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April 26, 2006
TT: One life to live, many to tell
A reader writes:I was disappointed, to say the least, when I read a while back that the title of your new book would be Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Why, you say? Do I hate subtitles? Do I hate Louis Armstrong?
No, it's because you're using that ridiculous phrase A Life of -----. When I first saw that in a subtitle a few years ago, in something like (to make up a book), America's Poet: A Life of Robert Frost, I immediately thought, what a silly use of language--did the man have several lives? No, he had one. Someone's writing about it, therefore it should be The Life of Robert Frost.
Now, Armstrong may have done enough with his to fill up two or three normal lives, but he, too, had only one. So I say it should be Hotter Than That: The Life of Louis Armstrong.
And yes, I think I know how it must have started. When my make-believe Frost book was submitted to its editor, he, in a fit of political correctness, said, "Oh, we can't use that title. 'Life' means biography in the literary world. Someone might think we're saying that this book is the biography of Frost--the one, the only, the best. No, no, no, we can't do that, it might hurt someone's feelings." And silliness won another small victory.
I know that it's currently a popular way to phrase it, but that doesn't make it right (and thank God, many authors are still using The Life of -----, for example, John Szwed's excellent So What: The Life of Miles Davis). "Life," in the title of a biography, means just that, someone's life, the time they spent on earth. It doesn't mean "biography," at least not in the real world.
So I'm begging you, man, change it back to the phrase that's worked fine for hundreds of years--it's not too late! Strike a blow for common sense!
Alas, my subtitle has what I regard as an impeccable and dispositive precedent, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, written by yours truly. I explained in the preface why I gave it that name: "This is a life of Mencken, not the life. I have made no attempt to be exhaustive, so as to avoid being exhausting." As you see, it had nothing to do with political correctness (don't make me laugh!). I simply felt--and feel--that every biography is by definition one person's interpretation of another person's life, a selection from and arrangement of the available facts, and that since multiple interpretations of the same facts are not only possible but inevitable, the title should indicate as much.
As for the larger question of the meaning of "life," The New Shorter Oxford defines it as, among other things, "A written account of a person's history; a biography." That usage dates back to Middle English.
Here endeth the lesson. (Nice try, though.)
Posted April 26, 2006 12:53 PM
