Category Archives: book review

Summoning the spirit of Alfred Deakin: Judith Brett’s The Enigmatic Mr Deakin

21 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in book review, political biography, politics and current affairs

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Like many biographers, I have a list of possible future subjects. One of my ten names has been Australia’s second prime-minister, Alfred Deakin (1856-1919). While researching his interactions with Katharine Susannah Prichard, I found him a fascinating character. I was surprised that the only comprehensive biography appeared fifty years ago. But I’ve removed Deakin from my list because Judith Brett has written a superb account of his life in The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, out this month.

Brett begins her biography with a comparison to a more famous Victorian born two years earlier, Ned Kelly:

Deakin is remembered too, but not so vividly, more as a bearded worthy than a national icon. He was Australia’s most important prime minister in its first ten years after federation, but he sits uneasily as a representative Australian figure. He is too intellectual, too respectable, for the larrikin masculinity of the Australian legend… Deakin was never a mate. He didn’t swear and rarely drank. He didn’t play organised sport nor fight in the Great War…. In short, he was middle-class, well-educated, urbane and supremely self-confident, like the city and the colony in which he grew to manhood. (3)

Australia needs more heroes like this, and Brett lays out a strong case for his significance and his achievements, while always alert to the ambivalence which marks him and his legacy. Continue reading →

Thornton McCamish’s Our Man Elsewhere

24 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by in biographical quests, biographies, book review

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For the second year, I’m working on an annual bibliography and introduction to Australian literature with my supervisor and another co-author for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. My focus is on non-fiction. I was surprised to find that in 2016 there were just five Australian literary biographies published, at least by our reckoning. Three of them came from UWA Publishing; the other two were both about mid-century middlebrow writers – Paul Brickhill (The Great Escape) and Alan Moorehead. The reviews for the biography of Moorehead (1910-1983) – Thornton McCamish’s Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead (Black Inc) – were so glowing about the writing itself that I just had to read it, despite barely having heard of Moorehead.

It truly is an excellent biography. It is a biographical quest as McCamish begins by describing the fever of obsession with Moorehead that came over him and asks why Australia’s most famous writer in the US and Britain in the 1960s has been so forgotten fifty years later. Some of the finest reflections on biography occur within biographical quests and McCamish’s were delightful. His account of looking through Moorehead’s papers at the National Library of Australia described my own experiences there so perfectly. In another scene, he captures so well the sense of the past, the thrill, the anxiety, and the prosaic elements of trying to find Moorehead’s house while on holiday in Italy with his wife and small children. Some quotes:

There isn’t much logic to the in-the-footsteps method. My idea was that if I followed the thread linking Moorehead’s words to the places where he wrote them, I might, with some intuitive effort, some narrowing of the eyes, get a fuller imaginative sense of what his world felt like. (124)

It was unsettling to meet the nieces. Years of document-sifting and note-taking hadn’t prepared me for the warmth of living memory. (148)

The photo of Moorehead with Churchill posed a question, one that is implicit in any book about a writer, but which I have managed to ignore till now. Was the life more interesting than the work? Or more specifically: had the life aged better than the books had? (202)

My Moorehead was constructed from the printed word, mostly, and my own preoccupations. But the actual man existed most truly in what people could remember of him; in what remained in fragile containers of memory. (206)

The focus, though, is on Moorehead’s life itself more than McCamish’s quest. McCamish describes the World War Two years in the most detail, the time when Moorehead turned his war journalism into a bestselling trilogy that made his name as a writer. He had a full, exciting life in the decades which followed, and yet McCamish captures so well an ennui always lurking in the background. It is a relatively short biography for an entire life at 351 pages, and the elements not pursued at length are his family and romantic lives. Moorehead’s wife, Lucy, is glimpsed as a fascinating character in her own right – crucial to his success – and we are only given limited insight into her feelings about his constant infidelity and long absences. With their children still alive, it would have been an area McCamish had to tread carefully.

This is a biography which gives a vivid sense of life and culture in the mid-twentieth century. It reflects in an indirect but profound way on what makes life meaningful and how the past is present – or not – today. It didn’t leave me with a strong desire to read Moorehead’s work but it did leave me with a strong desire to read whatever book McCamish writes next.

Capote by Gerald Clarke

27 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in biographies of writers, artists & musicians, book review

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I knew Truman Capote (1924-1984) was a shallow, miserable man, so why did I read his biography? It’s not that I think you should only read the biographies of the virtuous, but I do have an aversion to people who idolise celebrity and lack depth, which would put Capote high on the list of those to avoid. Yet Clarke’s 1988 book is a landmark biography and (speaking of shallow) it was on special on Kindle.

It took Clarke thirteen years to write and it deserves its reputation. It reads so smoothly, so effortlessly in a way which only a great biographer can achieve and only then with much sweat. It follows Capote from his troubled childhood in Alabama and the wounds his selfish parents inflicted on him to his emergence as a literary wunderkind in New York and the successes of his early and mid-career to the tragic descent into writer’s block, alcoholism, and exile from the circles of the wealthy and celebrities he had moved in. It’s a tragedy and it’s told with a restraint, clarity, and insight which make it compelling. Only in the 2010 afterword does Clarke reveals his friendship with Capote during those longs years of decline, something which explains his sympathetic treatment of Capote and credulity toward his stories, even if there’s moments in the narrative where Clarke suggests Capote is making things up.

It’s also a biography built on interviews. Not unsurprisingly, it seems to me that biographers often divide by background – journalists (like Clarke) tend to write biographies about the living or recently dead built on interviews, while historians will tend to write biographies of those longer dead built on archival research. I am a little suspicious of dependency on interviews; I think they still need to be backed by solid archival research. (And in this case, Clarke has definitely done solid archival research as well.) For my own biography, I would like to have a historian’s respect for the archives and a journalist’s hunger for a great story.

Melinda Tognini’s Many Hearts, One Voice: The Story of the War Widows’ Guild in Western Australia

23 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by in book review, history, Western Australia

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Melinda Tognini is one of the most generous writers I know – always looking to encourage other writers, to tell other people’s stories, and to begin conversations on her blog. I was thrilled that her book,  Many Hearts, One Voice: The Story of the War Widows’ Guild in Western Australia was finally published in 2015 by Fremantle Press, and embarrassed I am only reviewing it now.

The War Widows’ Guild began after World War Two as women whose husbands had been killed banded together for support and to advocate for recognition and benefits. The surprise for me reading Many Hearts is how hard these women had to fight for those things; I had wrongly assumed the Australian government would have been generous to them without any pressure. Instead, it is only through advocacy – by turns patient and noisy – that they have gained the support they now have. The book weaves the history of the organisation with the life stories of the women who have been a part of it. It places this in a wider historical context, things like the effects on the organisation of shifts in gender roles and society’s values, and new wars from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan.

Reading the book as a pacifist, it serves as a picture of the long shadow war casts over lives, the “many hearts” broken. While I doubt many of the widows share my pacifism, they are more aware than anyone of the cost of war. I was also struck by the significance of ritual for war widows. One of their continuing fights has been for recognition in ceremonies remembering the war dead, especially the opportunity to lay wreaths during these events. It speaks to the way in which, in a largely secular country, remembrance and the Anzac legend function as a civil religion. In such a system, it’s only right that war widows have a place of honour.

I’ve edited several organisational histories, which makes me appreciate even more Melinda’s achievement in Many Hearts. Organisations will tend to require detail (the names of many key players and often repetitive events); encourage cosiness or self-congratulatory anecdotes / memories; and discourage the writer from playing up drama and scandal. Melinda negotiates all these challenges very well within the conventions of the genre to create an engaging narrative. In every respect, it is so well-balanced. Balanced in its mix of the personal, the organisational, and the big picture; balanced in its use of oral history, archival documents, and newspaper reports; and balanced between respectfulness and truthfulness.

The book has been well published by Fremantle Press. Along with many photographs, I appreciate the reproduction of a number of key documents. It brings the reader into the history-writing process, allows them to glimpse the sources.

Many Hearts comes at the right time, when the origins of the organisation are still just within living memory. It is able to preserve the voices and experiences of women which otherwise would have been lost. At a talk Melinda gave at the War Widows’ headquarters, I had a sense of the excitement of the members that their story has been told.

Old Growth by John Kinsella

03 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in book review, Western Australia

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John Kinsella Old Growth 254pp Transit Lounge, 2017. Review copy supplied by publisher.

John Kinsella’s new short story collection, Old Growth, is a wondrously Western Australian book, centred on the wheatbelt with regular trips to Fremantle, the suburbs around Bicton on the south of the river, and up to Geraldton. Yet its pleasures are not just in its sense of place, but its capturing of so many different ordinary lives lived in these places. Continue reading →

2016: My year’s reading in biography

31 Saturday Dec 2016

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Like many readers who are also writers and/or PhD candidates, my reading is driven by several imperatives. There’s things directly useful to the research, but they often don’t get read cover-to-cover. (“One of the joys,” writes Yvonne on Stumbling Through the Past, “after I finished my history degree was reading a book from cover to cover.”) There’s interesting books with some connection to my research, which make me feel I’m being slightly productive to read in my spare time. (And given I’m trying to master the art of biography, any accomplished biography could fit this category.) There’s books by friends and colleagues which I want to read after knowing them in person and seeing some of their creative or scholarly journey – and to encourage them! And then there’s books for fun. There’s actually a lot of overlap between the second, third, and fourth categories.

I was still in the midst of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1997) when I summed up last year’s reading in biography. Lists are rather arbitrary; I had it at number three, but after finishing it in January and reflecting on it all year, I think it’s probably the best biography I’ve ever read.

I didn’t review Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, edited by Michael Bostridge, but it was the most enjoyable book I read this year. The volume was released to celebrate the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography but that project is not a focus of the book. The thirty-three short tales reveal funny / sad / poignant / fascinating anecdotes about writing biography as well as reflections on the art and nature of the genre. Almost all the great British biographers are included, including two of my heroes, Claire Tomalin and Hermione Lee. Two contributions impressed me so much I looked up their biographies and both made it near the top of my favourites list for the year: Kate Summerscale and Frances Watson.

Somehow I didn’t review either of the two of Kate Summerscale’s books I read, even though I loved them. Both The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace are gripping narratives which combine biography, true crime, and cultural history into absorbing pictures of the Victorian era. In Mr Whicher, Summerscale tells the story of the original, quintessential detective and the most famous case of the age – the murder at Road Hill House. In Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace extraordinary extracts from an upper-class woman’s diary in the 1850s are preserved in trial records and form the core of a sad and vivid story of the hopes, angst and misery of a woman trapped in an unloving marriage. The breadth of both books is incredible; Summerscale gives the wider context of shifts in society and worldview. She shows a whole age better than a comprehensive history. And she does this with the narrative skill of good fiction. I still need to read That Wicked Boy, the book she actually published this year. She will be at the Perth Writers’ Festival in early 2017!

I reviewed three significant literary biographies from UWA Publishing this year.  Sylvia Martin’s Ink in Her Veins is the pick of them for me, a great biography uncovering the life of Aileen Palmer, who lived an obscure life paradoxically near the centre of Australian literature. (Bill of The Australian Legend picked it as his book of the year.) Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow is a landmark volume, comprehensive and significant for literary scholarship. Georgina Arnott’s The Unknown Judith Wright is a well-argued revision of Wright’s early life. Another important Australian literary biography I reviewed is Philip Butterss’s  An Unsentimental Bloke.

I read less fiction than ever this year (it used to be the main thing I read!), but one book stood out – Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (USA, 2010). I wrote on my general blog: “the novel gives a sense of the poignancy of all the remembered (and forgotten) people and events in any one’s life. It’s a novel which expands our appreciation of life, going beyond initial viewpoint characters and their present to reveal the past and future and inner lives of other characters.”

  1. Victoria / Julia Baird (Australia, 2016)
  2. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace (2012) / Kate Summerscale (UK)
  3. How to Survive the Titanic or The Sinking of Bruce Ismay / Frances Watson (UK, 2011)
  4. Ink in her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer / Sylvia Martin (Australia, 2016)
  5. Toyo: A Memoir / Lily Chan (Australia, 2012)
  6. Lives for Sale / edited by Michael Bostridge (UK, 2004)
  7. Dark Night: Walking with McCahon / Martin Edmond (NZ, 2011)
  8. Births, Deaths, Marriages: True Tales / Georgia Blain (Australia, 2008)
  9. The Complete Maus / Art Spiegelmann (USA, 1991)

Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird

24 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in book review, historical biographies

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We all have our notions of Queen Victoria, even as the Victorian age recedes further into the past. It’s an obscure song from Leonard Cohen which I’ve long associated with her:

Queen Victoria,
My father and all his tobacco loved you,
I love you too in all your forms,
The slim and lovely virgin floating among German beer,
The mean governess of the huge pink maps,
The solitary mourner of a prince.

Cohen was right: there are many Victorias, public and private, old and young. Few have lived a more documented or contested life, making her a formidable biographical subject. It didn’t stop ABC journalist Julia Baird taking on the challenge and after eight years of work, her Victoria: The Queen was published in November.

Victoria is a superb biography, the kind I aspire toward, compulsively readable and intelligent. The combination of journalist and historian – Baird has a PhD in the discipline –  is an ideal one for a biographer. She writes vividly, precisely, and wisely as she narrates the development of Victoria through life stages and how she became the different Victorias, some mythical, some misunderstandings, some true but in need of nuance. One of the surprises for me, for example, was to discover that Victoria began life as a Whig, opposed to the Tories; it was fascinating to see her political transformation as the politics of Britain changed over the century and she finished her life as the more expected ardent Tory, close to Disraeli and hating Gladstone. The “mean governess” is only part of the story, and a fun-loving, opinionated, passionate woman emerges in the biography. Some cautious biographers avoid interpretation let alone judgement; others are far too confident and dogmatic in their judgements. Baird is a courageous and wise interpreter of her subjects. “Victoria’s passionate fits came and went, but Albert’s anger was white, cold, and enduring. He was willing to inflict pain on his wife.” She captures the complexity of Victoria’s character, her goodness and her faults in an evenhanded way.

The biography is structurally accomplished in its combination of the chronological and thematic. Each chapter takes us forward a little in the span of Victoria’s long life, but has its own mini-narrative ranging over the span of a particular incident, theme, or relationship. It’s one of the difficult and essential things to get right in biographies; biographies which are too strictly chronological tend to fall apart as narratives, constantly broken up with the next development in the myriad of “subplots” that are developing in any subject’s life at any time.

Most chapters begin with a scene, a fraught process in biography as there is rarely enough sensory detail to build up a scene purely out of historically verifiable material. Thus in chapter 11, Victoria’s wedding, Victoria is lying in bed before the wedding. “She closed her eyes and thought of the preparations humming across the city.” The preparations she imagines are all historically sourced, although in this case the device feels a little clumsy to me. However, it’s probably more a question of what the reader finds permissible in biography than anything else. Some other scenes work perfectly and it’s part of the biography’s appeal that Baird has used the approach.

I am in admiration of Baird’s grasp of nineteenth century British (and wider) history. To read the biography is to be given an accessible primer in the period, as Victoria was involved in everything from the social upheaval resulting from industrialisation to the Crimean War to the emergence of a unified Germany. Baird shows great skill in narrating complex historical events in a way which is gripping but not simple.

The amount of research involved in any biography is immense, but this book must have involved more than most. The volume of primary and secondary material is huge. Despite redactions, burnings, and the losses of time, many of Victoria’s letters and diaries remain, and that is only the first layer of material. The biographer has to be on top of it all and then have the instincts for what is important and how their reconfigurations and reinterpretations will add something new. One of Baird’s great discoveries – found in a doctor’s diary – is an account of Victoria and her confidante, John Brown, peeking under each other’s clothes. The temptation is to trumpet the revelation, but Baird avoids this completely, narrating her breakthrough material in a straightforward way and letting it speak for itself. I admire that, and would have allowed her considerable more trumpeting.

I really enjoy Julia Baird’s hosting of  ABC TV’s the Drum, where she brings out the best from her guests and steers the conversation well. (I’ve often wondered at her politics, given she comes from Liberal Party royalty but doesn’t seem conservative in outlook; turns out her Twitter profile tells all, at least for those better-read than I was: she is a “Mugwump.”) It was interesting to hear her on Philip Adams’ Late Night Live in the guest chair, speaking passionately and articulately about her subject, showing a different side of her character. She spoke then of the challenge of accessing the royal archives and how it was only the intervention of the former governor-general which secured her access. But her obstacles were even greater than that: she wrote movingly last year about living in the shadow of death after a cancer diagnosis, only to come through. I hope she continues to write for the New York Times and host the Drum, but most of all I hope she continues as a biographer.

 

The Choir of Gravediggers by Mel Hall

17 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in book review, fiction, history

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Any novel under 70,000 words tends to get called a novella, which I think is a misnomer. The true novella – say, 15,000 to 40,000 words – is a rare beast; publishers won’t tend to touch it, despite the fact it has the reading time roughly equivalent to watching a film. Kudos, then, to Ginninderra Press, an independent Adelaide-based publisher, who have published a true novella in The Choir of Gravediggers, 48 pages long, by my friend, the Western Australian Mel Hall.

The Choir of Gravediggers has a frame narrative – a kind of biographical quest – as the narrator looks through the documents and photos that remain of her flamboyant father, Charles Truelove, who ran the St Kilda Cemetery and a choir at the turn of the twentieth century before being plagued by scandals and disappearing. Choir has a zany, engaging narrative voice, by turns poetic, inquisitive, elegiac. Mel’s historical research is worn lightly, making the narrative sparkle with authentic detail as she evokes historical Melbourne. Choir compresses a big story into a small book. This reader would always rather a book which leaves too soon than one which stays too long, though it might be that this is one narrative suited to a 300 page novel. (As a defender of the novella form, I do hate to say this!) An afterword reveals the strong historical basis for the work – Charles Truelove was a historical figure; indeed, he was Mel’s great-great grandfather.

 

The Unknown Judith Wright

21 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in biographies of writers, artists and musicians, book review

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Georgina Arnott The Unknown Judith Wright (UWAP, September 2016) Review copy provided by the publisher.

Georgina Arnott’s The Unknown Judith Wright examines the first twenty-one years of Wright’s life. It reveals crucial aspects of the Australian poet’s life which have been obscured or misrepresented, particularly in the one full-length biography of Wright – Veronica Brady’s South of My Days (1998)  – and in Wright’s memoir, Half a Lifetime (1999). The first half of the book focuses on Wright’s ancestry and childhood. The second half focuses on Wright’s university years and their formative influence, downplayed by Wright and Brady. “The thrust of the Judith Wright life narrative, told with small variation by the subject herself and Veronica Brady,” writes Arnott, “is so strong that aberrant details, counter winds and inconsistencies have had a way of being left out.” (149) Arnott gets the tone just right in approaching the previous auto/biographical work on Wright. Even though she offers a significant reinterpretation of Wright, she does so with an obvious respect for the poet and not in a spirit of attack but of patient scholarship. Continue reading →