The Biographer's Art

I suppose I should be reading Jan Swafford's biography of Brahms at the moment. It sits highly invitingly on the part of the book shelves reserved for on-going reading, and I've perused the first few pages with delight, knowing it's going to be something special - but such has been the busyness of my little world of late, and the demands of Prof Pinker's latest magisterial tome, that I've deliberately delayed getting to grips with Swafford, knowing I'm not going to do his work any justice if I read it in a head-long rush.

Another factor that's been involved in this delay links to my reading of the Ian Bell biography of Bob Dylan I mentioned earlier this month. I completed it a couple of weeks ago - or, rather, I completed the first volume, the only one I've got, of the full two-volume biography - and my reading of it resulted in my doing a lot of thinking about biographies in general. Unfortunately the thinking I did, and, I suppose, am still doing, is not of the clear and lucid variety that makes for the well-balanced mind, but is of the impressively hazy kind with which I so often baffle myself. And this muddlement (my coinage, don't look it up) factored into my hesitation over the Brahms bio, despite the author's impressive clarity as to what he's doing writing the thing in his introductory pages.

Basically, whilst I read Bell's book with gusto and a sense of learning something about the Bobster, at times I felt something close to guilt about my intrusion into the great man's life via the rather gossipy content (but, then, what biography isn't simply a kind of heightened form of gossip when all is said and done?) and even more frequently a distinct sense of irritation manifested itself upon my reading some of Bell's more superficial judgements upon Dylan's work.

Bell is obviously a pretty intelligent bloke but he suffers from the syndrome that plagues, indeed almost defines writers who see themselves as 'critics' of various genres of popular music: he cannot stop himself, perhaps even sees his function as, standing in judgement over the work of the subject he seeks to anatomise, failing to recognise that what he is doing is nothing more than a kind of parasitical growth feeding on that subject's creativity. Almost as a matter of routine he evaluates each album, often picking his hits and misses therefrom. But what's the point of telling the reader that Ballad in Plain D is some kind of disaster of a song that presumably he thinks Dylan should never have written?

Indeed, it becomes clear after the first half of his book, which actually has got some genuinely interesting and insightful stuff on Dylan's youth, that we're going to get the life of the artist sequenced through the albums, as if they somehow constitute the life. In the case of Dylan this is particularly off the point, of course, since even in his earliest days the albums were not central to how he saw his work, paradoxical as that may sound.

So now I'm thinking, in my confused way, that I just might not pick up the second volume of Bell's work (but, then again, I probably will) and that maybe biography in general is such a sullen art that a sensible reader ought to bypass it completely (but, of course, that's not going to happen in my case) and that Mr Swafford may resolve these dilemmas for me and I've really got to get round to picking up his Johannes Brahms pronto.