Biography

Those who would have us believe that William Shakespeare was not the author of the poems and plays that bear his name – J. Thomas Looney and Sherwood Silliman come to mind – like to encourage the idea that almost nothing is known about his life. In fact, we have quite a lot of information about Shakespeare’s life, career and the cultural environment in which he wrote. What we do lack is any direct testimony from the man himself. His opinions are lost to us. There are no letters or journals that might illuminate his private thoughts and feelings. The basic facts of Shakespeare’s life (1564–1616) are largely set out in official documents recording births, deaths, marriages and legal transactions. If we must inquire into the nature of his personal relationships, the options are either to try and extrapolate his views from his poetry and dramatic works (an impossibly compromised practice), or else turn to circumstantial evidence and weigh up possibilities.

Gunther Grass, in his suave and controversial memoirs, Peeling the Onion (Harvill Secker, 2007, trans. Michael Henry Heim), rehearses many of the modern autobiographer’s qualms about the biddability of memory. Grass, with his long history of attacking other Germans’ wartime activities while concealing his own service in the Tenth SS Armoured Division, has every incentive to question the memoirist’s primary tool. ‘When pestered with questions,’ Grass writes, ‘memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.’ Changing metaphors, Grass contends with memory’s caprices and slippages: ‘Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.’

Before and soon after Federation, Australia established itself as a sporting nation. Australia enjoyed good weather, with space for play. Despite the hardships of these times, youngsters, especially boys, found time to indulge in a wide range of sports. Two boys in particular, one the son of a boat builder/operator in Sydney, the other an East Maitland farm boy, became legendary figures in their chosen sports. The first was Henry Herbert (‘Dally’) Messenger, an all-round athlete and champion rugby player who turned away from the amateur rugby union and became a professional. Its best player, Messenger was a mainstay of the ‘new’ game, rugby league, in the lead-up to World War I. The second was the boxer Les Darcy, who, fighting mainly as a light heavyweight, won a series of titles in Australia prior to and during the war.

Handsomely illustrated, beautifully produced and authoritatively written, Gavin Fry’s monograph on Albert Tucker aims to establish him as an important artist within the Australian twentieth-century canon. Fry begins his introduction with the statement that Tucker ‘was a man who inspired strong feelings and his work likewise required the viewer to make a stand. Many found his work difficult, some even repellent, but the artist and his art demanded attention. Equally gifted as a painter, and possibly more so as a draughtsman than his contemporaries Nolan, Boyd and Perceval, Tucker belongs with this élite who revolutionised Australian painting in Melbourne in the 1940s.’ But is this really so? Was Tucker really so much better than his contemporaries, or even as good as them?

Contemporary biography presents many challenges, even more so when the subject is a politician who is still in office. It is, at best, a progress report: necessarily provisional both in its analysis and its attempt to anticipate the weightier judgment of history. By its very nature, it inclines more towards journalism than towards scholarly assessment.

The official published accounts of Captain Cook’s three great voyages (1768-79) were immense popular successes in Britain. That for the third voyage sold out within three days of publication in 1784. When the Frenchman La Pérouse sailed from Botany Bay in March 1788 into the Pacific – and into oblivion – he remarked that Cook had done so much that he had left him nothing to do but admire his work. In the previous year, the German, Georg Forster, had published in Berlin his eulogy of Cook, Cook der Entdecker (Cook the Discoverer). Cook was the first international superstar, and time has only increased his celebrity status. Major scholarly biographies continue to be published, and seminars which feature Cook in their titles are sell-outs. The name is box-office magic.

The lives of scholars and critics, however distinguished they may be, however resourceful their narrators, do not always make for compelling reading, let alone for an account that runs so readably to the phenomenal length of John Haffenden’s absorbing two-volume biography of the English poet and critic, William Empson. Devoted as they are to things of the mind, most academics do not, after all, generally do very much that is likely to command the attention of a wider public, or make for sparkling story. ‘A quiet life’ – the phrase in which Lord David Cecil summed up the career of the Cambridge don and poet Thomas Gray (whose one big adventure was to move, when teased insufferably by his colleagues at one Cambridge college, to the fellowship of another Cambridge college immediately over the road) – seems almost to epitomise this entire genre.

One of the hazards of election years these days is the quickie biography of the latest Opposition leader. As Simon Crean missed out on an election, so he missed out on a quickie. On the other hand, in 2004 his successor Mark Latham scored two – or three if we include Michael Duffy’s comparative study of the two political bruisers Latham and Abbott. Not that it did Latham, or probably the reputation of the authors, much good.

Conversation is the raison d’être of this monumental monologue. But you might not think so if you read only the reviews. Splenetic, greensick criticism – and there has been plenty of it – insists that what Clive James has built out of a life’s voracious reading and careful noticing – his ‘notes in the margin’ – is a platform for his ego. Not so. But how ruthlessly we skin our own ...