Sam Leith

This is a book that really ought not to work. Being Shelley is not quite a biography and not quite a critical reader and not quite anything most people will have seen before. If you want to know, in order, what happened in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley — where he went, who he met, what he did — you’d be best off looking elsewhere. If you’re an undergraduate looking for a line-by-line interpretive guide to his canon, likewise this is not your book.Yet I think Being Shelley will grow to be indispensible to anyone writing or thinking about the poet from now on — a vital companion to the two more conventional volumes that it isn’t.

What a peculiar life it was: born in Poland, exiled to Russia, orphan- ed at 11, and sent to sea at 16. A decade and a half of salt water and solitude in the merchant marine. Then the rest of it spent as an English gent, writing literary novels in his third language (English) under the strong influence of the writers of his second (French). And yet, there he is, slap-bang in the Great Tradition. This biography, first published here in 1983 and now updated and expanded for the 150th anniversary of Joseph Conrad’s birth, has quite some heft to it. Coming to it as an enthusiast, rather than a scholar, of Conrad, I consulted a friend whom I knew to be a Conrad nut to ask roughly where Najder’s book stands in the Conradian conversation.

If nothing else, this biography has to be a candidate for the Title of the Year prize. The fact that it’s about Willie Donaldson gives it a good shout, too, at Subject of the Year. Just amble through the CV: feckless squanderer of inherited shipping fortune; impresario of Beyond the Fringe; ponce (though he was frequently and, he felt inaccurately, described as a pimp); submariner; author of the Henry Root Letters; lover of Carly Simon and Sarah Miles; unsuccessful glass-bottomed boat entrepreneur; geriatric crack-fiend; self-confessed pervert; corrupter of innocence; balletomane; Old Wykehamist. ‘Disgraceful’ he frequently was.

Charles Richter, born in 1900, was, in the words of his biographer, ‘a nerd among nerds: regarded as peculiar and intensely private even by scientists’ standards. And we’re talking about people who put red-and-white bumper stickers on their cars that read, “If this sticker is blue, you’re driving too fast”.’ The only seismologist most of us will ever have heard of was a crumpled, driven, disorganised figure, sometimes kindly and sometimes cantankerous — just as one wants one’s batty scientists to be. He conducted long, cheerful conversations with himself. He was prone to turn up to work wearing two ties at once.

‘Gott for damn, Rhoades, vos you drunk?’ was the indignant outcry of Captain Berndt, as he rowed alongside the Guendolen. Captaining the Guendolen was Berndt’s British friend and drinking partner Captain Rhoades, a man noted for his ‘Rabelaisian wit’ and ‘unprintable songs’, but who had just steamed up to the German end of Lake Nyasa and disabled Berndt’s ship the Hermann von Wissman with a single shot. Rhoades was not drunk. It was August 1914, and the Great War had just — unbeknownst to the unfortunate Captain Berndt — kicked off in Africa. When we think of the first world war we tend to think of exhausted Tommies drowning in freezing mud in the fields of Flanders.

It may have taken until the late 1960s for the expression ‘the personal is political’ to condense an important truth, but — as Lucy Moore’s fascinating new book shows — that truth is not a new one. Liberty tells the story of the French Revolution through the lives of the great salonnière Germaine de Staël, the passionate middle-class ideologue Manon Roland, the kind-hearted flibbertigibbet Thérésia de Fontenay, the feisty former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt and the much younger Juliette Récamier — whose beauty and chastity (a very rare thing, to judge by this book) caused her to become an icon of the Republic.

Only if you have spent the last few months living in a remote corner of Chad will you not have noticed that this year marks the centenary of Sir John Betjeman’s birth. We have already seen telly programmes, church restoration appeals, commemorative CDs of his readings, Cornish cliff walks and special outings on West Country railways in honour of a man whose genius consisted, as the late Sir Peter Parker put it, in ‘an infinite capacity for taking trains’. Now come two new lives: A. N. Wilson’s snappy and stylish short biography, and a still hefty one-volume boiling-down of Bevis Hillier’s socking three-volume authorised life.

Listing page content here Now comes a war and shows that we still haven’t crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on the rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other than mutual mass slaughter. If you had to guess the author, what would you say? George Orwell? Isaiah Berlin? Malcolm Muggeridge? Nope. Those words were written by, of all people, Leon Trotsky, which adds a particularly sour irony to the fact that they are, and remain, exactly right.

Just because you’re paranoid, as the cliché runs, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you. They certainly were out to get Queen Elizabeth I — and how. Her situation was strange and dangerous. She was a Protestant queen ruling a country the majority of whose citizens remained Catholic. ‘The ancient faith still lay like lees at the bottoms of men’s hearts,’ as Sir Ralph Sadler, a member of her Privy Council quoted here, put it, ‘and if the vessel were ever so little stirred, comes to the top.’ She was obliged to harbour the main Catholic hope for succession, Mary, Queen of Scots, in her own kingdom, albeit under house arrest.

‘We are here on earth to fart around,’ that wise man Kurt Vonne- gut once wrote. ‘And don’t let anybody tell you different.’ Denys Finch Hatton — who was born into the English aristocracy in 1887, and died in a plane crash in Africa not long after his 44th birthday — was one of the great farters-around of all time. That we know of him now is largely down to his long and tortured love affair with the ill-starred Danish coffee-farmer Karen Blixen, who under the pen name of Isak Dinesen described their relationship in Out of Africa. The image most of us have of him, then, is of a tanned and sunny Robert Redford heading non- chalantly to his doom in a Gypsy Moth. Denys differed from Robert Redford in one important particular.

The man christened Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, in a mining town in Switzerland in the last decade of the 15th century, has been more mythologised than described: as a Faust, a Prometheus, a holy fool, a eunuch, a necromancer. It is not hard to see why he was attractive to the Romantic poets and remains — even in the works of J. K. Rowling — shorthand for a whiff of brimstone. He’s a myth. But, like most myths, he’s also an idea, and an interesting one. Paracelsus himself was a stocky, odd little bloke. Contemporaries attest that he was often drunk and seldom changed his clothes. He seemed, much of the time, as mad as a badger. He was vastly boastful, and heroically rude about his enemies.

A phrase often used in praise of comics artists is that they ‘transcend the limitations of the medium’. The apologetic subtext to that phrase tells you a lot. Even as we praise the greats of comics, we tend to do so as if their achievements are in spite of, rather than because of, their chosen medium. You seldom hear people saying that a work in prose, in paint or for piano ‘transcends the limitations of the medium’. Comics have been ‘transcending the limitations of the medium’ from the get-go, as the lavishly printed and compendious coffee-table book, Masters of American Comics, accompanying a joint exhibition at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, makes clear.

In the mid-1930s, the poet Ogden Nash visited a rodeo, where the star attraction was a handsome cowboy parading with his wife and son. ‘This is Monty Montana,’ the announcer declared, ‘who is a great example to American young men and young women. He has never smoked a cigarette, he has never touched liquor.’ Nash’s voice rang out from the bleachers: ‘And that little boy is adopted.’ The chief thing about Ogden Nash was that he was funny. Though he wrote a handful of straightforward and affecting simple lyric poems, what he will be remembered for is his light verse.

On the very first page of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, you learn something strange and interesting about the first few moments of Shake- speare’s life: ‘A small portion of butter and honey was usually placed in the baby’s mouth. It was the custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare’s brains reduced to jelly.’ Who knew that the first food our greatest dramatist tasted was jellied hare’s brains? Yuck. On page after page that follows, he dishes out similar morsels.

After the Victorians opens with a coronation at which ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is played, and an expedition to the Himalayas: King Edward VII took the throne, Younghusband and his Maxim guns took Lhasa. It closes with a coronation at which ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is played, and an expedition to the Himalayas: Elizabeth II took the throne, Hillary took the summit of Everest. By the second time round, the chorus of ‘Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set’ has, as A. N. Wilson points out, more of hope in it than expectation. We’d had the unimaginable slaughter of two world wars, the collapse of Britain’s industrial base and overseas dominions, and we were deeply in debt to a nuclear America.

‘Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous,’ wrote Randall Jarrell, ‘for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.’ Jarrell’s cynicism is too slick, too rueful; but it does snag something in Robert Lowell, as it does in several of the American poets of his generation. Lowell was, at his best, a towering poet, but his public fame often rested on other things: that he was Boston posh; that he publicly thumbed his nose at the government; that he was, above all, mad. He was all these things, and a great poet, too. It’s easy myth-making to say that Lowell’s genius and his madness went hand in hand, but it’s certainly the case that they took turns at the helm.

‘This,’ announces Max Hast- ings at the outset, ‘is an old-fashioned book.’ So it is, and it is none the worse for it. As a schoolboy, Hastings thrilled to a 1920s’ anthology called Stirring Deeds of the Great War. His own book, a Brief Lives-style collection of essays on 14 of the most colourful or daring figures in (roughly) modern warfare, offers many of the pleasures those deeds must once have stirred, now overlaid with a more considered, war historian’s interest in what drives the very few people who turn out to be exceptionally brave in harm’s way. It is an old-fashioned book in other respects too.

Early on in Piers Morgan’s memoir of his career as a tabloid editor, there is a very funny incident. It is a Saturday in 1994 and Morgan, then editor of the News of the World, knows that the Sunday Times, his broadsheet stablemate, has bought the serialisation rights to Jonathan Dimbleby’s book about Prince Charles. Its editor, John Witherow, declines to tip Piers off about what’s in the book. So Piers decides to get one over on his snooty rival. He gets his colleague Rebekah Wade to sneak into the Sunday Times’s offices dressed as a cleaner. She hides in the loo for two hours waiting for the presses to roll, then jumps out, snaffles one of the first copies to be printed, and legs it back to the NoW.