Book Reviews - Biography / MemoirPick a biographee or scroll at leisure.
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W H Auden
Auden - Richard Davenport-Hines
A competent, if rather brief, account of the great poet's life. Occasionally I found the author's own personality and opinions intruding on the narrative; there is a proprietorial, almost defensive tone to the book, with Davenport-Hines sometimes seeming to be defying the reader to be critical of Auden.
Wystan and Chester - Thekla Clark
Thekla Clark is an American who befriended Auden and his partner Chester Kallman when the pair were resident in Italy.
The style of this brief memoir is undistinguished, but anyone interested in Auden will find it worth reading. Clark's account of Auden's and Kallman's life together is affectionate, honest and touching, and gives a sense of Auden's personality that is more vivid than Davenport-Hines's biography (q.v.), for all its academic virtues, can aspire to providing.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven: His Spiritual Development - JWN Sullivan
A while since I read this. It's not really a biography, nor a musicological analysis of Beethoven's work; rather, it tries to relate the emotional content of his works to his experiences and his evolving personality.
This is a concise and snappily written book that anyone who loves Beethoven will gobble up quickly. I didn't agree with all of Sullivan's analyses of the music, but his passion for his subject was infectious.
Alan Bennett
Untold Stories - Alan Bennett
Miscellaneous non-fiction by the English playwright/"national treasure", from the years since the publication of the similar volume Writing Home in 1994. Most of the writing is autobiographical, starting with memoirs of the lives of his relatives, taking in recent diary extracts, and finishing with an account of his recent, successful treatment for cancer.
The less obviously autobiographical material consists largely of introductions to plays and lectures on art from the period Bennett was a trustee of the National Gallery. Even here, the tone is highly personal, with his plays' material largely drawn from his own life, and his responses to art significantly influenced by personal associations.
Circumscribed though Bennett's concerns and interests are, they are represented here with his customary wit, insight and humanity. For me the most enjoyable part of the book was the diaries, where freedom from the requirements of large-scale form allows him to give reign to his appealing whimsy and, on occasion, his curmudgeonly bile. If some of Bennett's comments seem silly or crotchety, it's still welcome to get a picture of the man, warts and all.
A large part of the appeal of Bennett's prose has always been its intimacy - his willingness to admit his foibles, and to share his self-doubt and humour with his public. Until recently, however, he was coy about his private life. This changes in the present book, in which the prospect of dying of cancer prompted an unprecedented willingness to discuss, for the first time, his homosexuality (long an open secret in the literary world) and his domestic set-up with a partner thirty years younger. In a strange way, the reader feels complimented by the confidence, and finishes the book with the sense - no doubt erroneous - that an unannounced visit to the author would be greeted with a friendly chat over a solicitous cup of tea.
Albert Einstein
The Private Lives of Albert Einstein - RogerPaul Highfield / Paul CarterCarter
Can't remember much about this. As the title suggests, it focusses more on Einstein's personal life than on his career or exposition of his theories. However, it is perceptively written and conveys a vivid sense of the physicist's benevolent but unreliable personality. It's not as prurient as the title makes it sound.
Uri Geller
Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic? - Jonathan Margolis
Since watching a documentary on Uri Geller some years ago that exposed some of the self-styled psychic's tricks and failures, I assumed he was universally acknowledged as a fraud. I was therefore surprised to see this book recommended on clever old mentalist Derren Brown's Web site, and bought it out of curiosity.
This is effectively an authorised biography, and as such it inevitably errs a little on the side of sympathy. For two years, journalist Jonathan Margolis joined Geller as he walked his dogs along the Thames near his Berkshire mansion, and he admits to having developed a "real liking" for his subject. Geller is also a notoriously touchy chap, and it seems unlikely that he would have played ball if Margolis had seriously challenged his version of events. Still though, whatever his ultimate methods, Geller represents an interesting psychological phenomenon, and clearly his own account of his life must present the starting point for any further discussions on his "abilities", whatever their ultimate nature.
Some of Geller's stories certainly take some believing: that a dismantled 40kg piece of artillery spontaneously reassembled itself during an army exercise in Israel; that in 1973 he was teleported from Manhattan to his manager's house, 36 miles away. Perhaps most worryingly, Geller also seems fairly committed to the theory - originally suggested to him by the same manager, barking scientist Andrija Puharich - that he obtained his powers from aliens from a planet called Hoova, who speak in metallic voices and travel in flying saucers.
The obvious conclusion to draw is that Geller is both a fraud and a fantasist, a paradoxical mixture of blatant manipulativeness and laughable suggestibility. People from both the scientific and (more vociferously) the stage magicianship communities have claimed that all of his stunts can be reproduced by known tricks: world-famous ueber-sceptic James Randi was even sued by Geller for describing his stunts as the things that can be learned from the backs of cereal packets. (In the end, the case was settled out of court.)
Yet it would be a true doubting Thomas that would read this book and not admit that there *is* something weird about the man that goes beyond mere eccentricity. Laboratory experiments at the Stanford Research Institute concluded that Geller's telepathic abilities appeared genuine, though the researchers were unable to get instances of cutlery bending on film. When scientists from a top secret nuclear research laboratory did their own experiments on Geller, they became plagued with terrifying hallucations that led them to call off their investigations. And if only a quarter of those who claim to have experienced poltergeist-like activity, or telepathic incidents, during or after meetings with Geller are reliable witnesses, then an awful lot of ostensibly level-headed people are either deluded or lying.
But this book's most startling revelation would appear to be, in fact, an open secret - that almost anyone can bend spoons psychokinetically. The book includes a photograph of a heavy-duty spoon that the author himself claims to have curled effortlessly into a tight corkscrew under the instruction of a Californian lifestyle therapist. And US paranormal researcher Jack Houck has filmed hours of footage of his famed "PK parties" - sessions where dozens of people at a time seem to develop the ability to bend metal. (Interestingly, while hundreds of people claim to have seen metal bend under Geller's influence without physical contact, this phenomenon has never been filmed. A trick? Mass hypnosis? Who knows?)
Geller claims that he was only ever driven by the need to satisfy his ego and the desire to get rich. Given this, does his use of trickery necessarily discount the possibility of real - and by Geller's account, not always reliable - psychic abilities? Margolis may be too loyal to Geller's interpretation of events, but he writes well, has an evident analytical intelligence, and should not, I think, be dismissed as Geller's dupe for trusting the evidence of his experience, of research, and of a vast amount of credible testimony, over what some - but by no means all - scientists insist is physically possible.
André Gide
André Gide: A Life in the Present - Alan Sheridan
André Gide was a public and influential writer, famous during his lifetime as much for his controversial stances on homosexuality (he declared his publicly and confrontationally) and Communism (he started out for it, but became disillusioned), as for his literary output.
That's not to say his literary output was minor, by any means. He wrote exquisitely crafted, psychologically penetrating short stories; longer, bitingly sardonic novels of ideas; and a great deal of non-fiction. Some of his work, certainly, is more important for its socio-literary importance than for its quality - as with his most controversial book, Corydon, which, aside from being a general defence of homosexuality, is a rather meretricious theoretical declaration of the superiority of his personal brand of it (pederasty) over other kinds.
Gide was born into a wealthy Protestant family and had the inestimable advantage as a young writer of not having to earn a living while he learned his craft. To his credit, his life was never idle, devoted as it was to voracious reading, writing, travelling, piano practice, time with friends, and sex.
From this biography one gets the sense of an essentially serene life. Gide was unplagued by neuroses (and never felt the remotest guilt about his sexuality); he had many strong friendships; and he reaped the rewards in goodwill from others of a generous, open and loyal nature. In a way he seemed charmed, as exemplified by his going against the advice of his friends in publicly describing his sexuality: he seemed to intuit, what those friends didn't, that society would always want him around.
In his younger days, sex seems to have been Gide's prime motivator; gradually, a handful of long-standing friendships, with both men and women, and most of them platonic, came to mean most to him. As he entered late middle age, he was beguiled for a while by Communism - more, as he admitted himself, because he felt in danger of becoming a creature of the past, than due to true intellectual conviction of its dogmas.
Alan Sheridan's biography is thorough and readable, but not exceptionally imaginative. The author recounts the years' passage strictly chronologically, making some parts of the book seem little more than bullet-point records of places visited, friends seen, "adventures" had with teenage boys. Never, until a brief summary at the end, does the writer step back and try to view Gide's life in terms of phases or development. Perhaps that's partly because Gide didn't really develop - as a man - all that much at all. Life for him wasn't a matter of making mistakes and learning lessons, but of formulating and refining his understanding of what he always, instinctively, knew about himself.
All the same, the biography has a slightly shallow feel to it that isn't entirely due to the equability of its subject's life. Sheridan's portraits of Gide's friends rather lack colour: such pictures as we get of them are due more to their quoted words than to any consideration of their characters by the author. We find out relatively little about many of their backgrounds. We get very little sense of the personality of the friend, Beth van Rysselbergh, whose child Gide fathered (and no consideration of the significance of the act to this confirmed homosexual). The biggest mystery, by far, resides in Gide's unconsummated relationship with his reclusive, deeply religious wife, Madeleine - the person whom he claimed, at least in early adulthood, to love most in the world. Perhaps we're expected to consult Gide's letters to her to understand their tender and yet thoroughly unsatisfactory relationship; because in essence what this biography provides is a conscientous account of the events of a fully lived life, and a less thorough one of its emotional substance.
Robert Graves
Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves
Despite having had its reliabilty and objectivity thrown into question since publication, this is still probably the most famous British memoir of the First World War. Its virtues are obvious: a readable, unstuffy style; the blunt candour that the author applies to himself and to his experiences; and a lot of genuinely informative content about the specifics of warfare.
Graves was clearly a model soldier: tough, decisive, compassionate, and prepared to stand his ground in the face of fools. Yet this model soldier underwent a complete nervous breakdown a year before the war ended, from which it took him years to recover - if, in fact, he recovered completely at all. In the second part of his life Graves mostly shunned human business, setting himself up in the Mallorcan mountains as a novelist, off-beat literary theorist and poet.
The autobiography ends immediately before the author's move to Mallorca: by his own account, the point at which "life" for him as a dialogue with the outside world drew to a close. Though the majority of the book covers his war experiences, there are also pithy, opinionated descriptions of his miserable school days at Charterhouse, and of his postwar experiences as a student, husband, father, shopkeeper, and lecturer at an Egyptian university.
For me the most striking feature of the war descriptions is their matter-of-factness - their military terseness. The accounts of squalor, carnage and chaos are all neutral and unemotive, so that the report of Graves' breakdown, when it comes, is surprising and difficult to trace back to the preceding narrative. Clearly, suppression of emotion was the only way of coping with events, and perhaps Graves did experience them - at least consciously - as neutrally as he describes them here.
Above and beyond its account of the Great War, perhaps this book's main success is in conveying so vividly the character of its author: ingenious, stoic, self-absorbed, and always, perhaps, a little bit crazy.
Thomas Hardy
Young Thomas Hardy - Robert Gittings
A readable account of the first 35 or so years of Thomas Hardy's life. Gittings is scrupulous in separating fact from speculation, but has sufficient imaginative resources to build a coherent and convincing picture of the man - no mean task given Hardy's paranoid reticence about many aspects of his personal life.
Gittings emphasises Hardy's formative experiences, rather than giving each phase of his life equal weight. Much of the book therefore centres on Hardy's loss of religious faith; his close friendship with his mentor, the teacher and critic Horace Moule; his meeting with his future wife Emma Gifford; and the profound effect on him and his work of Horace Moule's tragic and untimely death. Each of Hardy's novels up to Far From the Madding Crowd is dissected closely for biographical and psychological significance.
I did feel that Gittings started to rush through events once he reached the point of Hardy's first publications - as though he'd got the interesting stuff out of the way and really wanted to get the book finished! This may even be true, as once out of his twenties Hardy seems very much to have become a man who lived in the past.
Another mild criticism I would make of the book is that Gittings tends to jump forward a lot - for example, he virtually tells the whole story of Hardy's marriage to Emma, right up to Emma's death, even though this event - chronologically at least - belongs firmly in the second volume of Gittings' biography, The Older Hardy. This tendency gets more pronounced as the book goes on, so that the more chronologically fixated reader finds himself somewhat disoriented and asking with increasing frequency, "What year are we in?".
Anyhow, biography is undoubtedly a difficult and under-rewarded activity, and Gittings vividly conveys here the essence of Hardy's fascinating, morbid sensibility.
The Older Hardy - Robert Gittings
The second half of Gittings' life of Hardy is as readable as the first. One assumes that the detail is accurate. Gittings admires Hardy as a writer but is objective in his assessment of him as a human being; he was a man who directed his sensitivity to fuel his art, his romantic delusions and his romantic regrets; little remained for committed attentiveness to the needs of his family and friends. Both of his wives, though by Gittings' account not blameless, suffered tragically at the hands of Hardy's egocentricity.
Gittings is particularly keen to set the record straight on Emma, Hardy's first wife, who suffered a bad press after Hardy's death, owing in no small part to the strenuous efforts of his second wife, Florence, to portray her as dim, domineering and half-mad. Gittings clearly has a higher regard for the somewhat ridiculous, but nevertheless spirited Emma, than for the intelligent, temperamental Florence. What emerges clearly from the biography, though, is that Hardy can't have brought out the best in either of these women. His remorseful poems after Emma's death, moving though they are, testify to a sensibility that could give reign to love only when nothing was demanded of it - in other words, during a relationship's incipience, and after its demise. The same sensibility also included a strain of morbid paranoia, which led to many hamfisted, and ultimately counterproductive, attempts by Hardy to hide the truth about his own behaviour and his family's social lowliness.
Still, perfect people don't generally make great writers - or, for that matter, interesting biographical subjects. Here's to Hardy.
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life - Andrew Motion
The best biography I've read. Larkin lived a legendarily uneventful life, beavering away as a librarian and studiously deterring his handful of ladyfriends from marrying him. Yet his inner life was rarely devoid of drama (not to mention misery), and Motion is very successful in bringing out what it must have been like *being* Larkin.
Admittedly, the author is helped considerably by the vast number of letters that Larkin wrote to his friends and family over his lifetime, which highlight his humour and his gloom as well as providing valuable detail about his circumstances. (Selected letters are available in a separate Faber volume, edited by Anthony Thwaite - highly recommended for Larkin lovers.)
This is a book that is extremely depressing, and yet, like Larkin's poetry itself, strangely exhilarating. Larkin committed himself to a poignantly melancholy existence, knowing that his poems depended on it; the atmosphere of a life lived with happiness always kept deliberately in view, but out of reach, is very haunting.
D H Lawrence
D H Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider - John Worthen
I've not read much Lawrence (just Sons and Lovers and a few poems), but I knew he was an interesting dude, so this book promised to be worth reading. It has certainly made me curious to read more of the work of this contrary, wilful and rather tragic writer.
Lawrence was a man at war with the world and - like most such people - at war with himself. A fairly unhappy childhood, permeated by a sense of the misery of his parents' marriage, seems to have left Lawrence with simultaneously a deep sense of dislocation from the world and a concomitant yearning for union with others, whether this was sexual, romantic or social. Such high ideals could only be disappointed; and yet reading this book one can only admire Lawrence's unflinching pursuit of his quest. Angry, obnoxious and unhappy though he often was, he never gave into despair or self-pity, but consciously nurtured the flame of his passion to the end of his short life.
Lawrence gave up on the ideal of perfect spiritual and sexual union between man and woman relatively early on in adulthood, but its shadow never left him. In Frieda Weekley, he found the uninhibited sexuality he sought in a partner, but it was at the price of the faithfulness and the thoughtful devotion that a more self-disciplined personality might have offered him. (Frieda came from a family of German aristocrats and was used to being waited on and indulged.)
Nevertheless, in Frieda Lawrence had made his choice, and he stuck with it. There were rows, there was physical violence, there were threats of rupture: yet as imperfect as the liason was, they were both honest enough to realise that their respective character flaws probably precluded the possibility of anything better for either of them.
Lawrence needed his independence as a writer, and worked astonishingly hard to make ends meet. He rarely settled anywhere for more than a few months, tending to become disillioned or at least bored with places, and always needing to move on. He rejected England, but never found anywhere else to make his home. The nearest he came to feeling settled seems to have been in New Mexico in the early 1920s, where he lived self-sufficiently on a ranch with Frieda and a succession of friends and acquaintances. He was taken with the idea of establishing some kind of artistic commune, but Frieda's possessive hostility to his friends, particularly his female ones, more or less thwarted the attempts he made in this direction.
One can hope for too much from biography: only what's known can be relayed, and the vivid sense of day-to-day life that one obtains from novels is bound to be, for the most part, lacking. On top of that general limitation, this is a fairly short account of a life that has already been analysed so much that the author perhaps felt he could afford to be elliptical at times. For example there's no real analysis of why Lawrence became disillioned with English society and despised the cause of the Great War; and there's often not much detail about how he established his friendships. A one volume biography perhaps can't do justice to a life lived so intensely, short though it was; given that limitation, one has to count this book pretty successful.
Penelope Lively
Oleander, Jacaranda - Penelope Lively NEW! (Added 29/12/2007)
Novelist Penelope Lively lived until the age of 12 in Egypt, the child of a banker father and a socialite mother, and cared for and educated almost entirely by her nanny. Though solitary and culturally ambiguous, her upbringing was not an exceptional one for a colonial child; however, Lively is an exceptionally perceptive observer of both the milieu she grew up in, and the state of childhood, and in this book she presents an interesting and touching portrait of her early years.
Lively succeeds in capturing the unmediated flavour of her childhood, but also manages to juxtapose her former perceptions (the book's subtitle is "A Childhood Perceived") with the often uncomfortable social and political realities of pre-war and wartime Egypt, and thereby to throw into relief the differences between the worlds of children and adults.
A picture emerges of Lively as an imaginative child, inevitably self-absorbed owing to her lack of contact with other children, but with a sharp curiosity and considerable sensitivity. Her account of her sense of dislocation when she moved permanently to England after her parents' divorce reveals the affection, ambivalent but strong, with which she clearly views her formative years.
I admire the straightforwardness of Lively's writing: there are no self-conscious literary flourishes, no obvious attempts to try to find things to say, but only the sense of a perceptive woman reporting on what strikes her as interesting, and supposing that we will find it so also.
Dennis Potter
Dennis Potter - Humphrey Carpenter
A solid and thorough survey of the life and work of one of television's most important and influential playwrights. It focusses firmly on Potter's career; one hopes that a future biographer will be able to dig deeper into the psyche of this complex, emotional, and sometimes difficult man.
Oliver Sacks
Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks
When the child Oliver Sacks's pet octopus died in tragic circumstances, the future neurologist, who was very attached to the animal, dissected it. Illustrated by this episode is the odd mix of human warmth and clinical curiosity that makes Sacks such an engaging and to some extent an ambiguous writer.
Anecdote like this actually fills a relatively small portion of this selective childhood autobiography. In fact despite its autobiographical framework, the book is really an oblique history of the science of chemistry, Sacks's first scientific passion, starting from its beginnings in alchemy and extending to the discovery of radiation and the quantum model of the atom. It's a kind of reliving of the author's scientific education, and he weaves the history of chemistry into the narrative so skilfully that it seems inseparable from his own progress as a schoolboy chemist.
This is a stimulating and highly informative book, although perhaps just a little too elliptical to be recommended as an introduction to chemistry, since it does assume the reader has some background scientific knowledge.
R S Thomas
The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of of R S Thomas - Byron Rogers
A short and unconventional biography of the great clergyman-poet. Byron Rogers is a journalist, not an academic, and his book is often as much about the process of investigating his subject as about the subject himself. Particularly in the earlier chapters, the humorous style borders on the flippant; and while Thomas had his own laconic wit, one feels the author's attempts to wring comedy out of quite banal anecdotes says more about him than his subject.
All that said, once the story of Thomas's life gets properly going (his birth occurs on page 64), the effusive Rogers quietens down a little, and the self-indulgent anecdotes start to take a back seat. There are many direct quotations from people who knew the poet, as well as descriptions of the author's handful of personal meetings with him. A picture emerges of an austere and ungregarious man, arguably the last person who should have been in a role of trying to bring people together spiritually. Nevertheless his faith was deep, if never unquestioning, and his dealings with the sick and dying seemed to bring out a well-hidden but profound compassion.
Pacifist though he was, Thomas had a combative streak, and notoriously failed to condemn the Welsh nationalist cottage-burners of the 1970s. He pretended not to speak English to tourists from over the border.
In fact Thomas's sense of his Welsh identity was never as secure as he would have liked. This accounts in large measure for his famed chippiness. In particular, not learning Welsh till he was an adult, he regretted profoundly his inability to write poetry in the language. On the other hand, he found the philistine parochialism of native Welsh speakers frustrating, preferring considerably the company of the English retirees who gathered in his Eglwys Fach parish. Thomas seemed, in fact, to want to have his cake and eat it - inventing himself as the complete Welshman, but not prepared to make the compromises in his personal or social life that living his dream would truly have meant. (He spoke with a cut-glass English accent, married an Englishwoman, sent his son to an English private school.)
This is certainly not the definitive biography of Thomas - in places it's like a scrapbook of memoirs - but in its quirky way it's highly successful, and it gets better as it goes on. Rogers is a true admirer of Thomas's poetry, and also, with reservations, of him as a man.