biography

The Grand Affair: A Thrilling Biography of John Singer Sargent

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Growing up in Rome in the mid-19th century, John Singer Sargent could not have asked for a better informal education for the world-class artist he would become. He was surrounded by museums overflowing with great art and just as important, his ebullient, energetic American mother hosted gatherings of painters, sculptors, poets and writers. 

Sargent’s mother was obsessed with European culture and may have modeled that enthusiasm for her son.  She also was an inveterate traveler “for her health,” so the family traipsed all over Western and Central Europe with young Sargent watching, studying, sketching–whether in museums or on mountain tops.  It’s fascinating to read about the challenging mountaineering he did in Switzerland with his father, something you might not associate with a man who later spent so much time in salons and studios.

This was a period when living in Europe cost much less than in the U.S. and  Americans like his mother were ravenous for culture of the Old World. Sargent grew up multilingual, voraciously interested in art, and Rome is where he was first exposed to an artistic subject that would be a constant in his life, though somewhat secret: male nudes. 

Whether painter or connoisseur, back then you could appreciate these nudes as the “ideal representation of humanity” without arousing suspicion, but Sargent’s sketches and paintings showed more than just artistic fascination.  Fisher explores this terrain with wit and style, referencing many of Sargent’s sketches and paintings that were unknown during the painter’s lifetime to make this crucial point.   As he puts it, they “stood out as charged, emotional composition.”

Sargent never married and had many deep friendships with male artists and models as long as he lived, while cultivating rich, powerful “iconoclasts and divas” like the famed art collector and Isabella Gardner.  Was he queer?  It seems obvious that he was and that it was part of his unique vision of people which astonished other painters, including tutors and teachers–and eventually made him famous. 

Some of the best writing in the book explores the not-so-hidden gay salons and haunts in Paris, New York, and Venice and how artists, writers, and wealthy men flirted with this subculture or made themselves at home in it. Fisher also deftly explains all the ways in which Sargent often focused on wealth and celebrity in his work while interrogating it as well, with many subtle touches of eroticism.  Fisher couldn’t be a better guide in analyzing paintings: he’s illuminating without ever coming across as academic or dry.

He also deftly analyzes Sargent’s keen business sense: even in his early twenties, Sargent knew how to cultivate wealthy sitters so he could attract more of them and knew what was daring and unique enough to have work publicly displayed.   He did that while remaining in his public persona “understated, hard-working, and self-effacing.” The author does a splendid job charting Sargent’s peripatetic life and the ways in which he presented as comme il faut but was actually innovative and even disruptive in his art, testing the limits of what the public might accept.  That thread is important for contemporary readers who might need some of the painter’s work decoded due to its subtlety.

Given the book’s subject and the gorgeous color plates, it’s strange that the cover is so grim and unappealing.  Fisher’s luscious book deserved better production, something worthy of his subject’s style and genius, worthy of this “painter of luminous complications.”  It also deserved much better copy editing because there are too many missing words and repetitions throughout the book.

All the same, this masterful biography is perfect not just for fans of the painter but for anyone eager to read more about The Gilded Age.  One celebrity after another passes through these pages–including Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Monet, Isabella Gardner–and Fisher ably interrogates the privilege that artists like Sargent benefited from, without sounding like too much of a scold.

Be prepared to spend some time on Google looking up paintings and painters you might not have heard of before. And readers might also want to try Donna Lucey’s brisk and entertaining Sargent’s Women which explores the colorful biographies of the women behind four of his iconic portraits.

A lifelong fan of vivid biographies, Lev Raphael fell in love with Sargent’s portraits in college.  One of the most enthralling exhibitions he’s ever attended was the mammoth 1987 show of the painter’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Raphael has reviewed books for Bibliobuffet, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report, The Washington Post, and The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

Blood, Fire, & Gold

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Even if you’ve read a dozen books about Elizabeth I, you might enjoy this study of the Tudor queen and her decades-long rival Catherine de Medici, Queen of France for over a decade and Queen Mother to Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III.  The two most powerful women in sixteenth-century Europe, both queens were highly educated and masterful stateswomen.  They learned while young how to navigate dangerous royal courts and religious turmoil, how to stay strong but outwardly pliant when necessary, and how to deal with demanding, powerful men in a world where they would be in the minority as women of power.  Both survived dizzying plots, war, and shifting allegiances “while enemies hid around every corner.” 

The dual biography deftly charts the twisting European alliances that could shift with a marriage as well as a treaty or just the threat of war, and demonstrates what excellent politicians both queens were as they maintained and expanded their power.   Mary Queen of Scots is the perennial wild card for each queen, and the book’s best surprise is its focus  on the fascinating trials and tribulations of an English ambassador to France, Sir Nicolas Throckmorton, who frequently begged to be released from his dangerous and demanding post but was unafraid to speak plainly to the Queen Mother.  

I wish the book had been more thoroughly copy edited.   That would have eliminated readers being told three times in a short space that Thomas Cramner was Archbishop of Canterbury and that Frances II was nine years old two paragraphs apart.  Or having to look up the translation of the French title of a religious work that Elizabeth gave us a gift even though it was highly controversial in France. Paranque says nothing at all about the controversy.  And good copy editing would have eliminated repetitious diction as well as odd phrasing like  “appease tensions” in place of “ease tensions.”  Some long conversations during negotiations between England and France could also have been summarized.

Paranque is no Alison Weir, Leanda de Lisle or Dan Jones, and the book doesn’t quite live up to the jazzy title.  But there are some good stories here, like the gruesome joust that wounded France’s King Henry II, Catherine’s husband, and led to his miserable death.  The intervention of a famed surgeon is an unforgettable classic of bizarre medical practice in that period.   Even more fascinating is elderly Elizabeth’s interview with a French envoy, dripping with jewels in her gorgeous dressing gown, bosom exposed, a picture of sad ruin and abiding grace.

Lev Raphael has been reading about the Tudors since elementary school. He has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report and three public radio stations.  He hosted an interview show where guests included Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong.

The New Agatha Christie Biography

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This engaging biography explores why and how Agatha Christie in effect lived a life of disguise: Despite her international fame and mammoth audience, she sought to be inconspicuous.  Not an easy task given that fans could come from as far away as Finland to try to meet her–and bang on her door!

When Christie was growing up, the ideal British woman and wife was like the one depicted in a revoltingly sentimental poem by Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House.”  This ideal figure was meant to be “devoted and submissive to her husband….passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all–pure.”

Christie was anything but passive, however, in both her marriages or when dealing with agents, publishers, and directors.  As a young woman she was funny and flirtatious despite being shy, a great dancer, loved to surf and seemed nothing like the grande dame we see in later publicity photos.  Through most of her adult life she was a “compulsive writer” despite self-deprecating remarks about her work as an author and she could turn out a fine mystery in six weeks when inspired.

If she were alive today, she might be a fan of makeover shows on HGTV because one of her great loves was buying a house, then remodeling and redecorating it.  At one point she actually owned eight homes.

The book devotes a great deal of time to Christie’s famous “disappearance” in 1926 when she seemed to be missing (and possibly dead) for almost two weeks.  Worsley does a fine job untangling what really happened amid of welter of possibilities, and is especially clear on how Christie’s image seemed to suffer at first when journalists and others suggested it was a publicity stunt.  That story gripped England and America, and readers might be surprised at how sexist some of the contemporary analysis of her reasons for going off the grid were.

Curiously, the author doesn’t tell us anything about Christie’s sales figures until almost midway through the book.  That’s especially puzzling for her early books.   Surely sales figures are a significant part of her story as a famously best-selling author who’s sold more books than anyone else in the world?  And how can we judge the success of her early books–or even later ones like Death on the Nile–without comparisons to books by her contemporaries?  Worsley also classes a number of Christie’s techniques as “tricks,” which seems a strange label.  There’s nothing unusual about novelists using real settings and real news stories in their books–it’s common practice.

Mystery fans can sometimes be ticked off that the genre they love is considered inferior  to Literature, but what struck me as revelatory was the sexism she face throughout her career. Christie was demeaned, diminished, and derogated not because of her genre but primarily because she was a woman.  Far too many critics couldn’t resist saying something sexist when they reviewed her books or plays. 

In An Elusive Woman, Christie has found a keen-eyed and witty biographer who honestly assesses her strengths and weaknesses, and makes a solid case for considering Christie one of the 20th Century’s most important writers.

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations.  He recently reviewed a collection of Christie ghost stories and a volume of new Miss Marple stories.

Review: Washington’s Retirement Was Anything But Dull

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Like other school kids, I was steeped in reading about the Father of Our Country from elementary school onward, but my fascination with George Washington had a personal backdrop.  I lived in Washington Heights in Manhattan, and our apartment building was on Ft. Washington Avenue.  My high school was named after him as well.

It created a sort of kinship which was deepened by studying his famous letter to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island where he promised that the new nation “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”  More than that, he wrote that Jews were not going to be less equal than Christians: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” (Slavery, of course, was a giant asterisk to this discussion)

How could a son of Holocaust survivors who came to American for freedom not admire a man like the author of that letter?  A man who could have been king if he wanted to, given how so many people idolized him.  But at the end of his second term as president, having steered the fledgling nation from revolution to democracy, he chose to ride off to his Virginia estate, leaving politics and governing behind because the quiet life of a farmer with large holdings suited him best.  He faded gently from the scene, appropriately aloof from politics.

As Hemingway wrote, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

In fact, Horn shows through brilliant use of contemporary letters and newspapers from a wide range of figures that Washington may have been offstage but he was as deeply embroiled in politics as ever.  He scrupulously followed every twist and turn of the rivalry between the two parties forming around President Adams and Vice President Jefferson and was keenly alert to the threat of war with our former ally France.  And for anyone who knows Alexander Hamilton only from the musical, he cuts a much less dashing figure here, and had delusions of grandeur.  But then Hamilton fits the general turmoil of jockeying for position against a background of tremendous political and global instability.  Many of our Founders and their supporters had their diva moments.

In the middle of all this Sturm und Drang, you feel the sorrowful isolation of Washington who complains of “Having staked my life–my reputation–my fortune–my ease, tranquility & happiness–in support of the government of our country” when at every turn fate might undo all that effort and plunge the United States into bloody chaos.

Yet there’s the wildly comic dithering about what kind of insignia officers for the new army being formed should be wearing, and you wonder how anyone could be so concerned with minutiae at a time when war with France was looming–or seemed to be.

Horn’s deft use of letters reveals the daily reality of Washington’s “retirement” and his recruitment as commander-in-chief.  President Adams realized that Washington was the best person to lead a newly strengthened army in case the French decided to invade the US.  He did not have to be on the scene to be caught in the tug of war between Republicans and Federalists and affected by war fever.  Just as important was his abiding concern about the legacy he left behind in his voluminous papers.

And if you thought our current political climate was newly poisonous, think again.  The scheming and invective between various factions around Washington before and after he left the White House were every bit as vicious, cruel, and divisive as today.  The main difference is the speed at which the poison spread and the tools used to spread it.  The rhetoric employed today to eviscerate your opponents is a lot more juvenile and not remotely as witty, either.

This book is everything you could ask for from a popular biography. It’s beautifully written, dramatic, compelling, colorful, revelatory, refreshing, sometimes hilarious and sometimes shocking–and at times it reads like a thriller.

Best of all, it makes Washington relatable and human, not a portrait, not a monument.  That’s the author’s greatest achievement.

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, several public radio stations, and had his own on-air book show where he interviewed authors like Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong.

 

 

 

Warning: Susan Cheever’s Alcott Biography Is a Book To Avoid

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When a friend told me she was reading Susan Cheever’s book American Bloomsbury about Emerson and his circle in Concord, I was intrigued, because I’d read Cheever’s memoir about her father John Cheever years ago and had lost track of her career after that.

I went to Amazon, but was drawn to Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott biography instead. I didn’t know much about Alcott and I’m a huge fan of biographies (I have several hundred in my library). The book grabbed me based on the sample because it revealed that Alcott didn’t want to write her famous novel Little Women — her editor pushed her to.

What a great hook.

When the book arrived, though, I gradually discovered it was awful. I hadn’t bothered reading the thoughtful critiques on Amazon — I learned its varied faults myself (reviews of Cheever’s American Bloomsbury are even more scathing and more numerous).

Cheever’s assessment of Alcott is marred by trivialities. You learn that Alcott once dropped a pie box in Boston and it tipped “end over end.” Alcott was teased by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. about her height.  In Boston, she had hyacinths in a window box. None of these details–and more just as inane–add to an understanding of Alcott’s life or writing.

Cheever’s prose can also be gag-worthy: “Death is a mystery, but life is filled with light and clarity.”  Then there are dubious assertions like “good writing is almost always subversive.”

She also claims that the Transcendentalists in Concord “essentially created American literature as we know it.” But the first two American authors to be international best sellers, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, got there before Emerson and company, and they had an enormous influence on major authors like Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Perhaps to hedge her bets, Cheever loves mentioning Hawthorne as often as possible, but he was peripheral to the Concord crew and mocked them in his novel The Blithedale Romance.

Cheever misrepresents Alcott’s relationship with Henry James and basically gives Alcott credit for more books of his than you can imagine. Without her, we apparently wouldn’t have The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians or any of his books with a young woman character. They were also good friends, Cheever says, despite every major James biography I’ve read which barely mentions Alcott — and Cheever doesn’t offer any proof of this supposed relationship.

Sadly, Publishers Weekly gave the book an attention-getting starred review and called it “authoritative.” Somebody at PW didn’t do homework.

Why did I keep reading? Morbid curiosity. That’s right: I couldn’t believe how badly written, badly researched, and badly edited a book by a well-known author could be. In the end, it had a kind of freakish charm.

Lev Raphael books is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders and 24 other books of fiction and non-fiction.

Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott Biography is a Hot Mess

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When a friend told me she was reading Susan Cheever’s book American Bloomsbury about Emerson and his circle in Concord, I was intrigued, because I’d read Cheever’s memoir about her father years ago and had lost track of her career after that.

I went to Amazon, but was drawn to Cheever’s biography of Louisa May Alcott instead. I didn’t know much about Alcott and I’m a huge fan of biographies (I have hundreds in my study). The book grabbed me based on the sample: Alcott didn’t want to write Little Women–her editor pushed her to.

What a great hook.

Louisa_May_Alcott_headshot

When the book arrived, though, I gradually discovered it was awful. I hadn’t bothered reading the thoughtful critiques on Amazon–I learned its varied faults myself (reviews of American Bloomsbury are even more scathing, btw, and more numerous).

Cheever’s assessment of Alcott is marred by trivialities. You learn things like this: Alcott dropped a pie box in Boston. Not only that, it tipped “end over end.” Wow. Alcott was teased by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. about her height, and in Boston she had hyacinths in a window box. None of these details (and more just as inane) add to an understanding of Alcott’s life or writing.

Cheever’s prose can be gag-worthy: “Death is a mystery, but life is filled with light and clarity.” Sounds like a Hallmark Card. Then there are dubious assertions like “good writing is almost always subversive.” How? Why? Makes a good quote for Pinterest or Tumblr, I suppose.

Cheever claims that the Transcendentalists in Concord “essentially created American literature as we know it.” Seriously? The first two American authors to be international best sellers, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, got there before Emerson et al. and had a huge influence on major authors like Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Perhaps to hedge her bets, Cheever loves mentioning Hawthorne as often as possible, but he was peripheral to the Concord crew and mocked them in his novel The Blithedale Romance.

hawthorneJust as egregiously, Cheever totally misrepresents Alcott’s relationship with Henry James and basically gives Alcott credit for more books of his than you can imagine. Without her, we apparently wouldn’t have The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians or any of his books with a young woman character. They were also fast friends, Cheever says, despite every James biography I’ve read which barely mentions Alcott–and Cheever doesn’t offer any proof of this supposed relationship.

james 1890Sadly, Publishers Weekly gave the book an attention-getting starred review and called it “authoritative.” Somebody at PW was lazy (or dim) and didn’t do their homework.

Why did I keep reading? Morbid curiosity. That’s right: I couldn’t believe how badly written, badly researched, and badly edited a book by a well-known author could be. In the end, it had a kind of freakish charm.  This tripe got published.

Lev Raphael books is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders and 24 other books of fiction and non-fiction.