Maladjusted Reviews: Biographies, Biopics and Jane Campion’s latest film
As promised, this is the new video with which I’d like to launch “Pretty Cool (for an iconodule).
Is it representative of what is to follow? Hopefully not. This one was a real bastard to do (worse than Greek participles). I hope that maybe some of you like…some of it. I know that it’s too long, but then it also exists as principally as an incentive to make all -subsequent- videos much shorter in the name of sparing myself an untimely death.
Love &c.
Mal
Congrats on emerging from social media hibernation and on the lovely new WP blog. As Claire said to you many eons ago, “you are a wordy bugger, aren’t you.” Love the new cultural review. Interesting you chose “Bright Star” because I wrote a lengthy review on that movie last fall. I must be one of the pretentious middle masses you are referring to. I will now resort to using an emoticon as it is the only way to properly express what I am thinking.
Dear Still,
Delightful to hear from you as always.
Especially, as you know, the whole video thing was actually inspired by a discussion that I had with you about podcasting. (Made me buy a microphone, which I still haven’t learned to keep at an appropriate distance from my mouth. Damned plosives: why do they have to cause so much static. Don’t want people to associate me with saliva, no matter how much of it I produce…)
BTW: I haven’t read your review of “Bright Star”: can I find it on “Une Filles Americaine.” Will check now…If not, is it possible that you could send me a link…?
Best wishes,
Mal
Mal, I wonder what you think distinguishes memoir from biography or autobiography? Or is the answer to this in my question?
Your timing with the post of the video could not have been more apt as I have just finished reading Clive James memoir part 1 “Unreliable Memoirs”, and am glad it was written, glad that I read it and wish others would read it as well.
In his preface he seems to echo you, though tries to be a step ahead of possible calls of self importance and selective reporting by saying “This autobiography is a disguised novel.”
Thanks for the posts,I always enjoy them.
Dear Garrick,
Thank you so much for your comment. I’m deliriously happy to have any readers at all, so to hear about one whose visited and kept coming back for more punishment is enough to learn that person an eternal seat at the banqueting tables of my personal Valhalla. (I’ll put in a good word for you with Odin, I promise!)
Anyway. As to your question:
The Clive James example is an excellent one.
I’ve read 4 out of the current 5 “Unreliable Memoirs” and I’ve never regretted a moment of the (minimal) time I’ve spent on them. The first two, in particular are, I think, incontestably brilliant: hilarious, poignant and choc-full of those extraordinary , evocative vignettes that make you feel that you can taste the cigarette smoke in Terence Kilmartin’s office…
Best of all, there are those cracking (dare I say “corsucating”) aphorisms that make his best prose so fist-shakingly enviable.
In the third volume he says that “all he can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.” (Genius, no?)
The U/R books, are, I think, a movingly eloquent testimony to the fact that if this is ‘all he can do’, it is no mean achievement. I also have a particular fondness for “May Week is in June” — a book that hangs together less well than the first two (and which is markedly less funny) but that somehow is still -just- masterful at capturing a certain mood (the older student returning to the Groves of Academe which he thought he’d left behind forever thus delaying the inevitable attempt to make it in ‘the world’ just a little bit longer so that he is graced with a second chance for the wisdom that he’s been resisting for so long, to finally start to sink in.) The book has a wonderful, elegaic tone that, I have to admit, remains somewhere near the forefront of my memory.
If I had to make a call on this, incidentally, I’d be tempted to say that the first three U/R books are James’s best work. It’s true that he has many wonderful essays (the Orwell and Goldhagen one are justly famous, as is the one on Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin — my personal favourite). I also agree, however, with several of his critics (see the latest “London Review of Books” for a good account of this) that James is at his best when he brings his excess of erudition and talent to material that might (deceptively) seem too slight for it.
In contrast, his more self-consciously serious efforts (like “cultural amnesia”) are I think, often, clunky, pompous, heavy and, ironically lacking in the depth o what could appear as his lighter work.
This is odd, not only because it sounds counter-intuitive, but because James has always made it clear that his ambitions have always been to combine a depth of learning and feeling with the lightness of touch that can be found in so many of his heroes (Schnitzler, Moliere, Peter Cook, Goethe and Wittgenstein in aphoristic mode).
Given that he is so good at doing exactly the things that he attests to be his vocation: I don’t know why he would take the detour into (far less successful) things like C.A.
(The guy in the LRB who reviews “The Blaze of Obscurity” says something about how he hopes that James never finishes his infinitely deffered Tolstoyan epic on Australians and Japanese at war, and I can’t help but agreeing with the guy.)
Anyway. What’s different about James’s memoirs that spares them from the denunciations that I make in the video? Well
Well, to begin with, I think that these books have, from the outset, an entirely different intention from the targets of my (doubtless bitchy and hyperbolic) polemic.
To explain, I’ve always thoughts that James’s ever-expanding autobiography is quite self-consciously Proustean in that each of the volumes is motivated, at heart, by the desire to regain lost or, in another sense, ‘ wasted’ time (both senses, incidentally are conveyed in the French ‘temps perdu’.)
So, in the first volume, James, in his own words hasn’t achieved any great things. Like Proust, however, he notices that he can write a great work, not by sitting down and saying ‘so, let’s get on with my masterpiece’ (a tactic which God knows I know only induces procrastination!), but by the attempt to convey in prose a fidelity to experiences that are preserved in memory in such a way that – far from being consigned forever to the oblivion of the past – stretch out a hand from the past to the future to be met by another hand reaching from the present to the past. (Bergson as an Escher drawing.)
All of this is, I think, in the starkest possible contrast to the kind of biographies that turn into biopics (the subject of the video!)
If I had to offer a formula, here I’d suggest that the best biographies (and the best autobiographies) are those that treat their subjects as people who are still living.
A memoir (I’m tempted to keep your distinction) tends to do something even better insofar as it attempts to do justice to complexes of experience and memory which still burn brightly in the mind of the person who writes about them, whether or not this person was the one who originally had the experiences…
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is something that I think autobiographies are likely to do better than biographies (which is not to say that autobiographies can’t be unbelievably stupid, crass and pathetically self-serving in the way that they so often are).
However, at the very least, I think an autobiography will usually avoid the anti-hagiographer’s tendency of prodding a corpse and then calling the person it once was a coward for not rising from the table and fighting back.
Bad biography dissects, good biography is a practice of fidelity to something that, we fear might disappear forever if it is not articulated as powerfully or as honestly as we can.
Does any of that make sense?
Best,
Mal.