tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post3021186275778021164..comments2024-03-28T21:32:26.550+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: Living with a biographyBruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-152686992500530682010-10-26T15:01:29.893+01:002010-10-26T15:01:29.893+01:00@Dave Lull - thanks, I saw a review of that.
Gra...@Dave Lull - thanks, I saw a review of that. <br /><br />Gray is a very distinctive illustrator, and I like especially the decorations for Unlikely Stories, Mostly; and the section headings for Lanark. <br /><br />He actually did a portrait drawing of me (I have the original) which is published in his Book of Prefaces.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-42869502301637122672010-10-26T14:07:54.219+01:002010-10-26T14:07:54.219+01:00"Canongate has a new book of Alasdair Gray..."Canongate has a new book of Alasdair Gray's artwork A Life in Pictures coming out . . . ."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2010_10.php#016764" rel="nofollow">http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2010_10.php#016764</a>Dave Lullhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01053227199985293516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-86278543717822094262010-10-24T08:26:55.415+01:002010-10-24T08:26:55.415+01:00Thakns for these comments and tentative recommenda...Thakns for these comments and tentative recommendations. <br /><br />I am not - I'd like to be clear - recommending the books I have listed. Some are pernicious! But they did influence me at certain points in my life. <br /><br />There is a horrible genre of poisonous biography, pioneered I believe by Lytton Strachey with Eminent Victorians. <br /><br />The intention (or at least the effect) of such biographies is to poison appreciation, to recontextualize - to emphasize the bad as representative and to explain away the good. <br /><br />A relatively mild example is AN Wilson's biography of CS Lewis - which is helped in its task by slapdash research, a few falsehoods and incompetences. <br /><br />But the supreme example is Lawrance Thomson's three volume 'authorized' biography of Robert Frost - which is hugely researched and documented, and accurate in every detail - and which achieves its self-consciously destructive goals purely by distortion of emphasis and by biased interpretation.<br /><br />Thomson's only error in his objective comes in the detailed index; which contains scores of index headings listing passages documenting Frost's (supposed) negative characteristics, faults and bad behaviors - and virtually none listing passages descriptive of his good qualities. In this Thomson makes all too clear his motivations.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-5367106948251010532010-10-24T06:03:07.469+01:002010-10-24T06:03:07.469+01:00The same effect is powerful for me, but for few ot...The same effect is powerful for me, but for few others I can think of among my literate friends. Novels have come to seem thin, and history generalized to the point of meaninglessness, compared to biographies. This is true although most of them now published, in skill and style, are no better than history and fiction. Still you can learn something from even an unbearably badly written biography, and this is not true of fiction or history. I envy you your ability to reconstruct your life of lives.<br /> Since I had the same reduction-to-pamphlet experience you had with that Emerson biography, I feel I have the standing to suggest two other extraordinary books: one is Henry James Life in Letters, and the other is odd - it is the great minor novelist Sybille Bedford's biography of Aldous Huxley, which is interesting not because of Huxley, but because in telling Huxley's story, Bedford enables one not only to come to know the far more interesting figure of Huxley's wife (whom Bedford knew as an adolescent), but to know her with such intimacy and force that one can find oneself actually falling in love with her. Be careful.HofJudehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02709538079720873322noreply@blogger.com