Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century British literary critic and the subject of the world’s best-known biography, once said the art of biography is rarely well executed because only those who live with a person “can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination” but that few in such a position “know what to remark about him.”
Johnson more or less hand-picked his biographer by drawing a worshipful James Boswell into his inner circle and encouraging him to record his daily life and utterances for posterity. The two travelled together and were often together for days at a time. Johnson occasionally would remind Boswell that a “panegyrick” – an account of a life containing only virtues and no vices – is not a fitting biography: someone professing “to write a life,” Johnson contended, “must represent it as it really was.”
After diarizing his frequent encounters with Johnson for more than 20 years, Boswell published his monumental Life of Samuel Johnson. It’s still often cited as the best biography ever written, despite the fact that it largely neglects Johnson’s early life and takes a clearly hagiographic attitude toward its subject while not neglecting some of the warts.
The Victorians excelled in highlighting the most heroic, virtuous and Christian aspects of their biographical subjects. But in 1918 Lytton Strachey published Eminent Victorians, in which he knocked a quartet of idols off their pedestals. Ever since, biography has continued to explore the degraded lower depths of human experience, sometimes to alarming degrees. Joyce Carol Oates coined a new word – “pathography” – for biographies excessively concerned with character defects, sins and loathsome deeds. Remember Mommie Dearest? A parallel trend has been evident in autobiography ever since Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821).
Johnson felt that a “judicious and faithful narrative” of almost any person’s life could be useful because every man has “great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use.” He also contended that despite the vast differences in our lives, human beings share a universal aspect that keeps us interested in reading about each other.
Having perused a handful of such books over the winter holidays, it seems to me that many such entries may enjoy their moment in the sun, but few are likely to make a lasting impression.
Paul Shaffer, a Jewish musician from Thunder Bay, Ont., has written a “swingin’ show-biz saga” with We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives. Shaffer lapped up his first applause as a 12-year-old organist in his hometown synagogue and continued to bask in audience appreciation as bandleader for The Late Show with David Letterman (“the gig of gigs,” he calls it). An inveterate name-dropper and storyteller, his star-studded celebrity autobiography presents colourful and entertaining tales about the Saturday Night Live crowd, Phil Spector, Jerry Lewis, Eric Clapton, Cher, Britney Spears, Ringo Starr, and many others ad infinitum.
It’s interesting to compare Shaffer’s book to that of Howie Mandel, another talented Canadian who made it big in the American entertainment industry. Mandel’s book, Here’s the Deal – Don’t Touch Me, tends toward the confessional mode as he expands upon his various fears, anxiety disorders and phobias, again ad infinitum. His reason for becoming a comedian, he explains, was basically to distract himself from more serious concerns: “If I’m making myself laugh, then I’m distracted from all the other things going on in my head that are, at times, tortuous.”
A former resident of the north Toronto neighbourhood of Bathurst Manor, Mandel catapulted to enormous fame on television, which I rarely watch: I think I’ve seen him only once, on an old rerun of St. Elsewhere. But that has not prevented me from enjoying anecdotes from the book, which jump out from almost any page. Here’s the Deal – Don’t Touch Me details Mandel’s rise in show business and provides telling glimpses of celebs met along the way.
As far as celebrities go, I’m far more interested in movie stars from Hollywood’s golden era. Donald Spoto is the famed biographer of a whole sidewalk’s worth of Hollywood stars, including Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, James Dean, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier and Elizabeth Taylor. He’s also crafted worthy books on filmmakers such as Preston Sturges, Stanley Kramer and Alfred Hitchcock. Having enjoyed several of these works, I recently opened the latest Spoto biography – High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly – and was not disappointed.
Provided you appreciate movies such as High Noon, Rear Window, High Society and To Catch A Thief, you’ll find plenty to appreciate in this warmly written bio. It’s brimming with cinematic lore and quotes from James Stewart, Hitchcock, Cary Grant and many others – including, of course, Prince Ranier of Monaco, whose marriage to Kelly essentially marked the end of her cinematic career. The book came out only recently because the princess had requested that Spoto not write her life story until 25 years after her death.
Those of us who lived through the Beatles phenomenon or who simply love Beatle music will likely enjoy John Lennon: The Life. This recent biography by Philip Norman presents an enjoyable compendium of Beatle lore, supposedly including some new, hitherto unpublicized details of his life. The pleasure lies in the revelation of John’s personality and the circumstances under which many of his songs were written.
Often the biography, autobiography or memoir written by a lowly commoner, with no claim to previous celebrity, makes for the best reading of all. I close my brief survey of some current titles with what seems to me the most outstanding title in the lot – Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. Here we have an ordinary person spinning a dramatic family saga that far excels the other books in terms of literary merit.
The Lagnados were among the 900,000 Jews who fled the Arab world. The author vividly re-creates the majesty and glamour of life in Cairo in the years from the end of World War II to Nasser’s rise to power. The family packed their belongings into 26 suitcases and hid their jewels and gold coins in sealed tins of marmalade. With much poverty and hardship, they made their way to Paris and then New York. Lagnado writes beautifully and compellingly of the crimes committed against her father and the high drama of escaping a dangerous regime, no matter the cost. The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit is a memorable autobiographical memoir and a valuable addition to our literature about the Sephardi world.