In the past couple of months I have read a few different biographies and generally found them a little disappointing, though pinpointing the reasons for this hasn’t been all that easy, nor has deciding completely what differentiates the better ones. The one I am reading now is about one of the bandsmen on the Titanic and it is irritating in its structure mostly, darting all over the place. The first chapter for instance begins with some speculation about how the subject, the author’s grandfather, and the others might have felt as they played on; it then says, "we must pause for a moment to understand what will now happen to them in the last minutes of their lives" and talks about the effects of severely cold water on people. Three pages of that and then a paragraph of the contrast between Jock Hume (the subject) and J.J. Astor. And after that he hops away to Dumfries and the family of Jock and his fiancée expecting his baby and Jock leaving her again. Next couple of pages are a mishmash of Astor and Jock with no seeming linkage. Then the last paragraph talks of the three bandsmen found together in the sea. It’s not difficult reading at all but it’s all over the place.

I read another Titanic book recently (I have three books about the Titanic in the last few months and I’m not even particularly interested in the Titanic – I’ve never seen the movie(s). It went through the people on the ship and was quite well written but was really a series of mini-biographies and by the time you’ve read little stories of fifty or more people you’ve forgotten them so when the next of the journey arrives you have to reacquaint yourself with them. One on cricket suicides I read was similar in that it was a series of little tales of men who had played cricket and committed suicide. Individually they were quite interesting, but again it was hard to keep any in mind, unlike the story of a single cricket suicide I read once, of maverick bowler Australian Jack Iverson.

Other biographies I have read have irritated me for their author’s attempts to pigeon-hole their subject. I gave up on the Agatha Christie one I read by Laura Thompson; she used the novels to explain Agatha Christie’s psychological state and fitted everything into her own theories. I see a review which explains well what I objected to in this book: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/270278935

Other biographies commit a similar folly, or they foist their 21[sup]st century views onto their subject, as happened in the one I read on Sir Truby King. Some of these also tend to look on the past with a somewhat patronising or superior eye, which annoys me too. It seems very hard for people not to assume they know much better than people in earlier times, or that the mores of the past are somehow best to be fondly and gently mocked.

So I’ve been wondering what makes a good biography and find that the ones I have enjoyed most in recent years at least have been more on subjects than on individual people – The Rose by Jennifer Potter was brilliant; helped by being a beautifully produced book, the author had researched and written about the history, literature, mythology, associations, geography, breeding lines, etc of the rose in various countries, mostly from Europe and South-East Asia, but also America. Juliet Barker’s book on Agincourt seems to me as good as it could get, and books like Mauve, a couple on the black death, Simon Winchester’s biographies/histories that start with a definite subject, various ones on settlers travelling to New Zealand, seem to me more objective and clearer in their writing. Can you call these biographies? You can’t call fiction biographies, can you? Not even fiction like Hilary Mantel’s, or Sharon Penman’s or Jean Plaidy who write about real people. And certainly not authors like CJ Sansom, or Bernard Cornwell, or Patrick O’Brian whose main characters are fictional. And yet some of them seem to get the feel of the times and the people in them better than non-fiction writers.

What do you think? What biographers/biographies have you most admired and what qualities made them good?

Hi Caro, I am just about to start on an autobiography about Andre Agassi called "Open" he was here for a day or so last month signing books etc. the book is recomended so here's hoping.

What an interesting topic.

I've just got David Loades's "The Cecils" - but it's more a *study* than a biography. Modern historians often don't bring their subjects alive which I find frustrating - they can't, I suppose, historians having to be sensible and clinical. MacCulloch's "Cranmer" and Brigden's recent biography of Thomas Wyatt left me wanting more somehow - but that's just me - the brilliance of these two scholars cannot be denied.

One of the best biographies I have ever read is Roberrt Gore-Browne's "Lord Bothwell" - you can smell the heather when you read that one.

Who wrote the first biographies - was it old Plutarch?

In great haste - back later.

What makes a good biography?

A good subject and a good writer. The subject can be interesting by virtue of their own life and personality, or be made interesting through being represented as such by an author who knows how best to go about that feat. A good writer of a biography is one who lets the subject's own actions and words speak loudest, and intervenes in the narrative only to aid comprehension. Deductions and summaries on the author's part are fine if they serve a useful purpose, but should never contradict those deductions the reader may already have made based on the text presented.

One thing I have noticed is that there are very few writers who I would call "good biographers" in the sense that having produced one good biography they can then necessarily be depended upon to write another. There are however "good writers" who will produce enjoyable books in different genres, including biography. But they often only have executed a biography because the subject held a particular interest for them and unfortunately rarely produce another.

Some writers make a living solely from doing "historical biographies" and since history itself is part of their and their readers' fascinations can produce enjoyable and informative books on a repeated basis, at least for their target readership. But even amongst these (and I do have some favourites) the variance in quality between an author's book and their next one can still be considerable.

There is no one biography that I would nominate as better than anything else I've read, though I'll credit Antonia Fraser for dragging me, on more than one occasion, through a dead notable's particulars for whom otherwise I might never have given a damn. Others have done the same, but she wins for most repeated effort!

I'm just thinking about *historical* biography at the moment, and I should like to add something to my rather rushed message above.

Are historians - however brilliant - sometimes actually handicapped by their training when they try to write biography? Nordmann tells us:

Quote :

A good writer of a biography is one who lets the subject's own actions and words speak loudest, and intervenes in the narrative only to aid comprehension. Deductions and summaries on the author's part are fine if they serve a useful purpose, but should never contradict those deductions the reader may already have made based on the text presented.

That is certainly true of the writer of fiction ("show, don't tell"), but I am not so sure that it is always true of the biographer. I rather like it when a thoughtful writer intervenes in a biography, offering possible psychological explanations and even making witty or irreverent comments about his or her subject. And contradictions to my deductions I usually find stimulating and challenging (but perhaps I've misunderstood the point there).

But I suppose such things are best avoided in a historical biography, as in a good history text-book, certainly nowadays. And to be obviously emotionally involved with one's subject - that, surely, is to be avoided at all costs, even if the resulting work becomes, though scholarly and worthy, rather dry and dull. Passion, after all, is a dirty word in history; to be passionate exposes the historian, or writer of historical biography, to mockery, even contempt.

One of the best biographies I have ever read, and one which sparked a passionate (I'm not afraid of that word) response and interest in me, is Paul Murray Kendall's "Richard III". It is a splendid, vivid, exuberant work, but, mention it in the company of proper historians and you will see - despite the acknowledged scholarship of the author - lips curling and horrified looks being exchanged. The writing is simply too vivid, too exciting, too biased to be good history. Does that also make it bad biography? The cruellest criticism of Murray Kendall I came across suggested that the good professor (Regents Professor of English at Ohio University and later Visiting Professor of English at the University of Kansas) possibly had regular fantasies about the dead Plantagenet: PMK's description of the fateful day at Bosworth was so good that one could only presume that he had often imagined himself actually present at the famous battle, wielding a broadsword and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with his beloved king, all the while shouting scornful abuse at the treacherous forces of Stanley and Northumberland.

And what of this from a biography of Elizabeth I - a comment on Elizabeth Tudor and Edward Courtenay: "The 'old stock' of English kings, tall and fair and perfectly moulded as a curled Norman knight on his tombstone, coupled with the red-gold, the quick-changing white and red of the new Celtic blood that had leaped to power and transformed English sovereignty - yes, they might indeed have been made for each other, to rule England together - 'if only,' sighed the cold old strain of Visconti blood that twined like a serpent deep within her, 'if only he were not such a fool'."

I think that's good writing, but is it good history? That comment about Visconti blood, by the way, was pinched from Lytton Strachey's "Elizabeth and Essex", another superb but possibly too dramatic (for our times) piece of writing. But I like Strachey: his "Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, inaugurated a new style of biography distinguished by irony, wit, irreverence and elegance of language, all of which I must say I thoroughly approve.

Antonia Fraser - drat the woman - she is brilliant. She does it all. Despite reading history at Oxford, the woman can still write like an inspired novelist (but without getting too carried away). The historian's ability to examine the past with a calm, dispassionate eye, but with the writer's gift for bringing it - and the people - alive: a rare combination, but it does happen.

PS Another favourite biography of mine is not of a person, but of a city. Peter Ackroyd's "London: The Biography" had me enthralled. I spent hours wandering around the capital a couple of years ago, Ackroyd in one hand, Oyster card in the other. He was a bit heavy to carry, but worth the effort.

Quote :

And contradictions to my deductions I usually find stimulating and challenging (but perhaps I've misunderstood the point there).

It was I who made the point badly, I fear. If, after completing a book - biography or otherwise - in which one has been offered several insights and deductions on the part of the author and nearly all of which contradict those you formed yourself from the author's own material, then something has gone wrong. An odd clash of views with an author is good - it indicates in fact a sort of intellectual dialogue between the reader and the text - but a book full of them normally means material badly presented and points badly made (like mine above).

I mean to say that the ones I have recently that haven't impressed me much seem to have written by journalists rather than historians. The Truby King one was the author's first book and I didn't get the impression he had written much else. There was an amateur tone to his introduction and the style.

I found modern American biographers have a more informal style which took me a while to get used to, but didn't devalue their research and writing. It was just a bit more chatty and casual than English historians/biographers.

I read somewhere during the recent biography I was reading, supposedly about the young violin player on the band of the Titanic but more about his father and his girlfriend, that the author (Christopher Ward) has was editor (deputy editor maybe?) of the Daily Express when Princess Diana was killed. I know the Daily Mail and the Sun and the Mirror and the more reputable papers, but I don't know the Express, so am uncertain about its style, but I feel that might be what I was uncomfortable with. There was a sort of sentimentality about the story, and almost sort of advocacy journalism. The best part, really, was the end where he talked about what had happened to his mother and others over the years. So much of the rest had him saying how people felt - how could he had known whether someone taking bad news to a family was readlly enjoying the drama when she was in tears at the door, for instance? Or what his great-grandfather was thinking at any point in time? There's no suggestion of letters or diaries from them.

Anyway soon I am going to be reading a different and infinitely superior sort of memoir/biography - Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Caro, I doubt he did know if someone was enjoying the drama but my thought on this is that people are excited by the novelty of drama - passing on bad news is a somewhat dubious excuse to communicate. We recently had several phone calls from relatives who rarely make contact to pass on a bit of alarming family news and though not exactly enjoying the moment but at the same time, I suspect savouring the jolt of excitement. So in a way perhaps the man you mention assumed this aspect of carrying news which I suspect is common..... the Express is somewhat like the Mail but lacking in circulation income to be as expansive in over dramatised content.

I'm reading Donald Spoto's biography of Tennessee Williams, The Kindness of Strangers, at the moment. It is a brilliant biography. Here's from the blurb:

""In this complete critical biography, Donald Spoto details the playwrights's family and background, including the events surrounding the lobotomy of his sister, Rose, a tragedy that inspired his play Suddenly Last Summer, the patterns and pressures of his sometimes savagely promiscuous homosexuality and his relationships with some of the great actors of our time, including Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Barbara Bel Geddes and Eli Wallach. It is the story of the cult of celebrity, of a man desperately seeking to be loved, the story of the creation of many of the greatest plays of the century."

It's blown me away, as they say.

Links to the madness thread. Tennessee Williams was bipolar, an alcoholic, a drug addict and hopelessly promiscuous. He was also a genius.

I have finally started reading Wolf Hall, not a biography but next best thing to, perhaps. I was anticipating a difficult read but it's not at all. The bit about Cromwell referring to himself as 'he' and 'him' doesn't bother me at all, though on one or two occasions I have thought it referred to the subject of a previous sentence and have had to rejiggle my thoughts. And the present continuous tense is fine by me.

I was worried about how often I would have to renew it from the library but at our book club the other day someone said they had been given it and didn't like or get into it, and I could have it. So I said I would bring it back and she said, "Na. Keep it." So at least I won't have to rush - good job since after about 5 days I have finished the first part of about 40 pages. I do need to feel like concentrating when I read it and I am pleased she put in the characters and where they fit at the start. I have some knowledge of the period but not a lot, and I would prefer it if every notable person hadn't been called Thomas. I have enjoyed reading the ordinary family life.

You can't dispute any of the "facts" in Wolf Hall, but Mantel's sympathetic portrait of Cromwell is so different from that offered by Robert Hutchinson. His Cromwell is a Stalinist thug (from the cover - "Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister").

Possibly the best - fairest? - biography of the man is John Schofield's (from the cover - "Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant").

But who is to say?

Hope you enjoy the book, Caro; I envy you that you have it still to read. Actually I gobbled it down so greedily that I'm sure I missed a lot. Must read it again - and Bring Up the Bodies.

The sympathetic portrayal won't bother me - it will be a bit of an antidote to his portrayal in CJ Sansom's books (not that they are completely the other way but Dissolution did portray him as ruthless and determined.

I tend to accept first person narratives (which despite the 'he' this is really) at face value and like the character, because people like themselves, or at least excuse themselves. (The main exception to this has been Humbert is Lolita who I couldn't stand, and thus Lolita remains with its bookmark at page 60. It's not the obsession with a young girl that I dislike - I am fairly tolerant of human frailty - but his views of other women are so obnoxious and there doesn't seem to be any redeeming features to him, and anyway it's very much a one-focus novel, which I never like much.)

I was listening the other day to some ex-policeman or fraud squad person or similar and he was talking of crimes of fraud mainly and said in fifty years he had never met anyone who thought they'd done wrong. And that seems to me how people are - they don't do things they can't justify to themselves. They see their actions as natural or pre-emptive or necessary for their family or what every does, or unavoidable in the circumstances. (Probably different for accidents or crimes of passion or spur of the moment.) So I don't see any difficulty with a view of Cromwell by himself as sympathetic and basically caring. But I haven't got very far yet. Wolsey is just being dismissed and Mantel manages to make that seem very sad.

I don't gobble any books down greedily unfortunately - the last 50 pages of a crime novel or romance perhaps, but not a serious novel. And I will intersperse this others (already am with one of Andrew Martin's Jim Stringer series books (railway detective of the early 20th C).

Best description of Cromwell (Thomas) that I've come across is from dear old David Starkey. DS describes Mantel's hero as "Alastair Campbell with an axe".

I will put that image out of my head - can't stand Alastair Campbell. But it was what I saw as his sliminess I didn't like, and the constant spinning, and taking people to an unnecessary war.

I am getting on well with Wolf Hall - have no real desire to intersperse it with my crime novel which consequently is not advancing well. But I am going to have to start my book club memoir which looks quite long and detailed, so will soon have to put WH aside. Off to Dunedin tomorrow (110km, about 70mile, trip), so should get a reasonable amount read on the trip up - dark on the way home and I am likely to be driving then anyway.

Yesterday, Temperance, I was at a hospital in Dunedin with Wolf Hall sticking out of my purse, and the specialist mentioned it and asked how I was liking it. I said I liked it a lot but it was rather long. He said the second one Bring Up the Bodies is the same. That was the end of that conversation which was a pity but we were there for my husband's arthritis appointment, not for a book discussion group. Wolf Hall is not the perfect book for popping in the handbag and sitting at a cafe reading though. But it's lovely for curling up in bed with the electric blanket on and the frost coming down.

This is an interesting article, Caro, although for me Thomas Cromwell is just one of the captains - the most ruthless and intelligent of them of course - with whom Henry VIII surrounded himself. It's Henry VIII himself who is Tony Soprano! The similarities are amazing - even to the inexplicable "charm" of both men. How come one ends up liking - even feeling sorry for? - these two brutal, murdering thugs who treat women like sh*t? Yet one does - well, sort of.

EDIT: Forgot the link:


http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/bring-up-the-bodies-henry-viii-meets-tony-soprano

PS "Charm" may seem a strange word to use about Henry VIII, but it was noted in his own day - even when he had turned into a bloated monster. And the women in his life continued to love him - even Catherine of Aragon whom he had used so cruelly. Her final words to Henry (in her last letter) were: "Lastly I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things."

Giles Tremlett, in his biography of Catherine, suggests that this final letter, supposedly dictated as Catherine lay dying, was "fictitious", but even he concedes "it is not unreasonable, however, to imagine the words reflect something of Catherine's state of mind".

Charm is a very elusive and indefinable quality, isn't it? I don't doubt Henry had charm, certainly as a young man. I am not so sure Katherine Parr found him so charming but I am going by novels etc not her own writing or even contemporary writings much. But I suppose those elements that make up charm are still around even the body has let you down.

My neighbour has just married for the third time. He is nearly 60, balding, fat, not in the greatest of health, and yet he has had endless fiancees and girlfriends, and I have no difficulty understanding why. There is just something attractive about his personality and manner, a twinkle in his eye, a sense of fun, definitely charm.

I read that piece (thanks for it, Temperance) a little vaguely, not wanting spoilers to tell me too much, but of course the events are known. (Though I didn't know Cromwell's personal history and have found that gives him a very definite human feel, especially when he is crying over their deaths and tells his protege lies or half-truths about it being because he is uncertain of his political future.)

(I would find it very hard to desire someone whose body must have spelt the way Henry's must have.)

An odd bit of reading happened to me the other day. I was reading a memoir of an American artist whose mother had bad schizophrenia (or at least untreated or badly treated schizophrenia). She wrote about Simonides bringing to mind where people were sitting after they had been killed by a collapsing building. Now it's possible I have read about Simonides and his memory style before this, but if so I don't remember. However when I was reading this, I thought she had mentioned it earlier, and couldn't understand why she had repeated it all more or less verbatim (though the book was rather repetitive in style - our bookclub all got bored with it after a while). I looked back and couldn't find it, and then realised it must have been in Wolf Hall that I had been reading as well. And there it was when I went back hunting for it yesterday!

I found that really weird. I am now about a third of the way through Wolf Hall, where Wolsey is being resettled up north.