone with even a modest acquaintance with the history of the abolition of slavery who does not know the name William Wilberforce? If so, then perhaps, just perhaps, this is the book for you. Eric Metaxas resorts to the third-rate biographer's buildup, assuring the reader that Wilberforce is forgotten. He changed the world, yet he remains unacknowledged. But wait! There is more: "Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest English reformer in the history of the world." Confronted with the armada of blurbs on the back cover of "Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign To End Slavery" (HarperCollins, 277 pages, $21.95) Rebecca West's retort comes to mind: "Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write." Mr. Metaxas slathers his prose with clichés: In only one paragraph, he manages to fit in "truth be told," "pulled some strings," and "power play." And poor Wilberforce is still in grammar school! And that's not all: "The fire he ignited in England would leap across the Atlantic and quickly sweep across America." Without Wilberforce's leaping and sweeping, the cause of reform itself would have hardly survived: The "America we know wouldn't exist without Wilberforce," Mr. Metaxas writes. This is biography as infomercial. Not even Thomas Carlyle rivals Mr. Metaxas as a shill for the Great Man theory of history. That Wilberforce was a key figure in British history is, of course, undeniable. It took him and his allies nearly 20 years, but they abolished the British slave trade in 1807, and Wilberforce lived just long enough to learn of the abolition of slavery itself in 1833. But this much is in the history books. Turn to Mr. Metaxas's biography and you will see: He thanks John Pollock for his "entirely fabulous" "Wilberforce: God's Statesman" (1977), Garth Lean for his "most readable" "God's Politician" (1980), Kevin Belmonte for his "excellent Hero for Humanity" (2002), as well as other biographers who were a "tremendous boon." Indeed, Mr. Metaxas has no new information to add, as he cheerfully admits, and perhaps that is why he foregoes any sort of documentation for his narrative. The unfortunate result of this biographer's hyperbole is to reduce the complexity of his subject, depicting Wilberforce as a saintly evangelical whose faith triumphed over a world that fervently believed in the rightness of slavery. Wilberforce did have a sparkling, "childlike affability" and a "becoming gracefulness," to quote the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. But Wilberforce was also a canny and patient politician, a British Member of Parliament who knew how to work the system, seeking powerful allies in figures like William Pitt, for example. Mr. Metaxas seems to understand the present no better than the past: "There's hardly a soul alive today who isn't horrified and offended by the very idea of slavery," he observes at one point. And later, "Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom." Mr. Metaxas seems oblivious to the contradictoriness of his bloated prose because he evidently has no sense of history to show him that the world is never one thing. If there had been no William Wilberforce, Thomas Jefferson would still have had misgivings about slavery, and George Washington would still have freed his slaves. Gouverneur Morris would still have stood up at the Constitutional Convention and denounced Southerners for their peculiar institution. And Benjamin Franklin, who once had owned a slave as a body servant, would still have joined an anti-slavery society shortly before he died. In other words, it was not Wilberforce against the world. To be sure, without Wilberforce, slavery would have likely persisted beyond 1833. Biography does alter history. But Mr. Metaxas commits the cardinal sin of biography: elevating the subject to ahistorical heights. William Wilberforce is a great historical figure not because he triumphed over the retrograde beliefs of his epoch, but because he capitalized on a minority but emerging conviction that slavery was wrong. Mr. Metaxas is an admirer of Wilberforce's evangelical Christianity and uses his subject's piety as a kind of subtheme to tout the positive role of faith in public life. It may be so, but God save biography from the likes of Mr. Metaxas.
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Leni Riefenstahl
by
Jurgen Trimborn
rollyson2002
, September 18, 2012
"Every woman adores a fascist," Sylvia Plath cried out in her poem "Daddy." "To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength," Leni Riefenstahl told a Detroit News reporter in February 1937. Riefenstahl has often been called the greatest woman documentary filmmaker ��" although she would have bridled at the "woman." No feminist, she wanted nothing less than her due as a great artist. In her masterpiece, "Triumph of the Will," her documentary film of the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi party rally, Hitler descends out of the clouds in his plane and down to earth. Riefenstahl's cameraman films Hitler standing in his Mercedes touring car, from behind, so that we are watching Hitler from the backseat of his moving vehicle as the dictator gives the fascist salute to crowds of yearning women clamoring for his attention. The documentary's famous low angle shots enhance Hitler's lofty presence ��" he is Germany's godlike savior. When he addresses the faithful, he urges them to be obedient, and they respond with joyful assent, affirming what Herman Hess, introducing Hitler to the crowd, makes explicit: Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Hitler. Seized by the sheer visual power of Riefenstahl's work, viewers across the world surrendered to a spectacle of power, harmonization, and grace. The careful choreography of the Nazi masses, the marching soldiers, the workers lined up with their shovels resting on their shoulders like rifles, reflects the director's dance aesthetic. Never before in film had anyone made a mass political movement look and sound (the music was carefully recorded in a studio) so seductive. Biographers are perhaps better situated than film critics to fathom the Riefenstahl paradox. New biographies by Jürgen Trimborn (Faber & Faber, 285 pages, $30) and Steven Bach (Knopf, 299 pages, $30) dismantle Riefenstahl's myth that she was an artist innocent of political motivations. Mr. Trimborn had the advantage of observing Riefenstahl close-up during an interview and in subsequent correspondence with her. He found the director to be a consummate protector of her reputation, a careerist of the first order who never wavered in her self-promoting agenda. Meanwhile, Mr. Bach's chapters on Riefenstahl's early career are also valuable since he is the first biographer to have access to a cache of more than 70 interviews with Riefenstahl's friends and co-workers. Mr. Trimborn's chapter on her anti-Semitism is a shocker. An expert on films of the Nazi era, Mr. Trimborn shows how intricately involved Riefenstahl was not merely with Hitler as he rose to power, but also with Nazis like Jules Streicher, who formulated the party's virulent anti-Semitic program. Mr. Trimborn's book has finally settled the issue of the Goebbels diaries, in which Riefenstahl figures as an artist who understands the party better than anyone and who comes to Goebbels's parties and attends the opera with him and his wife, Magda. Riefenstahl repudiated the diaries, pointing out that that by 1934 Goebbels resented her special relationship with Hitler and tried to interfere with her work. True enough, Mr. Trimborn shows, but he also provides the circumstantial evidence that bolsters Goebbels's portrayal of her as a Nazi enthusiast. Mr. Trimborn often writes as a film historian. He is primarily interested, for example, in exploring the "pre-fascist" elements of Arnold Fanck's 1920s "mountain films," which featured stunning shots of Riefenstahl climbing mountain peaks in her bare feet. Fanck's romantic exultation of the hero influenced Riefenstahl's portrayal of a heroic Hitler. The Führer, so often at the apex of the crowd scenes in "Triumph of the Will," towers over his followers. Mr. Bach, on the other hand, presents a more dramatic and intimate view of the Fanck/Riefenstahl relationship. His exclusive access to Fanck's own account (recorded by Peggy Wallace in 1974) shows how mesmerizing Franck found Riefenstahl. Her dancing revealed her childlike quality, her surrender to the moment, and this natural, naïve quality made her the perfect heroine for his Alpine love stories. Riefenstahl was involved in a love triangle involving Fanck and her leading man, Luis Trenker, demonstrating, in Mr. Bach's words, "Leni's skill at dominating the exclusive male society in which she found herself now and for almost all the rest of her professional life." She was naïve, in some ways, Mr. Bach implies, but rather cunning in others. Mr. Bach, who is florid compared with the trenchant Mr. Trimborn, provides more personal details and is just as good on Riefenstahl's politics. In the 1930s Riefenstahl won international awards, although, of course, there were critics who resisted her siren song. As she continued to attract a new generation of film scholars and feminists in the 1970s, the influential Susan Sontag repudiated her earlier endorsement of Riefenstahl and emphasized the director's disturbing politics over her aesthetic: All of Riefenstahl's work celebrated power and elevated strength and the body beautiful over all other values. This "fascist aesthetic" permeated Riefenstahl's work as an actress in her popular 1920s films and, most famously, in her documentary, "Olympia," about the 1936 Olympic games, hosted by Hitler in Berlin. And yet her film work remains a potent model. Mr. Trimborn, for example, points out that the "Olympic Portraits" (1996), shot by Sontag's life partner, Annie Leibovitz, reveals evidence of Riefenstahl's influence. Riefenstahl's own archive remains closed, and even though Mr. Trimborn believes it includes only self-serving material, that, too, may be more illuminating than Mr. Trimborn supposes. As good as these two biographies are, no one fascinated with Riefenstahl can forgo studying Ray Muller's revelatory film, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl," which allows the director to make her case even as her behavior confirms her latest biographers' findings.
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Belva Lockwood The Woman Who Would Be President
by
Norgren, Jill
rollyson2002
, September 16, 2012
Book Review Belva Lockwood by Jill Norgren Jill Norgren has quite a story to tell. Belva Lockwood (1830��"1917) had to wage an arduous campaign just to get into law school and after completing the course she was refused a degree. An expert lobbyist who befriended influential congressmen, Lockwood marshaled her forces, eventually obtained her diploma, and then had to wage another battle to be admitted to the Washington, D.C., bar. And that was hardly the last public struggle for the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court and to conduct the first full campaign for the presidency. In her new biography, "Belva Lockwood" (New York University Press, 311 pages, $35) Ms. Norgren, a legal historian, explains that she first learned of Lockwood while helping her daughter select books in the children's section at the public library. "I knew nothing about the woman or her accomplishments," Ms. Norgren writes, "virtually none of my university colleagues knew her name." More biographers ��" more scholars ��" should read biographies intended for children, which can serve as a syncretic introduction to the biographical subject. It is shame that Ms. Norgren does not identify the biography she first put in her daughter's hands. So why has Lockwood languished in biographical purdah? Ms. Norgren faults fashion: the appetite for biographies of "Founding Fathers and fighting generals." Well, sure, but other women of Lockwood's stature have attracted their fair share of biographers. More to the point, Lockwood's niece, an amateur biographer, never completed the job. At the time, few libraries collected the papers of notable women, Ms. Norgren points out. And then Lockwood's closest surviving relative, a grandson, unforgivably sent her papers off to the Salvation Army as scrap paper that was later pulped. Many biographers would balk at the paucity of archival sources. But Ms. Norgren persisted, calculating rightly that she would find important traces of Lockwood in others' papers. Lockwood also wrote about her life and published frequently. Newspapers covered her activities. As a practicing lawyer, she appears in all manner of other records, as well. In Ms. Norgren's credible narrative, Lockwood emerges as a shrewd self-promoter, never hesitating to garner publicity for herself and her causes. After a brief first marriage and the birth of a daughter, Lockwood started on her public career. A second marriage to a much older man was agreeable but also strategic, for Lockwood did not hesitate to use her husband's business contacts to corral her own clients. Nellie Bly, the New York World's "daredevil girl reporter," pronounced Lockwood a worthy presidential candidate, calling her a "womanly woman … intelligent without being manly … the beau ideal of a woman with a brain." In eloquent detail, Ms. Norgren shows how Lockwood loved the law. As a solo practitioner, she went after all sorts of cases: civil actions, divorces, and criminal trials. Lockwood ventured into other states acting on behalf of clients, and she helped to set up networks of female lawyers who could help one another. When Ms. Norgren falters, it is hardly her fault. With so much private correspondence missing, it is difficult to picture the private Lockwood. In more intimate settings, was she always able to put on such a brave face? Was she really so unruffled by male chauvinism? Ms. Norgren could make a little more of Lockwood's personality. An amusing episode, for example, shows Lockwood in motion, deflecting the sort of criticism that made other feminists fume. In 1881, to get to her appointments quickly, Lockwood adopted the then exclusively male practice of riding a large tricycle on the streets of Washington, D.C. The press attacked this unladylike behavior, lampooning it in cartoons and even speculating that it might ruin the "feminine organs of matrimonial necessity." While certain feminists like Susan B. Anthony made an ideological issue out of the controversy, proclaiming the bicycle an instrument of female emancipation, Lockwood composed a poem: A simple home woman, who only had thought To lighten the labors her business had wrought. And make a machine serve the purpose of feet. And at the same time keep her dress from the street. Ms. Norgren calls this ditty "light-hearted," an expression of Lockwood's amusement at the hullabaloo. So it is, but it also demonstrates how Lockwood got ahead, making her vehicle seem like the natural extension of a successful woman's work, while also reminding readers of the alternately muddy and dusty streets of the capital that made it difficult to preserve ladylike behavior. This episode would be a good way to begin a Lockwood biography ��" one perhaps a children's biographer could use as a means of amplifying Ms. Norgren's sober-sided book.
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Emerson and Eros: The Making of a Cultural Hero
by
Len Gougeon
rollyson2002
, September 15, 2012
Biography, quite simply, gives the lie to literary criticism, and that is why it is such an affront to many literary critics. The genre suggests literature cannot be an end in itself, but rather that writing constitutes a part of some larger enterprise uncontainable within the covers of a book. Academic critics, in particular, would like to make of literature a priestly profession, a coded discipline practiced by adepts and sanctified by the Ph.D. This aspect of biography struck me while I read Len Gougeon's "Emerson & Eros: The Making of a Cultural Hero" (State University of New York Press, 272 pages, $35). It is often the case that a biographical study, rather than a fullfledged biographical narrative, raises profound questions about biography itself, helping to explain why so many readers find the story of how literature is created as compelling as the literature itself. Mr. Gougeon asks a riveting question: What happened to Ralph Waldo Emerson as he approached the age of 30? Until then, Emerson had seemed a conventional man content with the orthodoxies of his religion ��" Unitarianism ��" and social custom, which only the most original thinkers are inclined to challenge. Emerson had been an undistinguished student, apparently an attenuated branch of a prominent New England family tree. At least two of his brothers were regarded as far more promising prospects than the placid Waldo, as he was called. Mr. Gougeon deftly presents this background in his prologue, so that even readers whose knowledge of Emerson is rusty, or those who hardly know more than the name, will absorb his biography and his main ideas with surprising ease. I say surprising, since I have seldom encountered a scholar so steeped in his material ��" Mr. Gougeon has been studying Emerson for 30 years ��" and yet so capable of conveying that learning with an admirable lucidity. Read the essays "The American Scholar" and "The Poet," and you have the basic Emersonian argument that there is a divinity in man that modern life has beaten out of him. "Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind," as Emerson put it poetically in 1847. But why did Emerson forsake his religion, attack societal institutions such as slavery, and generally call upon his fellow man to find in himself the seeds of his salvation? "It occurred to me early on," Mr. Gougeon explains, "that understanding the dramatic transformation that made his exceptional career possible would require both spiritual and psychological, as well as literary, insight." The literary text ��" take that literary critics! ��" is not enough. We need to know, for example, about Emerson's devastating loss of his young and beautiful wife, Ellen Tucker, in 1831, which Mr. Gougeon contemplates while examining his subject's journals and published writings. When Mr. Gougeon describes the role eros played in Emerson's life, he is not dealing with an abstraction. Ellen's death provoked such acute pain in Emerson that the supports of religion, tradition, and family proved nugatory. Emerson realized that he would have to rebuild himself by embarking on what Mr. Gougeon calls "a heroic, inward journey." During his rebirth Emerson became a public figure, often focusing on the development of the hero and history. This focus is why he inspired a group of what Mr. Gougeon calls "psychomythic humanists," writers like Joseph Campbell, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, Norman O. Brown, and their successors ��" including Mr. Gougeon himself, who does not hesitate to explain the autobiographical origins of his commitment to Emerson, which involved his youthful concern with the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. The "eros" in Emerson is the unifying principle of the universe otherwise known as love. He was a passionate man, Mr. Gougeon insists, and scholars and biographers who have treated him otherwise ��" primarily as an intellect ��" have done Emerson a disservice. Emerson's eros meant he was as intensely committed to people and their plight as to ideas. Stuart Sherman's study, "Americans" (1922), expresses Mr. Gougeon's own unified vision of Emerson: "To know him is not merely knowledge. ... His value escapes the merely intellectual appraiser." Enter the biographer ��" or rather the biographical critic ��" as precise as he is passionate, evincing in his evocation of Emerson's eros a deep feeling of his own that renews the sense of his subject as our contemporary.
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Freuds Wizard Ernest Jones & the Transformation of Psychoanalysis
by
Brenda Maddox
rollyson2002
, September 14, 2012
Brenda Maddox's "Freud's Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis" (Da Capo Press, 354 pages, $26) poses a fundamental question about biography: To what extent do ideas, or, more specifically, the spread of ideas, depend on personalities? Freud himself wondered whether or not his new "science" of psychoanalysis would travel beyond turn-of-the century Vienna, Austria, and become something more than an exclusively Jewish enterprise. At first Carl Jung seemed to be the gentile vehicle for Freudian ideas, but he became a rival. Ernest Jones, a Celtic Welshman turned Anglophile, proved an antidote to renegades such as Jung who broke out of Freud's tight circle and sought to establish their own therapeutic regimes. Jones was a kind of wizard (his mother had wanted to name him Merlin). He was a good mobilizer with a knack for establishing organizations that furthered Freudian ideas. He wrote in an accessible style that enticed influential readers ��" his book on Hamlet and Oedipus impressed both James Joyce and Laurence Olivier. But Jones was not merely a popularizer. He had a magnetic personality that attracted women. He courted Freud's daughter, Anna, and though his suit was not successful, it demonstrated how powerfully he wished to impose his personality on Freud's movement as well as his intimates. Jones's erotic adventures often got him into trouble, but Freud understood that Jones was the indispensable disciple, worth any amount of trouble. Jones repaid his mentor's trust during Freud's moment of peril in Vienna. Ms. Maddox begins her biography by tersely evoking Jones's mission in March 1938 to save the founder of psychoanalysis. Hitler had entered Vienna the day before. His views of psychoanalysis as a Jewish virus were well known. Jones understood that if Freud did not leave Vienna he might well be murdered. Commercial flights to Vienna from London had been canceled. The enterprising Jones hired a private plane and managed to enter the city, only to be arrested. Fluent in German, he talked his way out of incarceration. It took him nearly a week to convince Freud to abandon the city that meant everything to him. Freud did not relent until Jones promised to spirit his master's immediate family and associates out of Nazi-occupied Vienna. Not only did Jones succeed in this daunting task, he got the British government to approve work permits for these refugees at a time when public opinion in Britain was opposed to exiles whose arrival increased competition for precious jobs. Where did Jones get his chutzpah? He liked to joke that he was a "Shabbes-Goy" who does the work Jews are not allowed to perform on the Sabbath." Jones had grown up in Wales at a time when a bright boy yearned to assimilate into British culture. Yet he never lost his Welsh character, a feistiness he shared with his hard-working father. Jones rejected a place at Oxford for medical studies in London and Cardiff, Wales. Interested in brain neurology, Jones found Freud's ideas captivating and adapted them to his own purposes. That Jones became Freud's biographer, writing an elegant three-volume biography, seems inevitable in retrospect. The Freud biography perfectly expressed Jones's desire to honor his master even as Jones advanced his own life's work. Jones's story, Ms. Maddox notes, has been told before by Jones's friend Vincent Brome, and she might have added another word or two about her predecessor, an author of several biographies to whom many of us are deeply indebted. But Ms. Maddox is right that much new material has appeared since Brome published his biography in 1982, and she pays handsome tribute to the scholars who have enriched her work. Ms. Maddox herself has a special place among current biographers. She has a knack for picking figures like Nora Joyce, for example, who are slightly off-center, but without whose presence the story of a James Joyce or a Sigmund Freud would be immeasurably diminished. Her approach to biography did not seem essential when she first began work on Nora Joyce. Richard Ellmann, the distinguished Joyce biographer, doubted Ms. Maddox would have enough material for a full-scale biography. But Ellmann acknowledged that Ms. Maddox had proved him wrong. While Ms. Maddox does not face the same skepticism with "Freud's Wizard," it is important to realize how her work has re-centered the enterprise of biography, broadening and deepening its reach into the panoply of personalities that surround and sustain the Freuds and Joyces who once seemed a force unto themselves.
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George Kennan
by
John Lukacs
rollyson2002
, September 13, 2012
John Lukacs calls "George Kennan: A Study of Character" (Yale University Press, 224 pages, $26) a "biographical study," noting that a full-fledged biography has yet to be written. Mr. Lukacs ranks Kennan above Henry Adams as a historian and autobiographer and above Ernest Hemingway as a writer about Europe. Kennan emerges, toward the end of this impassioned work, as the conscience of his country. Although Kennan (1904��"2005) is best known as the author of the famous "X" article in Foreign Affairs that formed the basis of America's Cold War "containment" policy, his diaries alone (spanning more than 70 years) have no equal, Mr. Lukacs suggests, as American writing that recaptures history in the making, especially in Germany, where Kennan, a foreign service officer, was stationed in 1927, 1928��"1931, and 1939��"1941. Profound respect for Kennan the man and the writer is writ large on every page of this crystalline book, which is a kind of throwback to the 18th century, when the term "character" meant a good deal more than it does today. Life may be unpredictable and ever changing, but character "changes hardly or not at all," Mr. Lukacs asserts. "And by ‘character' I mean his conscious decisions, choices, acts and words, but nothing of his ��" so-called ��" subconscious; that is, no attribution of psychoanalytic categories, no ham-handed projections or propositions of secret or hidden motives." Mr. Kennan's character consisted of certain lifelong principles: Liberal democracies should be viewed with as much concern as dictatorships; the major defining event of the 20th century was World War I, not the Russian Revolution; diplomacy is nearly always a better course of action than intervening in the internal affairs of other nations. What were the practical consequences of Mr. Kennan's principles? He objected, for example, to much of what passed for American anti-Communism because it was hysterical and ignorant. Stalin should be viewed as a Russian tyrant who had certain national goals, not as an international revolutionary who wanted to take over the world. When Kennan argued that Soviet communism had to be contained, he viewed the USSR as pursuing tsarist goals: dominating Eastern and Central Europe. In the long run ��" as Kennan predicted as early as the 1940s ��" the Soviets would not be able to hold onto Eastern Europe, let alone the rest of the world. So much of the American anti-communist talk was puerile, he concluded, especially when coupled with "national self-adulation." Kennan supported the Korean War because he felt the North Koreans had to be pushed back to the 38th parallel. But he opposed the war in Vietnam, and though Mr. Lukacs does not say much about Kennan's view of later wars, especially the current one in Iraq, to divine Kennan's attitude is not difficult. He called our current president "profoundly superficial," a judgment Mr. Lukacs tacitly affirms when he quotes John Adams: "We are friends of liberty all over the world; but we do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Mr. Lukacs also admires another Kennan zinger about the "curious law which so often makes Americans, inveterately conservative at home, the partisans of radical change everywhere else." Mr. Lukacs venerates Kennan, but he also faults him, noting that Kennan was spectacularly wrong when he argued America and Britain should not ally themselves with Stalin after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Similarly, Kennan's "distaste for democracy," Mr. Lukacs points out, is a "problem that his biographers must not dismiss or ignore." Indeed, Kennan's disdain for this country's domestic politics surely is one reason many of his prescient views went unheeded. Mr. Lukacs never makes that connection. He notes, instead, how tireless Kennan was as a writer and public speaker and how so many of his books and articles have stood the test of time. Why then have they not received the attention Mr. Lukacs believes they deserve? In my view, Kennan was constitutionally unfit to submit himself to the daily grind of politics, where he might have been able to slowly and painfully shift the thinking of decision makers his way. How could he cajole congressmen when he had nothing but contempt for most of them? He derided Dean Acheson for overselling the Cold War, but Acheson understood that he could not hold himself above politics. Was Kennan's estrangement from domestic politics a failure of character? This is a question I wish Mr. Lukacs had addressed. Or is it a matter of ��" dare I mention the vile word? ��" psychology? Surely Kennan's biographers will need to probe precisely that sensitive point: that node where character and personality intersect.
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Ho CHI Minh: A Biography
by
Pierre Brocheux
rollyson2002
, September 12, 2012
A biography of Ho Chi Minh, regarded by many as the father of his country ��" and a figure who also became an icon for elements of the American left during the Vietnam War ��" poses a problem, Pierre Brocheux announces in his preface. The biographer cites American historian Alexander Woodside, who argues against writing "another biography while certain periods of the subject's life are still obscure and questions remain about the man even today." Surprisingly, Mr. Brocheux does not confront this epistemological issue head-on in "Ho Chi Minh" (Cambridge University Press, 288 pages, $35). It is in the nature of biography to probe what Herman Melville called "the ambiguities." It is impossible for biographers ��" or historians for that matter ��" to wait until all the evidence is in and verified. That never happens. There is always more evidence and, sad to say, always more data that disappear along with dying witnesses to history. Or is Ho a special case? Mr. Brocheux seems to think so. Recently opened Soviet archives are heavily restricted, he reports, and the Chinese, he adds, are engaged in using their archives for patriotic purposes, ensuring that the available papers are "carefully screened." Determined to heap even more difficulties on himself, Mr. Brocheux notes that Ho Chi Minh's tracks are vanishing at a "vertiginous pace" in Paris, Moscow, and Vietnam ��" the places Ho inhabited like a character in a John le Carré novel, changing his name from Nguyen Sinh Cung to Nguyen Tat Thanh to Nguyen Ai Quoc and finally to Ho Chi Minh. But wait! It gets worse: Ho gave four birth dates:1890, 1893, 1900, and 1903. Mr. Brocheux is much attached to 1890, noting in a footnote that Ho would have been 55 in 1945, "a suitable age to become President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam." Okay, but is it verifiable? Apparently not. With Mr. Woodside's doubts shadowing Ho's latest biographer, Mr. Brocheux acknowledges that five biographies in French, Russian, and English have preceded his. So why, indeed, another? The answer, Mr. Brocheux avows, is Montesquieu: "One's character is based largely on that of the people with whom one lives. … Knowledge opens the mind. … Travel also greatly expands the mind; we leave the circle of our nation's prejudices, and are hardly in a position to take on those of another." This Enlightenment view of self and society provides a kind of grid that is meant to confine and clarify the elusive Ho's movements. Born in the Vietnamese village of Hoang Tru, a student in the imperial city of Hué, world traveler (by 1918, he has been to Paris, parts of Africa, America, and England), first a French socialist and then a communist (1918��"23), and reputedly a student in Moscow (1923), Ho joined a Soviet mission in Canton (1924), returned to Moscow in 1927, and then was on the move again in Europe and Southeast Asia, founding the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1930. The British then arrested him in Hong Kong, and his death was announced in 1932, but more of the same peregrinations continue, culminating in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, when Ho declared Vietnam's independence from the French. Of course he was involved in plenty more history up to 1969 dying this time for good), six years before the communists declared Vietnam re-united in April 1975. Like the proverbial cat, Ho's many lives have baffled biographers, Mr. Brocheux insinuates, though I wish he had engaged in more of a debate with his predecessors. It seems to me, especially in the case of someone as slick as Ho, Mr. Brocheux ought to open up a debate with biographers. Instead he hugs his Montesquieu: Both the regional and family backgrounds of Ho Chi Minh suggest a certain geographical and sociological determinism, as well as individual destiny. Nghe An province is known as the forge of great men, from the conventional to the rebellious, and as the theater of historical events that gave birth to a tradition of heroism and sacrifice for the common good. Ho, the biographer argues, clev erly merged this Confucian world view with communist teachings ��" or rather this was the line he took as a nationalist who believed he al so needed an ideology to unite his people. But Ho was no more successful in providing his country with a co herent dogma than he was in articulating a consistent self. For all the ambiguities, Mr. Brocheux certainly provides a clear conclusion "Ho, steeped in Confucian humanism, gave into ��" or rather was crushed under the weight of ��" an implacable system that he had helped put in place through his in disputable charisma."
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Too Close to the Sun The Audacious Life & Times of Denys Finch Hatton
by
Sara Wheeler
rollyson2002
, September 11, 2012
Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) may evoke for millions the visage of Robert Redford, who plays this quintessential British adventurer with an American accent in "Out of Africa." Finch Hatton, the original, had sherry-colored hair and "topsoil brown eyes," Sara Wheeler reports in "Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton" (Random House, 320 pages, $27.95). His aristocratic ancestors gambled their money away, and Denys was confronted with two choices: become a decadent nobleman in the manner of a Henry James protagonist in search of a rich American heiress, or restore the family fortunes by seeking new worlds to conquer in virgin territories such as Africa, where European powers were slicing apart the continent and setting up their own preserves like so many casinos on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Finch Hatton decided to pursue the family franchise; that is, he continued his forebears' gamble with existence, ultimately crashing an airplane in Kenya on his way to Nairobi. He believed that to live fully and well meant travel, or as Ms. Wheeler puts it, "movement between opposing environments." That phrase occurs early on in "Too Close to the Sun," when Finch Hatton becomes aware of his family's need to sell off thousands of acres while hunting and otherwise frolicking on the remainder, collecting rents, and inheriting new properties at a time when Britannia ruled one-quarter of the world's land mass. The Eton-bound Finch Hatton peregrinated from Surrey to London to that most exotic of places for an Englishman: the peaty hills of Wales, another family property. A captain in the Allied forces in East Africa during World War I, where Finch Hatton witnessed a grim and protracted guerrilla war ��" a portent of things to come ��" he became a big-game hunter, renowned bush pilot, and, of course, the devastating lover of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Beryl Markham, the aviatrix author of the autobiography "West With the Night." Finch Hatton has mainly served biographers as a foil to Blixen and Markham. I wondered how Ms. Wheeler would fare with a much-told story. Here is a sample of her Blixen, known to African English settlers as Tania: At 33, she had "deep-set dark eyes, a beak nose, and abundant chestnut hair, and her face was sometimes beautiful and at other times all wrong." Markham is best summed up in one word: "patherine." Markham and Blixen knew each other, and though Beryl was a man stealer, Tania was tolerant. Exactly why, Ms. Wheeler does not say, but Tania may have recognized that Beryl and Denys were two of a kind, happiest when they were in motion ��" in this case often riding together on their beloved horses. Ms. Wheeler observes that "Tania was wafty and incorporeal, whereas there was something earthy and physical about Beryl." These opposites attracted: "Beryl was a man's woman (actually, she liked men and horses equally) with few close female friends, and she grasped the hand Tania held out to her." That last phrase is meant to be taken literally and metaphorically, and it demonstrates how deftly Ms. Wheeler negotiates the terrain between fact and figuration. But what of Ms. Wheeler's main character? Denys Finch Hatton charmed so many women and men that Markham alleged he was bisexual. Ms. Wheeler finds no evidence of that, but she explains his appeal by quoting one of Tania's letters: "I have always felt that he has so much of the element of air in his makeup … and was a kind of Ariel." Then Ms. Wheeler gives Beryl her due, quoting a Markham passage about Finch Hatton's flying skills: "The competence which he applied so casually to everything was as evident in the air as it was on one of his safaris or in the recitations of Walt Whitman he performed during his more somber or perhaps during his lighter moments." People just liked to watch Finch Hatton walk. He was evidently one of the most poised men to ever grace the earth, the spirit made flesh ��" or so this stylish biography would have us believe.
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Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr
by
Nancy Isenberg
rollyson2002
, September 10, 2012
"It is time to start over," contends Nancy Isenberg in her iconoclastic "Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr" (Viking, 544 pages, $29.95). Burr is, of course, infamous for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. But historians have also branded Burr a Machiavellian villain who schemed to deny Thomas Jefferson the presidency and most likely committed treason, even though he escaped conviction. Ms. Isenberg faults historians and biographers for not examining Burr's papers ��" although many were lost, thus obscuring the man, she acknowledges. In popular fiction, as well, she notes, Burr has been portrayed as a Gothic villain, highly sexed and unscrupulous, a depiction that derives from the notion expressed, for example, in the "Federalist No. 6," that "sexual corruption (i.e., seductive women) could be equated with disunion." Yet, she adds: "It should be clear that Hamilton was not one degree less libidinous than Burr:" If one reads the newspapers, rather than simply relying on the papers of prominent founders (Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams), it soon becomes clear that sexual satire pervaded politics. The sexualization of Aaron Burr was a means for his opponents to increase their political capital, because the vocabulary to do so was already part of the political scene ��" not because of Burr's particular shortcomings. Gore Vidal made the same point in "Burr" (1973), which Ms. Isenberg briefly mentions, but she does not acknowledge that her book validates Mr. Vidal's view of a man abiding by important principles the shifty Thomas Jefferson never respected, and living by a code of honor that the scandalmongering Alexander Hamilton could not fathom. Surprisingly, Ms. Isenberg spares not a word for William Carlos Williams's essay on Burr in "In The American Grain" (1925), which portrays the fallen founder as the very feminist Ms. Isenberg lauds, a man who believed in equal rights for women and practiced his principles in regard to his wife and daughter. A man with an excellent war record as a staff officer under Washington, attorney general of New York, then a senator, Burr received 30 electoral votes for the presidency in 1796, and tied Jefferson in 1800. Indeed, many electors favored Burr over Jefferson because Burr was a man of both action and principle. He had an admirable reputation in New York ��"arguing for lower and fairer taxes and various public improvements ��" that aroused the envy of his rival, Hamilton. There is no evidence that Burr tried to undermine Jefferson's election ��" Burr was quite amenable to serving as Jefferson's vice president. But Burr did resent Hamilton's swinging his support to Jefferson in the 1800 election, and the tension between them increased when Hamilton bruited about charges that Burr was a "despicable" man and public servant. Burr demanded that Hamilton explain what he meant, and Hamilton waffled, giving his version of "it depends what you mean by sex." Hamilton accepted Burr's challenge to a duel in New Jersey (where such affairs of honor were legal), even though Hamilton claimed he opposed dueling. Hamilton left word that he would not aim to wound his opponent. Yet, as Ms. Isenberg notes, Hamilton carefully examined the dueling ground, took up various positions to check the sun's angle, and then put on his spectacles ��" not exactly the behavior of a man who did not intend to shoot straight. Afterward, Gouverneur Morris, a man who was an excellent "bullshit detector" (to use Hemingway's term) doubted the veracity of Hamilton's pre-duel pacifist declaration. While many condemned Burr ��" even alleging that he had somehow got the drop on Hamilton (it is not clear who shot first) ��" many believed he behaved like a gentleman, and his popularity soared in the South. Jefferson had no qualms about dining several times with Burr after the duel, and all charges against Burr were eventually dropped. He returned to Washington, D.C., and presided with dignity and acumen over the impeachment trial of Justice Salmon Chase, drawing praise even from his political enemies. But Burr's political career in New York was over. As many Americans did then and since, he went west, hoping to recoup his political power, and earned the admiration of men like Andrew Jackson. Burr's enemies said he was forming an army to occupy the West and overthrow Jefferson's administration. Jefferson himself, besotted with suspicion after reading Republican newspapers and relying on doubtful intelligence, rigged a treason prosecution. Already acquitted by three grand juries, Burr faced trial in Richmond, emerging triumphant both in the jury's verdict and in Chief Justice John Marshall's judgment. At worst, Burr was guilty of a misdemeanor, for organizing a "filibuster," a private army intent on liberating Mexico from the Spanish ��" although no proof was ever produced that such an army actually existed. As in Mr. Vidal's novel, Thomas Jefferson emerges in Ms. Isenberg's biography as a chief executive who never seems to have understood the crucial importance of an independent judiciary or of the rule of law. It was sufficient for him to believe the "will of the people" had turned against Burr and therefore he should be punished. Burr, for his part, submitted himself to the legal process again and again, trusting in the courts. He was a brilliant lawyer, of course, but his exoneration was no mere "technicality." I haven't done justice to Ms. Isenberg's scrupulous handling of evidence. Her work is profoundly original, and if American historians do not "start over again," they will be doing their own profession ��" not to mention the history of their country ��" an injustice.
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Young J. Edgar: Hoover and the Red Scare, 1919-1920
by
Kenneth D. Ackerman
rollyson2002
, September 09, 2012
In "Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties," Kenneth Ackerman plays to his strengths. He has served more than 25 years in senior posts on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch, as well as in private practice as a Washington, D.C., attorney, and the result is a chilling account of how the rule of law in a war on terror can be subverted into a war of terror. Mr. Ackerman traces Hoover's rise from 1917 as a young attorney in the Department of Justice, to his appointment in 1921 as deputy director of the Bureau of Investigation, to his promotion in 1924 as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A hard worker superb at navigating the federal bureaucracy, Hoover made himself indispensable not long after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer decided to implement his infamous raids ("the Red Scare") in November 1919. At first, Mr. Ackerman acknowledges, the raids were "applauded by top officials in government, media, business, academia, and religion, almost across the board." In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, anarchists and communists in this country spoke openly about violently overthrowing the American government. A series of riots and bombings seemed to signal that the Reds were advancing toward their goal. Palmer, a Woodrow Wilson progressive, had resisted calls for a government crackdown on radicals. But when his own home was bombed and he realized that he and his family had narrowly escaped death, he decided that nothing less than an extermination of the Red threat could secure his government's survival. Implementation of extralegal procedures seemed essential. Or as Mr. Ackerman puts it: There is a seductive downward spiral in times of crisis from ‘doing something' to ‘doing what it takes' to ‘doing anything.' Abetted by Hoover's dogged surveillance of radicals and by his extraordinary record-keeping and filing apparatus, Palmer had plenty of people to round up. Mr. Ackerman provides a persuasive account of Palmer's mindset and why it led to a "civil liberties catastrophe": Probable cause to get a search warrant or an arrest warrant, providing prisoners a fair trial, including access to a lawyer … these rules can seem arcane and counterproductive when they occasionally get in the way, stopping police from preventing a crime, helping a guilty person go free, or interfering in the tracking of a possible terrorist. But they serve an essential purpose: they force the government to get its facts straight before it deprives any person ��" citizen or immigrant ��" of his or her freedoms, locks them up, deports them, seizes their property, or invades their privacy. On January 2, 1920, Hoover sent federal marshals to arrest 2,700 suspected communists in 33 cities A later raid rounded up another 3,000. Many of the arrested were union leaders and immigrants and their crime was, at worst "guilt by association," as Mr. Ackerman notes. Not only did Hoover continue to feed Palmer's enthusiasm for the raids, he lied about his part in this despicable episode. Later he would use many of the same illegal methods to pursue suspects throughout his five decades as FBI director. Mr. Ackerman calls the attorney general's reliance on the 24-year-old Hoover Palmer's biggest single mistake. "Despite his clear genius for organization," he writes, "Edgar lacked the other essential qualification for the job, the life experience and human context to appreciate the responsibility that came with power." As hard as Mr. Ackerman is on Hoover, he does not demonize him. The biographer's own "life experience" and knowledge of power tell him that men like Hoover result from how their superiors deport themselves. Thus Mr. Ackerman excoriates Woodrow Wilson's "loyalists" for creating the myth that the president "had nothing to do with" supporting the Palmer raids. If so, Mr. Ackerman insists, "it was only because he [Wilson] kept himself ignorant, not because Mitchell Palmer refused to tell him." Mr. Ackerman finds Hoover's immediate superiors even more culpable: "There were at least five people in the Justice Department who outranked Edgar at the time. … But none of them objected. Instead, they let Edgar call the tune from below" ��" a point that attorney Jackson Ralston made clear testifying before Congress in 1921, when the public and Congress turned against Palmer's violation of the Constitution. That Mr. Ackerman has a moral with an urgent contemporary ring is apparent in his conclusion: "To the extent that our modern war on terror is paralleling the attitudes of the 1919-1920 Red Scare, we have to wonder: How many young J. Edgar Hoovers are we creating today?"
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FDR
by
Jean Edward Smith
rollyson2002
, September 08, 2012
"The literature on the Roosevelt era is immense," Jean Edward Smith notes in his preface to "FDR," "there is little that has not been said, somewhere, about the president." So why another biography? Because "Roosevelt himself has become a mythic figure, looming indistinctly out of the mist of the past." Mr. Smith aims to write not only history but also Plutarchian biography: The "children's hour" every evening when the president mixed martinis for his guests, the poker games with cabinet cronies, the weekly sojourns on the presidential yacht Potomac, and his personal relations with family and friends warrant extended treatment. Roosevelt enjoyed life to the full, and his unquenchable optimism never faded. The biographer builds such an intricate network of personal detail that toward the end of the war, when President Franklin Roosevelt asks Eleanor to mix the martinis, we know Roosevelt is about to die. Anecdotes in this biography unmask FDR the man, with his shrewd ability to size up subordinates. When the preening Douglas MacArthur kept Roosevelt waiting during the President's trip to Pearl Harbor, FDR mildly asked the senior military advisers, "Where's Douglas?" MacArthur then arrived seated in a very long, open touring car with sirens screaming and a motorcycle phalanx. "Hello, Doug," Roosevelt said. "What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It's darn hot today." Every Roosevelt biographer has to come to terms with how FDR's polio affected the man and his policies. As Mr. Smith notes, for the last 23 years of his life FDR could not stand unassisted, let alone walk even a brief distance without the aid of heavy leg braces. How is it that this "Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man"? The conventional explanation, Mr. Smith notes, is that overcoming personal adversity gave Roosevelt "insight into the nature of suffering." True enough, but that analysis hardly explains the specific nature of FDR's politics. Mr. Smith contends that the decisive influence was FDR's exposure to the "brutal reality of rural poverty" in Warm Springs, GA., an experience that prompted him to help that third of the nation that was "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," to quote one of his most famous speeches. It seems to me after reading Mr. Smith's deeply moving biography that there is yet another reason for FDR's empathy for the less fortunate: Here was a man with a powerful physique (massive shoulders, arms, and chest) who could not propel himself upward or forward, and who risked falling as he stood to greet world figures such as Stalin and Churchill. He expended more energy getting up than most people did in an entire day. He had the money to disguise his disability, to create the illusion that he could walk. But what of most other people who did not have his resources? That was the question that dominated Roosevelt's politics and the reason he believed government had a role in providing equal opportunity for all. Mr. Smith ranks Roosevelt with Presidents Washington and Lincoln as among this country's greatest leaders. FDR's creation of programs such as social security and the G.I. Bill have ensured his high position among presidents. But Roosevelt was also a great wartime leader. Mr. Smith credits FDR's eight years as second-in-command in the Navy Department during the Wilson administration for FDR's understanding of military organization, allowing him to make key decisions quickly and effectively. Better yet, he had taken the measure of figures such as George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR knew that these three men were indispensable, even though many other commanders outranked Marshall and Eisenhower. Although FDR's greatness is an indisputable theme in Mr. Smith's book, this is no hagiography. If FDR did not invite the attack on Pearl Harbor, he certainly neglected the Pacific theater and pursued policies that, in retrospect, made the Japanese attack all too feasible, Mr. Smith argues. And about FDR's court packing scheme ��" his attempt to add members to a recalcitrant Supreme Court that declared many New Deal measures unconstitutional ��" Mr. Smith is scathing. The issue was not a reactionary court, not a group of nine old men not up to the job, but a power-grab by a president who had overreached himself. Similarly, Mr. Smith is in no mood to exonerate FDR from the deplorable decision to intern Japanese residents during wartime. FDR's flaws notwithstanding, the epigraph to Mr. Smith's biography, taken from Governor Cuomo's keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, beautifully captures the greatness of the man and the leader: "He lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees."
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Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Fr�mont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America
by
Sally Denton
rollyson2002
, September 07, 2012
"They were everything a growing nation needed for a symbol of success, and the country was not to see this combination of youth and daring again until the later cults of hero worship for George and Elizabeth Custer, Charles and Ann Lindbergh, or John and Jacqueline Kennedy," wrote the biographer Richard Egan about the subjects of Sally Denton's "Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, The Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America." John Frémont (1813��"1890), called "The Pathfinder" for his repeated forays into the treacherous West at a time when California still belonged to Mexico and Britain still staked a claim on Oregon, was celebrated for intrepid journeys (surviving the hazardous Rockies, hostile Indians, and death-threatening diseases) that made him the embodiment of manifest destiny. Jessie Frémont (1824��"1902), the daughter of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, one of the most progressive and learned politicians this country has ever produced, sat at the knee of Andrew Jackson in the White House, where, in moments of stress, the President would unconsciously clench her hair. Taught not to complain, Jessie became an independent, spirited woman far ahead of her time, working with her husband on best-selling narratives of his adventures and managing his 1856 presidential campaign. So how did it all go wrong? And how did this couple right themselves only to suffer enough repeated setbacks and comebacks to fill at least five seasons of an HBO series? The trouble began shortly after they met. While Benton admired the young explorer and touted his prospects, it was quite another matter when Frémont fell in love with 15-year-old Jessie. Smitten with the 26-year-old Frémont, Jessie married John in a secret ceremony performed by a Catholic priest, apparently the only member of the clergy not sufficiently worried about Benton's wrath. Eventually reconciled to the marriage, Benton again sponsored Frémont, who was promoted quickly to colonel in the U.S. Army, but who also aroused the envy of senior officers. They resented his popularity and tendency to take action without (so they thought) proper authority. What should have been Frémont's crowning glory, conquering California without war, turned into a court martial when he refused to cede command to President Polk's handpicked replacement. Frémont's original orders, Ms. Denton explains, were ambiguous, allowing Polk to retain or replace Frémont depending on the president's closely held political objectives. For all Frémont's skills ��" he was a trained scientist, engineer, and cartographer ��" he had no political brain, and he never stooped to study politics. Charged with being a secret Catholic during the 1856 presidential campaign, he would not even issue a denial, let alone go on the offensive against his inept but ultimately victorious opponent, James Buchanan, a Democratic Party hack. Jessie always had to do the heavy lifting, tirelessly trying to get her father to support her husband's presidential bid, for example. Benton was anti-slavery, pro-Western exploration, and so a natural Frémont ally, but Benton could not abide his son-in-law's high-handed moral tone or his inability to see that preserving the Union came first. Benton thought, and rightly so, that Frémont would make a terrible president, although Ms. Denton seems to demur on this point. Jessie, a stellar player in her husband's campaign (she was the first presidential candidate's wife to make widespread public appearances), became the target of critics who decried such a visible role for a woman. She never wavered in her husband's support, even when advisers close to his campaign resigned, suspecting him of infidelity (rumors of his affairs would continue even after he abandoned politics). Later she made a major blunder: In 1861, she went directly to President Lincoln to argue her husband's case��"why it was necessary for Frémont (in charge of defending Missouri) to issue an Emancipation Proclamation before Lincoln was ready to countenance such a momentous act. Lincoln rejected her plea, even ridiculing her for arguing in her husband's stead. Whether Frémont was morally right is beside the point. Ms. Denton calls his proclamation an act of courage and Jessie's plea a natural consequence of a woman at home in the White House. But Frémont's proclamation was also an act of political folly. No president can countenance an officer in the field announcing such a momentous policy on his own authority. Disagreeing with Ms. Denton's judgments, however, is not as important as recognizing that she has written a riveting narrative about what she calls a "power couple" who "fascinated and baffled" the public. They are curiously modern and "evocative of Bill and Hillary Clinton," Ms. Denton rightly concludes.
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Shoot The Widow
by
Meryle Secrest
rollyson2002
, September 06, 2012
In a lifetime of writing biographies of famous men, Meryle Secrest has been tempted on more than one occasion to do away with their surviving wives. Widows are the inconvenient keepers of the flame, who watch over the biographer's shoulder and forbid forays into intimate matters that might compromise the reputations of their husbands. For Ms. Secrest, "widows" are not simply the spouses of dead subjects: They are anyone who might block her access to private papers and privileged information. Having written lives of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Salvador Dalí, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other celebrated figures, Ms. Secrest is more than qualified to bring us behind the scenes to witness the hazards and frustrations of the business. Her new book, "Shoot the Widow" (Knopf, 256 pages, $25.95), chronicles her mood swings, false starts, and ��" above all ��" delusions that her subjects can be easily snared. Sometimes it begins well. For her biography of Sir Kenneth Clark, the august art historian, Ms. Secrest initially had her subject's cooperation. "Say what you like," Clark's son told Ms. Secrest. But family members rarely mean it when they endorse openness. They admire your work, what you have done with some othersubject, but then they discover that you have got it all wrong when it comes to themselves! Sir Kenneth tried to control everything ��" even paying some of Ms. Secrest's interviewees on the sly. Such maneuvers lead subjects to believe they've got their biographer in pocket. But, as Ms. Secrest illustrates, they must part ways when the biographer asserts her independence. How do biographers get into such fixes? Ms. Secrest explains: Biographers want access. They are agreeable. They seem like good friends. But to write a credible life they have to get the goods. Subjects as sophisticated as Sir Kenneth might be assumed to have wised up: The biographer, in the end, cannot be controlled. "To hell with you all," Ms. Secrest finally had to tell his family. Only then could she write her book. But how could a writer as professional as Ms. Secrest repeat her errors? Ah, that's where the self-delusion comes in. This time it will be different, the biographer thinks. I have such a good subject and great access! Well, there is no access without acrimony ��" a truth understood only in retrospect. Ms. Secrest writes beautifully and perceptively. Her description of a dying Dalí (she got to see him only once for an unauthorized biography) is harrowing. Stripped of his joie de vivre, Dalí was barely able to talk because of the thick tube in his nose. When Ms. Secrest tries to interview him, she finds the layers of his personae had shriveled to a shrunken figure. And yet she describes the scene so vividly and with such a delicate attention to pathos that she conveys a great deal about Dalí in his final days. Ms. Secrest has alternated between dead and living figures, choosing her subjects according to her interests and what she thinks the market will bear. She is honest about her miscalculations, and even admits to a certain flatness that enters her prose where she has not been able to capture her subject. I would argue with only one of her opinions. In her biography of Mr. Sondheim, she decided not to pursue the composer's sexual experience. She equates interest in sex with the trend toward salacious biographies critics have recently deplored. But surely the sexual nature of a subject (alive or dead) is, to modern minds, a part of the whole person. But would Mr. Sondheim have been so cooperative if Ms. Secrest had done a "Kitty Kelley" (her codename for salacious biography)? Putting aside what I see as an injustice to Ms. Kelley's unauthorized biographies, it seems to me that in this case Ms. Secrest paid too dearly in this case for her access. Perhaps she was spooked early on when playwright John Guare pointed out to Mr. Sondheim that Meryle Secrest's name is an anagram for "merely secrets." I suspect Mr. Sondheim subtly restricted Ms. Secrest by suggesting she was only interested in secrets. She then had to prove how high-minded she was. This is a common enough trap for biographers, but it's better to risk full disclosure and the inevitable name calling (James Joyce called them biografiends) than capitulate to the kind of propriety that dooms biographical truth.
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Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America's First Black Filmmaker
by
Patrick McGilligan
rollyson2002
, September 05, 2012
"Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America's First Great Black Filmmaker," is a culminating work, the result of more than 35 years of scholarship intent on returning its subject to his rightful place in the history of American cinema. Micheaux (1884��"1951) "deserves to be considered in the same breath as the sainted D. W. Griffith," argues Patrick McGilligan, who pays handsome tributes to the biographers and critics who have made his comprehensive biography possible. But what made Micheaux great? Like Griffith, Micheaux's best work was state of the art, employ ing deft use of close-ups and mon tage, for example, but also taking on epic and controversial subjects Indeed, Griffith's heroic depiction of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and disparaging portrayal of blacks in "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) so enraged Micheaux that he decided to present a counter argument in films that would match his rival's high aesthetic standards. To call Griffith a rival, however, is misleading. Although Micheaux wanted to compete, his films never reached more than 300 theaters whereas between 1919 and 1951 (during which Micheaux made something like 45 films), Griffith and other Hollywood filmmakers had access to between 16,000 and 20,000 movie screens. As an independent filmmaker Micheaux never had access to the kind of production funding that even low-budget Hollywood films could count on. Hollywood was almost exclusively white, employing black actors, to be sure, but usually in minor, demeaning roles. Micheaux persevered, seeking the backing not only of black entrepreneurs but also of a few Jewish theater owners, who ran his "race pictures" in venues ranging from Harlem to the Southwest. That Micheaux had only one subject, really ��" the ramifications of being "colored" ��" also limited his audience, not only among whites but even among blacks who felt his focus on the color line impeded the progress of the race or was simply passé. The director constantly fell afoul of censors, who mutilated his films, forcing him to delete, for example, references to miscegenation and scenes that castigated religion. Although Micheaux had a popular following, he was criticized in the black press for not providing his audience with positive role models. He fought back, sometimes showing his films in uncensored form, or even attaching censors' seals of approval from earlier films to his new releases. Micheaux was his own man. He began his career as a homesteader in South Dakota, writing about his experience in self-published novels and in the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, touting his success but also chastising blacks for not striking out on their own. As the only black homesteader in his part of South Dakota, Micheaux was at first a novelty tolerated by his white neighbors, and then a highly respected authority the whites came to for advice. He fell in love with a Swedish woman, sharing both an emotional and intellectual bond with her that he broke at painful cost to himself. Deciding he must marry a black woman, he chose one in thrall to a pompous father, a corrupt preacher who eventually got hold of some of Micheaux's land, selling it for a pittance. Micheaux's disgust with his father-in-law fueled a distrust of established religion and black leadership that would make Micheaux a controversial figure in the black community and would lead to the production of one of his masterpieces, "Body and Soul," starring Paul Robeson. The essential theme of Micheaux's fiction and films was how the black man could remain true to himself and his race while developing his full human potential. James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" (1912) had a profound impact on Micheaux, who used the phenomenon of lightskinned blacks passing as white in many of his films. Micheaux sympathetically portrayed the temptations of passing as a way to assimilate into the majority culture, but ultimately his films show that blacks cannot deny their roots. Micheaux did not politicize the issue of passing so much as present it as a psychological and ethical issue. He thought his race could rise only through individuals taking responsibility for their own fates. He distrusted movements and organizations, especially the Communist Party, which exploited black disenchantment and provided no encouragement for individual endeavor. Micheaux's films do not discount the injustices blacks have suffered, but as Mr. McGilligan demonstrates, what makes Micheaux "the great and only" is his unswerving devotion to an art that explores his own characters' failings as well as their triumphs. This pioneering filmmaker, unbowed by criticism, censorship, and controversy, has finally been honored by a biography that does justice to his provocative and indispensable work. Micheaux & Robeson Although Patrick Gilligan estimates that Oscar Micheaux made something like 45 films, only 15 survive, and most of those are in terrible condition. Unlike Hollywood filmmakers, who would have 30 or more prints of a film available for distribution, Micheaux could afford only four, and those copies were lost in the distribution cycle. Censors chopped up his work, and he did not have the resources to restore it. His second wife made no effort to preserve his films and even destroyed many of his papers. Of the 15 extant films only a few are available on DVD, such as "Lying Lips" (1941), a murder mystery set in Harlem. It is an awkward potboiler. The acting is atrocious. Clearly Micheaux thought he could make a quick buck by inserting nonsensical but crowd pleasing musical numbers that have only a tangential relation to the plot. The DVD is of poor quality: Images are blurry and lines of dialogue are lost in this scratched and patched print. "Body and Soul" (1925), on the other hand, is available in a stunning restoration from the George Eastman House. Paul Robeson is mesmerizing in his screen debut. He plays an ex-convict who has recast himself as the Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins. Women adore him ��" especially Martha Jane, who is obsessed with the idea that her daughter Isabelle should marry Jenkins. Martha Jane tells her lady friends she is going to give all her savings to Jenkins when he marries Isabelle. Robeson's portrayal of Jenkins's self-satisfied villainy is a tribute not only to his acting (without the aid of his superb voice), but also to Micheaux's script and direction. Jenkins is not sentimentalized as a lovable rascal or as a tormented sinner; he is an evil man who relishes his ruses. Micheaux's unforgiving and riveting portrait is intensified by Robeson's second role as Jenkins's twin, the meek Sylvester, who seeks to wrest Isabelle away from his nefarious brother. But what truly elevates the film is Micheaux's portrayal of the mother, who is so besotted with Jenkins that she cannot bear to hear Isabelle's story. In a brilliantly conceived scene Jenkins rapes her, although only his huge shoes are shown as he advances toward his victim. Micheaux scholar Pearl Bowser, who supplies a commentary for the restoration of "Body and Soul," suggests that Martha Jane has sublimated her own sexual desire in offering Isabelle to Jenkins. Perhaps. Although Micheaux's point, it seems to me, is much larger: the blindness of the black community in failing to detect the hypocrisy and criminality of leaders who cloak themselves in the sanctity of the church.
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Harriet Tubman Imagining A Life
by
Beverly Lowry
rollyson2002
, September 04, 2012
Reared in slavery, beaten by her masters, struck in the head as a young woman with a heavy weight that caused narcoleptic spells ��" the story of Harriet Tubman is well-known. This petite, illiterate woman ran away to the free North, and then repeatedly returned to her home ground of Maryland, spiriting away not only her own family, but dozens ��" perhaps even hundreds ��" of slaves, never once getting caught or losing anyone in her charge. When the Civil War broke out, Tubman became a nurse and intelligence agent. Her exploits are well documented, including the dramatic liberation of nearly 800 slaves in South Carolina in a Union army expedition Tubman planned and led ��" the only time a woman, let alone an ex-slave, managed such a feat. No wonder, then, that Tubman is a staple of children's stories, not to mention three recent biographies. Scrupulous scholars have detailed what Tubman did, but they have all been stymied when having to account for how she did it. Although Tubman obliged countless journalists and biographers with stories about her adventures, she rarely divulged her methods. A woman who could have run the Central Intelligence Agency, she never gave up the secrets of her trade. Enter Beverly Lowry, a novelist, who has "imagined" her subject's life in her new biography, "Harriet Tubman" (Doubleday, 432 pages, $26). Reviewers have already expressed a certain uneasiness about Ms. Lowry's methods. She sometimes resorts to the nugatory "must have been," but usually she is bolder and more effective than biographers who try to bootleg factoids into their narratives ��" those statements that sound certain, but are actually bootless speculation. Ms. Lowry reminds me of Faulkner's Ike McCaslin in "Go Down, Moses," who scrutinizes his family's commissary books and ledgers to recreate the past and make it live again. Like Faulkner, Ms. Lowry even uses italics to denote words taken from documents she has studied while envisioning life as Tubman lived it day-to-day. The author often shifts tenses, moving from past to present, back to past again, simulating the kind of dynamic that occurs when attempting to make a continuum of history. If Ms. Lowry's method succeeds, it is because she is a historiographer who examines what other biographers have done with the Tubman material and explains how she regards their redactions of Tubman's words. Through Ms. Lowry's text we see how the historical record develops and what it omits. By all accounts, Tubman was a devout woman who believed her successes were the result of divine will. She spoke in parables. She believed God talked to her, and whites and blacks called her Moses. But Tubman's words require parsing, since like many ex-slaves, she was schooled to use coded language that occluded her life, preventing her masters from understanding her deepest feelings. Ms. Lowry focuses, for example, on Tubman's earliest recorded memory. Harriet is in a tree cradle when "the young ladies in the big house where my mother worked came down, caught me up in the air before I could walk." Ms. Lowry dwells on these words, wondering about the circumstances of the tree cradle story. Unable to supply any more details, and she concludes: See her: a special child with a large spirit, irresistible to the young white women. Her small, compact body in flight, airborne, like a ball pitched to the sky, the baby who would one day find her own way to fly. Arms out, she catches at the air, aloft. Most biographers would be afraid to write this way: It seems too fanciful. But biography, Ms. Lowry knows, is about more than facts ��" so long as the biographer never forgets what facts are available. Biography is about imagining a life, wondering why as a young women Tubman hired herself out, became a "freelancer," as Ms. Lowry calls her in an inspired choice of words. Tubman refused to be a house slave, preferring the hard manual labor that put her in the fields with men. "Harriet Tubman" is a biography that goes to the core of character, using the record to create a fully imagined life. Here is Tubman making her first escape: "From among the laborers, most of whom are men and boys, a young girl ��" compact, tightly wound, her low center of gravity a certain sign of surefooted speed ��" sets off at a quick clip." There is no document that justifies this sentence, but look at Tubman's photographs and consider the whole life. Ms. Lowry's prose, you will find, runs right along with her subject.
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Lost World of James Smithson
by
Heather Ewing
rollyson2002
, September 03, 2012
On June 27, 1829, a rather obscure Englishman died in Genoa. He carried with him a receipt for a will stipulating that the bulk of his fortune ��" something like £100,000 (around $50,000,000 today) ��" should be employed by the United States for "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." James Smithson wrote the will himself and omitted the lawyerly language that might have made his bequest clearer. A chemist by training who published a number of narrowly focused scientific papers measuring the amount and action of minerals in various substances, and active in London's Royal Society for the Advancement of Science, Smithson may have intended a museum of natural history ��" or perhaps a laboratory or school. No one knew. And why America? Early on, Smithson expressed sympathy for the revolutionary cause, but as the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland, Smithson seemed as much a royalist as a democrat, adopting after his mother's death the name of Smithson (it had been Macie, his mother's first husband's name) as if to reassert his aristocratic prerogatives. The man was a mystery. South Carolina senator John Calhoun, always suspicious of centralized power, opposed a national museum, especially one endowed by a virtually anonymous Englishman. Accepting Smithson's bequest was "beneath the dignity" of America. John Quincy Adams, on the other hand, still aggrieved over his failure to establish a national university, led the forces that eventually prevailed in establishing an institution that describes itself as "America's national education facility with 19 museums, 9 research centers, and over 140 affiliate museums around the world"��"not to mention its display of Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis" and Dorothy's ruby slippers. But the Smithson mystery deepened in 1865, when a fire in the newly established Smithsonian Institution destroyed his papers. Heather Ewing begins her new biography, "The Lost World of James Smithson" (Bloomsbury, 349 pages, $29.95), by making it seem that Smithson's story has irrevocably vanished, which of course makes her heroic efforts to recover a sense of Smithson from public documents and from the diaries and letters of his friends all the more laudable. Ms. Ewing has turned up valuable new material, bringing to light her subject's "lost world," but whenever his own words and papers are missing, the diligent biographer heads for quaint, entertaining tidbits ��" such as this description of John Graham's "Temple of Health and Hymen," an institution capitalizing on the public's "newfound curiosity for electrical experiments and their ageold interest in sex": Visitors willing to pay an exorbitant fee could allegedly cure their infertility with a night in the massive "Celestial Bed," in which silk sheets performed "in oriental manner" atop mattresses stuffed with the "most springy hair, produced at vast expense from the tails of English stallions." The bed's domed canopy, supported by forty pillars of colored glass, contained a series of artificial lodestones or magnets, providing the participants with "the exhilarating force of electrical fire." Remember, these were prehistoric days before you could hook yourself up to a car battery. This is all very jolly, but in the end Ms. Ewing has to resort to the bane of all biographers: the "must have been." She does not know much about what Smithson really thought, but she is sure about what "must have been." The results of all her probablys and likelys are tenuous, if suggestive. In "The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and The Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian" (2003), Nina Burleigh has written a tauter, more penetrating biography. Instead of trying to stretch her data, Ms. Burleigh asks pointed questions. Why didn't Smithson marry? Why didn't he give his money to the Royal Society? Because, Ms. Ewing answers, he had a falling out with his colleagues. But then why not another august British institution, Ms. Burleigh asks. Her questions, it seems to me, are more instructive than Ms. Ewing's nugatory speculations. Smithson's motivations remain a puzzle, though Ms. Burleigh has a final surmise of her own that strikes home. Northumberland never publicly acknowledged his illegitimate son, and Smithson knew that if he did not "specify a contingent use for his money and his nephew died, the estate would revert to the government of England." Whatever else America was, it was a new world, one where Smithson's name could be recognized in its own right rather than absorbed into England's treasury. Ms. Ewing makes a similar point, that Smithson's life was all about seeking "identity, prestige, and progress," but her narrative is tricked out with too many suppositions that make its arrival at that fundamental point a rather tedious affair.
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Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life
by
Mark Francis
rollyson2002
, September 01, 2012
Think you know Herbert Spencer? Look him up in, say, "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy," and besides supplying his dates (1820��"1903), the entry calls him an "English evolutionist, father of sociology, and self-appointed philosopher." Self-appointed, I suppose, because Spencer claimed he read few books, especially not those he disagreed with, explaining that they gave him a headache. A classic Victorian eccentric, he is probably best known for coining the phrase "survival of the fittest," a notion that greatly appealed to captains of industry such as Andrew Carnegie. Mark Francis, in his iconoclastic, "Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life,", argues that the great man is not at all what he has been represented to be. The clinching scene of this intellectual biography is Spencer's appearance at Delmonico's, the famous New York City restaurant, where, on November 9, 1882, 200 of his admirers gathered to honor Spencer with a farewell banquet capping off his only American tour. Spencer told his American acolytes there was too much emphasis on the "gospel of work" ��" a direct blow to Carnegie and his ilk. Now it was time, he said, to emphasize the "gospel of relaxation." The audience was in a state of shock, but Spencer was not attempting to be provocative. He had come to believe that overwork had ruined his own constitution, and that the evolutionary progress he believed in should lead to a world where people worked less and lived for pleasure, especially aesthetic enjoyment. Looking ahead, Spencer saw an opportunity to level with sympathetic listeners. Or as Mr. Francis puts it, "Since he was addressing Americans, who he had mistakenly assumed liked to hear the truth, he had spoken more plainly than usual." Indeed, as the author painstakingly documents, Spencer was not a social Darwinist at all. So why has Spencer been so poorly understood?His self-mocking irony, especially in his autobiography, has gone undetected by those who still read him, in the main social scientists not known for their sense of humor. Spencer's reputation, and the modern understanding of him, would have been quite different, Mr. Francis suggests, if literary critics had taken up the nuances of Spencer's prose. And it is hard to refute this point once one learns that Spencer's favorite reading was Lawrence Sterne's outrageously satirical "Tristram Shandy." Although Mr. Francis does full justice to Spencer's ideas ��" indeed certain chapters turn into rather tedious rehearsals of 19th-century sociology, theology, and politics ��" Spencer the man is delightfully present when Mr. Francis provides subtle readings of Spencer's courtship of George Eliot, his love of playing with children, his hypochondria, and his penchant for hydropathy. Spencer was a kind of Prufrock figure, afraid to plumb his own emotions ��" he withdrew from Eliot, even though she was prepared to marry him. His autobiography was a kind of object lesson that implied, "Don't do as I have done." With women, in particular, Spencer the bachelor never had the strength to "force the moment to its crisis." Although Spencer could have taken his place among the eminent Victorians ridiculed by Lytton Strachey, Mr. Francis presents a much more complex man, living long enough to recant many of his early, confident notions about the human psyche and its perfectibility. Aside from the value of Mr. Francis's study as a fresh view of how Spencer's ideas developed, his book also represents an attack on the way academics have specialized knowledge, thus a disservice to someone as protean as Spencer. "Writing about Herbert Spencer had made me aware of the narrowness of academic disciplines," he notes in his preface. Without knowledge of Spencer's "authorial intentions," of the way he "lived his philosophy," his ideas, in themselves, seem "uninspired and disconnected." Intellectual biography can be problematic because it makes for an awkward conflation of narrative and textual analysis, but in Mr. Francis's hands it becomes a rewarding re-creation of his subject and of the world from which he emerged.
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Becoming Shakespeare
by
Jack Lynch
rollyson2002
, August 29, 2012
Jack Lynch's argument in "Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into the Bard" is reminiscent of Walter Pater's idea that the greatness of "Mona Lisa" depends on the masses of people who have projected greatness onto the painting. This is not to say that Leonardo's work is not a masterpiece, any more than it is to suggest that Shakespeare is not the immortal bard. On the contrary, the Leonardos and the Shakespeares both create and benefit from our collective impulse to impose an aesthetic order on existence. If Shakespeare is the superlative object of our search for artistic perfection, this is because he is so elusive, so Mona Lisa-like. Or as Matthew Arnold put it in "Shakespeare": Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. Mr. Lynch quotes Paul Fussell's remark that what is known about Shakespeare would probably fit on a 3-inch-by-five-inch index card. While Mr. Fussell may exaggerate, most of what we know about Shakespeare derives from legal documents and the stray observations by the bard's contemporaries. No manuscript written in his hand exists, and he never published his plays. Nothing found in his will even acknowledges he was a writer ��" a fact that had led to much speculation that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare but rather Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, or even Christopher Marlowe, who faked his death so that he would go on writing as Shakespeare. Mr. Lynch has no patience for such speculations, though he might concede that they, too, are part of the biography of Shakespeare's afterlife. But Mr. Lynch is more concerned with how Shakespeare became more alive after his death than during his lifetime. A keen literary historian, writing in pellucid prose, Mr. Lynch re-creates the truly extraordinary trajectory of a B+ writer (this is the grade his contemporaries would have given him) who suffered obscurity immediately after his demise and then virtual extinction after the Puritans successfully shut down the English theater. Not until the restoration of the monarchy and the play-loving Charles II did Shakespeare's fortunes revive. Even then, though, he took second place to Ben Jonson, a classical author who, unlike Shakespeare, observed the unities of place and time and seemed less vulgar (the raunchy Porter scene in "Macbeth," for example, was routinely excised in performance). But 17th-century and 18th-century objections to Shakespeare's faults, including his obsession with punning and mixing comic and tragic scenes in a most ungodly way, gave way to fascination with his characters and the desire to improve upon them. Surely King Lear, for instance, did not have to come to such a miserable end. The happy ending version of the play was popular right up to the end of the 19th century. As the critic Michael Dobson explains, "Shakespeare's plays belonged to the theatre more significantly than they belonged to Shakespeare." And, adds Mr. Lynch, "All were fair game for rewriting." Mr. Lynch might have made more of Shakespeare's stagecraft and verbal vivacity. As any actor knows, he is marvelously playable and much fun to parody ��" as Mark Twain demonstrated in "Huckleberry Finn." Shakespeare's wonderfully quotable words positively cavort and are easily susceptible to memorization. "Becoming Shakespeare" focuses, instead, on the scholars who set about restoring the playwright's corrupted texts and the forgers who fed the public appetite for documents authenticating the bard's existence. Mr. Lynch spends much of a chapter on the story of a young scamp who tried to impress his Shakespeare-besotted father with a tale about a lost play he had uncovered among some old papers. This play even got produced in London, and though it was howled off the stage, the father refused to believe it was a fake because he believed his son was not clever enough to imitate Shakespeare. Mr. Lynch does not deplore any of the Shakespeare travesties ��" not even one by an eminent scholar who made major discoveries but also inserted fake findings right alongside his legitimate aperçus. To this day, scholars can be fooled by seemingly reliable emendations. Missing from this entertaining survey is a chapter on Shakespeare biography, though Mr. Lynch does include a few comments on it in his "further reading section." He notes, for example, that Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" (2004) is too speculative. Quite so. But surely Mr. Greenblatt's flights of imagination are just the kind of stuff that has contributed to Shakespeare's robust afterlife. Quibbles aside, this is a very impressive, accessible book that synthesizes and clarifies hundreds of years of scholarship, and as such belongs on every Shakespeare shelf.
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Ike An American Hero
by
Michael Korda
rollyson2002
, August 27, 2012
Michael Korda misses the point about American heroes, thinking we pester them into infamy or insignificance. In his new biography of Dwight Eisenhower, he quotes Emerson's comment, "Every hero becomes a bore at last," noting, by way of contrast, France's "national passion for Napoleon," England's "sentimental hero worship of Nelson," and Russia's "glorification of Peter the Great." But if we cut our heroes "down to size," as Mr. Korda contends, we do so only to build them back up again. Hence David McCullough's sanctification of Truman and now, in the same tradition, Mr. Korda's "Ike: An American Hero." The title is positively antique ��" a throwback to 19th-century American biographical tradition, in which the hero's early years are rendered in the soft sepia of nostalgia and his command decisions related boldly so as to stand out against his lesser contemporaries. If Mr. Korda breaks no new ground and is rather timid when it comes to describing Eisenhower the man, he is sound on Eisenhower's role as Supreme Commander. The biographer presents a powerful picture of a soldier gifted at inspiring and training his troops but just as savvy in dealing with world-class politicians and prima donnas such as Winston Churchill, Bernard Montgomery, and George Patton. The latter two often derided Ike as weak because he did not check their insubordinate behavior, but Ike tolerated their guff only so long as they adhered to his strategy of destroying the German war machine. To bolster the prestige of Britain, a world power on the wane, Churchill wanted to take Berlin before the Soviets arrived, but Eisenhower resisted this political ploy. Patton and Montgomery wanted Berlin for their own glory. But in March 1945, the Soviets were only 35 miles from the German capital, while Patton and Montgomery were 200 miles away. Eisenhower was given estimates that taking Berlin (which had no strategic value) would cost 100,000 American lives. In the event, the Soviets lost something like 360,000 soldiers taking the German capital, according to John Wukovitsin"Eisenhower"(2006). What is more, with the atomic bomb as yet unexploded, Eisenhower knew Roosevelt counted on Soviet help with the invasion of Japan. To grab Berlin, especially after the Yalta agreement had ratified the city as part of the Soviet occupation zone, would have accelerated the Cold War, even if it did not provoke an immediate crisis on the Allied side. Ike was such a strong wartime leader, Mr. Korda suggests, that he does not have to earn our respect again on the home front, does not, for example, have to denounce baddies like Joseph McCarthy. Eisenhower did not want to get "in the gutter with that guy," he writes. How would a strong public defense of George Marshall, Eisenhower's mentor, have been a brand of gutter politics? Yet Eisenhower, to the chagrin of many friends, failed to support Marshall, one of the towering figures of the century. Similarly, Eisenhower's inaction on civil rights receives a pass from Mr. Korda. As president, Eisenhower reacted to the unanimous Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education with dismay, later voicing his deep regret that he had nominated chief justice Earl Warren to the court at all. Eisenhower believed that outlawing segregation went too far, and would have preferred a decision that simply affirmed equality of opportunity. But as Warren demonstrated to even the most conservative of the justices, separate but equal was a contradiction in terms. The true hero of the saga was Earl Warren. Although Eisenhower's record of enforcing desegregation in the military was strong, and although he did enforce the Supreme Court integration decision when he sent troops to Little Rock, he was in his actions affirming the authority of the federal government, not making a moral statement about civil rights. In this, he simply did not act heroically. A hero is not only courageous, he must be farsighted. Eisenhower, devoid of a moral imagination, hoped instead to maintain the status quo. After powerful Eisenhower biographies by Stephen Ambrose and Carlo D'Este, it would seem incumbent on Mr. Korda to provide a fresh assessment of the man. I thought that perhaps he might achieve a breakthrough in his treatment of Kay Summersby, Eisenhower's driver, social secretary, and companion during the war. After all, Mr. Korda published her memoir, "Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower" (1975). Instead, the biographer retreats to the safe "nobody knows and prurient speculation is out of place." Ike's wife, Mamie, suspected him, and friends generally assumed Kay was his mistress. (Mr. Korda even speculates that Ike's letters to Kay "are not those that a general would normally write to a driver.") Kay wrote about Ike with insight and sensitivity in her memoir, which she wrote while dying of cancer in the 1970s. What is it that Mr. Korda needs at this point? A photograph of them in bed? The biographer's reticence obfuscates the crucial role this woman performed in Ike's life. In the end, Mr. Korda's "Ike" differs little from previous accounts that have steadily increased Eisenhower's stature as a self-effacing man who nevertheless made a powerful mark on history.
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George Mason, Forgotten Founder
by
Jeff Broadwater
rollyson2002
, August 26, 2012
So why is George Mason a forgotten founder? As Jeff Broadwater notes in his biography, "George Mason," "during Mason's lifetime only Washington ranked higher in public esteem." An agile debater, Mason had a major impact on the Constitutional Convention. As principal author of Virginia's Declaration of Rights, his work served as a model for the Bill of Rights. Washington and Jefferson regarded him as indispensable to the revolutionary cause. And yet Mason has not been accorded a niche in the pantheon that includes his august admirers. Mr. Broadwater canvases the traditional explanations for Mason's eclipse: He died in 1792, "too soon to play a major role in the politics of the federal government." But so did Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Paul Revere, the biographer reminds us. The argument that Mason's anti-federalist disagreements have not worn well is perhaps more persuasive. Even though he was influential in drafting the Constitution, in the end, he opposed it. Mr. Broadwater seems correct, though, in suggesting a more important reason for Mason's "relative obscurity": He wanted it that way. He made no effort to preen for posterity. Indeed, he often had to be virtually dragged from home to play his role in the Revolution and in nation-making. He did not seek national office. He did not write his memoirs. Unlike Washington, he did not carry with him a sort of portable archive that testified to his importance. Unlike Jefferson, Mason did not regard himself as a symbolic figure, representing in his person a body of ideas and a new form of government. Mr. Broadwater shrewdly links Mason to John Adams. Both men were stout defenders of civil liberties and representative democracy. Mason was the first American to enunciate in writing an American political philosophy: "[T]he fundamental Principle of the People's being governed by no Laws, to which they have not given their Consent, by Representative freely chosen by themselves."This was the American Revolution in a nutshell. The British Parliament could not dictate terms or taxes to Americans who thought of themselves as having, in effect, dominion status before there was such a thing as a British Commonwealth of Nations. But like Adams, Mr. Broadwater points out, Mason feared the new republic could founder on "unchecked individualism, transient popular majorities, and the inherent virtue of the marketplace."Such forces were sure to lead to corruption ��" as they had in Great Britain ��" and to a demagogic chief executive. Mason opposed the Constitution, in part, because he thought it gave too many powers to a popularly elected chief executive. Washington as the obvious choice for the first president posed no problem for Mason, but who to trust thereafter? Mason walked away from the Constitution, in other words, because he did not feel it contained enough checks and balances. He thought, for example, that the federal judiciary had been made too independent and that even federal issues (with a few significant exceptions) should be settled in state courts. In retrospect, Mason's fears may seem misguided. And yet from his perspective ��" looking at how the monarchy and Parliament had developed ��" Mason had a point. After the all, Parliament had refused to seat the Whig, John Wilkes, four times (so much for accepting the will of the people!), and the initial American faith that George III could be appealed to directly as a representative of all the people proved fallacious. While Mason supported a national government with a written constitution, he opposed a heavily centralized government in whichWashington, D. C., would function like Westminster. And was he so wrong? Take, for example, the issue of slavery. Mason was appalled that such a nefarious institution had been acknowledged and accommodated in the Constitution. A slaveholder himself, Mason had evidently witnessed how owning other human beings corrupted and degraded their owners. He did not believe that blacks were equal to whites, but slavery and the slave trade were evils he could not condone. I can imagine what Mason would have said about the Dred Scott decision. Didn't it show that not only the legislative, but also the judicial branch, had been corrupted into upholding an immoral institution? This question, however, turned back on Mason himself, befuddles Mr. Broadwater. If Mason so vehemently opposed slavery, why did he not free at least a few of his slaves, as Jefferson did, or free them all, as Washington did in his will? "Mason never seemed defensive about his glaring inconsistency," the biographer observes. "In all likelihood, Mason believed, or convinced himself, that he had no options." This last sentence seems to imply that Mason may have been blind to his own hypocrisy. At any rate, Mr. Broadwater concludes, "Mason must have shared the fears of Jefferson and countless other whites that whites and free blacks could not live together." Beware of the "must haves" of history. In effect, the biographer does not know what his subject thought but is keen to have him think it anyway. Call Mason a hypocrite, if you will, but look at it this way: Mason did not see himself as a symbolic figure. He always made a point of saying he was being drawn away from his private life as a planter, father, and husband to engage in public affairs. He was one of the few Virginian aristocrats who kept his own books and made significant profit out of his tobacco farming and land holdings. He operated within the system he had inherited. He did not wring his hands over it. He owed his children a debt-free future and a reasonable run at prosperity. To be sure, Mason wanted to abolish slavery, starting by omitting any mention of it in the U. S. Constitution. But any gesture he made as an individual was, to him, trifling ��" or so I interpret his character. He could not stop the virus of slavery by eradicating it on his own plantation. He argued, instead, for a corporate decision that his colleagues, North and South, were not prepared to make. To see him as I have makes Mason more principled, not less. If for nothing else he should be remembered because he saw that the Constitution ��" a great document, no doubt ��" was also infected with the germ of evil that would spread, in time, to the entire body politic.
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Secret Life of Houdini The Making of Americas First Superhero
by
William Kalush
rollyson2002
, August 25, 2012
Not to keep you in suspense any longer: The secret is that Harry Houdini may have been a spy, an operative for the U.S. Secret Service, and other police organizations here and abroad. Unfortunately, the evidence is circumstantial, the biographers' conclusions inconclusive. To be sure, Houdini hung out with cops and ops. He was, after all, the handcuff king, escaping from every kind of lock and chain the fuzz fettered him with ��" including treacherous thumb cuffs that tore the skin on Houdini's fingers to the bone. Pardon the patois. I picked it up from William Kalush and Larry Sloman, whose hokey-cum-portentous prose is catchy, if not convincing. Houdini was a showman and a fakeout artist. As a master of publicity, a dabbler in magic, the occult, card tricks, and just about everything else he absorbed from his early days in the circus, it is a wonder that he did not at least hint that he was also a spook. But of course, covert enterprises are by definition hidden from view ��" like Houdini himself when he retired behind a curtain to rid himself of his manacles. The biographers are entertaining, with accounts of Houdini's breathtaking escapes and encounters with skeptics determined to prove him a fraud. But Houdini's brand of entertainment was suspect by nature ��" the series of conversations and scenes that accompany it belong in a novel, not a biography. Messrs. Kalush and Sloman assure us in "The Secret Life of Harry Houdini." "We've made nothing up; in some cases we've just turned the facts into dialogue." That sentence is footnoted: "Every fact in this book has been substantiated, but the notes are so extensive, that we have decided to publish them online instead, at www.conjuringarts.org." But when facts are turned into dialogue ��" beware! Facts? I hate to sound pedantic, but what do they mean by facts? Evidently, they mean newspaper reports, letters, diaries, and other documents that are evidence but not facts. The result of their masquerading evidence as drama is a bogus "you are there" spectacle. This questionable conversion of evidence into dialogue was propagated in the early 1920s by Andre Maurois and other practitioners of what was called the "new biography," an attempt to enliven a stodgy genre that could not compete with the vivacity of the novel. By 1927, Maurois had recanted in "Aspects of Biography," regretting that he had blurred the line between fiction and biography. Since then, reputable biographers have rarely used dialogue unless it was presented as such in their sources. Even Norman Mailer, who wanted to stretch the boundaries of biography, was careful to note that he invented dialogue in "Marilyn" (1973) in order to speculate about matters his sources could not confirm. The dialogue in "The Secret Life of Houdini" is sometimes taken from Houdini's own accounts of his exploits. The biographers give, for example, a blow-by-blow account of how Houdini escaped from the Carette, the "dreaded Siberian Transport Cell," lined with zinc sheeting and secured with steel bars. After reading their account, you will know exactly how it was done. But do you really know? Turn to "Houdini!!!" (1996), by Houdini biographer Kenneth Silverman: Unfortunately this legendary feat [escaping from the Carette] is poorly documented. No photographs of it exist, nor even any accounts in the Moscow press . . . Nothing remains but Houdini's boastful, questionable retellings, and a poster he later produced in Leipzig, picturing the scene. Mr. Silverman then carefully assesses the different ways Houdini may have performed his feat, in the process showing how canny his subject was about not disclosing details of his technique. And what about all that spying? Much of it amounts to Messrs. Kalush and Sloman noting that Houdini knew spies and wrote to some of them ��" and that he appears in a spy's diary. But here is an example of the "facts": Inspector Melville of Scotland Yard's Special Branch notes in his diary, "Called at War Office to pass on letter from HH." The biographers call the letter a "field report" and say the diary entry acknowledges the importance of Houdini's information. Melville's mention of Houdini is intriguing but hardly enough on which to build a biography. An even more egregious example: "It is interesting that an apolitical escape artist paid such close attention to the budding Russo-Japanese conflict, expressing amazement that the ‘Japs were able to bring the Russian bear to his haunches.'" If this is a specimen of Houdini's "intelligence," I wonder what value Scotland Yard saw in his "field report." Having read raw FBI files, I know that the amount of junk, gossip, and hearsay that intelligence agencies collect is astounding. And yet an agent like Melville would feel obliged to pass on the "chatter" ��" as it is now called ��" just in case some nugget of truth might emerge. Houdini liked to feel important, and he seems to have cultivated law enforcement and intelligence agents who were intrigued by magic and escape artists. Who was fooling whom is always an appropriate question to ask with respect to such relationships. There isn't much reason to read "The Secret Life of Harry Houdini" because whatever Houdini might have done by way of intelligence gathering is still secret. Better to read or reread Kenneth Silverman, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer, who writes in "Houdini!!!" with the care and elegance that befit a state-of-the-art biography.
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Andrew Carnegie
by
David Nasaw
rollyson2002
, August 23, 2012
Why did Andrew Carnegie give away all of his money? This is the question that Carnegie's biographers have to confront. David Nasaw's authoritative new biography goes a long way toward answering the question, even if he cannot��"perhaps no biographer can��"ultimately fathom Carnegie's complex motives and temperament. Mr. Nasaw deftly dismisses the conventional explanations. Carnegie did not feel guilty about accumulating a vast fortune. He did not feel he had earned his wealth immorally, let alone illegally. J.P. Morgan's claim that Carnegie became the richest man in the world when he sold his steel corporation to Morgan did not embarrass Carnegie a bit. Carnegie did not build his famous public libraries or establish his endowments for peace and social welfare as public relations ploys. Long before he became a controversial public figure, during a period when he was regarded as a pro-union supporter of the workingman and a rebuke to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he had resolved to divest himself of his capital. Mr. Nasaw's probes Carnegie's personality and philosophy ��" which Carnegie wrote up as "The Gospel of Wealth" ��" to describe an individual who believed he owed his good fortune to his community, a key term in the Carnegian lexicon. Unlike many self-made men (Carnegie was the son of a feckless Scottish weaver), he did not claim he had succeeded through hard work and genius. Carnegie scoffed at businessmen who put in 10- and 12-hour days. Even at the height of his involvement in business, Carnegie rarely spent a full day in his office. He disliked the go-getter mentality and counseled his fellow Americans to make opportunities for leisure. Carnegie loved to travel, read, attend the theater, and generally absorb culture, which he regarded not as a frill but as a necessity. Carnegie headed for the country's cultural capital, New York City, as soon as he could break away from commitments in Pittsburgh, where he had begun his rise as a messenger boy and telegraph operator before graduating to Pennsylvania railroad executive positions. Pittsburgh had set him up to sell bonds and form partnerships in the iron and steel industries based on insider trading (not yet designated a crime or even considered immoral). What Mr. Nasaw dubs "crony capitalism" formed the basis of Carnegie's success. But the ebullient Carnegie ��" one associate called him the happiest man he had ever met ��" had literary aspirations and quoted Shakespeare liberally. He befriended influential figures like Matthew Arnold and William Gladstone, not to mention the man who became his philosophical mentor, Herbert Spencer. Indeed, Spencer and Shakespeare went hand in hand for Carnegie to the point that he could close a deal quoting either writer. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Nasaw believes, is the key to Carnegie's decision to give away his money. Spencer believed in evolutionary progress and that the "apogee of human achievement was industrial society," Mr. Nasaw writes. "What counted most for Carnegie was not simply that Spencer had decreed that evolutionary progress was inevitable and industrial society an improvement on its forbears, but that this progress was moral as well as material." Businessmen like Carnegie were not the creators of this progress but its agents. They arose out of the community that fostered their efforts. In Carnegie's view, Spencer was not merely presenting ideas. For him, Spencer's notions were laws, and so in "The Gospel of Wealth," Carnegie refers to the "Law of Accumulation of Wealth" and the "Law of Competition." In this positivist reading of history, Carnegie met the world head-on ��" very much as he does in the evocative photograph on the cover of Mr. Nasaw's biography. Carnegie is shown walking toward us, open to whatever experience has to teach him. Naturally, then, he argued that he should give back what the world had, in effect, bestowed upon him. So certain was Carnegie that great wealth must be redistributed that he even argued against the notion of inheritance for children of the wealthy. Let them, as well, meet the world head-on. With so much empathy for his community, then, how could Carnegie have consorted with Henry Clay Frick, a notorious and brutal strikebreaker? Unions, Carnegie concluded, did not understand that the Spencerian world, had periods of downs as well as ups��"as Mr. Nasaw's illustrates in his redaction of the philosopher: "It seems hard than an unskillfulness which with all his efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artisan," Herbert Spencer had written, almost as if he were advising Carnegie not to give in to the demands of employees. "It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence. Or as Carnegie himself notes in the social Darwinist "The Gospel of Wealth" (included in a new Penguin paperback edited by Mr. Nasaw): "While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department." As you may already have gathered, Carnegie was a better stylist than Spencer. But a mystery remains in the heart of Andrew Carnegie's heart. When he published "Triumphant Democracy," which essentially ignored the terrible suffering that Spencer's version of evolutionary progress entailed, Spencer himself wrote Carnegie: "Great as may be hereafter the advantages of enormous progress America makes, I hold that the existing generations of Americans, and those to come for a long time hence, are and will be essentially sacrificed." What did Carnegie say to that? Mr. Nasaw does not comment, except to say, "What mattered most was that he be taken seriously as a thinker and author." In other words, Mr. Nasaw does not know what Carnegie thought of Spencer's rebuke. Instead of just shilling for capitalism, shouldn't Carnegie have explored its devastating consequences as well? Failure to do so deprived Carnegie of the very status of literary figure and thinker he craved. Didn't Carnegie understand as much? And shouldn't Mr. Nasaw probe this fatal flaw? Instead, he writes that Carnegie "wore his many hats well." So he did, when he looked in his own mirror. But biography ought to reflect perspectives not available to the subject. Even where evidence is lacking, some rather sharp questions have to be asked of a subject who did so much good while refusing to acknowledge that it arose out of so much questionable philosophy.
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Woodward & Bernstein Life in the Shadow of Watergate
by
Alicia C Shepard
rollyson2002
, August 22, 2012
Two Metro reporters at the Washington Post, both in their late 20s ��" one a dogged investigator who writes badly, the other rather a flake who writes well ��" team up to take down a president of America. The plot for a bad movie? No, actually the scenario for a rather good one, "All the President's Men," and, improbably, a true story ��" although to give the whole credit for Watergate to Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein is (as Huck Finn would say) a stretcher. Why were Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein so successful? They were ambitious, single, and single-minded. While many veteran journalists kept saying Richard Nixon would not be so stupid as to tie himself directly to the burglary at the Democratic party's Watergate Hotel headquarters, "Woodstein," as the duo was dubbed, simply kept asking questions and going after sources. But this is not the whole story. As Alicia C. Shepard recounts in her absorbing biography, "Woodward and Bernstein," Carl Bernstein had grown up in Washington, D.C., and worked in newsrooms since the age of 16. He had a nose for news. Bob Woodward, growing up as a conservative Midwesterner, seemed constitutionally curious about the secrets people and institutions zealously guarded. He believed in openness. He had no agenda; he simply wanted to know. But this is not the whole story."Woodstein" needed and received the full backing of their newspaper. Even when other major papers like the New York Times did not accord Watergate much space, the young reporters got the go-ahead from their immediate supervisors as well as from the newspaper's executive editor, Ben Bradlee, and its owner at the time, Katharine Graham. Graham risked Nixon's wrath ��" there was talk in the White House about revoking the Post's television licenses ��" and the contempt of other newspaper owners who doubted her judgment in allowing Mr. Bradlee to back Woodstein. But this is not the whole story. Ms. Shepard believes the primary reason for Woodstein's success was their status as outsiders. They were beholden to no one. They had no reputations to lose, really, and they could not be co-opted by politicians. They bonded together as outsiders ��" a development Ms. Shepard acknowledges but does not fully explore. "There are special things only the two of us understand, from the work we did together to the way each of us looks at journalism," Mr. Bernstein told Ms. Shepard. Boy, did that ring a bell for me. Having written several unauthorized biographies, I know that the reporter often becomes the target, not just the subject of the investigation. Family members, friends, and the press (reviewers) all pile on to question the motives of a journalist like Bob Woodward, who simply wants to know. When Mr. Woodward published his biography of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Belushi's "Saturday Night Live" colleague, said publicly that Mr. Woodward deserved to be put to death. But this is not the whole story. Mr. Woodward developed a crucial source that became the celebrated "Deep Throat." Neither Messrs. Woodward nor Bernstein ever claimed that Deep Throat had the key to Watergate. Instead, he served as a sounding board for Mr. Woodward, pointing the reporter in the right direction by asking provocative questions. Mr. Woodward never voluntarily disclosed the identity of his source, and then did so only reluctantly after Mark Felt's family decided that what they deemed his heroic role should be acknowledged before he died. Why Mr. Woodward balked at full disclosure is a story in itself. Mr. Woodward had always said he would not unveil Deep Throat's identity until the source died. Felt no longer was mentally competent at the time his family through its lawyer divulged Felt's role in history, but Mr. Woodward still felt bound by his promise. Only when his own newspaper pointed out that it had to cover this news story did Mr. Woodward confirm the family's account and then publish his own version of his relationship with Felt. Mr. Woodward's use of anonymous sources has been his bête noir. His fellow journalists have repeatedly questioned his ethics and his veracity. How are they to believe what he has reported about the inside deliberations of the Supreme Court, the CIA, or the Bush and Clinton White Houses, when they cannot check his evidence? Especially troubling to his critics has been his use of omniscient narration. How can he know what his subjects are thinking? Much of this criticism, in my view, is misguided. Omniscience, in Mr. Woodward's books, is a literary technique, not a claim to an all-knowing, definitive account of history. Here is what happens: A source, X,says "I felt like resigning when I discovered that Nixon had done such and such."To Mr. Woodward it becomes, "X felt." The drama and immediacy are enhanced. He has not made anything up. Of course, there is a downside to using anonymous sources, since who said what can be as important as what was said. But Mr. Woodward has never offered his model of investigative journalism as one the whole profession should emulate. Mr. Woodward has yet to be caught out in a significant error. More importantly, though, there is nothing stopping other reporters from doing their own work to corroborate or refute Mr. Woodward. Mr. Woodward has been so much more productive than Mr. Bernstein that it seems inevitable that his work should dominate a dual biography. It is to Ms. Shepard's credit, however, that interest in Mr. Bernstein never flags. She treats his marital and professional failures sympathetically without excusing his bad behavior or injudicious career moves. His move to ABC television was a disaster, and the few books Mr. Bernstein has written have received mixed reviews and made little impact. Certainly, he has suffered far more than Mr. Woodward from the "shadow of Watergate." Nevertheless, Mr. Bernstein remains an appealing figure, owing to his lack of self-pity and his enduring relationship with Mr. Woodward, despite the ups and downs of their friendship. Ms. Shepard has benefited from the huge archive Woodstein sold to the University of Texas. Both men were available for interviews, and she diligently canvassed opinions from friends, former friends, and associates. The result is a richly detailed book that does justice to both history and biography ��" an impressive achievement in a well-wrought narrative of fewer than 300 pages.
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Decca The Letters Of Jessica Mitford
by
Jessica Mitford
rollyson2002
, August 21, 2012
"Compilations of correspondence are necessarily biographies of a kind��"biographies of individual consciousness with less intrusive mediation and interpretation than one finds in a traditional biography," Peter Y. Sussman, editor of "Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford" writes. But what constitutes "less intrusive mediation"? Jessica Mitford supplied an admirable answer, which Mr. Sussman quotes: "The whole point of letters is to reveal the writer & her various opinions & let the chips fall where they may. Censoring them for fear of offending the subjects is in my view absolutely wrong." Why then does Mr. Sussman disregard Mitford's uncompromising conviction? Mitford belonged to a family of outspoken individualists, including her older sister, the novelist Nancy Mitford, who satirized her own family's peculiarities and their devotion to the fascist cause. Another sister, Diana Mosley, was unapologetic about her marriage to the British fascist Oswald Mosley, and Jessica herself publicly excoriated Diana and another sister, Unity, for their pro-Hitler activities. Jessica, for her part, became a communist and later an outspoken critic of American institutions, and is perhaps best known for her watershed book, "The American Way of Death," a hilarious but savage attack on the funeral home industry. What is more, unlike many of her fellow writers, Mitford applied her principles to herself and to her friends, sparing (with one exception) no person or organization when she believed an important principle was involved. For example, when biographer Joan Mellen asked for an interview with Mitford about her friend, the writer Kay Boyle, Mitford assented even when the capricious Boyle withdrew her support for Mellen's biography and enjoined Mitford to do the same. Mitford refused, preferring to anger her friend, and to honor an agreement, noting, as well, that she had a right to speak with anyone she liked. Would that more writers obeyed that Samuel Johnson injunction: It is more important to reveal the truth than to worry about hurting people's feelings. Yet Mr. Sussman wants to protect Mitford's correspondents, to mitigate their pain, and is even willing to hide the identities of Communist Party members who have not, in his words, "outed" themselves. I cannot believe, based on the evidence of the very letters that Mr. Sussman provides, that Jessica Mitford would find his concerns about the tender feelings and reputations of others worthy of respect. Mr. Sussman's motives are all the more suspect since Mitford's own Communist Party membership is one of the least attractive features of her biography. While the wayward Mitford was a problem for the party, since she was by both nature and nurture such an independent soul, she nevertheless lent her talents to an undemocratic and conspiratorial organization that took its orders from a foreign power. Why? Because for her the party stood for social justice, especially civil rights, a laudable concern Mitford championed in countless ways in the San Francisco Bay area. She not only wrote about social issues, she put her day-to-day energies into the drive for equal rights. At the same time, Mitford, who prided herself on her investigative skills, turned a blind eye to the global and geopolitical actions of the party, headquartered in Moscow. Take, for example, the astonishing letter Mitford wrote after visiting Hungary shortly before the 1956 rising, which (Mr. Sussman notes) resulted in 30,000 deaths in Budapest alone: "Why couldn't we see signs of this while we were there?" she wrote to her mother-in-law. Why indeed. Anyone who traveled, as I did, in communist Europe right through the end of the 1970s, had to be aware of repressive and closed societies that produced sullen functionaries and a cowed populace ready to unburden itself to visiting Americans if an appropriately secure location could be arranged. Mitford (a member of the party until 1958) expressed some sympathy with the uprising, but look how she frames her discussion: However, I gather from news releases that the rebels were quickly joined by fascists and that a "white terror" was being established. Because of this, I think in the long run the interests of the Hungarian people are best served by entry of Russian troops. It takes your breath away. As Woody Allen said in "Annie Hall": "Excuse me, I'm due back on planet earth." While Mitford's criticisms of American social institutions often hit their mark, the Soviet Union, until very late in the day, got no more than wry wrist slaps. Her letters disclose a love of causes, and even the fawning Mr. Sussman admits that sometimes Mitford was not doing much more than stirring the pot. Mitford was a muckraker, and the downside of a continual raking of the muck is that the raker can get pretty soiled herself. I was dismayed to read, for example, these gloating passages: I was also successful in getting the book [a history of the Mitfords written from a pro-Diana bias] thoroughly trashed by reviewers in S.F. Chronicle, Boston Globe, & NYT Book Review, having pointed out to reviewers ��" all friends of mine ��" some of the stupider passages. More on OJ: Bob [Treuhaft, her husband] & I rather agreed with you ... we were pleased with verdict but thought he's prob. guilty ... serves the cops right. A thought: sort of an Affirmative Action type of vote? Redressing centuries of injustice in our law courts? Forget the brutality of the murder and find your solace in revolutionary justice. No wonder it took Mitford so long to leave the communist party. Elsewhere she writes that she supported Stalin: "Mainly for pragmatic reason that his lot won. Trots lost. I think Trotsky wld have been more to our liking philosophically." Her inhumanity is striking. For all the good Mitford did in exposing corruption, there was corruption at her very core as well. She seemed to have little understanding or empathy for liberals like Senator Clinton, who once was an intern in Bob Treuhaft's law firm, but later helped her husband reform the penal system in Arkansas. Rebecca West, who in some ways had a temperament similar to Jessica Mitford's but drew very different political conclusions from her investigative reporting, might have said Mitford lacked a sense of process, a grasp of the mechanisms by which genuine social change is accomplished. Mitford was curious about West and wrote to me, wishing to know more about my research for a biography of West.Too bad Mitford did not take to heart West's key insight: That no matter how slow and contradictory it might be, there is no substitute for the Rule of Law ��" a phrase West liked to capitalize. Resort to revolutionary justice results in no justice at all.
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I Was Vermeer The Rise & Fall of the Twentieth Centurys Greatest Forger
by
Frank Wynne
rollyson2002
, August 20, 2012
Art history is a matter of provenance; art collecting an affair of prestige. Commerce in art is the ineluctable confluence of provenance and prestige. Han van Meegeren (1889��"1947), a talented painter who despised the work of modernists such as Picasso, understood that he could only succeed as an artist by obliterating himself and becoming his 17th-century avatar, Vermeer. To Han, as Frank Wynne calls him throughout this lively biography, "I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century's Greatest Forger." Vermeer's radiant realism was the very embodiment of the highest art. Ironically, Vermeer's own reputation rose most rapidly in the early 20th century ��" largely through the efforts of a Dutch critic, Abraham Bredius ��" even as artists were abandoning the kinds of verisimilitude Vermeer perfected. While Han's own work languished for lack of critical attention, critics hungered for more Vermeers, a slight body of work now reckoned to include no more than 35 or so paintings. Bredius speculated that because Vermeer's reputation had only recently risen, there might well be other Vermeers that a discerning critic might discover. So it was that Han set out to create a veritable Vermeer. Possessed of extraordinary skill, Han also was fired by a desire to humiliate critics who had shunned his own work. To prove them fools, however, he had to do more than paint like a genius. He had to re-create the paints Vermeer employed, find just the right 17th-century canvas he could strip of its paint, reproduce in depth the crackling (fine lines) that grace the work of Old Masters, and harden the painting's surface so that it could withstand various tests designed to ascertain whether a canvas had indeed aged over time. Finally, Han had to choose just the right subject matter. Here he was at his cunning best, choosing "The Supper at Emmaus," which he would pass off as a rare example of Vermeer's middle period, a work that would fill the gap between the artist's early and late periods. The trick was to get Bredius to authenticate the painting. Shrewdly Han worked through intermediaries, friends he coached to tell the tale of how this painting belonged to a Dutch family that preferred to remain anonymous because they had been forced to smuggle it out of Italy, fearing the Fascists would confiscate it. Better that the Dutch government buy this masterpiece in hope it would remain in Holland. Han's initial plan was to disclose the forgery as soon as the painting sold, in 1937. But he was a reckless and extravagant man who quickly went through the fortune he acquired for the forgery. Living the good life meant more forgeries and millions of dollars for Han. Even Herman Goering was swindled, a ruse which, unfortunately for Han, ended the forger's career. Right after the war the Dutch were eager to punish collaborators, and Han found himself in prison because of his dealings with Goering. It took Han some time to tell the truth. So convinced were certain critics that they stuck by their attributions. What nonsense, they cried, the idea that an inferior artist could produce a Vermeer! But Han set about creating another Vermeer while serving a sort of house arrest, thus proving his bona fides ��" an odd word, to be sure, to use in connection with a forger. Han never served his sentence, dying in 1947 shortly after his trial. In the end, he hardly seemed a criminal at all to the Dutch. One journalist wrote, "It is not the Vermeers, but the experts who authenticated them that are fakes." The journalist even proposed erecting a statue to Han van Meegeren, collecting funds for a work that was never built. Mr. Wynne misses certain opportunities that a student of art history might have explored. What about Han's scorn for the critics? Although he was able to dupe the greatest Vermeer expert in the world, Han got lucky, since Bredius, then in his 80s with failing eyesight, was perhaps not in top form. At the same time, there were always critics who saw through Han's Vermeers. Like other forms of criticism, art criticism is only as good as the critic. Han's success, however, raises other significant questions about art and art criticism. Do we, for example, stand in awe of the Mona Lisa because we know we are supposed to stand in awe of the Mona Lisa, because generations of admirers have done so? Walter Pater suggested that such works of art derive their value not merely from what is actually on the canvas but from what the beholder brings to the painting. Similarly, Oscar Wilde, Pater's student, suggested in "The Critic as Artist" that art's value is a matter of projection ��" that in order for the critic to say something valuable about the work of art he has to re-create it, so that, in effect, he is an artist. Han may have in one sense conned the critics, but in another way (according to Wilde) he affirmed art. Had Han not confessed, countless people would still be admiring his Vermeers ��" as one critic whom Mr. Wynne invokes suggests. The biographer also notes that other forgeries remain on museum walls, while still others are attributed to the wrong artists. Frank Wynne tells Han's story well, although how well it is hard to say. He clearly relies on other biographies, including several in Dutch, a language that the biographer apparently knows well. He includes a bibliography but no source notes. Especially troubling are the long dialogues between Han and others. Do these conversations come from other biographies? And if so, how accurate are they? And how strange that a biography of a forger should provoke troubling questions about its own provenance!
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Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary
by
Alice Sparberg Alexiou
rollyson2002
, August 19, 2012
Mention that a biography is unauthorized and all sorts of presumptions come into play: This is a hostile takeover, and the subject will be savaged; access to the subject and sources has been limited because the biographer has gone negative; it is best to wait for the full life ��" presumably the one the authorized biographer publishes. Put aside the possibility that the authorized biographer operates under limitations as well ��" such as the psychological and perhaps even legal burden of being beholden to the subject or the subject's estate ��" and consider that quite a different set of problems confront certain unauthorized biographers. Without the imprimatur of the subject and her intimates, the unauthorized biographer can become overly cautious, bending too far in the direction of bland fairness, lest reviewers deem the biography mean. This is not a hypothetical concern: One reviewer of my Norman Mailer biography actually asserted it was too fair to be really interesting. The comment itself may not have been fair, but it is indicative of the restraints that unauthorized biographers suffer. The editor of the Susan Sontag biography my wife and I wrote favored an "on the one hand this, on the other hand that" approach to forestall the fear that another editor expressed: By taking a sharply critical perspective on our subject we would be leading with our chins. So my antenna went up when Alice Sparberg Alexiou mildly noted that Jane Jacobs would have nothing to do with "Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary." The result is a well-intentioned, informative, but tepid biography. Ms. Alexiou is a great admirer of Jacobs ��" no problem there since there is plenty to admire ��" but Jacobs was a firebrand (she died April 25, 2006), and her biographer ought to be as fiercely inquisitive as her subject was. Although Jacobs's obstreperous behavior goes back as far as challenging teachers in grade school, the biographer does not really grapple with the consequences of being someone as assertive as Jane Jacobs. Jacobs attended college for only two years and had no formal training as an architect or city planner. She married an architect, though, and wrote for architectural magazines with a fresh vision that could not be learned in any academy. Her signal achievement, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"(1961), turned city planning on its head. This was the age of "urban renewal," by which city planners meant slum clearance and the building of high-rise, low-cost housing for the urban poor while at the same constructing civic showcases like Lincoln Center. Jacobs opposed this thinking ��" she believed the Robert Moses school of urban design effectively destroyed neighborhoods and a sense of community, actually contributing to urban congestion by inviting the automobile into places like Washington Square via massive highways. When the park was closed off to traffic, both business and the community profited because urban congestion decreased. Jacobs lost more battles to Moses and his ilk than she won. And would we really want to do without Lincoln Center? As Ms. Alexiou notes (repeating what other critics have said), Jacobs was better at pointing out the negatives of urban renewal than she was at prescribing remedies. Not everyone could live in the messy funk of Greenwich Village and love it as Jacobs did. Certainly suburban sprawl ��" the bête noire of Jane Jacobs ��" can be ugly and wasteful, but the suburbs themselves are surely not the problem. And this is where Ms. Alexiou's failure to confront Jacobs's rather crabbed personality is telling. Ms. Alexiou affirms that Jacobs loved the city "passionately and unconditionally." Not a good thing for a critic, I would say. When families began to flee the cities after World War II, it was not just a matter of white flight and escaping high crime rates, or a bad case of indulging in conspicuous consumption. This movement embodied a desire for space and a modicum of privacy. Not everyone wants to sit on those stoops Jacobs extolled. When my family moved into the suburbs from Detroit, I watched my grandmother take immense pleasure in creating a garden ��" her own bit of land, something she had not had since leaving her life as a peasant in Poland in 1911. I went to a new high school and marveled at how the doors to the classrooms had different colors, and how the one-story school had a human scale lacking in Pershing High School, the rather grim edifice I dreaded when I walked toward it on the east side of the city. What kind of woman could see beauty only in a city or presume that those raucous urban neighborhoods were some kind of ideal form of living? To this question Ms. Alexiou has no answer. I wanted to know more about the Jacobs who did not live only in her books. Here, for example, is just about all the biographer has to say about Jacobs's wedding: It took place in Jacobs's hometown, Scranton, Pa. It was a modest ceremony. "Miss Butzner [Jacobs's maiden name] will wear a white, streetlength dress trimmed with turquoise and fuschia, and a corsage of white orchids."This and a few other quotations come from the local newspaper. What I want to know is did Jacobs wear this getup, or did she, at the last minute, decide the corsage was too much? My complaint may seem trivial, but it is indicative of a larger problem: How did Jacobs actually behave and what was this event and others actually like for her? About her attraction to Robert Hyde Jacobs, she is quoted as saying: "Cupid really shot that arrow." I realize Jacobs resisted the biographer's prying into her life. But that does not let the biographer off. Jacobs deserves her historic place for shaking up conventional thinking about urban design. This is why a much tougher, inquiring Robert Caro-style biography, is required.
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The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President
by
George Pendle
rollyson2002
, August 17, 2012
Millard Fillmore (1800��"74), 13th president of the United States, a lawyer, and a Whig, lost a race for New York governor in 1844, ran as Zachary Taylor's vice president in 1848, and became president in 1850 after Taylor died. Ridiculed as a bumbling figure and denied re-nomination in 1852, he ran for president on the Know-Nothing Party ticket in 1856, carrying only the state of Maryland. When George Pendle announced at the Biographer's Club in Washington, D.C., that he had decided to write about Fillmore, Carl Sandburg snorted, "You idiot, that pecker never did a damn thing in his life!" The normally well-behaved Arthur Schlesinger Jr. cut off Mr. Pendle's retreat to the club door, grabbing the top of his underpants and hoisting them halfway up the biographer's back. Undeterred, Mr. Pendle discovered that his subject led an adventurous life; stowing away on a battleship bound for Japan; befriending a Native American tribe who in turn adopted him; discovering gold in California; daring to correct Queen Victoria's English; fighting at the Alamo; and shepherding slaves to freedom along the underground railroad. "The Remarkable Millard Fillmore" is documented in Fillmore's journals (volumes 1��"53, another of Mr. Pendle's discoveries), in addition to a cache of unpublished letters ��" and perhaps most important of all, a collection of Fillmore's napkin doodles. With so much new primary material, no wonder, as Mr. Pendle's publisher notes, historians have been in an uproar, contesting this radically revisionist history. Even where Fillmore seems most vulnerable ��" his maladroit stint in the White House��"Mr. Pendle offers an explanation: It was too late to do anything about the Compromise of 1850, which temporarily put off the conflict over slavery. Fillmore's address on the subject, "What I Did During My Summer Holidays," was not "well received." Indeed, his party was already looking for his replacement. What ensued, however, was hardly Fillmore's fault, since he spent the better part of his presidential term in Japan ��" the best solution, his biographer argues, for a politician who decided that as a "divisive figure" he was "best kept out of public view." Mr. Pendle belongs to the P.T. Barnum School of Biography. In his "Notes," he quotes his avatar's answer to a question put by a visitor to Barnum's American Museum of human oddities: "Is it real or it is humbug?" Barnum replied, "That's just the question: Persons who pay their money at the door have the right to form their own opinions after they have got upstairs." Mr. Pendle, in other words, has written the funniest sendup of an American historical figure and politics since Herman Melville's "Israel Potter" (1855) ��" not to mention a full-scale debunking of biographers and historians. The recondite paraphernalia of scholarly biography is parodied in hilarious, pedantic footnotes (rendered in puny type): There has been some conjecture, postulated by A. Davidson, Ph.D. (Phys. Ed.), in her book Lincoln's Diphthong, that the correct pronunciation of Millard is with an open front unrounded vowel sound, in order that it rhymes with retard. This author maintains that Millard should be pronounced with a mid-central unstressed and neutral resonance, so that it can be rhymed with dullard. Presidential biography also gets its comeuppance with references to tomes such as Hubert Tavistock-Monroe's "Who's Your Daddy? Inherited Wealth and the Presidency from George Washington to George W. Bush." The typeface of "The Remarkable Millard Fillmore" is an 18th-century affair, with chapter titles echoing the old-fashioned great man of history narratives: "Fillmore, Man of Law, "Fillmore the Explorer," "Fillmore Among the Natives," "Fillmore the Kingmaker," and my favorite, "Fillmore Goes West." But classical allusions abound also in "Fillmore Agonistes" and "Fillmore Unbound." Mr. Pendle, not one to shirk any parody, titles his first chapter, "I, Fillmore." The illustrations accompanying the text are a comic tour de force. They picture figures like James Madison, president during the War of 1812, whom Mr. Pendle describes as "a man of small stature at a time when being small meant being very short indeed." Below the text is a portrait (about twice the size of a postage stamp) with the subtitle: "James Madison: actual size." And the War of 1812? What was that about? Its causes, Mr. Pendle reports, are "now lost in the mists of time." But a footnote adds, "Something to do with boats, probably." The laughter this book occasions is therapeutic. Biography, like every genre, requires a thorough satirical scour now and then, as Mr. Pendle's ingenious novel proves in its inimitable fashion.
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Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels
by
Deborah Martinson
rollyson2002
, August 16, 2012
Lillian Hellman (1905-84) has not lacked for biographers. In "Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman" (1986), William Wright produced a credible first effort, concentrating on Hellman's fraught politics and her memoirs. My own "Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy" (1988) drew on extensive interviews and archival material while providing extensive coverage of her plays, films, teaching career, and her Stalinist skewing of history. Then in "Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett" (1996), Joan Mellen, with the cooperation of Hellman's estate, produced a penetrating character study. Now we have Deborah Martinson's "Lillian Hellman: A Life With Foxes and Scoundrels" (Counterpoint, 448 pages, $27.95), which I would term a biography of moral equivalence. Ms. Martinson belongs to the two-sides-to-every-story school. She is right to point out that Hellman's biographers - myself included - have been highly critical of her, but extends this to claim that all of us failed to present the whole woman because we were obsessed with proving Hellman a liar. But Hellman forces such an obsession on her biographers, who are obliged to sort out her misstatements of fact and distortions of history. Her account of Whittaker Chambers in "Scoundrel Time," for example, is a travesty of the true story. Ms. Martinson begins well, providing much new material on Hellman's early life in New Orleans gleaned from local records and from Hellman's own papers, especially her diaries, which Ms. Mellen did not have access to. Martinson does not call herself authorized, but there is no need since Hellman's estate could not have hoped for a more positive biography than Ms. Martinson's whitewash. She deepens our knowledge of that half of Hellman's family that was rich and rapacious - and formed the originals of the Hubbards in Hellman's masterpiece, "The Little Foxes." She admired their fortitude and power even as she decried their exploitative personalities. Other figures in Hellman's life, like her first and only husband, Arthur Kober, are also drawn in greater depth than in previous biographies. The writer is less well-served. Ms. Martinson is right to claim attention for Hellman's four volumes of memoirs - though she overpraises their innovations. Less satisfactory is her perfunctory treatment of the plays, some of which, like the estimable "Autumn Garden" and "Toys in the Attic," are barely mentioned. Most of the others get the cursory attention of a biographer who only knows how to quote from reviews. Hellman the "whole woman" is not any more apparent in Ms. Martinson's work than in the earlier biographies. If we were too negative from Ms. Martinson's point of view, she's gone to the opposite extreme by completely failing to confront her subject's shadier side. Every biographer of Hellman must sooner or later come to terms with the the fabrications in Hellman's memoirs. Ms. Martinson would like to wish away this problem, but it simply will not do to say that of course writers fictionalize their memoirs, exaggerating and even inventing scenes and characters in service of a good story. In the case of "Julia," Hellman did much more than gussy up her life; she appropriated someone else's. In "Pentimento" (1973), Hellman told the story of a friend named Julia, an anti-fascist activist in Vienna, and of Hellman's efforts to smuggle money to the Austrian resistance. Hellman then collaborated with the making of a film version - starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave - of the story, which glamorized Hellman's anti-fascism and left out her deep-seated Stalinism. There is no question that Julia was Muriel Gardiner, who was very much alive when Hellman wrote "Pentimento." She had never met Hellman but they had once shared a lawyer, and it seems likely that he told Hellman the story of Gardiner's life. It is revealing that the one time Hellman proposed a meeting with Gardiner, Hellman said she would be bringing a lawyer along - a sure way to fend off Gardiner,a decent woman who had no stomach for the kind of controversy Hellman thrived on. Ms. Martinson mentions all this, but reports that many people wrote to Hellman believing she had described events in their lives. So? Does Ms. Martinson make a case for Hellman? Hardly. Instead she concludes with this lame comment: "Hints of this woman's [Julia's] identity come through in the Hellman archive." Well, tell me more. How Ms. Martinson could write of Julia as she does after reading Ms. Mellen's devastating chapter, "The McCarthy Suit and Julia," is beyond me. When Mary McCarthy called Hellman a liar on national television, saying that even Hellman's use of the words "and" and "the" could not be trusted - obvious hyperbole - Hellman filed a lawsuit, engaging as her counsel a close friend, Ephraim London, who charged her no fee. Hellman wanted to ruin McCarthy by driving up her legal fees, and she made no secret of the fact that she was out for blood. Ms. Martinson concedes Hellman's motivations, but acts as though her subject's behavior could be attributed to failing health. What Ms. Martinson does not divulge is that Hellman lied to Ephraim London at every turn. (He knew his client was lying but stood by her anyway.) When I interviewed him a few years after Hellman's death, he was still deeply worried about what would have happened if the suit against McCarthy had gone to trial and Hellman had been forced to divulge her falsehoods. Her behavior, of course, is the mark of high Stalinism: not merely punishing your enemies but trying to annihilate them as you claim the high moral ground. Hellman ever stood by the Soviet Union, even backing its invasion of Finland (a fact Ms. Martinson does not mention). Only once, when for a few months her anti-fascist play, "Watch on the Rhine," was out of step with the Hitler-Stalin pact, did Hellman deviate from the party line, and even that act of dissent ought to be viewed as more of a lover's quarrel - a desire to compel her beloved to return to the anti-fascist fold. Hellman's critics come off in Ms. Martinson's book as rather mean spirited. We just want to reduce Hellman's stature. Well, of course, we do - her accounts of her politics, especially in "Scoundrel Time," were mendacious. Hellman did stand up to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but like so many other unfriendly witnesses she essentially wanted to avoid discussing her Stalinist allegiances. She presented herself as an independent woman, but what independence is there in a political position that amounts to fealty to the party of a foreign power? If Hellman's biographers have been hard on her, it is because of her refusal to report the truth. When she came back from the Soviet Union during World War II, Harold Ross at the New Yorker declined to print her articles. "What about the Russians?" he asked after reading her opinionated pieces. Ms. Martinson notes Ross's reaction, but she does not seem to realize how damning it is. That Hellman was able to place her puffery with Collier's is telling.The same magazine suppressed a piece by Martha Gellhorn in which Polish soldiers told her how they feared for the fate of postwar Poland. Gellhorn appears in Ms. Martinson's book only as one of Hellman's carping critics. And the same is the case for Rebecca West, who is absurdly identified as "a socialist turned anti-communist turned FBI informer" Arguments that Hellman was just one of a generation who sank their hopes in the Soviet Union will not wash. She had ample opportunity to learn about the disaster of Soviet Communism from West, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and any number of others who wrote against the Stalinist tide. She had friends, like the Trillings, who had a nuanced view of the Cold War (Lionel had been a friend of Whittaker Chambers and based a novel on his friend's spying career for the Soviet Union). Even more importantly, her lover John Melby, a career diplomat, patiently and lovingly tried to disabuse her of her simplistic Stalinism. Hellman's politics - like most of her plays - were melodramatic. She could think only in terms of villains and heroes, and she chose the wrong side. The plays are often brilliant - deserving of their place in the canon of the American theater - but Hellman's autobiographical writings are scandalous; she quite explicitly lied about her life. If Ms. Martinson had more passion for Hellman's plays, she might see how they fit with her memoirs. Julia arose out of the anti-fascist "Watch on the Rhine," not out of the actuality of Hellman's life. Julia is the projection of a woman who was a legend in her own mind - a Dickensian tale of wish fulfillment. Hellman always wanted to appear on stage; as memoirist, she had it all to herself. During the interviews I conducted for my own biography, Richard de Combray told me something remarkable. He watched Hellman die and concluded, "She wanted to bring the scenery down with her."
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Orientalist Solving the Mystery of a Strange & Dangerous Life
by
Tom Reiss
rollyson2002
, August 15, 2012
"Who is this Essad Bey?" Trotsky asked in a 1932 letter to his son. By then, this mysterious writer had written bestselling biographies of Mohammed and Stalin, a book on the oil industry in Baku (in the early 20th century the Texas of the Caucasus), and a steady stream of articles on literary and political subjects from Tolstoy and Dreiser to the Ottomans and Americans ("American History in Five Hundred Words"). In one photograph he appears as a sporty figure in a fez; in another he is dressed as mountain warrior with a dagger at his waist. He claimed descent from Muslim princes, but others alleged he was the son of an oil millionaire in Baku, a nationalist poet, or a Viennese writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot. Not many biographers have to begin their projects by first figuring out the identity of their subjects. But in order to write "The Orientalist," Tom Reiss traveled to 10 countries in search of Essad Bey, aka the bestselling novelist Kurban Said, author of "Ali and Nino," a 20th-century literary classic. Mr. Reiss's book chronicles the adventures of a biographer, disclosing the process by which he discovered that in fact his subject was Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew born in Baku in 1905, an escapee via camel caravan from his native land, which Stalin (once a guest in Lev's own home) was plundering and devastating. Lev would die of a rare blood disease in 1942 in Italy, two weeks too late to take advantage of doing the radio broadcasts that Ezra Pound had arranged for him. Lev (as his biographer calls him) yearned for the pre-World War I world. Like Disraeli and a generation of 19th-century Jews, Lev was an orientalist - a mystic, really, who believed in a kind of pan-Semitic peopling of the East. Although Lev assumed the identity of a Muslim - even converting to the religion - and married an American wife without telling her that he was born a Jew, he was something other than an imposter. Among friends, he would even joke about his assumed identity, and anyone who became Lev's friend quickly realized that his father, who lived with Lev, was hardly the Muslim prince Lev claimed as his progenitor. Lev is best understood as a writer. All else - his marriage, love affairs, politics - was at the service of his imagination. Life for him was something that had to be brought to book. Stalin, in Lev's biography, was not only the monster-totalitarian who destroyed the diverse world of the East and tyrannized his own people, he was also a gangster/bank robber and a friend of his mother, herself a revolutionary who committed suicide after marrying Lev's oil millionaire father. Or so Lev claimed. Mr. Reiss can sort out the fact from the fancies only up to a point. As he asks when he quotes Trotsky's query: "Was it even clear that Lev knew the answer by this point?" Lev was a bestselling author in Nazi Germany until Goebbels & Co. discovered his Jewish identity. After 1935, Lev could have stayed in the United States, even though his marriage had broken up, since he would have had no trouble earning his living. He was a prolific author who had already been translated into 17 languages. But Lev was a monarchist. He had no more faith in the United States than he had in Weimar Germany. Democracy, to him, represented merely a cacophony of political factions. Kings had ruled the world for centuries, and so they should again. Dictators ran a poor second to kings, since they did not, in Lev's view, hold power in trust for the people but only for themselves. In fascist Europe, where Lev returned to live, he sought protection from those in power. So as late as 1938 he aspired to be Mussolini's authorized biographer. At least Mussolini had shown some respect for the Italian monarchy. Lev was no Nazi, but like Disraeli he might be called a racialist (Mr. Reiss shows how Disraeli's novels dramatize a sense of Semitic supremacy that made the imaginative world of Essad Bey conceivable). Lev thought of himself as a "Man from the East, a realm of lost glory and mystery. He began to fantasize about a pan-Islamic spirit that would preserve everything from revolutionary upheaval." Lev carried with him what Mr. Reiss calls a "portable Orient," which Lev would embody for the entertainment of his audiences. He was Zeliglike (Mr. Reiss alludes to Woody Allen's movie) in so far as he seemed to be able to change identities without any sense of inner conflict. In Positano, Lev's final destination, he enjoyed the admiration of a community that did not doubt his identity, finally erecting a gravestone that read "Mohammed Essad Bey." Mr. Reiss does not provide a scrap of evidence to show that Lev turned Turk because he repudiated his Jewishness. "Figures as diverse as Disraeli and the philosopher Martin Buber played a part in this relocation of the Jewish spirit to the realm of pan-Asia," writes Mr. Reiss. This is a lost world of the imagination that the biographer recreates with extraordinary aplomb. It appears in all its strangeness and wonder in the midst of the biographer's own tales about his strenuous efforts to find out who Essad Bey and Kurban Said really were. As a biographer, I especially enjoyed Mr. Reiss's accounts of his efforts to entertain his interviewees. In one case, he had to visit a castle inhabited by a source who was writing lyrics for a musical. The trouble was she had never seen such a production. Had Mr. Reiss seen one? Not in a long time, he replied, but the obliging biographer then performed versions of "Singin' in the Rain" and other classics of the musical stage - all while making his way to a freezing room stuffed with prized documents he could only peruse under natural light. (Ah that's the trouble with those castle assignments, an arduous part of the biographer's task). For sheer reading pleasure, for insights into the biographer's world, and for the rediscovery of a major literary figure (please, someone, reprint Lev's biography of Stalin!), this book cannot be bettered.
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William Faulkner: Overlook Illustrated Lives
by
M. Thomas Inge
rollyson2002
, August 14, 2012
What does it mean to be a Faulknerian biographer? In his new book "William Faulkner" (Overlook, 104 pages, $19.95), M. Thomas Inge supplies the answer right off: Faulkner wrote as if there were no literature written in English before him, no century and more of convention and literary tradition established before he put pen to paper. He recreated fiction anew and set the novel free to better serve the twentieth century through a powerful, discordant, and irresistible torrent of language that crashed through time, space, and experience to tell the story of modern mankind in ways both tragic and comic. Faulkner would have written the way he did whether or not James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and the others had ever existed. To be a Faulknerian biographer, one has to be bold, to realize that source studies (what Faulkner absorbed from other writers), social and cultural context, psychological analysis ��" indeed all the staples of modern literary criticism and biography ��" do not avail when it comes to portraying the greatest writer in the English language save Shakespeare. Mr. Inge, a Southerner steeped in Southern literature and history, and eyewitness to a Faulkner lecture at the University of Virginia (the biographer includes a charming sketch he made of his subject), understands that it is best just to stand back, so to speak, and simply describe the career of a writer who admitted that his genius was a gift he could not explain. The lesser Faulkner ��" the one who wanted to be a poet ��" failed precisely because he was derivative and wanted to show that he could write like A.E. Housman, T. S. Eliot, Keats, and the other greats he worshipped. Only when Faulkner decided to put away his books did he rise to the magnificence of "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying," "Light in August," "Absalom, Absalom!," "The Wild Palms," "The Hamlet," and "Go Down, Moses" ��" works that defy categorization, products of savage humor and searing tragedy, embodying an epistemology that has enticed generations of scholars and general readers. Faulkner has often been described as a "difficult" author. His answer to that charge was to suggest reading his work again. There is no better advice to be had. What certain reviewers decried as chaotic was in fact writing of exquisite order and perception. Faulkner is fathomable, but you need to take the time to take him at his word. I was heartened recently to find on amazon.com a lively volume of chatter about "Absalom, Absalom!" ��" not among academics but among readers who had found their way to greatness and wanted to share their knowledge of it with others. Faulkner appeals to us on a gut level. We want to know who his characters are, why they are telling their stories, why others contradict their stories, why, in the case of "Absalom, Absalom!," all of them are fixated on Thomas Sutpen, who came to Jefferson, Miss., where he built himself a mansion and started a dynasty and then somehow destroyed it all. Albert Camus was right when he said Faulkner had brought Greek tragedy into detective fiction. Although I was introduced to Faulkner back in my undergraduate days by Mr. Inge and went on to publish my own book on Faulkner, I still had much to learn from this deft, cogent book, which is certainly the definitive introduction to Faulkner. Mr. Inge dispels a few myths and misperceptions. Myth No.1: Faulkner was a neglected writer whose reputation need rehabilitating by the critic Malcolm Cowley, whose publication of "The Portable Faulkner" in 1946 set off a re-evaluation of the novelist that led to a Nobel Prize in 1950. Not so. Until reading this biography, I did not fully appreciate the cumulative impact Faulkner made on readers in the 1930s and 1940s, even as Hemingway and Fitzgerald outshone him in the public eye. Faulkner's original and "difficult" novels received discerning reviews. Certainly Cowley's "Portable" was propitious, but it was not decisive. Myth No.2: Faulkner was an acquired taste among the literati, and sales of his work did not pick up until after the Nobel Prize. In fact, "Sanctuary," "Pylon," and "The Wild Palms"were best sellers. It is true that Faulkner went through a dry period in the mid-1940s when most of his books were out of print, but by 1948 his novel "Intruder in the Dust" was another best seller. That Faulkner had his detractors is hardly worth mentioning, although Mr. Inge scrupulously gives them their due. An unconventional man, Faulkner was bound to irritate some reviewers because of his relentless quest to shatter the norms of storytelling. Who would dare to begin a novel from the point of view of an idiot? And yet having Benjy Compson do so in "The Sound and The Fury" produced some of the greatest imagist prose of this century. Who would create a novel by alternating chapters with a passionate love story, rather like "A Farewell to Arms" with those devoted to the tall tale of a convict caught in a Mississippi flood? And yet the emotional entanglements evoked in these juxtaposed narratives suddenly collide in the convict's terse concluding word, "Women!" ��" which makes "The Wild Palms" such a powerful tragicomedy. Mr. Inge's book is a wonderful addition to the Overlook Press series of illustrated biographies. His selection of photographs is astute: He puts together sequences of images that suggest the rhythms of Faulkner's life This biography is a miracle of compression, made possible only because its author has distilled a lifetime of devotion to his subject into this small gem of a book.
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An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell
by
Robert Landers
rollyson2002
, August 13, 2012
This superb biography of James T. Farrell shows why the genre is so vital to an appreciation of literature and the literary life. Farrell is now an overlooked writer. To discover why this is so is to explore how his career played itself out and how literary fashions change, as well as to understand the roles politics, the publishing industry, and literary criticism play in making and breaking writers' reputations. Born in 1904, Farrell grew up on Chicago's South Side among the Irish who would become the most important characters in his fiction. His father was a teamster who did a reasonably good job of supporting his large family. But Farrell was never close to his father, and he never understood why at the age of two he was shuffled off to his grandparents while the rest of his siblings remained at home. This separation from home and hearth, so to speak, made the young and sensitive boy somewhat of an aloof observer. On one memorable occasion, Farrell's father spotted him walking down the street, and when young Jimmy realized that he was being watched, he ducked out of sight. The biographer reports but does not comment on this incident, although it seems emblematic of Farrell's relationship with his community: He was there to see, not to be seen. Not that on the face of it Farrell was anything like an estranged youth. Except for his inability to attract the girls he was interested in, Jimmy Farrell was a regular guy--good at sports (baseball, football, and basketball)--but not especially brainy or studious. His main ambition was to become a great baseball player. Farrell grew up in the Catholic faith, evincing no desire to rebel or to question orthodoxy. He went to Catholic schools, pumped gas that helped fund two years at the University of Chicago, and gave his family part of his earnings. Nothing in his early years suggests Farrell was cut out to be a writer. Yet his ambition to become someone set him apart from his mates. He was the first in his family to go to college; although the University of Chicago was just blocks away from his home, it was an unusual choice for an Irish lad. But he had decided, after an injury to his knee, that he would never be able to play professional sports. Perhaps, he thought, he could become a lawyer. While still in high school Farrell had begun writing for the school newspaper. He liked the sense of power and independence associated with speaking his mind. College, he supposed, could help him hone his forensic skills. Then he came under the spell of an English professor, James Weber Linn, who was also a newspaper columnist. Linn did what I wish more English professors would do: He talked about his writing, about how he became a writer, about how hard it had been, and about how he still had a good deal to learn. This approach to teaching writing to young people is far more effective than only relying on the pretense of authority derived from analyzing errors and giving out grades. But of course the truth is most English professors are not really writers and could not write engaging newspaper columns to save their lives. In fact, most teachers of writing are not writers and therefore cannot interest their students in writing as a living process. But Linn not only taught James T. Farrell that writing is a lifetime commitment, he also published his student's work in his column. Farrell quit college after two years and went to New York City to become a full-time writer. His first efforts were failures. He returned to Chicago and spent more time at the university. He went to Paris and received encouragement from Ezra Pound. Farrell wrote and wrote and wrote. Eventually the persistent Farrell found a form in which to write about his main subject: why so many of the South Side Irish failed to rise above their squalid environment, instead ending up, like Studs Lonigan, with short and unfulfilled lives, while a few others, like Danny O'Neill and like Farrell himself, were able not only to succeed but to triumph. I use the word "triumph" advisedly, even though there was never a time when Farrell did not have to sweat for his words, or when even his best work did not receive negative reviews. He triumphed in the sense that he never quit writing and never lost control of his life's ambition or his integrity. This biography honors that effort and redeems even his worst books in the sense that the biographer shows how writing itself was Farrell's lifeline and worth any amount of abuse critics could hand out. The trouble was that the novel form did not suit Farrell. He did not have the power to shape his story into a single narrative. His forte was the epic, a series of interconnected narratives portraying the lives of the same characters in the same setting. As his most sympathetic critics noted, Farrell's authority was cumulative. The virtue of this biography is that Landers can weave in and out of Farrell's massive oeuvre to show how the Lonigan and O'Neill novels cohere. To appreciate the Farrell effect, then, one would have to read, at a minimum, three novels (the Lonigan trilogy), and to do real justice to Farrell read another five--the O'Neill series. Critics and reviewers have seldom had the patience to read Farrell as an American Balzac, especially when influential critics of Farrell's day--like Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin --were conspicuously tired of the all-Irish South Side milieu. To critics enamored of modernism, Farrell's naturalism seemed stodgy and unsophisticated. To magazines like The New Republic and The Nation, rife with Stalinist critics, Farrell, a Trotskyite, seemed a heretic. Then, after the success of the Studs Lonigan trilogy--hailed mostly as a piece of literary sociology--reviewers became impatient with Farrell's lengthy and often inelegant books. Although Landers is Farrell's champion, he does not deny his subject's faults or place the blame for his hero's difficulties solely on the literary or political communities. Reading a Farrell sentence requires an appetite for more wordage than is strictly necessary: "Nothing remained of that past now but scars and wounds, agonies, frustrations, lacerations, sufferings, death." This verbose and earnest style can be very wearing. Most scholars would concede Farrell's historical importance. He was the first American author to portray the life of an ethnic neighborhood with realistic specificity. He avoided the sentimentality of proletarian fiction and gave a clear sense of the language, the prejudices, and the whole gestalt. Farrell inspired writers like Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut to write about classes of characters and groups that had gone largely unrepresented in American literature. But the impression lingers that Farrell was a sort of inferior Dreiser, his distinguished predecessor in literary naturalism. While both writers stress the way society shapes individuals, Farrell was more concerned with the quality of the minds a given environment produces rather than with the environment itself. There is relatively little physical description in Farrell, of the environment itself, for he was greatly influenced by James Joyce's stream of consciousness technique, in which the concerns of a society are filtered through individual mentalities. Nevertheless, Studs Lonigan is clearly kin to Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy (1925), who has the same romantic longings, seeing in Roberta Alden the ideal representation of womanhood that Studs finds in Lucy Scanlon. Both characters are dogged by the same nebulous and unfounded belief in their own greatness, which is their American tragedy. .p Farrell's achievement is comparable not only to An American Tragedy but also to Huckleberry Finn and to E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate. All three novels center on young boys who reject schooling, are attracted to romantic or criminal figures, and evolve as complex products of their society's values even as they apparently rebel against its mores. Each author tries to render American speech realistically, to capture the times their characters inhabit, and to assess the extent to which Americans are capable of achieving the individuality they so prize. The career of James T. Farrell reminds me of that wonderful sentence in T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent": "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know."
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Lover of Unreason Assia Wevill Sylvie Plaths Rival & Ted Hughes Doomed Love
by
Yehuda Koren, Sylvia Plath
rollyson2002
, August 12, 2012
Assia Wevill is the dark lady of the Plath/Hughes agon. As Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev put it in "Lover of Unreason,", "Assia was reduced to the role of a she-devil and an enchantress, the woman alleged to have severed the union of twentieth-century poetry's most celebrated couple." When Sylvia Plath and Assia first met, they liked each other. Assia, a part-Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, bore, in Plath's words, her "passport on her face." She had lived the suffering that Sylvia had imagined in poems like "Daddy." Plath was happy that Assia and her husband David, a fine poet, would occupy the flat she and Ted were relinquishing to pursue their passion for poetry and for each other in the Devon countryside. Then the Wevills were invited to Devon, and the world went terribly wrong. Later Ted Hughes would accuse Assia of being the "dark destructive force that destroyed Sylvia." Several biographers say Assia boasted to friends she was putting on her war paint to seduce Ted Hughes. She was on her third marriage and had a reputation as a femme fatale. But what exactly happened in Devon is hard to say. Even Olwyn Hughes, a staunch defender of her brother, could tell Anne Stevenson (commissioned by the Hughes Estate to write "Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath" [1989]), no more than what Assia told Olywn: There had been a "sexual current" between Assia and Ted that enraged Sylvia. In "Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath" (1991), Paul Alexander reports: "Strong-will and determined, Assia ��" apparently ��" made the first move with Ted." Diane Middlebrook in "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath ��" A Marriage" (2003) follows a similar line, suggesting Assia had Ted "under a spell." And yet Elaine Feinstein's "Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet" (2001) presents evidence that confirms the story in "Lover of Unreason": Ted Hughes was "a sexual stalker by nature" and no longer enraptured with Sylvia, who had become a housewife and mother ��" a "hag," as he called her in one of their arguments after the Wevill visit to Devon. According to Ms. Feinstein, Hughes eventually tired of Assia too because, in the words of William Congreve's "Way of the World," she had begun to "dwindle into a wife." Whatever the alluring Assia did or did not do during that fateful rendezvous in Devon, she became the vessel of Ted Hughes's desire to shuck off his domestic duties and seek some haven where he could recapture his poetic spirit. Assia did not make it easy for Hughes, since she still cared a great deal for David Wevill and continued to live with him off and on. Meanwhile, Hughes attempted to square himself with his disapproving parents and settle on some kind of domestic routine with the two young children Plath had been careful not to gas when she took her life on February 11, 1963. But if Assia was slow to forsake David ��" as David has made clear to several biographers ��" she could not have been simply the she-devil enchantress of legend. Perhaps the most telling part of "Lover of Unreason" concerns Hughes's search for a home that he and Assia could share. A man who had never previously had trouble making up his mind about where to live, Hughes repeatedly found fault with the houses he and Assia inspected. Indeed, he led her on, for during this house-hunting period he had several other women on the side ��" it was Hughes's practice to create the conditions that provoked women to leave him. No biographer would be willing to state that Ted Hughes was a very bad man, for to do so is to invite the biography to be read as an indictment. Ms. Feinstein feels the need to mitigate Hughes's appalling behavior ��" destroying some of Plath's work, essentially erasing the record of Assia's important role in his life, and in so many ways attempting to control the telling not only of his biography but those of Plath and Wevill. To Ms. Feinstein, Hughes had a "granite endurance" to go on writing after so many tragedies. Of his cover-ups, she suggests he took the "harsh road of a survivor." Yehuda Kore and Eilat Negev are careful not to condemn him, but they eschew such rationalizations. The worst of it is that on March 23, 1969, Assia Wevill took not only her life but also that of her 4-year-old daughter by Hughes. As her biographers show, such acts are not uncommon among single mothers in their 40s who are so disturbed at the horrible nature of the world that they cannot imagine a better one for their offspring. Except for a few periods and poems of self-blame, Hughes never could confront his culpable role in the lives of Plath and Wevill; instead, he issued his apologia in the form of a poetry collection, "Birthday Letters" (1998). So it is fortunate indeed to have "Lover of Unreason," an impressively researched and well-told biography that will occasion, I believe, yet another rewriting of the Plath/ Hughes agon.
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Summertime
by
J M Coetzee
rollyson2002
, August 11, 2012
Novelists enjoy taking revenge on biographers. A typical example of this phenomenon is William Golding’s The Paper Men (1984), in which a biographer is featured as a snoop digging through his subject’s kitchen pail. Only in rare instances do biographers not come off as second-raters and sensationalists, as in Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives (1979). But no writer of distinction has definitively challenged the line Henry James laid down in The Aspern Papers (1888), where the biographer is dismissed as a “publishing scoundrel.” Thus J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime is quite a surprise. Rather than focusing on the unseemly prying biographer��"a young Englishman named only as Vincent, about whom we learn very little��"the subject, Coetzee himself (or rather his fictional persona, since the Coetzee of the novel is deceased) draws most of the fire. The biographer’s interviewees, who represent quite a range of ages, nationalities, genders, and occupations, come to remarkably similar conclusions about Coetzee: He was not much of a lover and did not demonstrate the genius that would be expected of a Nobel Prize winner. “Women didn’t fall for him,” reports Dr. Julia Frankl, who had an affair with the writer. His cousin Margot Jonker wonders what happened to the brilliant boy she once loved and why he has become a drifter living with his father. To Adrianna Nascimento, a Brazilian woman who spurned Coetzee’s advances, he is a fool and hardly a man at all. But wait! It gets worse: Sophie Denoël, one of Coetzee’s colleagues who taught a course with him, concludes he is an overrated writer devoid of originality. The interviews make powerful, compelling reading because the voices are so distinctive. The biographer rarely interjects himself. He asks questions and occasionally responds to his interviewee’s queries, fending off their hostile comments about biographers as gossip-mongers by blandly announcing that they can excise whatever they deem inappropriate from his narrative. The only male interviewee, Martin, is concerned that Vincent’s interest in Coetzee’s personal life will come “at the expense of the man’s actual achievement as a writer.” But this objection is raised perfunctorily and does not merit the attention some reviewers give it as an example of the novel’s supposedly anti-biographical theme. Quite often the biographer maintains silence in the face of provocative comments calling his integrity into question. He is there to get the story and remains thoroughly professional. As a result, so much of the palaver about the indiscretions of biographers seems petty��"especially compared to this engrossing investigation of how friends, family, and lovers assess the man they knew. They are far harder on him than any biographer could possibly be. Coetzee has used himself��"or should we say a simulacrum of himself��"to show that biography has a powerful a story to tell, regardless of who is hurt and whose privacy is violated. Coetzee seems an anomaly among modern authors, many of whom put their energies into thwarting biographers and trashing the genre. In contrast, Coetzee addresses the profound human need biography satisfies. It is as if he said to himself, “I cannot control what others have thought of me. In fact, there is a pattern of such reactions that some biographer is bound to shape into a narrative. So why not take a whack at it myself?” For Coetzee, the biographer is not the issue. In Summertime, we do not even learn Vincent’s full name, let alone the experiences that led him to pick his subject��" his motivations are not the point. On the contrary, Coetzee seems to realize that he has drawn the world to himself, and the world will find him out. A biography is not something he owes the public; it is just inevitable, no matter what he does and no matter what kind of life he has fashioned. In so far as the biographer does present a brief for his work, it is mainly this idea that Coetzee belongs to the world and no permission or authorization is required to write Coetzee’s life. The biographer tells this to one of his wary informants, but at the same time he acknowledges that each of his interviewees knew Coetzee in a particular way and that he wants to preserve their memories. At first, it may seem that Vincent is ceding too much when he agrees to omit certain stories, but the overall pattern of the testimony is so persuasive that eliminating this or that iteration of it hardly matters. Is this novel a disguised autobiography? The question seems to be dismissed in Summertime when Vincent remarks that Coetzee was a “fictioneer”: “In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity.” Such comments level the playing field on which biography and autobiography are the contestants. In effect, there is no unimpeachable standard of truth by which a biography can be found wanting. Thus the extracts from the fictive Coetzee’s notebooks do nothing to undermine the biographer’s work. Summertime is that rare novel that grants biography its autonomy and treats the biographer as an independent agent, not a parasite or a hanger-on to someone else’s life. It is also a work of fiction that perhaps will break the mold Henry James cast for biography, one that has bedeviled its practitioners for more than a century.
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Man of Parts A Novel of H G Wells
by
David Lodge
rollyson2002
, August 10, 2012
H. G. Wells (1866��"1946) is one of those protean modern writers who are destined to last, no matter how critics lament his slapdash prose or deplore his involvement in dubious movements such as eugenics and Fabian socialism. Not even the ire of feminists can ultimately bring down this “womanizing” colossus of concepts and causes and books (he penned more than a hundred of them), not to mention the biographies and critical studies that continue to pullulate around this seminal figure. Wells was truly a breathtaking writer. He broke into public consciousness with his early science fiction novels, The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897), virtually creating a new genre. Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910) retain their status as greatly admired comic novels. Even with its flawed ending, Ann Veronica (1910) is one of the first English novels to explore the consciousness of the “new woman,” and it is still in print. The heavily autobiographical Tono Bungay (1909)��"Wells’s bid to be taken seriously not only for his subject matter but also his style��"has its place in the history of the English novel and on college syllabi. His Experiment in Autobiography (1934) and the posthumously published H. G. Wells in Love (1984) set a new standard for candor in discussing both public and private life. His Outline of History (1920), little read today, nevertheless had an enormous impact on the reading public and became a staple of household libraries, making world history a popular form of study. There will always be more to say about H. G. Wells because he was a writer who always had more to say, traveling the world as a journalist interviewing Theodore Roosevelt and Vladimir Lenin, for example, as well as reporting on the establishment of the League of Nations and many other political events. No writer today could possibly command this kind of attention or stand athwart so many different public venues while carrying on the kind of provocative private life Wells enjoyed, one that included affairs with young women who were part of what was called the “Fabian nursery,” as well as with writers as diverse as Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Rebecca West��"not to mention the birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. It is not surprising that David Lodge��"already the author of a novel about Henry James��"should want to have a go at Wells, who was in many ways James’s counterweight. To paraphrase Rebecca West’s Henry James (1916), Wells preferred the straightforward declarative sentence to meandering paragraphs swathed in subordinate clauses. Wells wanted the novel to be a shaper of public events, not a pristine art object. As a biographer of Rebecca West, Wells’s most significant lover, I was keen to see what Lodge made of the evidence and commentary amassed by so many critics, scholars, and biographers. What can a novel, a biographical fiction, reveal that these nonfictional narratives and analyses cannot? Lodge actually hampers the novelist’s advantages over the biographer by deciding to adhere to the documentary record, citing biographies and studies of Wells, West, and other figures in his acknowledgments, as well as confessing where he has made up letters when evidence is unavailable. In other words, rather than boldly using all of the novelist’s resources, he relies slavishly on what Wells and others wrote in order to bootstrap their authentic voices into a novel that often sounds like just another biography. Rather than using the creative power of a novel to challenge received accounts, to provide an alternative history, he does a sort of mash-up of the available sources (using only one technique: the invented interview) to catapult his narrative into territory biographers cannot tread without incurring accusations of excessive speculation. But these interludes of interviews are ultimately unsatisfactory because we learn nothing about the interviewer, and Wells is allowed to back away in rationalizations of his behavior. The interviewer might as well be just any reporter or biographer about whom we know nothing. Novelists are not supposed to rely on first-person narrators and interviewers about whom we cannot form an opinion. The raison d’être of the novel��"at least of a modern novel��"is precisely to question the teller of the tale, because achieving a trustworthy point of view has become a problematic enterprise. And it gets worse for Lodge when he simply relies on the testimony of West, whose ten-year affair with Wells is given full play, and who returns at the end of Wells’s life to provide the coda to his biography. Once again, Lodge is faithful to the documentary record, but his novel never questions West’s veracity. Lodge takes her at her word in a way no biographer can afford to do. To say that she was a liar is not quite the point. Let’s just say she loved to contort the truth, utilizing the wonderful kaleidoscope of her imagination to transform life into a grand drama. Her husband Henry Andrews once cautioned her, “Rebecca, you’re making a scene,” to which she replied, “Me? Making a scene!” To put it baldy, she did not seem to realize when her powerful reportorial gifts were overwhelmed by a need to bend reality to her interpretation of it. No inkling of this side of West (surely fertile ground for a novelist) intrudes into Lodge’s sedate novel. What went on inside West and Wells remains as inaccessible in this novel as in a biography. Lodge does, occasionally, get a bit intimate, as in this scene when Wells, approaching eighty, tells West he does not want to die: “A tear trickles from one eye down his cheek and loses itself in the roots of the moustache, now grey and rather straggling, with which in his prime he would tickle intimate parts of her anatomy.” As the biographer of Martha Gellhorn, I confess to deep disappointment that she does not appear in this novel. Wells included her among his inamoratas in a volume of his autobiography intended for posthumous publication. Gellhorn threatened G. P. Wells, H. G.’s son, with legal action if her name should appear in what became H. G. Wells in Love, and so a compliant G. P. bowdlerized his father’s book. Gellhorn, like other ambitious young women writers, got to know the world-famous author, stayed in his London home, and allowed him to guide one of her books through to publication. But she vociferously denied any sexual liaison and treated Wells’s account of their love affair as the fantasy of a doddering old man wanting to boast one more time of his conquests. I never detected anything in Wells’s behavior that would justify her scornful rejection of his account. He did not boast about his passades (as he called them) or make them up. He did not need to. Here then, it seems to me, we have the very case for a novelist to pursue, creating a definitive portrayal in fiction that a biographer can only envy. To put it another way, what we look to in a novel is the deepest possible exploration of personhood. As wonderful as any biography might be in terms of its narrative scope and the biographer’s access to intimate materials, only the novelist has license to go beyond the facts, the testimony, and the documents to move into the bedroom and the brain, the heart and the soul, of his characters, so that his work stands by itself instead of on a heap of evidence.
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Miss Fuller
by
April Bernard
rollyson2002
, August 09, 2012
Before Martha Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War with Ernest Hemingway, before Susan Sontag hunkered down during the siege of Sarajevo to direct a production of "Waiting for Godot," Margaret Fuller (1810-50), author of "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" and intrepid reporter for the New York Tribune, drowned in a shipwreck with her husband and their child on her way home to deliver her masterpiece about the revolutions in Italy. Recent biographers have plumbed Fuller's life, teeming with incidents and arresting personalities (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tribune editor Horace Greeley, revolutionary leader Giuseppi Mazzini), but their endeavors lack the spare elegance of April Bernard's novel. Not only does the intimate side of Fuller's life emerge in her own voice, but so does her precarious status among her prejudiced fellow writers. Henry David Thoreau treated her with studied courtesy, and Nathaniel Hawthorne dismissed her with outright hostility, suspecting her of engaging in an affair with a Jew in New York City and in a bogus marriage to an Italian nobleman. An uneven stylist, Fuller nevertheless wrote passages of uncommon poetry and passion that Bernard employs with considerable finesse: "Those who till a spot of earth scarcely larger than is wanted for a grave, have deserved that the sun should shine upon its sod til violets answer.
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William Golding the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies
by
John Carey
rollyson2002
, August 08, 2012
This first masterful biography of Golding, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, serves as an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to know about the man who wrote a modern literary classic, and about why and how he created it. Aided by unfettered access to Golding's private papers, Carey provides a meticulous but rather sobering investigation of an individual considered, while in school, "not quite a gentleman." Golding was well into his forties before he experienced his phenomenal success, and he nursed his grievances against a world that was late in recognizing his greatness. He did not consider himself a good man; indeed, he believed that his renowned novel reflected the evil within him. Carey hesitates to reveal the dark side of his subject, but provides an empathetic portrait of a troubled man. And, good critic that he is, he explains why Golding's later novels, for example, The Paper Men, were not entirely successful. Carey has produced a cutting-edge work exemplifying the best features of literary biography. No explanation of Golding is likely to supplant this one.
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A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families
by
Michael Holroyd
rollyson2002
, August 07, 2012
This group biography may be Holroyd's finest achievement. His subjects are hardly neglected figures, but the weaving together of their stories over several generations is new and profound. The world of the stage becomes a metaphor for a changing culture--in this case, the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian epoch, when Ellen Terry became the most beloved actress of her time and Henry Irving the most successful and innovative theater manager in London and abroad. Although Holroyd makes deft use of the copious secondary literature on these figures, he has done considerable research in primary sources. And rather than relying on the conventional endnotes, his "Outline of Sources" serves as an especially valuable introduction to the period and its personalities. Quite aside from offering an engrossing narrative, Holroyd has a point to prove: "Despite alterations in the law, in accepted social and moral habits, and in our methods of recording history, the configurations of family life today still echo and reflect the concealed lives of a hundred years or more ago."
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Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature
by
Bradford, R.
rollyson2002
, August 06, 2012
Only scholars specializing in what Bradford terms an "as yet ill-defined field of study," will want to consult this volume. Chapters such as "'The Contrived Innocence of the Surface': Representing Childhood Memory in Recent British Autoibiography" and "Pictures and Places: Enclaves of Illusion in the Life-Writings of Elizabeth Bowen and Annabel Goff," have very limited appeal, although others, including "Obstacles Confronting the Literary Biographer" and "Literary Biography: The Elephant in the Academic Sitting Room," offer a broader outlook. Perhaps in an effort to remedy this unfocused volume's narrow interests, Bradford includes interviews with prominent contemporary writers such as Martin Amis and Ruth Fainlight. Some chapters are well documented while others seem rather perfunctory in their acknowledgment of the extensive recent work published on biography and autobiography. An annotated bibliography would have been helpful, putting this miscellany into some kind of context as well as distinguishing it from the other collections of criticism on life writing. Unfortunately, Bradford's brief introduction does little to provide coherence since he seeks refuge in vague statements about his contributors' "diversity and dynamism" and their "equal
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by
Anne Conover Heller
rollyson2002
, August 05, 2012
Sensational popular novelist and cult philosopher for the American libertarian Right, the controversial Ayn Rand (1905-82) and her work have inspired an astounding volume of writing. When she died, she was both heralded and excoriated for her uncompromising belief in individualism and capitalism. An unabashed worshipper of male heroes who triumph over leveling, crippling influence creeds like socialism and communism, Rand inspired legions of readers to believe in what she deemed "the virtue of selfishness" (the title of one of her nonfiction books). Although not stinting a concern with Rand's ideas, Heller is mesmerized by Rand the novelist and the person. The biographer pores over Rand's early years in Russia with brilliant results, showing how much Rand (born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum) drew on her experience in the 1920s Leninist state for her impressive novel We the Living (1936). Early on Rand projected an idea of America as a land of unfettered freedom where she could reinvent herself. Heller's riveting depictions of Rand's marriage and her affair with a disciple half her age make this biography a worthy companion to Rand's still best-selling The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
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