Biography

This is a heavy book with which to make a leap of faith: to trust that one life can make a difference in the deeply compromised pursuit of international justice and security. In the epilogue to her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, Samantha Power suggests ‘if there was anyone who could have wrung from the UN whatever reform and promise it could muster, it was he’. In this long book, depicting some of the worst that humanity can inflict on itself, Power builds this image of Vieira de Mello. If her claim for his significance is justified, then we might indeed revisit the conditions for such faith.

In the days of the Great Anzac Revival, it is unusual to find an Australian VC who has not been the subject of a biography. Here we have one of the most famous of them all – Arthur Blackburn (1892–1960). I was surprised to find that this is the first biography of him.

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) occupies a pivotal position in the development of modern writing, not just as the poet of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) but as the proponent, in his critical writings, of a modern aesthetic based on the experience of city life. More than any other French poet of his time, he marks the transition from the Romantic to a proto-modernist poetic style and stance. T.S. Eliot recognised the nature of this achievement when he said that for him the significance of Les Fleurs du mal was summed up in the first lines of ‘Les sept vieillards’ (‘The Seven Old Men’), in Baudelaire’s vision of the ‘teeming city, city full of dreams, / where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passer-by’. ‘I knew what that meant,’ Eliot said, ‘because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.’

Does it matter whether Robert Schumann suffered a slow, passive and continuous decline towards the madness of his last two years or, as John Worthen strongly affirms, a sudden descent into psychosis after a creative lifetime marked by personal resilience and determination? Many people would argue that it is particularly important in music not to let biography get in the way of hearing what the composer has created in sound, if for no other reason than that it could hinder music’s special freedom to mean quite different things to different listeners.

During the hot summer of 2002, I visited Canberra for the first time and alternated between the air-conditioned confines of the National Gallery and the National Library of Australia. It was in the latter that I stumbled upon The Flower Hunter, an exhibition of works by the Australian flower painter Ellis Rowan, whose life is now chronicled in a biography by Christine and Michael Morton-Evans.

Barcroft Boake is remembered as one of the lesser lights in the school of Bush poets publishing in the Sydney Bulletin in the late nineteenth century. Two facts are probably known to most people who have heard of him: that he wrote a gloomy but impressive and memorable poem, much anthologised, called ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’, and that he hanged himself with his stock-whip when young. (Some, mindful of Keats, might guess he was twenty-six when he died, and they would be right.)

The word ‘memoir’ is used with a nice precision in the title of this beautifully written book. The Macquarie Dictionary distinguishes between the singular and the plural meanings of the word: ‘memoirs’ are autobiographical, ‘records of one’s own life and experiences’; a ‘memoir’ is a biography. Almost all of the book is written in the voice of its protagonist, Bette Boyanton, with some sharp interventions from her daughter Gina; her husband Les is credited as a co-author, though he does not speak. But the book also stands firmly as a biography, elegantly crafted by its major author, Carolyn Landon.

In 1881 Charles O’Neill abandoned a career in New Zealand and moved to Sydney, settling in The Rocks, close to the Marist fathers at St Patrick’s on Church Hill. Soon he had gathered about him a group of men keen to do something about the poverty they saw around them under the name of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. O’Neill was then in his early fifties, having been born in 1828 in Dumbarton, Scotland, the youngest of eleven children in the family of Irish Catholic parents.

Now aged in her mid-seventies, the activist, artist and one-time parliamentarian Joan Coxsedge has penned her memoirs. Cold Tea for Brandy is as entertaining a read as her own varied life seems to have been. Decades of public advocacy, a firm – some would say a fixed – moral compass and an illustrator’s gift for precise impression have given Coxsedge a writing style to be admired. Her prose is brisk, simple, amusing and easy-going, laced with an old-fashioned Australian vernacular. Some readers may find the writing as anachronistic as the socialist beliefs that Coxsedge has so ardently espoused for decades. Still, the clarity of her writing flows organically from the that of her politics.

A Family History of Smoking, the most recent of Andrew Riemer’s memoirs, focuses on the world of his great-grandparents, his grandparents, and his parents. In so doing, it traces Hungary from the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse at the end of the Great War, on through the brief springtime of the 1930s and the chaos of displacement and destruction of World War II. It is a rich and rewarding memoir.