Uncle Orson Reviews 1998

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Biography

Larry Gelbart, Laughing Matters: On Writing M*A*S*H, Tootsie, Oh, God!, and a Few Other Funny Things (Random House, 1998, 276pp hc). Sometimes the memoirs are fascinating; sometimes the smugness of a rather shallow thinker is pretty hard to take. Anybody who makes it in television deserves a medal, though, and the fact that Gelbart came out of it with something of a sense of humor left is remarkable.

Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (Knopf/Borzoi, 1997, 434pp hc $30). See the review under "My Favorites of 1998" above.

Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (Random House, 1997, 334pp hc $25.95). Probably the most depressing biography I've ever read, not because Jung was the worst human being I've ever read about, but because such a pathetic human being was one of those whose self-justifying, self-indulgent rationalizations have given shape to the world we live in today. I have known for years that Freud and Jung were founders of religions with themselves as prophets, and that their religions happen to be, along with Marx's, the most extraordinarily false and pernicious of our time. But this picture of the tawdriness of the grasping ambitions and utterly unfounded "scientific" declarations of these self-promoters made me so sad I could not bring myself to finish the book. Noll does have something of the air of a muckraker about him, but it doesn't change the fact that even if we rely only on the most reliable sources, the picture of the founding of Jungianism is bleak indeed.

Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life (Knopf/Borzoi, 1998, 461pp hc $30). As with most biographies of famous people who are still alive, the temptation to worship is part of the impulse to write, and this book is not immune. Sondheim is a powerful, influential figure in contemporary musical theatre, but it is worth remembering that with only a few exceptions, his remarkable talents have been used in the service of broken shows. This biography inadvertently makes clear why this happens, for Sondheim is perpetually torn between a desire to create art honestly for a caring audience and a desire to win the admiration of the elitist "serious music" establishment. For me, the best part of the book is not the account of his career or the embarrassingly shallow and pointless blurbs from reviews of the shows, but rather the account of his childhood and family life. I have no idea how this childhood led to the art; what I cared about was that anyone had to grow up in such a way, and that Sondheim emerged from it as a creator.

D.M. Thomas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (St. Martin's, 1998, 583pp hc $29.95). Solzhenitsyn is a prophet today without honor in any country, as his jeremiads are not appreciated by any of the contemporary cultural elites and are not written so as to be heard or understood by ordinary people. But his greatness was honestly come by, and this thorough, detailed biography (no more detailed than a Solzhenitsyn novel, however) reminds us that there are times when the pen truly is mightier than the sword. One wishes that Solzhenitsyn's private life could have been happier -- it should have been, had it not been so deformed by the heavy hand of the state. But I admired him for proceeding to be the man he was, and the writer he was.

Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine, 1998, 532pp hc $27.50). Weir makes no pretense -- this is not a life-and-times or an account of the public acts of a queen who reigned and ruled. This is a personal history, the story of her friends and lovers, the people she trusted and the people against whom she struggled. Anybody who ever intends to write a historical or fantasy novel with a king or queen in it should read the book if only to get a real sense of the powerful boundaries on a monarch's personal decisions, and the impossibility of separating private desires from public necessities. Rulers don't have private lives, and especially not private sex lives. I came out of this book both admiring and loving this woman, and wishing only that Weir had made perhaps a bit more of one obvious (to me) truth: That one guiding, shaping principle of her life was a genuine faith in the Protestant God.

Alex Zwerdling, Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London (Perseus/BasicBooks, 1998, 383pp hc $35). Of Henry Adams I knew little, but Henry James and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were already on my list of Writers Who Destroyed Modern Literature. This book does nothing to dispel that conclusion of mine, but its value comes from the way it puts these men into context and shows them as rebels against the increasing domination of American life by its common citizens -- and in particular by its newcome immigrants. What Eliot and Pound were fleeing, partly, was the rush of Russian Jews into the U.S.; it is ironic that those very Jews and their children and grandchildren have largely led large swathes of American culture in the years since then -- and have done so, quite often, in service of principles that Eliot (in particular) expounded.

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