Six Big Fat Summer Biographies!

Ah, yes: windows open, ceiling fan going, bare feet propped up on the nearest basset hound – all the typical hallmarks of November in New England! And how better to pass a hot, languid November weekend than with a nice fat biography, to take your mind off the sultry weather?

Certainly I myself don’t know any better way. I have a long-standing love affair with big fat biographies; they really allow their authors to lay out the full fruits of their research, and the resulting account of a person’s life can benefit enormously from the slow accumulation of small details – whereas a conspicuously short biography always raises suspicions in my mind that the author is using that concision as an exclusionary tactic, a way of shaping one particular interpretation. There can be exceptions, of course: I’ve read plenty of short biographies that were excellent. But in a nice big thousand-pager, the constant overlay of endless facts stretched out over endless chapters can set up almost a parallel narrative to anything the biographer is trying to impose on the mass of assembled data. Even when you read as fast as I do, you end up living with the subject in a book of that kind of length, and I like living with a book every bit as much as crawly-slow readers do.

Long, hot weekends like the ones that characterize November (and every other month) in Boston therefore always pull my mind toward the surplus of enormous fat biographies on my shelves here at Hyde Cottage. These were some of my main temptations this time around:

John Marshall: Definer of a Nation by Jean Edward Smith – This book, from 1996, clocks in at only 700 pages, but what it lacks in that extra ooomph it makes up in sheer convivial readability. I’d read two biographies of Marshall before this one, and they’d predictably concentrated on the man’s writings, legal cases, and decisions, all of which were monumentally important in shaping the United States. So I was at first surprised by Smith’s decision to write so much about the man as well, giving us the first detailed and well-rounded portrait of Marshall’s personality that anybody had ever thought to create. I discovered that three-dimensional Marshall in this great book, and I also discovered Jean Edward Smith, whose big biographies I’ve eagerly consumed ever since.

The Life of Captain James Hook by J. C. Beaglehole – This 1974 biography of the greatest seafarer since Ulysses is slightly longer than the John Marshall book, at 760 pages, and it’s equally definitive. Cook’s life and career is a great sprawling thing full of large personalities and very small technical details, full of benchmarks now largely forgotten by readers of popular biography. Beaglehole writes a very scholarly line of prose, but it somehow manages likewise to be a surging epic of sea life and exploration, of strange new worlds and squalor and valor. Beaglehole also has a very sly understated humor the sparkles at the oddest moments. Like Marshall, Cook can seem very much larger than life when you look at his accomplishments in outline – this book counters that handily, presenting readers with a passionate, prickly man.

Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times by Robert Dallek – It almost feels like a kind of heresy to read a Johnson biography not written by Robert Caro, and certainly Caro’s Master of the Senate is a perfect example of the kind of enormous fat biography I love to read on a long November summer’s afternoon. But this 1998 biography of LBJ (another 760-pager, the concluding volume of a multi-part work on the man) has enormous merits on its own, largely owing to Dallek’s wry, reserved tone throughout. He allows Johnson a great deal of space to speak in his own voice, and he’s done a lot of old-fashioned legwork with the people who knew LBJ, and this volume wonderfully pulls all that together in an intensely readable brick of a thing. I never like Johnson any more after re-reading it, but I like Dallek just a bit more each time.

John Ruskin by Tim Hilton – Of course, some enormous fat biographies would test the patience of Job – some of them seem more like taunts than invitations. A famous stereotype of this would be those not-infrequent Victorian behemoths that needed several hundred pages simply to bombast their way to the day their putative subject was born, but the breed most certainly exists still in our present day (Reiner Stach, for instance, writing a 600-page volume on the boyhood of Kafka), and at a whopping 900 pages, this omnibus volume combining Hilton’s two already-hefty biographies of that great Victorian sourpuss John Ruskin certainly qualifies. Ruskin is one of those subjects even enthusiastic readers tend to regard with a studious kind of alarm; he’s the attack-cleaning project you’ve never yet got around to, the long end-of-term exam for which you can never adequately prepare. He wrote no single accessible masterpiece; he deeply influenced two entire generations but was nearly-complete gibberish to himself, and in 2015 even otherwise literate people, if asked to pair something, anything with Ruskin’s name, they would draw a blank. So the idea of spending 900 pages with such a figure is probably enough to warn most readers away, but I’m actually a fan of the man’s writing, and after reading this book, I’m a fan of Hilton’s writing as well: he’s fiercely opinionated and memorably eloquent (the paperback I own is covered with critical praise and deserves every word of it), and if he doesn’t quite land a case for why we should all know Ruskin better than we do, well, I’m not sure anybody could do that.

The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blakc by G. E. Bentley – Yale University Press spared no expense in producing this heavy 500-page volume when it came out back in 2001: it’s not only beautifully designed but lavishly illustrated (with Blake’s own work, naturally). This was the first big biography of Blake I’d ever read that concentrated more on his career as a professional illustrator and engraver than on his fame as a poet. Bentley likes pursuing some daffy line about how Blake the religious fanatic was really a kind of alien being making his way through the streets and relationships and meeting houses of his day-to-day life. But thankfully, Bentley’s book is extensively concerned with the real world, and after a few hundred pages, his Blake begins to emerge as a far more complex and interesting (though still barking mad) character than any version of the man I’ve read in biographies before or since.

Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny – And if Bentley’s Blake book surpasses all other biographies of the man, how much more true is that of the last of our tremendous fat biographies, Gitta Sereny’s magnificent 750-page 1995 masterpiece about Hitler’s architect? Sereny had all the tools and resources at her disposal to write either a conventional biography of this complex “good Nazi” or, after her many face-to-face interviews with the man, to write some kind of muted defense of Speer’s highly questionable integrity. Instead, she chose to delve deeper into the twisted psychology of Nazism – and of Speer in particular – than all but a handful of writers had ever even attempted with this kind of subtlety. Every time I re-read this book, I’m struck anew by the incredibly nuanced way Sereny navigates her topic. Her Albert Speer is fascinating and sometimes charming without ever for a moment ceasing to be an oily, narcissistic monster in a good suit. Conveying that kind of multiplicity is very often beyond the abilities of biographers, but Sereny makes it look easy.

Of course there many other such excellent fat biographies that I use to beguile the long, hot afternoons of autumn in New England. Local lore and mythology hints that in ages past the autumns in Boston could actually turn cold enough so that people shut their windows and did something called “bundling up” when they went outside. That same folklore maintains that those cold days could likewise spark a desire to pull down some big book and lose yourself in it, although that seems hard to believe. But for these endless summer days, the expedient works just fine.