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Oldie Review Of Books - Arts & Music
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What has happened to biographies?
BIOGRAPHIES have boomed in recent years, bestowing wealth and acclaim on practitioners like Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes, but according to Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian the business is in a critical state, and she knows whom to blame. Ten years ago Amanda Foreman published her biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Foreman was bright, ambitious and good-looking, and happy to pose naked behind a stack of her books, and nothing has been the same ever since.
According to Hughes (the biographer of Mrs Beeton) royal mistresses have proliferated at the expense of more worthwhile subjects: “Georgiana was the precursor of modern-day celebrity culture, in which Being Jordan which is surely a ghosted autobiography, rather than a biography sells 335,649 in hardback, while Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse splutters along on 12,451.
It seems a bit hard to blame it on the hapless Foreman: royal mistresses have always sold best in the biography stakes, and Nancy Mitford wasn¹t rapped across the knuckles half a century ago when she produced her biography of Madame de Pompadour. But Amanda F. is not the only villain of the piece: equally culpable, it seems, are publishers, who far prefer to commission a well-known name to write another unnecessary biography of Hitler or Napoleon rather than risk an untried author and an unfamiliar subject. There's some truth in the accusation, but again it¹s nothing new.
In the 1930s Jonathan Cape, the most distinguished literary publisher of the day, urged authors stuck for a subject to have another crack at Nelson; O G S Crawford is hardly a household name, yet Kitty Hauser found herself a publisher and was widely reviewed. Kathryn Hughes approves the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate¹s suggestion of a 'paradigm shift', in that bright biographers now concentrate on an aspect of a life rather than a blow-by-blow account.
The truth is that too many biographies are boring and badly written: their authors may or may not be familiar with primary sources, but unlike Hesketh Pearson (who wasn¹t) they cannot tell a story, crack a joke, build up the subsidiary characters, or modulate between slow and fast, sad and funny. If some of them fail to find publishers, so much the better.
Benjamin Robert Haydon kept company with Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, and lived through momentous events, such as the Battle of Waterloo.
MARK SIMPSON’s biography of the bald-pated and comically sinister character actor who was a staple of British films in the 1950s was only reviewed in The Oldie and the Mail on Sunday.
‘IT’S THE ALCOHOL rather than the acting that takes centre-stage,’ noted Paul Mulrooney in Canada’s Dominion Post.
A REPORTER IN the 1970s complained that Julie Andrews ‘submits to an interview like a Victorian wife submits to sex’, so her frank memoir about her childhood and early career – she was exploited by her pianist mother, molested by her alcoholic stepfather, and casually informed by her mother at the age of 14 that a businessman for whom she had just performed was her biological father – came as a surprise to most reviewers.
Britten kept an almost daily diary between the ages of 15 and 25, and though some entries have been published previously, this is the first time the full version has been made available, edited by musical scholar John Evans.
In 1923, T S Eliot lamented ‘I am simply distracted and destroyed – everything seems to be crumbling away from me.
The book opens when Allegra Huston is four years old and her mother has just died in a car crash.
IN THIS SECOND volume of Sergey Prokofiev’s diaries, the modernist composer survives the Russian Revolution, emigrates to America and subsequently consolidates his reputation as one of the most progressive musicians of his time.
‘Fifteen years of work by a team of scholars at the van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, has gone into this work,’ said Martin Gayford in the Telegraph, ‘and it shows.
‘Fifteen years of work by a team of scholars at the van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, has gone into this work,’ said Martin Gayford in the Telegraph, ‘and it shows.
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