What follows is a selection of this fall’s large number of biographies, autobiographies and memoirs. But it’s not all dissection and self-evisceration. In these books, some astonishing people come to life again.
JOHN EDWARD HASSE’S LIFE OF DUKE Ellington, Beyond Category (480 pages. Simon & Schuster. $25), takes its title from the Duke’s term of highest approbation. To Ellington, the greater a thing, the more it defied classification, and his own protean character certainly warrants this characterization. Just as improvisation is the soul of jazz, it was the recurring theme of Ellington’s life. Borrowing what he needed from jazz, pop and the classics, he wrote on trains, in hotel rooms and recording studios, composing for revues, dances, concerts both secular and sacred, Broadway shows, ballets and movie soundtracks. He was arguably the greatest American composer ever. He was also a great arranger, bandleader and piano player, a consummate showman and a great sensualist with gargantuan appetites. As trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton once observed, “He’s a genius, all right, but Jesus, how he eats!”
Ellington (1899-1974), raised in a closeknit family in Washington, D.C., kept the world at bay with fulsome intimacies (“We love you madly” from the stage). Even his sister, Ruth, who knew him better than almost anyone, said he wore “veil upon veil upon veil.” As such, he’s proven a stubborn subject for biographers. In “Beyond Category,” Hasse wisely does not try to unriddle the man but concentrates on his singular music. With access to the recently opened Ellington archives at the Smithsonian, Hasse sheds invaluable light on Ellington’s composing habits (how much was improvised, how much orchestrated). With its copious illustrations and discography, this is a succinct and fair-minded introduction to one of the greatest yet most elusive figures in 20th-century music.
MALCOLM JONES Jr.
IN THE HUNDREDS OF LETTERS Bertrand Russell wrote Lady Ottoline Morrell during a turbulent five-year love affair, a recurrent theme was the tyranny of his mind. In one he called himself “a sort of logic machine,” in another he said, “My mind is like a search light, very bright in one direction but dark everywhere else.” And as Caroline Moorehead’s Bertrand Russell: A Life (596 pages. Viking. $30) shows, all too often the effect was to thrust people away from him. “I feel how wonderful his intellect is,” said Ottoline, “and then this awful shrivelling comes over me.”
It was indeed a wonderful intellect. Russell was that rare philosopher to whose work the tired word “seminal” can actually be applied. He was a father of mathematical logic. His “theory of descriptions”–a famously abstruse discussion of language and meaning–underlay two major philosophical movements, logical positivism and linguistic analysis. Yet despite his wellknown interest in ethics and politics–Russell was a peace-movement activist into his 90s–he did no original philosophy in either area.
Moorehead provides some clues to this paradox through letters and reminiscences within Russell’s large circle of friends and lovers. It is clear from the book that he had a hard time appreciating the importance of the particularities that define most moral and political dilemmas; his generalizing mind wouldn’t allow it. It is equally clear that he was painfully aware of how alienating this could be. It made him one of the loneliest yet most interesting of men.
PETER McGRATH
WELL INTO THEIR 60S, THE LIKES OF Kirk Douglas as and Gregory Peck stayed pretty young on screen while settling nicely into eminencehood off it. Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz in New York in 1925) did the opposite. He wasn’t even 50 when he started his cinematic descent into grotesque leads (“Lepke”), facetious guest shots (“Sextette”) and evil scientists (“Brainwaves”). Offscreen, Curtis bedded actresses and groupies, careered in and out of three marriages and abused substances with impunity until he entered the Betty Ford Center in 1984.
Before that, he made some memorable movies: “Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Defiant Ones,” “Some Like It Hot” and “The Boston Strangler.” Tony Curtis: The Autobiography (with Barry Paris. 352 pages. Morrow. $23) is a highly readable, candid reminiscence of a guy who never stopped thinking it was still 1948 and he was the hot new hunk on the Universal lot. He routinely cheated on first wife, Janet Leigh, but when a woman cheated on him it drove him deeper into drugs. In Las Vegas, Curtis recalls, he “used show girls like some guys use vitamin pills–two a day.” Then he crashed.
These days Curtis, 68, is an artist who does his “Schwarzenegger-prescribed” workouts, then paints and makes Joseph Cornell-like box assemblages in his studio. Recently he dined alone at Spago and was later able to go “home without any bodyguards or bull—-.” His star may have faded but Curtis’s personal assistant can still gush, “He has never had a bodyguard, which is amazing.” Did he tell her that? That old Tony charm isn’t dead yet.
PETER PLAGENS
THE ONLY ARTISTIC GENIUS OF THE Nazi era, Leni Riefenstahl, has been the center of savage dispute for almost 60 years. Chosen by Hitler to film the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Riefenstahl made “The Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” two masterpieces that stick in the craw of Western civilization. Now, still hale at 91, she’s published her autobiography, Len! Riefenstahl: A Memoir (669 pages. St. Martin’s. $35). This riveting apologia will supercharge the debate. The book is a stream of short bursts like movie sequences: in an early scene little Leni is nearly strangled by a child-killer in Berlin (aha! Fritz Lang’s “M”). We see her whirl to success as a barefoot dancer, then we feel her frostbite when she becomes the star of Arnold Fanck’s mountaineering movies. Hitler sees one and is smitten. She attends one of his speeches and is smitten–not by his politics, she says, but by his personality.
She writes to him, he replies, they meet. Make my films, says the fuhrer. “if I had been born an Indian or a Jew you wouldn’t even speak to me,” scolds Leni. This kid’s got guts. Or a memory problem. But she accepts his offer, and completes her two classic films despite the fierce opposition of Goebbels–whom she rebuffs after his feverish advances: “You must become my mistress!” Hitler himself never makes a pass at her: “My love belongs wholly to my nation,” he proclaims.
Such scenes have the ring of the absurd truth: these people were characters in their own pseudo-Wagnerian opera. After years of postwar harassment by the Allies (including forced electroshock treatment in a French mental hospital) she was cleared of being a Nazi. Hitler would be apoplectic at her work in recent decades, photographing tribes in Africa, her second home after Germany. Riefenstahl claims that she never knew about the death camps. Maybe not: she’s the pure aesthete, her eye always pressed to a lens, real or metaphoric. “The Triumph of the Will” is a fascist Woodstock, a clarion call to a seductive, falsely transcendent community. But in her greatest work, “Olympia,” the humanist fuses with the aesthete in a thrilling celebration of the human will in its real triumph.
JACK KROLL
TOO MANY BIOGRAPHIES OF AUTHORS run aground on a hard fact: writers spend most of their time alone doing nothing but putting words on paper–not a very action-packed life. Robert Louis Stevenson was exceptional, a man who wrote exciting books, and led an adventurous life. He is a biographer’s dream, and in Dreams of Exile (296 pages. Holt. $25), Ian Bell has seized the opportunity.
The astonishing thing about Stevenson was that he spent so little of his short life writing the books for which he is remembered. Dead at 44, he was 30 when he began his first novel, “Treasure Island.” Before that he spent years learning his craft, sponging off his parents in Scotland or seeking cures for his wretched health in European spas. A chain-smoking, consumptive bag of bones, he needed a keeper, and found one in Fanny, his fiercely protective American wife, 10 years his senior. Marriage didn’t settle him down (he stayed on the move and wound up his potboiler of a life in Samoa), but he did settle down to write.
Bell is by no means the first biographer to tackle Stevenson, but he is one of the best. A journalist, not a scholar, he writes prose that never dithers: “There is no more spare flesh on ‘Treasure Island’ than there was on its author.” The portrait that emerges is admiring, a bit romantic, but never sentimental. We see Stevenson as charming, mercurial, brave and altogether singular, “a man of no country but that of his own imagination.” No writer could ask for a fairer shake.
MALCOLM JONES Jr.
THE STRANGE DIFFICULT UNGENEROUS unreliable unkind and not always honest people who created the world in which Lionel and I shared…are now most of them dead," writes Diana Trilling in The Beginning of the Journey (442 pages. Harcourt Brace. $24.95). This memoir of intellectual life in the ’30s and ’40s is both mean-mouthed and elegiac. Writing about her husband, Lionel (1905-1975), the distinguished critic who secretly longed to be a disreputable novelist, she can break your heart. On country walks early in their marriage, he swung his stick “like a golf club, driving fallen apples down the road–I still have the stick and, more than sixty years later, it still smells of apples.” Settling old scores, she can turn your stomach. She writes about summering with a party that included a pregnant woman, who blamed her morning sickness on “the sight of Felix [Morrow, a now forgotten Trotskyite at breakfast, splashing and dripping his coffee, naked beneath the dressing gown which failed to span his substantial girth.”
Trilling, 88, dictated her book because of poor eyesight; editors missed some repetitions. But her version of how she and Lionel defected from the Stalinist left must be reckoned with by anyone who cares about the history of ideas. And despite her swipes at almost everyone who ever crossed her path–Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt–there’s something admirable in her unrelenting rigor. “The New York intellectuals had their moment in history and it has passed,” she writes. But it was her moment; their “life of significant contention” was her life. As much as her enduring love for Lionel, her enduring disdain for her adversaries honors that moment.
DAVID GATES
