Yesterday I posted on fiction and novel. Today I want to post on "best biograpies" as selected by Paul Johnson, a man whose work I respect greatly. Here's his 5 top choices:
Macaulay
By Sir Arthur Bryant (1932)
1. There is no doubt in my mind what is the best short biography ever written. It is Sir Arthur Bryant's life of Macaulay. I have taken it as the model for my own small-scale lives, of which I have done five, and my 60 biographical essays, in four volumes. What is required for this kind of work is a combination of ruthlessness and elegance. Ruthlessness in discarding everything but the essential; elegance in concealing your brutality behind a flow of prose in which not a word is wasted, room is found for wit and the telling anecdote, and the reader never gets an impression of hurry. Macaulay was a tough subject. He was a poet, a journalist of the highest class and a historical writer who enraptured his contemporaries but also a man of action, cabinet minister, reformer and the best administrator in the whole course of the British Empire in India. He never wasted a day. He always had a book or two in his pocket for reading—and remembering—in odd moments. His memory was prodigious. He never had to search for a word, in writing or speech. Coping with this phenomenon, and reducing his crowded life to a mere 109 pages, required a historian of the highest caliber and a writer of unusual gifts. Bryant was that man. In 1945 the world was astonished when the British electorate deposed Winston Churchill and replaced him with the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee. As they were processing to the House of Commons for the opening of Parliament, Churchill said to Attlee: "Who is our finest historian?" "Arthur Bryant." "Well," said Churchill, 'at least we agree on something.'
Ulysses S. Grant
By Michael Korda (2004)
2. Americans make very good biographers for thoroughness. But they write on an ample scale, and short biographies are rare. But they do occur, and one I admire is Michael Korda's "Ulysses S. Grant." Here was a man whose early life was humble and marked by failure, but once he got a grip on success he was unusually proficient. He contrived to end the Civil War, and to end it on a note of grace, to serve two terms as president, and then to write one of the most successful books in American literature. As Korda says, in the late 19th century, in every American home, you could count on finding two books, the Bible and Grant's memoirs. Korda manages to bring this man alive, and nail down his qualities and significance, in 158 short pages.
Lincoln at Gettysburg
By Garry Wills (2006)
3. Of Grant's contemporary, Lincoln, there are over 1,000 biographies, many multivolume, with more appearing every year. There are few short ones, and none outstanding, but there is one that contrives to take a particular episode and use it to epitomize and illuminate the whole life. This is Garry Wills's "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America." The main text is only 175 pages, but it shows how Lincoln in this short speech was able to ennoble the war, to explain why it was necessary, to show why it succeeded in its objects and to give Americans a key text about themselves. The book sums up Lincoln's qualities and makes good his claim to be the exemplar of the American virtues and the central figure in American history. This is a two-day read—with the appendices three—but time profitably spent.
Rossetti: His Life and Works
By Evelyn Waugh (1928)
4. Of modern writers in English, I rate Evelyn Waugh as the one who used words most carefully, judiciously and imaginatively and who never employed one more than he absolutely needed. So it is no wonder that he wrote a fine short biography, "Rossetti: His Life and Works." Rossetti is not an easy man to write about. He was a poet as well as a painter. He can be seen both as the central figure in the one important artistic movement of the 19th century in Britain, the Pre-Raphaelites, but also as an outsider who never fitted into its aims. He was also a complex of opposites. He was industrious. He was lazy, almost beyond belief at times. He was highly literary. He rarely read books. He drew like an angel. His drawing was sometimes clumsy and indelicate. His coloring melted the heart. It was also harsh and disturbing. His thoughts about art, literature and culture were incisive and passionately interesting. They were also mindless, at times, and incoherent nearly always. Waugh contrives to fit all these opposites together and to convey, without wasting words, the course of the internal dialogue in himself by which he reached his conclusions. It is a notable achievement for a young man—published when he was 25, it was his first book—and well worth reading.
A Portrait of Charles Lamb
By David Cecil (1983)
5. Finally there is David Cecil's life of the 19th-century essayist Charles Lamb. I knew Cecil when I was an Oxford undergraduate, and he still makes me laugh, though I'm not sure whether I am laughing at Cecil himself or at Kingsley Amis's brilliantly funny imitations of him. Cecil was good at short books. He did an excellent one on Jane Austen, another on the young Lord Melbourne and a third on William Cowper. But his Lamb is the best. Cecil was attracted to Lamb by his gentleness, punctuated by occasional spasms of fury, by his exquisite use of words and expressions, and his interest in their gestation, and by his delight in human eccentricity. Lamb's life was made tragic by his beloved sister's periodic bouts of insanity, but it was always a continual comedy—occasionally a farce—thanks to Lamb's eye for the unconscious human behavior that makes one laugh and his ear for wit, as well as his genius for delivering it. This charming book can be read easily in a couple of days, but it will linger in the mind forever.