Archives for April 26, 2006

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.)

– 6:30 a.m. I wake without prompting, having slept for just five hours–not uncommon for me on days when I have a morning deadline. I descend from the loft, fix and eat a low-fat multi-grain English muffin and a bowl of cereal with skim milk, and start writing my drama column for Friday’s The Wall Street Journal, a review of The History Boys, Lestat, and The Wedding Singer.

– 10:35 a.m. The column is done. I e-mail it to my editor, change clothes, and go to the gym for a session with my trainer.

– 12:05 p.m. Dripping with sweat, I return to the apartment and check my e-mail. My editor isn’t finished with the column, but I find in the box an e-mail from Shellwood, a new British record label based in Surrey whose Web site says it is “dedicated to recording light music, mostly from the 1920-40s.” To my amazement, they’ve released a Cy Walter CD called The Park Avenue Tatum and want to know if I’d like a review copy. I respond in the aggressive affirmative. Walter was a legendary cabaret pianist who is now remembered (if at all) for having played two-piano accompaniments with Stan Freeman on a couple of albums recorded in the Fifties by Mabel Mercer and Lee Wiley. I’ve never heard any of his solo recordings, none of which has previously been reissued in any format, and I’m curious, to put it very mildly.

– 12:35 p.m. No word yet from the Journal, so I take a shower and go out a second time. I stop by the post office (where I hear a man use the expressions “Hel-lo?” and “I don’t think so!” in consecutive sentences) to mail my mother a souvenir menu from the White House mess, at which I dined last month. Next comes lunch at Good Enough to Eat (where I hear a woman use the words “condescending,” “colonialist,” and “eco-variety” in a single sentence). Then I go to the bank, the drugstore, and the grocery store. My hands twitch as I stroll past a short stack of three boxes of Mallomars, to which my attention is drawn by a handwritten sign: “Last batch of the season!!” The spasm passes and I fill my cart with low-calorie foods instead, feeling virtuous as I pay the cashier.

– 2:25 p.m. Back to the apartment again, where Tuesday’s snail mail (none of it worth reading) has arrived, as has the edited version of my column, lightly salted with the usual editorial queries, all of them helpful. I make the necessary fixes and e-mail the revised column back to the Journal.

– 2:45 p.m. I decide to spend the rest of the afternoon looking at art. Acting on a tip from an “About Last Night” reader, I take a crosstown bus to the Metropolitan Museum to see a small but choice-sounding show of Stieglitz-period American works on paper. Alas, it’s no longer on display (though the signs are still up) and I’m not in the mood to look at anything else. Even a wallful of mostly unfamiliar Arthur Doves fails to do the trick. I depart in a state of moderate dudgeon, immediately dispelled by the beautiful spring weather (it was supposed to rain today, but didn’t).

– 4:20 p.m. I watch a BBC documentary on Bette Davis
stored on my DVR. What on earth do people see in her? I mean, I like All About Eve as much as the next guy, but who cares about those other movies she made in the Thirties and Forties? I’d take Ida Lupino any day. In search of insight, I consult David Thomson, who answers my question with his usual pithiness: “Davis was a vulgar, bullying actress, who made mannerism a virtue by showing us how it expresses the emotion of the self.”

– 5:50 p.m. No show tonight! I wrestle briefly with the compulsion to spend the evening tinkering with Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Inspired by Thomson, I choose instead to pop a Mikl

“In this country, you never pull the emergency brake, even when there is an emergency. It is imperative that the trains run on schedule.”