"small but perfectly formed"
bookburn
Times Online
November 28, 2004
Biography: Small but perfectly formed
Size isn't everything when it comes to the year's most outstanding
biographies, finds Humphrey Carter
I have always avoided new biographies of Shakespeare. It seemed a
fatuous enterprise - apart from the plays, we have so little to go on.
But in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Cape
£20), Stephen Greenblatt really gives me a sense of being in touch
with the man. Greenblatt's knowledge of the plays and the times in
which they were written is so encyclopaedic that he can assemble a
convincing portrait of Shakespeare without resorting to smoke and
mirrors. A good book to keep the brain cells alive at Christmas.
There remains the disconcerting possibility, of course, that
Shakespeare may not have been a serious intellectual at all - he
could, say, have been like Gyles Brandreth, who is a great deal
cleverer than he usually chooses to seem. Brandreth's latest
enterprise, Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage (Century
£20), has his silly-ass hallmark, but he boldly goes where other royal
biographers have feared to tread - see, for example, his transcript of
a conversation with the Queen; or rather, non-conversation, so
appalling (Brandreth alleges) is her lack of social skill. The book is
exceptionally hard to put down.
I wish the same could be said of the mountain of literary bio-
graphies that has appeared this year. It would seem that size matters,
and it isn't the done thing to hand your publisher a manuscript that
will come out at fewer than 500 pages. Bevis Hillier's Betjeman: The
Bonus of Laughter (J Murray £25) is 746 pages - bringing Hillier's
total length in his three-volume biography to nearly 2,000 pages. As
John Carey pointed out in his review, this makes it probably the
longest biography of any poet in the English language. Yet I have to
say I find it fascinating. Hillier, for example, prints all the
rejected drafts about the poet's Marlborough schooldays from Betjeman'
s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, and (having been to the same
school) I wouldn't wish to be deprived of a single one of them - nor
of such details as Betjeman writing to his publisher Jock Murray from
the "Crystal Palace low-level refreshment room".
The other biographical trilogy that reached its final part this year
was Norman Sherry's huge authorised The Life of Graham Greene: Volume
Three (Cape £25). Sherry has been much reviled by reviewers and
accused of literally losing the plot. But he deserves to go down in
the annals of biography for heroic tenacity, having spent a lifetime
devoted to following in Greene 's footsteps.
Men write about men, women about women. True? Well, generally yes. It
is hard to imagine, for example, Antonia Fraser being drawn to
Christopher Isherwood, or Peter Parker to Mary Queen of Scots. Parker
has published his long-awaited Isherwood (Picador £25), another huge
volume, but full of fascinating detail - but Mary Stuart has indeed
acquired a male biographer, Cambridge history don John Guy. His very
readable My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Fourth
Estate £20) ignores its predecessors and portrays a much more
proactive Mary. And Eric Ives, who 18 years ago wrote a much-admired
life of Anne Boleyn, has now produced The Life and Death of Anne
Boleyn (Blackwell £25), which has immediately taken its predecessor's
place as the standard work.
Rosamund Bartlett wouldn't claim to be Chekhov's standard or
definitive biographer, but in this centenary year of his death she has
tackled a new biography (a woman writing on a man, excellent!) and has
come up with the ingenious idea of basing it on the places he lived in
and visited. Consequently, Scenes from a Life (Free Press £20) brings
freshness to a familiar story. But most of this year's women
biographers have played it safe, and have gone for comparatively
small-scale, less challenging "women's" subjects.
Such books tend, ironically, to feature women who operate in a man's
world. Typical examples are Lucinda Hawksley's Lizzie Siddal: The
Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (Deutsch £17.99); Judith
Summers's The Empress of Pleasure (Viking £20) about a former mistress
of Casanova who became a London club owner; and Kathy Watson's The
Devil Kissed Her (Bloomsbury £16.99), the story of Mary Lamb (sister
of Charles), whose manic-depression led her to stab their mother to
death. These are all decent books (although the Lamb biography is
irritatingly without source notes) and I could name half a dozen
others of the same sort. But I have to say that, temperamentally, I
turn to, well, more masculine material.
For example, Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh (Headline £20) is a
vivid study of paternal-filial relationships in four generations of
the Waugh family. Evelyn Waugh's frequently blimpish attitude to his
offspring is well known to readers of his diaries and letters. What
surprised me was the cloying adulation of Evelyn's own father Arthur
towards his elder son, Evelyn's brother Alec. It was a piece of
emotional misjudgment that damaged both boys - although it inspired
the resentful Evelyn to become a writ er, so I suppose we should be
grateful.
"Dysfunctionality" is the theme of so much biography these days that
it's almost a cliche. John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds by Eileen
Warburton (Cape £25) - unusually, a woman biographer of a male writer,
and a very good one - goes down into the emotional depths, the worst
moment being Fowles's mistress agreeing to put her two-year-old
daughter into a convent to get her out of the way. But until you read
Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist by Nikolai Tolstoy
(Century £16.99), about the author's life before Master and Commander,
you ain't seen nothing yet. O'Brian's treatment of his son Richard is
so appalling that one wants to get into the book and intervene, if
necessary physically. Fowles and O'Brian run neck and neck for
monstrous selfishness. What a pity they never met, quarrelled and had
a public punch-up.
Wait a minute. This is getting too testosterone-fuelled. Let's finish
on some less pugilistic pen-pushers. Michael Barber manages to fashion
a reasonably eventful (and mercifully brief, at 338 pages) biography
out of a rather bloodless character in Anthony Powell: A Life
(Duckworth £20), and similar feats are performed by John Sutherland
with Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography (Viking £25) and Jeremy
Treglown with V S Pritchett: A Working Life (Chatto £25). But my
closing choice is a rather different sort of book.
Biographers traditionally fall in love with their subjects. While
writing The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend (Simon &
Schuster £15.99), Miranda Seymour fell in love with her subject's car.
Hélène Delangle was a good-time gal who drifted from dancing and
stripping for a living into driving racing cars. Soon she became one
of the royalty of the racetrack.
Seymour, who stumbled across her story and makes it into an
electrifying tale, had, at the outset, no personal interest in vintage
autos. But the author photograph shows her at the wheel of a
magnificent inter-war Bugatti, with the light of true love in her
eyes. Rumour has it that she is now driving at rallies - a woman
biographer truly making her mark in a man's world.
Available at Sunday Times Books First prices plus £2.25 p&p on 0870
165 8585
TOP FIVE
WILL IN THE WORLD
by Stephen Greenblatt
Cape £20
A convincing portrait of the Bard that gives readers a sense of being
in touch with him
PHILIP AND ELIZABETH
by Gyles Brandreth
Century £20
Boldly goes where other royal biographers have previously feared to
tread
THE BUGATTI QUEEN
by Miranda Seymour
Simon & Schuster £15 99
Lively portrait of inter-war female racing ace Hélène Delangle
PATRICK O'BRIAN
by Nikolai Tolstoy
Century £16 99
O'Brian is a figure of monstrous selfishness in this account of his
early life
JOHN FOWLES: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton
Cape £25
Another appalling ego exposed in this telling biography
(unquote)