There has been much discussion on this blog about the affect of technology on our culture, especially upon print. Certainly, whenver something comes along that revolutionizes the way we do things, as computers have, there is an adjustment period where we transition from the old to learning the new. The following Norwegian video quite humorously depicts such a shift, as it shows a helpdesk during the Middle Ages when books first came about.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon (2)
This is my favorite book in the series so far. I've started STREETS OF LAREDO so I'll comment on it later. I suspect I will rank the series as follows:
1) Comanche Moon
2) Lonesome Dove
3) Streets of Laredo
4) Dead Man's Walk
Comanche Moon has a strong plot line, although it tails off at the end. The characters are memorable as they always are with McMurtry. The book is worth reading just to have to fun with the Sculls. It is interesting that the most admirable person in the novel (in my opinion) is a Yankee.
The best parts may be the Indian characters. I like Buffalo Hump even with his brutality. Kicking Wolf is OK, but that Blue Duck is truly evil. Those Indians certainly know how to torture, don't they? Too bad we couldn't use them at Guantanamo.
1) Comanche Moon
2) Lonesome Dove
3) Streets of Laredo
4) Dead Man's Walk
Comanche Moon has a strong plot line, although it tails off at the end. The characters are memorable as they always are with McMurtry. The book is worth reading just to have to fun with the Sculls. It is interesting that the most admirable person in the novel (in my opinion) is a Yankee.
The best parts may be the Indian characters. I like Buffalo Hump even with his brutality. Kicking Wolf is OK, but that Blue Duck is truly evil. Those Indians certainly know how to torture, don't they? Too bad we couldn't use them at Guantanamo.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon
The novel is dedicated to Susan Sontag, who published an influential essay in 1966 in which she said the following:
"America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."
If I ever meet Larry McMurtry, I want to ask him if his dedication had anything to do with this quote.
"America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."
If I ever meet Larry McMurtry, I want to ask him if his dedication had anything to do with this quote.
Ray Bradbury on Censorship
As a staunch believer in intellectual freedom, I abhor censorship. Ray Bradbury addresses this evil in his Coda for the 50th Anniversary of Fahrenheit 451, which I think is worth reading:
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.
But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?
A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?
Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire store should be dropped.
Two weeks ago my mount of mail delivered forth a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”
The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito - out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch - gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer - lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, blue-penciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Doestoevsky read like - in the finale - Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention - shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above?
By “firing” the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.
“Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. The fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butchers/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.
But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared to my play - it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ballbats if the drama department even tried.
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real word is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m going out again, giving it the old try.
And no one can help me. Not even you.
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.
But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?
A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?
Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire store should be dropped.
Two weeks ago my mount of mail delivered forth a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”
The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito - out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch - gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer - lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, blue-penciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Doestoevsky read like - in the finale - Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention - shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above?
By “firing” the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.
“Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. The fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butchers/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.
But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared to my play - it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ballbats if the drama department even tried.
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real word is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m going out again, giving it the old try.
And no one can help me. Not even you.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
The Downside of Social Networking
I am fascinated with social networking websites. Thru the miracle of the internet I am glad we have such a valuable tool to use to keep in touch, share thoughts, and make new friends. At the same time, I believe we live more and more in a superficial society. The depth of life comes from actual esperiences, face-to-face contact with other human beings, AND reading, which, as we know, is in serious decline. The article below is appopos.
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: July 22, 2008
One of my great surprises from roaming the library stacks during graduate school was discovering that every author, no matter how minor, was already the subject of a quarterly or a newsletter. I would stumble upon a new name — Felicia Hemans, say, or Edward Young — and find that there was already a society devoted to their work, even, in many cases, a concordance and an annual meeting with elected officers. I had the distinct feeling that I had arrived late in the day, after the literary teams had all been chosen.
Skip to next paragraph
The Board Blog
Additional commentary, background information and other items by Times editorial writers.Go to The Board »
I get the same feeling — vastly multiplied — from the many worlds of social networking on the Web. I get wind of a new site, pay it a visit and discover that it already has a population four times the size of some midsized countries — everyone speaking the local dialect, taboos and kinship patterns well worked out, a robust economy and brisk trading with other social-networking sites. I have begun to fear the result if one site declared war on another. What if Bebo fired upon fubar? What if LinkedIn threatened to blockade imeem?
I can see the appeal of a virtual community. I’ve joined three or four of these groups, partly just to see what’s going on but also to reconnect with old acquaintances and find new music. But some of these sites I don’t quite get.
I’ve used Twitter a couple of times since it came to the iPhone recently. The idea is to send short messages — microblog entries of 140 characters or less — to a group of people who are “following” you. The reason is so they’ll know what you’re doing. What I come away with is a mental image of 30 or 40 people following me around all day long asking “Whatcha doing?” while I’m trying to work.
One effect of so much social networking — so many overlapping communities of interlinked individuals — is that the language of actual human interaction begins to feel degraded. What can the word “friend” mean after Facebook, where it is really a synonym for “coincidence”? How subtle can the emotions be in a TiVo-ish world like iLike, where it’s thumbs up or thumbs down? There’s no room even for the hand-wiggle that means “meh.”
There is, of course, a pleasure in sharing the things you love. But the greater pleasure will always be secret sharing. You find a book you love, you tell your best friend about it and the two of you share the secret. Something is ruined if your friend tells someone else about the book. Surely you remember this from fifth grade. I hope there will be room soon for some anti-social Web sites — places on the Web where you can go to be alone, to hide from your “friends.” Perhaps that is what real life is for. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
More Articles in Opinion »
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: July 22, 2008
One of my great surprises from roaming the library stacks during graduate school was discovering that every author, no matter how minor, was already the subject of a quarterly or a newsletter. I would stumble upon a new name — Felicia Hemans, say, or Edward Young — and find that there was already a society devoted to their work, even, in many cases, a concordance and an annual meeting with elected officers. I had the distinct feeling that I had arrived late in the day, after the literary teams had all been chosen.
Skip to next paragraph
The Board Blog
Additional commentary, background information and other items by Times editorial writers.Go to The Board »
I get the same feeling — vastly multiplied — from the many worlds of social networking on the Web. I get wind of a new site, pay it a visit and discover that it already has a population four times the size of some midsized countries — everyone speaking the local dialect, taboos and kinship patterns well worked out, a robust economy and brisk trading with other social-networking sites. I have begun to fear the result if one site declared war on another. What if Bebo fired upon fubar? What if LinkedIn threatened to blockade imeem?
I can see the appeal of a virtual community. I’ve joined three or four of these groups, partly just to see what’s going on but also to reconnect with old acquaintances and find new music. But some of these sites I don’t quite get.
I’ve used Twitter a couple of times since it came to the iPhone recently. The idea is to send short messages — microblog entries of 140 characters or less — to a group of people who are “following” you. The reason is so they’ll know what you’re doing. What I come away with is a mental image of 30 or 40 people following me around all day long asking “Whatcha doing?” while I’m trying to work.
One effect of so much social networking — so many overlapping communities of interlinked individuals — is that the language of actual human interaction begins to feel degraded. What can the word “friend” mean after Facebook, where it is really a synonym for “coincidence”? How subtle can the emotions be in a TiVo-ish world like iLike, where it’s thumbs up or thumbs down? There’s no room even for the hand-wiggle that means “meh.”
There is, of course, a pleasure in sharing the things you love. But the greater pleasure will always be secret sharing. You find a book you love, you tell your best friend about it and the two of you share the secret. Something is ruined if your friend tells someone else about the book. Surely you remember this from fifth grade. I hope there will be room soon for some anti-social Web sites — places on the Web where you can go to be alone, to hide from your “friends.” Perhaps that is what real life is for. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
More Articles in Opinion »
Monday, July 21, 2008
Larry McMurtry - Books
McMurtry's latest offering is a delightful collection of short essays--anecdotes--on his days as an antiquarian bookseller. It seems that this man loves books as much if not more than writing!
We bibliophiles can relate. I will read anything by a booklover.
Having been to San Francisco many, many, times, I especially enjoyed his details concerning the city by the bay. San Francisco takes some getting used to; I chuckle to see Larry struggling to adjust.
Here are some specifics.
57
McMurtry wonders if bookmen are eccentrics and if reading is becoming an eccentricity. Interruptive narrative has become natural. Our technology toys have interrupted our concentrated reading into shorter and shorter sequences.
He wonders if some day our technology toys might lose their freshness and the book, such an old-fashioned thing, will come to hold some interest for the masses again.
I hope Larry is right, but I doubt it.
69
He says that many bookmen rarely, if ever, read. I am not surprised. I sell textbooks for a living, and my impression is that most of my fellow textbook sellers do not read either.
70
"I'm proud of my carefully selected twenty-eight-thousand-volume library and am not joking when I say that I regard its formation as one of my most notable achievements."
I undertand, Larry, I do understand.
We bibliophiles can relate. I will read anything by a booklover.
Having been to San Francisco many, many, times, I especially enjoyed his details concerning the city by the bay. San Francisco takes some getting used to; I chuckle to see Larry struggling to adjust.
Here are some specifics.
57
McMurtry wonders if bookmen are eccentrics and if reading is becoming an eccentricity. Interruptive narrative has become natural. Our technology toys have interrupted our concentrated reading into shorter and shorter sequences.
He wonders if some day our technology toys might lose their freshness and the book, such an old-fashioned thing, will come to hold some interest for the masses again.
I hope Larry is right, but I doubt it.
69
He says that many bookmen rarely, if ever, read. I am not surprised. I sell textbooks for a living, and my impression is that most of my fellow textbook sellers do not read either.
70
"I'm proud of my carefully selected twenty-eight-thousand-volume library and am not joking when I say that I regard its formation as one of my most notable achievements."
I undertand, Larry, I do understand.
Friday, July 18, 2008
My New Blog
Hello Hudsons,
I have created a personal blog on this site. Please check it out and read my single post. The blog's name is Immersed in the Madding Crowd. The target is http://housefulofbooks.blogspot.com/
I have also, this morning, created a blog where I will try to post books I am reading, and some thoughts on each at http://onemanreview.blogspot.com
As I told Fred, now that I have grasped the computing fundamentals of this, I hope to continue on. Let's inspire each other to write great things... or at least to continue to remind each other that we are intellectually superior to most of our peers.
I have created a personal blog on this site. Please check it out and read my single post. The blog's name is Immersed in the Madding Crowd. The target is http://housefulofbooks.blogspot.com/
I have also, this morning, created a blog where I will try to post books I am reading, and some thoughts on each at http://onemanreview.blogspot.com
As I told Fred, now that I have grasped the computing fundamentals of this, I hope to continue on. Let's inspire each other to write great things... or at least to continue to remind each other that we are intellectually superior to most of our peers.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Larry McMurtry
I am currently reading McMurtry's COMANCHE MOON after first reading LONESOME DOVE and DEAD MAN's WALK. The former, which won the Pulitzer, is a magnificient novel of the old West whereas DEAD MAN's WALK was a disappointment. So far COMANCHE MOON is every bit as good as LONESOME DOVE.
I am also perusing McMurtry's new memoir called BOOKS. In addition to being an author, McMurtry is a long-time antiquarian bookdealer and collector. He owns bookstores in Archer City, Texas, his hometown, and Washington D.C.
The book is composed of short chapters of a page or two or three with stories about his life in books. Here is what he says in one place with regard to his penchant for collecting reference books.
"Most young (book) dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Everything there is may be a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them."
I identify with McMurtry, but I fear that our way of thinking may be passing away.
I am also perusing McMurtry's new memoir called BOOKS. In addition to being an author, McMurtry is a long-time antiquarian bookdealer and collector. He owns bookstores in Archer City, Texas, his hometown, and Washington D.C.
The book is composed of short chapters of a page or two or three with stories about his life in books. Here is what he says in one place with regard to his penchant for collecting reference books.
"Most young (book) dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Everything there is may be a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them."
I identify with McMurtry, but I fear that our way of thinking may be passing away.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
How to be Good by Nick Hornby
About a married couple, with two kids, who have serious marriage difficulties. David undergoes a sort of spiritual shift in which he tries to be good, by no longer being cantankerous towards his wife Katie and by doing such things as housing the homeless and giving away the family's possessions to charity. Katie is disturbed by this, leaving her feeling lonely and embarrassed. She insists that her being a doctor makes her good.
This is an interesting premise. I think it suggests that you cannot be good in David's way because it is disruptive to normal life and because our culture is too cynical. Also, though, Katie's goodness is not real, but a rationalization to avoid her difficulties. Goodness is somewhere in between, and these characters must learn to accept that life is not an ideal in your head, but fraught with bumps and triumphs. Katie is forced to look at herself and contemplate what it means for her to be good, but I do not think she ascertains what that is.
However, I didn't like it as much as A Long Way Down. I couldn't resonate with the characters. It also dragged and would be better if it lost fifty pages. As much as I like Hornby's other books, this is a disappointment.
This is an interesting premise. I think it suggests that you cannot be good in David's way because it is disruptive to normal life and because our culture is too cynical. Also, though, Katie's goodness is not real, but a rationalization to avoid her difficulties. Goodness is somewhere in between, and these characters must learn to accept that life is not an ideal in your head, but fraught with bumps and triumphs. Katie is forced to look at herself and contemplate what it means for her to be good, but I do not think she ascertains what that is.
However, I didn't like it as much as A Long Way Down. I couldn't resonate with the characters. It also dragged and would be better if it lost fifty pages. As much as I like Hornby's other books, this is a disappointment.
Monday, July 7, 2008
John Updike on print vs. electronic
(SEE THE LAST TWO PARAGRAPHS IN PARTICULAR)
By JOHN UPDIKE
Published: June 25, 2006
Booksellers, you are the salt of the book world. You are on the front line where, while the author cowers in his opium den, you encounter — or "interface with," as we say now — the rare and mysterious Americans who are willing to plunk down $25 for a book. Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. At my mother's side I used to visit the two stores in downtown Reading, Pa., a city then of 100,000, and I still recall their names and locations — the Book Mart, at Sixth Street and Court, and the Berkshire News, on Fifth Street, in front of the trolley stop that would take us home to Shillington.
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. In addition to the Coop and various outlets where impecunious students like myself could buy tattered volumes polluted by someone else's underlinings and marginalia, there were bookstores that catered to the Cambridge bourgeoisie, the professoriate, and those elite students with money and reading time to spare. The Grolier, specializing in modern poetry, occupied a choice niche on Plympton Street, and over on Boylston there was the Mandrake, a more spacious sanctum for books of rare, pellucid and modernist water. In the Mandrake — presided over by a soft-voiced short man, with brushed-back graying hair — there were English books, Faber & Faber and Victor Gollancz, books with purely typographical jackets and cloth-covered boards warping from the damp of their trans-Atlantic passage, and art books, too glossy and expensive even to glance into, and of course New Directions books, modest in format and delicious in their unread content.
After Harvard, I went to Oxford for a year, and browsed for dazed hours in the rambling treasury, on the street called the Broad, of Blackwell's — shelves of Everyman's and Oxford Classics, and the complete works, jacketed in baby-blue paper, of Thomas Aquinas, in Latin and English! Then I came to New York, when Fifth Avenue still seemed lined with bookstores — the baronial Scribner's, with the central staircase and the scrolled ironwork of its balconies, and the Doubleday's a few blocks on, with an ascending spiral staircase visible through plate glass.
Now I live in a village-like corner of a small New England city that holds, mirabile dictu, an independent bookstore, one of the few surviving in the long coastal stretch between Marblehead and Newburyport. But I live, it seems, in a fool's paradise. Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article that gleefully envisioned the end of the bookseller, and indeed of the writer. Written by Kevin Kelly, identified as the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine, the article describes a glorious digitalizing of all written knowledge. Google's plan, announced in December 2004, to scan the contents of five major research libraries and make them searchable, according to Kelly, has resurrected the dream of the universal library. "The explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade," he writes, "has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?"
Unlike the libraries of old, Kelly continues, "this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person." The anarchic nature of the true democracy emerges bit by bit. "Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page," Kelly writes. "These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or 'playlists,' as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual 'bookshelves' — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these 'bookshelves' will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages."
The economic repercussions of this paradise of freely flowing snippets are touched on with a beguiling offhandedness, as a matter of course, a matter of an inexorable Marxist unfolding. As the current economic model disappears, Kelly writes, the "basis of wealth" shifts to "relationships, links, connection and sharing." Instead of selling copies of their work, writers and artists can make a living selling "performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions — in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the 'discovery tool' that markets these other intangible valuables."
This is, as I read it, a pretty grisly scenario. "Performances, access to the creator, personalization," whatever that is — does this not throw us back to the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value? Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an "access to the creator" more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an unmediated, unpolished personal conversation? Has the electronic revolution pushed us so far down the path of celebrity as a summum bonum that an author's works, be they one volume or 50, serve primarily as his or her ticket to the lecture platform, or, since even that is somewhat hierarchical and aloof, a series of one-on-one orgies of personal access?
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.
In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another — of, in short, accountability and intimacy? Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant "Aw, shucks," disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.
The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other's steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village. "When books are digitized," Kelly ominously promises, "reading becomes a community activity. . . . The universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book."
Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.
So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
John Updike's most recent novel is "Terrorist." This essay is adapted from his address to booksellers at the Book Expo convention held last month in Washington.
By JOHN UPDIKE
Published: June 25, 2006
Booksellers, you are the salt of the book world. You are on the front line where, while the author cowers in his opium den, you encounter — or "interface with," as we say now — the rare and mysterious Americans who are willing to plunk down $25 for a book. Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. At my mother's side I used to visit the two stores in downtown Reading, Pa., a city then of 100,000, and I still recall their names and locations — the Book Mart, at Sixth Street and Court, and the Berkshire News, on Fifth Street, in front of the trolley stop that would take us home to Shillington.
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. In addition to the Coop and various outlets where impecunious students like myself could buy tattered volumes polluted by someone else's underlinings and marginalia, there were bookstores that catered to the Cambridge bourgeoisie, the professoriate, and those elite students with money and reading time to spare. The Grolier, specializing in modern poetry, occupied a choice niche on Plympton Street, and over on Boylston there was the Mandrake, a more spacious sanctum for books of rare, pellucid and modernist water. In the Mandrake — presided over by a soft-voiced short man, with brushed-back graying hair — there were English books, Faber & Faber and Victor Gollancz, books with purely typographical jackets and cloth-covered boards warping from the damp of their trans-Atlantic passage, and art books, too glossy and expensive even to glance into, and of course New Directions books, modest in format and delicious in their unread content.
After Harvard, I went to Oxford for a year, and browsed for dazed hours in the rambling treasury, on the street called the Broad, of Blackwell's — shelves of Everyman's and Oxford Classics, and the complete works, jacketed in baby-blue paper, of Thomas Aquinas, in Latin and English! Then I came to New York, when Fifth Avenue still seemed lined with bookstores — the baronial Scribner's, with the central staircase and the scrolled ironwork of its balconies, and the Doubleday's a few blocks on, with an ascending spiral staircase visible through plate glass.
Now I live in a village-like corner of a small New England city that holds, mirabile dictu, an independent bookstore, one of the few surviving in the long coastal stretch between Marblehead and Newburyport. But I live, it seems, in a fool's paradise. Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article that gleefully envisioned the end of the bookseller, and indeed of the writer. Written by Kevin Kelly, identified as the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine, the article describes a glorious digitalizing of all written knowledge. Google's plan, announced in December 2004, to scan the contents of five major research libraries and make them searchable, according to Kelly, has resurrected the dream of the universal library. "The explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade," he writes, "has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?"
Unlike the libraries of old, Kelly continues, "this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person." The anarchic nature of the true democracy emerges bit by bit. "Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page," Kelly writes. "These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or 'playlists,' as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual 'bookshelves' — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these 'bookshelves' will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages."
The economic repercussions of this paradise of freely flowing snippets are touched on with a beguiling offhandedness, as a matter of course, a matter of an inexorable Marxist unfolding. As the current economic model disappears, Kelly writes, the "basis of wealth" shifts to "relationships, links, connection and sharing." Instead of selling copies of their work, writers and artists can make a living selling "performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions — in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the 'discovery tool' that markets these other intangible valuables."
This is, as I read it, a pretty grisly scenario. "Performances, access to the creator, personalization," whatever that is — does this not throw us back to the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value? Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an "access to the creator" more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an unmediated, unpolished personal conversation? Has the electronic revolution pushed us so far down the path of celebrity as a summum bonum that an author's works, be they one volume or 50, serve primarily as his or her ticket to the lecture platform, or, since even that is somewhat hierarchical and aloof, a series of one-on-one orgies of personal access?
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.
In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another — of, in short, accountability and intimacy? Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant "Aw, shucks," disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.
The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other's steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village. "When books are digitized," Kelly ominously promises, "reading becomes a community activity. . . . The universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book."
Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.
So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
John Updike's most recent novel is "Terrorist." This essay is adapted from his address to booksellers at the Book Expo convention held last month in Washington.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Is the Biography Genre Dead?
The following is an excerpt from an article that questions whether the biography, as a genre, is dead or at least not as potent as it once was. I got this article from Paper Cuts, which suggests that there are still people worth writing about, including Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pynchon.
"The death of life writing"
by Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
Published June 28, 2008
Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes
Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. "Sclerosis" might be nearer.
Sales, it's true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it's worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling's Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.
However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch's Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials. Since becoming a biographer 15 years ago - most recently of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot - I have read widely within the genre and with professional attention. I also teach on the MA in life writing at UEA, which aims to give would-be biographers a solid grounding in their chosen art. And I get hundreds of titles sent to me every year for review. I have to say I am struck by their recent falling-off. Of course there are always stand-outs, even in a thin year such as 2007 (Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton and Rosemary Hill's Pugin), and 2008 is shaping up to be better, with new work from Richard Holmes and Michael Holroyd in the autumn. But the general standard, the mean, the middling, seems to have sunk to a listless low.
Let me give you a taste of what I am sent each week. There are endless lives of saucy 18th-century society ladies, even though it is a full 10 years since the surprise hit Georgiana by Amanda Foreman opened up that particular realm. (The worst moment was receiving a biography of Georgiana's sister, Harriet.) There are plenty of royal mistresses, to the extent that one wonders if there is a boudoir somewhere where they sit all day doing their hair, waiting to be called forward for active biographical duty. Lives on the edge of empire are popular too, probably in response to the academy's continuing interest in all things postcolonial. So each week you can be guaranteed stories about people who ran little kingdoms in clammy parts of the globe and/or were worshipped as gods by confused locals.
While there is a respectable rationale for doing these minor lives, grounded in the argument that hidden or forgotten subjects deserve their restorative moment in the sun, the real reason is more pragmatic. The fact is that anyone really important has already been done, probably several times. The 19th and 20th centuries have long been harvested for any royal, writer, actor, painter or soldier whose life and work could conceivably yield 350 pages of serviceable prose. (That's another problem: the misguided belief that writing a biography requires nothing more than journeyman skill when it comes to putting one word in front of another.) For a while, the 18th century appeared fertile, with its combination of ebullient consumerism and unbuttoned sexuality seeming to offer an easy parallel to our own. Now, though, it is all fished out. Go back any further than 1700 and you run into the problem not just of finding the sources, but of making sense of them. People in the early modern period had such different ideas about what it meant to be a self, especially in relation to others, that trying to corral them into the kind of unfolding psychodrama expected by the modern biography reader becomes tricky, unless you're prepared to gloss like crazy.
The least imaginative response to this lack of good new subjects is simply to go back to the big lives and do them over - and over - again. You can justify this by an appeal to the idea that each decade (actually, every four years might be nearer) needs its own Dickens or Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to this convenient way of thinking, dressing up old subjects in new clothes becomes playful and postmodern, rather than just desperate. Yet Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary, London University, whose The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection reached the Samuel Johnson shortlist two years ago, warns against being taken in by this sleight of hand. "What often happens is that a perfectly solid biography from 1978 gets rewritten with an eye to the intellectual moment, without the addition of a single bit of new information." The result: a George Eliot for the New Labour age (I plead guilty), or a queer Queen Victoria for the noughties, or the six wives of Henry VIII refashioned as the post-feminist heroines from Sex and the City.
Why doesn't anyone say or do something about these acts of biographical cannibalism? According to literary agent Andrew Lownie, who runs the Biographers' Club (a networking organisation for practitioners), it's because the power in publishing companies has decisively passed from the commissioning editors to the sales people. "Their thinking is, if something was once a hit, then let's try it again, even though clearly there's a law of diminishing returns. Anything new or different is looked on with suspicion." Lownie's theory is confirmed by the recent experience of one writer I spoke to. Having produced a first biography that punched well above its weight, he has been looking forward to writing his second, this time on a playwright whose work he knows well. His publishers, though, are having none of it and have suggested instead that he try a life of ... Graham Greene. That Norman Sherry's authorised multi-decker Life has sucked every last shred of marrow from Greene's tired old bones seems scarcely to matter.
What makes it doubly strange is that biography as a genre has a tradition of lively experimentation. Consider John Aubrey's Brief Lives, written in the lee of the civil war. If published today, its zany mix of biography and autobiography, gossip and scholarship would be hailed as wonderfully postmodern. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians of 1918 is a fine example of the short, pithy group biographies that are making something of a comeback. These are the fresh, wayward models that I ask my students to consider when they begin their own biographical projects. (Anyone who suggests embarking on a cradle-to-grave narrative of a royal mistress goes to the back of the class.)
In the interests of balance, I should report that it is not only Hamilton who remains bullish about the state of biography. When I asked Claire Tomalin, the biographer of Austen, Pepys and Hardy among others, she could see no reason to worry. Michael Holroyd agrees that "something has definitely changed", though stops short of calling it a crisis. His reading is that popular history and misery memoirs have temporarily knocked biography off its top spot in the non-fiction hierarchy, and that it's probably a question of waiting out the cycle. Michael Prodger, literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph, agrees that the golden age of biography, in which the publication of fat lives of important people by leading writers were automatically given the hushed attention due to a major minor cultural event, has probably passed. But he warns against uncritical nostalgia: "The fact is that there has always been a second division of biography, good enough without being distinguished. These nearly-books are always with us."
The responses of publishers were more upbeat. This could be because they are obliged to sound perky in public, or it may be that being on the receiving end of hundreds of proposals every year gives them a helpfully elevated view. Thus Jenny Uglow, editorial director of Chatto & Windus, herself a distinguished biographer, reports that "interesting ideas are still coming in, although perhaps we're having to look harder for them than we used to". Arabella Pike, meanwhile, who heads up a distinguished biography list at HarperPress, is justly proud of Linda Colley's Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which came out last year. An intellectually bold book, Elizabeth Marsh sets itself the task of plotting "the world in the life" of a humble British woman in the 18th century whose own history happened to collide with that of Britain's emerging empire. It is a fascinating book, which speaks straight to the current preoccupation with globalisation, written by one of our leading academic historians...
Yet, despite this gloomy picture of careless publishers lashing on inexperienced writers, there are signs that something important is about to happen in biography. Jonathan Bate of Warwick University, who wrote a prizewinning life of John Clare, declares that "we are on the edge of a paradigm shift". In fact, he believes that he has already seen the future, in the shape of books such as Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street and Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which come at familiar subjects from odd angles. "Instead of old-style literary biography, which tells the story from cradle to grave, these books focus in on just one episode in a life and, in the process, unfold a far richer story." Bate is also justly excited about Holroyd's upcoming A Strange Eventful History, which, rather than concentrating on a single subject, braids together the lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families in order to tell a broader story about theatre culture on the eve of the modern age.
Pike is also enthusiastic about the mutation of biography into new, hybrid forms. She points to the work of Robert Macfarlane, who recently blended ecological reportage with auto/biography so memorably in Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. She also admires Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, published this year, which cleverly melds family history and crime writing with social and literary history.
To this list I would add, from two years ago, Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards - winner of the Guardian first book award - which, like work by Macfarlane and Summerscale, managed to become both a critical and a popular success. The book is about Stuart Shorter, an alcoholic, homeless man whose life story seemed to demand that it be written backwards in order to catch a proper sense of chaos. Masters, a young first-timer now working on his second book, happily admits to being turned off by the idea of writing what most people understand as biography: "It would never cross my mind to do the life of someone dead or great - it would be completely beyond me." (If that sounds admirably modest, Masters also added, "Anyway, who on earth needs another biography of George Eliot - it's so boring!") Instead, he urges biographers to "get out and write about the people under their noses - the people whose stories may seem mundane, but whose daily existences are actually filled with Homeric struggles".
I'm guessing that Stuart was written with a small advance. In order for biographers to make these kinds of breakthroughs in form, it may mean taking less money than they might like. Certainly Uglow urges writers to stick up for the projects they want to pursue, even if they don't initially seem like money-spinners. Her own recent book, Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, is a masterclass in how these risks can pay off. A biographer with a firmer eye on the market might have passed up the opportunity to write about the artist whose visual renderings of country life went so far towards defining the way the early 19th century saw the natural world. Nonetheless, Bewick ended up as one of the big successes of 2006, mentioned in "book of the year" slots more than any other title.
None of these aforementioned books on its own represents Bate's "paradigm shift", but taken together they do suggest that something significant is astir. Nor should we be complacent that, when the biographical future does arrive, we will necessarily like or even recognise it. The first time I heard about Stuart from Masters's publicist, I thought it sounded glum and dull - a view shared by Masters's then agent, who refused even to take the manuscript out of the Jiffy bag (he was soon replaced). All one can hope, really, is that a small but growing band of writers are financially and intellectually brave enough to strip biography back to its first principle - the recording of lived experience - and consider that brief in the widest possible terms. And even if we don't at first enjoy their efforts, perhaps finding them tricky or strange, at least it means that we will be spared too many more visits from those royal mistresses with their come-hither smiles.
"The death of life writing"
by Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
Published June 28, 2008
Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes
Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. "Sclerosis" might be nearer.
Sales, it's true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it's worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling's Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.
However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch's Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials. Since becoming a biographer 15 years ago - most recently of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot - I have read widely within the genre and with professional attention. I also teach on the MA in life writing at UEA, which aims to give would-be biographers a solid grounding in their chosen art. And I get hundreds of titles sent to me every year for review. I have to say I am struck by their recent falling-off. Of course there are always stand-outs, even in a thin year such as 2007 (Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton and Rosemary Hill's Pugin), and 2008 is shaping up to be better, with new work from Richard Holmes and Michael Holroyd in the autumn. But the general standard, the mean, the middling, seems to have sunk to a listless low.
Let me give you a taste of what I am sent each week. There are endless lives of saucy 18th-century society ladies, even though it is a full 10 years since the surprise hit Georgiana by Amanda Foreman opened up that particular realm. (The worst moment was receiving a biography of Georgiana's sister, Harriet.) There are plenty of royal mistresses, to the extent that one wonders if there is a boudoir somewhere where they sit all day doing their hair, waiting to be called forward for active biographical duty. Lives on the edge of empire are popular too, probably in response to the academy's continuing interest in all things postcolonial. So each week you can be guaranteed stories about people who ran little kingdoms in clammy parts of the globe and/or were worshipped as gods by confused locals.
While there is a respectable rationale for doing these minor lives, grounded in the argument that hidden or forgotten subjects deserve their restorative moment in the sun, the real reason is more pragmatic. The fact is that anyone really important has already been done, probably several times. The 19th and 20th centuries have long been harvested for any royal, writer, actor, painter or soldier whose life and work could conceivably yield 350 pages of serviceable prose. (That's another problem: the misguided belief that writing a biography requires nothing more than journeyman skill when it comes to putting one word in front of another.) For a while, the 18th century appeared fertile, with its combination of ebullient consumerism and unbuttoned sexuality seeming to offer an easy parallel to our own. Now, though, it is all fished out. Go back any further than 1700 and you run into the problem not just of finding the sources, but of making sense of them. People in the early modern period had such different ideas about what it meant to be a self, especially in relation to others, that trying to corral them into the kind of unfolding psychodrama expected by the modern biography reader becomes tricky, unless you're prepared to gloss like crazy.
The least imaginative response to this lack of good new subjects is simply to go back to the big lives and do them over - and over - again. You can justify this by an appeal to the idea that each decade (actually, every four years might be nearer) needs its own Dickens or Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to this convenient way of thinking, dressing up old subjects in new clothes becomes playful and postmodern, rather than just desperate. Yet Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary, London University, whose The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection reached the Samuel Johnson shortlist two years ago, warns against being taken in by this sleight of hand. "What often happens is that a perfectly solid biography from 1978 gets rewritten with an eye to the intellectual moment, without the addition of a single bit of new information." The result: a George Eliot for the New Labour age (I plead guilty), or a queer Queen Victoria for the noughties, or the six wives of Henry VIII refashioned as the post-feminist heroines from Sex and the City.
Why doesn't anyone say or do something about these acts of biographical cannibalism? According to literary agent Andrew Lownie, who runs the Biographers' Club (a networking organisation for practitioners), it's because the power in publishing companies has decisively passed from the commissioning editors to the sales people. "Their thinking is, if something was once a hit, then let's try it again, even though clearly there's a law of diminishing returns. Anything new or different is looked on with suspicion." Lownie's theory is confirmed by the recent experience of one writer I spoke to. Having produced a first biography that punched well above its weight, he has been looking forward to writing his second, this time on a playwright whose work he knows well. His publishers, though, are having none of it and have suggested instead that he try a life of ... Graham Greene. That Norman Sherry's authorised multi-decker Life has sucked every last shred of marrow from Greene's tired old bones seems scarcely to matter.
What makes it doubly strange is that biography as a genre has a tradition of lively experimentation. Consider John Aubrey's Brief Lives, written in the lee of the civil war. If published today, its zany mix of biography and autobiography, gossip and scholarship would be hailed as wonderfully postmodern. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians of 1918 is a fine example of the short, pithy group biographies that are making something of a comeback. These are the fresh, wayward models that I ask my students to consider when they begin their own biographical projects. (Anyone who suggests embarking on a cradle-to-grave narrative of a royal mistress goes to the back of the class.)
In the interests of balance, I should report that it is not only Hamilton who remains bullish about the state of biography. When I asked Claire Tomalin, the biographer of Austen, Pepys and Hardy among others, she could see no reason to worry. Michael Holroyd agrees that "something has definitely changed", though stops short of calling it a crisis. His reading is that popular history and misery memoirs have temporarily knocked biography off its top spot in the non-fiction hierarchy, and that it's probably a question of waiting out the cycle. Michael Prodger, literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph, agrees that the golden age of biography, in which the publication of fat lives of important people by leading writers were automatically given the hushed attention due to a major minor cultural event, has probably passed. But he warns against uncritical nostalgia: "The fact is that there has always been a second division of biography, good enough without being distinguished. These nearly-books are always with us."
The responses of publishers were more upbeat. This could be because they are obliged to sound perky in public, or it may be that being on the receiving end of hundreds of proposals every year gives them a helpfully elevated view. Thus Jenny Uglow, editorial director of Chatto & Windus, herself a distinguished biographer, reports that "interesting ideas are still coming in, although perhaps we're having to look harder for them than we used to". Arabella Pike, meanwhile, who heads up a distinguished biography list at HarperPress, is justly proud of Linda Colley's Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which came out last year. An intellectually bold book, Elizabeth Marsh sets itself the task of plotting "the world in the life" of a humble British woman in the 18th century whose own history happened to collide with that of Britain's emerging empire. It is a fascinating book, which speaks straight to the current preoccupation with globalisation, written by one of our leading academic historians...
Yet, despite this gloomy picture of careless publishers lashing on inexperienced writers, there are signs that something important is about to happen in biography. Jonathan Bate of Warwick University, who wrote a prizewinning life of John Clare, declares that "we are on the edge of a paradigm shift". In fact, he believes that he has already seen the future, in the shape of books such as Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street and Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which come at familiar subjects from odd angles. "Instead of old-style literary biography, which tells the story from cradle to grave, these books focus in on just one episode in a life and, in the process, unfold a far richer story." Bate is also justly excited about Holroyd's upcoming A Strange Eventful History, which, rather than concentrating on a single subject, braids together the lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families in order to tell a broader story about theatre culture on the eve of the modern age.
Pike is also enthusiastic about the mutation of biography into new, hybrid forms. She points to the work of Robert Macfarlane, who recently blended ecological reportage with auto/biography so memorably in Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. She also admires Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, published this year, which cleverly melds family history and crime writing with social and literary history.
To this list I would add, from two years ago, Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards - winner of the Guardian first book award - which, like work by Macfarlane and Summerscale, managed to become both a critical and a popular success. The book is about Stuart Shorter, an alcoholic, homeless man whose life story seemed to demand that it be written backwards in order to catch a proper sense of chaos. Masters, a young first-timer now working on his second book, happily admits to being turned off by the idea of writing what most people understand as biography: "It would never cross my mind to do the life of someone dead or great - it would be completely beyond me." (If that sounds admirably modest, Masters also added, "Anyway, who on earth needs another biography of George Eliot - it's so boring!") Instead, he urges biographers to "get out and write about the people under their noses - the people whose stories may seem mundane, but whose daily existences are actually filled with Homeric struggles".
I'm guessing that Stuart was written with a small advance. In order for biographers to make these kinds of breakthroughs in form, it may mean taking less money than they might like. Certainly Uglow urges writers to stick up for the projects they want to pursue, even if they don't initially seem like money-spinners. Her own recent book, Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, is a masterclass in how these risks can pay off. A biographer with a firmer eye on the market might have passed up the opportunity to write about the artist whose visual renderings of country life went so far towards defining the way the early 19th century saw the natural world. Nonetheless, Bewick ended up as one of the big successes of 2006, mentioned in "book of the year" slots more than any other title.
None of these aforementioned books on its own represents Bate's "paradigm shift", but taken together they do suggest that something significant is astir. Nor should we be complacent that, when the biographical future does arrive, we will necessarily like or even recognise it. The first time I heard about Stuart from Masters's publicist, I thought it sounded glum and dull - a view shared by Masters's then agent, who refused even to take the manuscript out of the Jiffy bag (he was soon replaced). All one can hope, really, is that a small but growing band of writers are financially and intellectually brave enough to strip biography back to its first principle - the recording of lived experience - and consider that brief in the widest possible terms. And even if we don't at first enjoy their efforts, perhaps finding them tricky or strange, at least it means that we will be spared too many more visits from those royal mistresses with their come-hither smiles.
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