Book review - biography

The Watergate scandal already commands a wide bookshelf. In the fifty years since Richard Nixon fell on his sword, we’ve had the big-ticket books by the tag-team of Woodward and Bernstein, and others, by contrast, seeking to exonerate Nixon and pin the whole thing on his adversaries; tales about secret sources and White House interns and plucky whistleblowers like the oleaginous John Dean and that human hand grenade Martha Mitchell; not to mention self-serving memoirs from all the principals, some now on their second or third helping at the table; or the ones saying it was all a conspiracy involving an unholy alliance of the FBI, MI6 and KGB, with the little green men from Mars thrown in.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who died aged fifty in 1673, was a divisive character whose life spanned one of the most fraught periods of English history. To some contemporaries, she was one of the wonders of the age, while others considered her one of the silliest writers ever to have taken up a pen. In her last two decades, Cavendish published over a dozen works of drama, philosophy and poetry, including what some consider her masterpiece, The Blazing World. Posterity has seen her obscured and dismissed, the fame she admitted craving granted only in 1929, when Virginia Woolf described Cavendish in A Room of One’s Own as “a giant cucumber” who “frittered her time away, scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity.

Before “Walk On The Wild Side” changed everything for Lou Reed in 1972, bringing him status and bolstering his bank account, he had been lead singer of the Velvet Underground, a group, as managed by Andy Warhol, that served up songs about drugs, gender-bending and sexual fetish, all designed to crash the boundaries of what polite America considered acceptable. The great thing about Velvet Underground songs was that musically, too, they transgressed: drone-based harmonies progressed glacially as rhythmic impetus stuttered. The big problem with the Velvets, in terms of finding any wider audience beyond self-confessed weirdos who hung out with Warhol, was that virtually nobody wanted to hear drone-based harmonies moving glacially or rhythms that fragmented. Where was the fun in that?

What is it about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that still hooks us in, thirty-nine years after his death and twelve years after hers? In his magnificent, definitive double biography, Roger Lewis nails down the answer. Liz Taylor was the last great Hollywood movie star, starting in the golden age in National Velvet (1944), aged twelve. As Lewis puts it, her origins were in the magazines and movies of the Forties: “the era of Bing and Bob, Big Bands, such as Glenn Miller, Bogie...Tom and Jerry, Disney.

What to call her? The question troubled George Eliot, and challenges Clare Carlisle, her latest biographer. Even this book’s indexer plays along, providing more than one entry for its shapeshifting but steadfast subject. The Marriage Question shows us a woman fragmented, attempting to understand in her various existences how — and if — personal freedom can be achieved when your life is bound to another. Mary Ann (or Anne) Evans was born in Warwickshire, in the West Midlands of England, in 1819. On moving to London in 1850, hoping to make her living as a writer, she became Marian Evans.

Outside Broadcasting House, the BBC’s main center in London, is an imposing, eight-foot-high statue of a man. He leans over slightly, as if to accost passersby, and holds a cigarette. A sign behind him declares, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” The man is the author and critic George Orwell and the statue was intended as a permanent commemoration of his writings and values, as well as his short-lived stint at the BBC during World War Two.

In some ways, the world of George VI and his consort Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, from 1936-52 was very different from how we envision that of today’s British royal family; its rituals seem to belong to an era of Jurassic antiquity. In George’s day, Britain was still a global power, and its monarch ruled over both an empire and an elaborate court system with a “Page of the Backstairs” and a “Yeoman of the Pantry” — not to mention a fully staffed, oceangoing yacht — at his disposal. His coronation in May 1937 was as protracted as that of any maharajah. The Edwardian braid and sashes on display during more recent military pageantry look sadly Ruritanian by comparison. In other ways, their lives resonate more clearly with our own.

Jonathan Eig’s new King: A Life (KAL) is the first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years, and it will succeed my own Bearing the Cross (BTC), published in 1986, as the standard account. One normally does not review a book one’s blurbed — I’ve called it “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” — nor where one’s actively aided the author’s research and read his manuscript multiple times. But comparisons between KAL and BTC will be legion, so highlighting the three most significant ways in which the two biographies differ will be a service both to the thousands of readers whom Eig’s volume should attract and to students of King’s life more generally.

Book reviews should be like Car & Driver: flip over the page to a concrete, plainly written piece — no writerly words or literary drivel — by someone who’s test-driven the book and punched up a nuts-and-bolts guide. The reader should get a look under the hood: polished steel and chrome cylinders. Does it hum? Vroom, we’re off the races. I say this because I’m reporting on a prototype I’m afraid of driving: an advance reader’s edition, uncorrected, not for sale or quotation. I can’t rev this baby for you, or even kick the tires, but here goes.

‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my own conceit — and always surprised to find that anyone likes my work or character.’ This admission by Robert Graves — made to his then friend Siegfried Sassoon in the mid-1920s — goes to the heart of his character as a man and a poet. It projects a powerful mixture of defiance and neediness, which in his personal life produced a series of highly disruptive assertions and reversals, and in his writing life an equally striking set of commitments and walkings-back. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, who has previously published fluent biographies of Sassoon and Edward Thomas, is a reliable guide to all these contortions.

The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in the faith that style makes content. This, not the question of which way you dress, is the secret compact between tailor and client. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of clothes wisely and well, so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress,’ Carlyle wrote of the dandy in Sartor Resartus. Tommy Nutter was one of Tommy Carlyle’s dandies, a ‘clothes-wearing man’ and a ‘poet of the cloth’. From 1969 to 1976, Nutter bestrode the world of tailoring like a Narcissus. Though he could barely manage a backstitch, his designs rewrote the book on male style.

Saint Paul is unique among those who have changed the course of history — responsible not just for one but two critical historical developments 15 centuries apart. First, he persuaded the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth that gentiles as well as Jews could belong to their nascent church. This enabled its spread throughout the Roman empire, until Christianity become the state religion under the Emperor Constantine, and remained the official creed of all European nations until the French revolution. Second, there was his teaching on justification by faith alone —a ticking time bomb detonated by Martin Luther in the 16th century.

 At a press conference in October 1981, Ronald Reagan quoted Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in support of what is known as supply-side economics. Although the 14th- century politician and thinker wrote extensively about economics and was almost unique among medieval Arab writers in so doing, it is quite ‘marvellous’ writes Robert Irwin, the author of a new intellectual biography of this famous North African, that he ‘should have anticipated American Republican party fiscal policy’.