Biography

Ambitious, arrogant, talented, brave, learned, truculent, and convivial: Ben Jonson was too outstanding, too odd, and too contrary to be taken as a creature of his time. Yet he had so wide-ranging a life that to write his biography is to capture, in little, a great part of his remarkable age.

Russell Braddon was part of the first wave of postwar Australian ‘expatriates’ who embedded themselves in British cultural life. He published memoirs, novels, and biographies. He wrote for newspapers. He was a regular guest on BBC radio, a presenter on television, always in demand on the lunch and dinner speaking circuit. He enjoyed the life of a popular and successful author for more than forty years. He was a showman with sound instincts and good intentions. Nigel Starck has written his biography with respect and affection.

Catherine Duncan looks like becoming the poster girl for Australian women playwrights of the 1930s and 1940s. Her sleek, sophisticated face – the epitome of the 1940s career woman – looked out from the cover of Michelle Arrow’s Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last (2002), and now it graces the cover of Views from the Balcony: A Biography of Catherine Duncan, written by her son, Michael Keane.

Recognising biography as ‘one of the new terrors of death’, the eighteenth-century wit John Arbuthnot made sure his life would be sparsely documented. Manning Clark, preoccupied with his inevitable extinction, took the opposite tack. He massively archived all his thoughts and doings as a strategy ...

‘I kept thinking: if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ David Hockney’s assessment of the craggy countenance of W.H. Auden is clipped and convenient, but I suspect Auden would have been far more interesting on the subject of sitting for Hockney. Given the concentration and quality of the encounters between English portrait painters or sculptors and their subjects, it is slightly odd that more writers have not published accounts of the experience of sitting for their portrait.

Don Watson sits low in his chair, shy and silent when faced with a group of university administrators gathered to hear him talk about management speak – those weasel words that Watson has hunted down with grim enthusiasm. He speaks hesitantly at first, struggling to recall examples of misleading expression, evasive phrases, dishonest communication. Soon the rhythm quickens. There is indignation now in the voice, derision anew at the decay of public language. The speaker rocks forward, ranging more widely as he explains the link between thought and expression. Jargon hides intentions. Clichés abandon serious engagement with an issue. This is not the pedant’s obsession with grammar, but anger when the contest of ideas is undermined by impenetrable language.

Marion Mahony (1870–1961) was that rare commodity in late nineteenth-century American society: a woman functioning as an equal in a professional world dominated by men. Born to progressive parents, and a household and wider circle of strong and socially engaged women, Marion Lucy Mahony was only the second woman to graduate from an American university (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1894) with a full degree in architecture, and the first to be licensed to practise under any state regulatory structure anywhere in the world (Illinois, 1898).

One section on Australian photography slowly growing on my bookshelves is devoted to anthropological and ethnographic photography. Philip Jones’s latest book, Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers, belongs there because of the amount of anthropological material it contains. But it could also take its place among books devoted to vernacular photography, because none of the seven photographers Jones has selected was professionally trained. All were keen amateur photographers who produced substantial bodies of work during the time they lived and worked in Central Australia. The book deals with an epoch of dramatic change, beginning in the 1890s with some of the earliest European photographs of the Centre, and concluding in the 1940s.

As the dust settles on twentieth-century acting giants, and reputations are appraised, it is at least arguable that John Gielgud emerges as the greatest. Certainly his was the longest and most varied career, spanning nearly eighty years, only death itself, when he was ninety-six, causing him to slow down. Since then his pre-eminence has seemed confirmed as one reads about him and his distinguished contemporaries.