“By current standards,” wrote a recent commentator, “biographies without voyeuristic, erotic thrills are like ballpark hot dogs without mustard.” He described Kitty Kelley’s 1991 life of Nancy Reagan as essentially “a drive-by shooting,” while Germaine Greer, faced with an unwelcome biography, called the genre a form of rape.
These hostile reactions are recorded by Hermione Lee in Biography, one of the newest volumes in the Oxford University Press series that we began discussing two weeks ago. Lee, who was for 10 years Goldsmith’s Professor of English at Oxford, and is now President of Wolfson College at the same university, is the latest celebrity to be recruited to this admirable series.
Lee entered the ranks of top-level biographers herself with her 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf. This superb book succeeded both championing Woolf as a woman writer (almost all the subjects of Lee’s critical writings have been women) while at the same time avoiding all the feminist cliches about the author. The sigh of relief among traditionally inclined critics was almost audible, and an invitation to apply for the Goldsmith’s professorship at Oxford (Lee was at the time teaching at York University) followed almost immediately.
Lee’s penchant has always been to take the middle ground. She seeks truth, you feel, and as a result “a more complex picture,” so it’s no surprise that her Woolf biography was 944 pages long. This tendency is everywhere present in Biography, and a good example is her treatment of Shostakovich. It may seem surprising that she includes him at all as she doesn’t discuss in detail any particular biography of the composer. The 1979 volume Testimony, which purported to be a record of Shostakovich’s conversations with the author, Solomon Volkov, gives the topic an entree into the book, however, and allows Lee to consider the complexities that arise when two opposing ideologies compete for acceptance.
Shostakovich had for decades been taken in the West to be a largely conforming Soviet artist. Volkov displayed him as an out-and-out lifelong dissident. Very predictably, Lee seeks the middle ground, rejecting both the original simplifying myth and its resulting mythic opposite. She quotes a 2000 biography of Shostakovich by Laurel Fay that describes Volkov’s portrait as “an equally unconvincing caricature.” Shostakovich, Lee writes, is “a tremendously complex subject for biography,” with the implication that anyone is just that once you begin to find out all about their life in detail.
Of course, taking the middle line can also be seen as itself another form of ideology. However, when it produces such insights and such zestful appreciations as Lee comes up with in this little book there can be few complaints.
A much earlier contributor to the series was Germaine Greer herself. Her Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction appeared in 2002, having previously been published in paperback by the Oxford University Press in 1986. Clearly the press already owned the copyright, found the length appropriate, and decided to give the book another lease of life in its then new series.
This was a huge compliment to Greer, nonetheless. The topic was a major one, and there must have been many writers eager to take it on. But on examination Greer’s book proves to be a gem, a toughly argued, even difficult, work that’s a far cry from the kind of exercise in recycled “bardolatory” that a lesser mind might have come up with.
Greer is best known as a fighting feminist whose The Female Eunuch set the cat among the pigeons back in 1971. She had also been prominent in the counterculture of those days and was an iconic figure well-known to the readers of London’s tabloid newspapers. But she’d originally been an academic, moving from her native Australia to the UK’s Cambridge University to complete a PhD thesis on The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies in 1967. She’s long returned to the academic fold, however, as her superb Shakespeare volume demonstrates.
One of the books Lee discusses in Biography is James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare — 1599. A copy came my way this week, and it makes for a fascinating comparison with Greer’s shorter book. Lee is full of praise for Shapiro’s work, as almost all his reviewers have also been, and it is indeed a book that resonates on many levels.
Greer is keen to probe Shakespeare’s ethics — his attitudes to human responsibility, marriage and interior self-examination. Shapiro, while not neglecting this dimension — indeed, it’s hard to believe he neglects anything — opts to focus more on the politics of the day, together with the evolution of Shakespeare’s craft up to that point.
There’s a huge amount of entertainment in Biography. Lee quotes Wilde (“It is always Judas who writes the biography”), describes the howls of Victorian execration that greeted J.A. Froude’s publication of information about Thomas Carlyle’s sexual impotence, cites the determination of Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) to include the lives of “brothel-keepers, contortionists, gamblers, transvestites and centenarians” in his Dictionary of National Biography, mentions the burning of Byron’s scandalous journals in his publisher’s office following his death, and points to both the accusations of immorality and coarseness that initially greeted Jane Eyre, and the “censoring eye” on Hallam Tennyson of his mother Emily as he wrote the life of his father, the former Poet Laureate.
The book is strongest on its British subject matter — there’s a whole chapter on Boswell’s Life of Johnson — but not much more than a mention for Rousseau’s incomparable Confessions (though Lee does note that Johnson hated the French charmer and self-fashioning social prophet). And even though the author published a major biography of Edith Wharton in 2007, US biographies could be said to be generally underrepresented. We do, though, learn that “no Life of Elvis could afford to avoid Colonel Tom Parker.”
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