The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed The World), by Karen Armstrong

This is a neat, clearly written short history of the Bible, starting with the myths and oral traditions that created the basis for the text we have today as the bible, then following the way the Bible has been interpreted and read right up to the current day.

Many of us who don't study Biblical history think the Bible just kind of sprung into life a couple of thousand years ago, with one God as its centre piece. The wonderfully humanistic scholar Karen Armstrong shows how the text of the Bible is in fact the work of many authors whose work overlaps each other.

The Bible, we learn, is a work of extraordinary and intense editorship. Not only that, it's a living, breathing work that has been reinterpreted and re-imagined throughout history.

This is the main lesson that Armstrong wants to draw: the Bible resists literal interpretation. The modern idea, favoured by so many evangelicals and fundamentalists, to read the Bible as literally true, is wrong. Some groups even want to bring back Old Testament Law, an idea close to madness.

The Bible Karen Armstrong presents here is one that has fired the imagination and creativity of millions throughout the millennia. The modern religious insistence of literal readings are against its history and purpose and even, paradoxically, its meaning.

Armstrong's The Bible ends on a bummer note, with the fundamentalists having hijacked the Bible for their own purposes. I guess Armstrong's lesson is that the Bible is extraordinarily rich in complexity and ambiguity, and that it can be read by secularists, as well as the devout, as deeply rewarding literature.

Chaucer, by Peter Ackroyd

I have just been reading through the list of author’s works provided in Peter Ackroyd’s ‘brief lives’ biography of Geoffrey Chaucer. I could certainly remember his enjoyable novel The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, but was certain I had read something else by him. Ah-hah. It was his biography of Charles Dickens. To tell the truth, it was a truncated version I read that ran to some 500 pages. The memory of those two enjoyable reads probably spurred me to pick this short biography up off the library shelf as a sort of ‘interlude read’, something to keep me busy whilst I had run out of things to read.

I’ve long been a fan of Chaucer, especially his amazing Wife of Bath. I agree with critic Harold Bloom that a lot of his characters are pre-Shakespearian in their three dimensionality (is ‘dimensionality’ a word? My spell check did not reject it so I’m keeping it.)

In this book the prolific author Peter Ackroyd marshals his considerable erudition on the subjects of London and poetry to give us a kind of essay, history, biography and all round appreciation of the life and work of Chaucer.

It’s all good as far as it goes, but I found there was something a little bit missing. Ackroyd goes from one topic to the next, from England in the fourteenth century to critical discussions of Chaucer's poetry, and in the deft skips the author took from one biographical aspect to another, I found myself falling through the cracks.

I should perhaps here admit that my attention did waver, and so the fault may lie more with this reader than the writer. I guess what I’m saying is that I found some parts of the book a bit obtuse, like they’d been written with a more specialist audience in mind.

My favourite parts were the descriptions of England in Chaucer’s day, which I found fascinating.

If anything, it’s made me want to read his biography of London.

This book however, I’m sorry to say, I found a little dull.

Charles Dickens, by G. K Chesterton

Recently I read G. K. Chesterton’s bizarre, surreal, and quite often baffling novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. Wordsworth classics now print an edition of Chesterton’s monograph on Dickens (many thanks to Mr Chris Hubbard for kindly letting me read his pristine new copy).

Many consider Chesterton’s Charles Dickens to be one of the best books on Dickens, and has long been admired by one of my favourite literary critics, Mr Harold Bloom.

It would perhaps be tempting in our day and age to call Chesterton a conservative, but of course that will not really do. Chesterton’s moral intellect (if I can put it like that) and startlingly original insights are far too abundant to squeeze into such a tiny descriptive box.

One of the chief charms of Chesterton’s literary criticism, or appreciation, is that he has a poet’s vision of the world. This also means that he has a rich and strange way of looking at things. For the reader this means that we too must try to see the world through the author's eyes if we are to at least understand, if not grasp, Chesterton’s ideas.

I think Chesterton’s book a success because so much of what he says about Dickens rings true. In writing a book about Dickens he has taken out his paint brush and colours and really created very much a portrait of Dickens that we instinctively feel gets to the heart of the novelist’s writings.

For example, there was one section in the book where Chesterton says that Dickens was not really a novelist, that his books were really long rolls of the fabric of humanity, and Dickens mere cut out large strips for us. In this I think Chesterton meant there is a great continuity in Dickens’s characters. Their humanity overflows the pages and seeps into real life via their becoming embedded in our unconsciousness.

Harold Bloom, when writing about Shakespeare, said that he knew more about us than we knew about ourselves. You could perhaps say of Dickens that he knew more about our humanity than we know about it ourselves.

A lot of people when they take to writing criticism end up spouting a lot of rubbish, and frequently tie themselves up in knots trying to say something clever or original.

Chesterton’s book on Dickens comes across as being eminently sane. This book's best quality is its uncanniness at getting to the heart of Dickens.

Capote, by Gerald Clarke

Truman Capote’s life you could describe in three parts. Firstly there was the preternaturally gifted youth who wrote Other Rooms, Other Voices. So much promise at such a young age. Then there was the brilliantly accomplished Capote of his middle years: Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. But thereafter he completely and tragically fell to pieces. He took to drink and drugs and bad boyfriends and could never turn himself around. In the end he seemed to almost will himself to death.

What went wrong? Capote himself says that it was the writing of In Cold Blood that was his undoing. After watching the executions of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock he was never the same. Something inside of him snapped. The promised novel, Answered Prayers, was never finished. Only two chapters were published, and nothing else since has come to light.

Gerald Clarke spent 12 years researching this marvelously readable biography. There are long interview excerpts from Capote himself, plus other key characters, which gives the book an authentic ring, like you’re in a conversation with Capote and his friends.

Read this book and marvel at genius flowering then suddenly imploding. Why are artists so self-destructive?

Shakespeare: A Life, by Park Honan

Alas, this is quite a boring book. Apparently it is up to date with all the latest ‘new material’ that has come to light about Shakespeare. This biography takes you through a lot of the dull, day-to-day life of Elizabethan England – buying and selling of land, the work of councils, the willing of property.

As for ‘Shakespeare’ in all of this, you merely get his shadow. The life of his contemporaries is etched out in enough detail – we get glimpses of the theatres, taverns, shops and houses. Many of the controversies of the day are illuminated. Against this canvas we must stick our blank Shakespeare. In short, we know of the forces that must have shaped him – the politics, customs and religious beliefs. This goes a good way to letting us imagine what life for Shakespeare must have been like, but doesn’t much tell us about Shakespeare himself.

There are plenty of passages in this book where the author asserts Shakespeare must have been this, or this event would have shaped his mind thus. But this can only be sheer speculation. How can we ever know the mind who created characters like Iago and Macbeth? There is scant detail on what Shakespeare was really like as a person.

All that has come down to us are a few fleeting descriptions of him as a fairly easy going guy, of an open and honest character. If you really want to know Shakespeare, the only real way is through his poetry and plays.

I think the main problem with this book is that it goes into very academic detail about what we know of Shakespeare’s life – basically his business dealings that are on the public record. Then this is contrasted against his extraordinary work as a playwright. It’s this mixture of the banal and the extraordinary that make this book a somewhat disappointing read. Who cares about the minor details of Shakespeare’s life? And such speculations on how these events in his life impacted on his work are to be taken with a grain of salt.

If you want to read a terrific book on Shakespeare, read Harold Bloom’s Invention of the Human. Bloom does things the right way around, by writing a biography of Shakespeare’s plays.

This book is for dull academics who sit in dusty libraries poring over minutiae.

Frank Hardy: Politics Life Literature, by Jenny Hocking

Jenny Hocking is Deputy Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University and has written books on politics, politicians and ASIO. Frank Hardy: Politics, Literature, Life is not so much a conventional biography of a writer as a kaleidoscope of history, politics, biography and literature. More pointedly, Jenny Hocking explores the role of fact in the making of literature, and leaves the reader pondering: What is the role of the politically committed fiction writer in times of upheaval and discord?

Hocking cites pacifist and anti-fascist Egon Erwin Kisch as an early influence on Frank Hardy, with his view that fiction had been rendered obsolete by the horrors of the First World War, to be supplanted by fact based writing as a new form of fiction.

The case of Kisch is an interesting one, with numerous parallels to today. The Czech author had been an inmate of the Nazi’s concentration camps. He accepted an invitation from the Movement Against War and Fascism to speak at its anti-war congress in Melbourne. Yet Robert Menzies, then Attorney-General in the Lyons government, felt he was more a Communist proselytizer and famously determined that ‘he shall not set foot on the soil of the Australian Commonwealth.’ (Recall how John Howard made similar boasts about asylum seekers on the Tampa.)

Kisch jumped ship, was dragged back on the Strathaird and eventually disembarked at Sydney. What followed was a game of cat and mouse through the courts, until Menzies’ plan came undone, the High Court judging that the exclusion of Kisch from Australia had been invalid. (Scott Parkin comes to mind in 2005.)

The book also reminds how Menzies was an admirer of Hitler. After Menzies’ 1938 visit to Germany, the Attorney-General was moved to say, ‘Hitler is not an administrator as Mussolini is. He is a dreamer, a man of ideas, many of them good ones.’ In that same year Menzies even went so far as to say that he ‘thought it was a great thing for Germany to have arms.’

Another historical curiosity is the appearance of the German aristocrat, Count Felix von Luckner, on Australian shores. On June 6, 1938, at the Sydney Town Hall, the Count held a gig in which he demonstrated Aryan supremacy by ripping up telephone books and bending pennies, all the while telling the audience how happy Germany was. Sydney’s rich and powerful filled the front row seats. On the Count’s arrival in Sydney, he was welcomed by a private audience with Prime Minister Joe Lyons.

Some eight years after these tumultous events, Frank Hardy would start work on his most famous novel, Power Without Glory. It was written with the express purpose of lifting the veil on the corruption within politics, most notably within the Labor Party. Throughout his life Hardy harboured a mistrust of parliamentary politics, and later admitted he had worked throughout his life for a communist dictatorship in Australia.

Power Without Glory is an odd novel, in that it was pretty much commissioned by the Communist Party. Hardy was provided with financial backing by the Party for four years; he also had a swag party member researchers. The novel in a lot of ways reads like blockbuster fiction, yet doesn’t really have a plot, rather it piles political intrigue upon political intrigue, until you feel quite sick at the canker in the democratic bud. There’s no let up in the pornographic detail. This was pretty much Hardy’s aim: a book aimed at moral improvement, not so much of the reader, but of the current political culture.

Writes Hocking:

‘The Communist Party’s strategy intersected with Hardy’s interest in attempting an epic political novel as expose. It was suggested that a book written around the successful and dynamic financier and Victorian Labor Party identity John Wren, sufficiently disguised to avoid prosecution, yet obvious enough to ensure popular declamation, would be a unique form of political strategy as literature.’

Hocking’s interest in ASIO also provides much fascinating detail from the period of the Australian Communist Party’s heyday. Again, reading through this history one is struck by the parallels to today, especially the fact that Labor Party passed the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950, for fear of appearing soft on communism. Indeed, the past is prologue!

Prior to the passing of the Dissolution Act on October 23, 1950, the Menzies Government had received an ASIO report on what the Communist Party was up to. While admitting that support for the Communist Party was waning, nevertheless ASIO provided lists of groups that were sympathetic, yet not members of the party. The groups listed for attention were the likes of The New Housewives Association, the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Sydney Technical College’s Student’s Union. ASIO also provided lists of people to interred in case of war.

As you can see, life was a sea of troubles if you were a member of the Australian Communist Party during the ban. ASIO’s file on Hardy was so prodigious that it had a habit of casting dark clouds on innocent bystanders: Hardy’s son, Alan, had his details indexed. He was seven years old at the time.

The second half of Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life concentrates more on Hardy’s somewhat haphazard literary output over the years (after Power Without Glory’s 1950 publication, he didn’t write his next novel until 1958) and his personal life. There were the love affairs with Greek songbird Nana Mouskouri and Rumanian actress Elena Arama. The destructive addiction to gambling. Not one to pay his bills, despite his Marxist education and sure knowledge that he must be living off the labour of others, he could be found lining up with kids at busted phone booths in order to make a free call. Hardy even received a letter from some angry battlers after not paying one of his removalist bills: "We are a company of battlers and cannot survive when people, like yourselves, do not pay their debts!’

How different we are from what we profess ourselves to be.

The book also contains a nice little section on Mary Hardy, Frank’s youngest sister by fourteen years. As a youngster growing up in the seventies I always had to be in bed by the time her show The Penthouse Club started, but I instinctively knew at that young age that Mary Hardy’s wit and snappy one liners were something to be celebrated – Australia’s answer to Dorothy Parker. Her life too was pretty miserable, ending in suicide in 1985.

She went out with a bang. In 1983 Mary stormed a Liberal Party Function in Sydney. It was a $500 a pop fundraiser. Newly elected PM Malcolm Fraser and wife Tammy were the guests of honour. After interjecting during Fraser’s speech and making crow calls during Colleen Hewitt’s rendition of the Liberal Party theme song (is that available on CD I wonder?) she was taken to Redfern police station. Now that’s what I call civil disobedience.

Jenny Hocking’s Frank Hardy: Politics, Literature, Life, with its theme of the intersection of where politics and art meet, will keep your mind wonderfully focused on the role of the writer, and his or her responsibilities.

George Orwell, by D J Thomas

Near the end of D J Thomas’ biography he says that it is the unfortunate fate of most biographers that they fall ‘devastatingly out of love with their subjects’. He then goes on to happily state that that has not been the case with him, and that his affection for Orwell is still fully intact. Well, you could have fooled me!

Before starting this bio – a gracious gift from a work colleague – I did a quick check at Amazon.com, to read a few reviews. They were pretty mixed. Some loved it. Some really bitched that the author seemed to have it in for Orwell. They especially took D J Thomas to task for disbelieving Orwell’s account of his school days, provided in his famous, posthumously published long essay ‘Such, Such Were The Joys’. (If you’ve ever had a lousy time at school, you should read this essay. You’ll eat it up.)

I didn’t mind so much D J Thomas’ suggestion that Orwell created his own myth. Lots of authors do that, and it doesn’t seem out of line to argue that Orwell liked to exaggerate the truth himself. Yet I found in D J Thomas a tough minded, almost mean, intellectual. He’s smarter than I’ll ever be; certainly knows heaps more than me. Yet I found myself questioning some of his surmises.

For example, in Tosco Fyvell’s biography of Orwell, he quotes Orwell on his sickbed asking the question, ‘Is it possible to die with another book inside you?’ To me, this seemed a sad, whimsical sort of question. But Thomas claims that Orwell really believed this, almost intimating that he was a bit silly or far fetched.

Then there was a sentence that Thomas quotes from one of Orwell’s essays, where Orwell, in a mood of self pity, says that all his novel writing has been a failure, and that indeed, all books are failures. Thomas then gets on his high horse all of a sudden, all out of proportion to the quote I felt, and thunders something along the lines of, How can all novels be failures, how can he dare to say this about other writers? But the way I interpreted that line I felt Orwell was trying to say that, as a novelist and writer, he senses that all writers have this sense of failure, that their literary dreams never live up to what they had hoped.

Then there is a very short chapter – 3 pages long – titled, ‘The Case Against’, where he argues against Orwell, listing his failures. Well, the absolute vigour with which he plunges into this theme! I was quite shocked. You get the feeling that D J Thomas feels a little superior to his subject, or that maybe he has ‘fallen out of love’ with his subject.

Having said that, I did very much enjoy this book. It confirmed a lot of what I suspected about Orwell, the basic conflicts in his life, like between military action and pacifism, aggressive politics and the common people who muddle through life.

On his death bed Orwell requested that no biography be written about him. Making sure that no one could possible do such a thing, it seems, there is scant information available about him. He seemed very private – Thomas calls him ‘secretive’. In the afterward, Thomas says that most of the biographical detail about him comes from Professor Peter Davison’s 20 volume complete works, or which I have read one volume. So there you go, if you want to put together your own bio, you know where to start. And if you want to find your own version of the truth with regards to George Orwell, I’d pursue some of the letters and diary fragments, which I think give you the truest sense of Orwell as a living human being, rather than a literary artefact. Also read the self-deprecatory lines in his essays, which I think quite revealing. They pop up out of nowhere in his essays from time to time, almost tripping you up by their frankness.

My final verdict: a smart, perhaps too smart biography. I don’t totally trust all of what the biographer has to say. He doesn’t seem too sympathetic to Orwell.

This is quite a long read, and I can’t imagine it being picked up and read just for amusement. I dare say this in only for Orwell fans.