From time to time, I find myself reading books that, for whatever reason, lack interest and stop engaging me.
One particular type of book where this happens is autobiographies. There are a number of interlocking reasons why this can be true:
- The person in question is writing a hagiography, and therefore it is all “I am great and I did this” content, with nothing remotely complete, rounded, or informative about their life
- The person does not like controversy or honesty, and therefore glosses over or ignores significant events in their life because they are controversial or embarrassing
- The writing style is poor, some combination of superficial, turgid or pseudo-conversational (which works well in the bar when you are extemporizing, but may not look that good when written down verbatim as prose)
- The content is focussed on the trivial or newsworthy (or scandalous) aspects of their life, with nothing substantive covered or revealed
- Translation from a different language removes light and shade and other details
Over the years, I have read autobiographies by people in the same line of endeavor that were like equal and opposites of each other. A great example is Niki Lauda and Alain Prost, two racing drivers in F1 who raced against each other.
Prost’s autobiography, titled “Life In The Fast Lane” (eegads, what a cliched and boring title that is, couldn’t they have done any better than that?) is boring, superficial and actually achieves the fairly considerable feat of leaving you, at the end of it, thinking that you know less about Alain Prost than when you started. Missing from the book is any detail on some of the pivotal events in his life and career, including any detail explanation of why he lost the 1983 championship and why he was fired by Renault at the end of that season. (This may be an example of controversy avoidance; one rumour at the time was that part of the reason that Prost was fired was because he had been found in flagrante delicto with the wife of his team manager in mid-season).
I have to wonder if some of the problem is down to translation. I suspect that the book was first published in French, and then translated into other languages. Poor translation can squeeze out subtlety.
Niki Lauda’s autobiography, “To Hell and Back”, is, by total contrast, engaging from start to finish. You get the impression that you are listening to the unfiltered voice of Lauda (in contrast to Prost’s book, which reads like an extended press release). Lauda talks frankly and honestly about pivotal moments in his life (which fits Lauda, because one thing that everybody always said about Niki Lauda was that he was not a man of artifice, he said what he was thinking at all times). You feel that you have actually learned things along the way. Plus, Lauda was as fluent in English as he was in German (I watched him being interviewed in 1976, and his command of English vernacular and swearing was scarily good), so I suspect that translation may not have been an issue.
Lauda’s book is a page-turner. Prost’s book is a bargain-bin throwaway borefest.
Of course, what we don’t know is how much of the content of these books was influenced by editing. It is entirely possible to edit or smooth out a work of art so much that all of the interesting aspects of the work disappear. The phenomenon of the final version of a song that is less interesting than the original demo is a common issue in the music world.
There is also is the issue of what content the publisher wants to emphasize. Billy Joel famously signed a contract to write his autobiography, and apparently mostly completed it, only to terminate his contract and return the advance. When asked why he had cancelled out of the work, Joel explained that he felt that the publisher wanted him to major on the non-musical salacious stuff instead of creating a rounded life story. In other words, more sex drugs and scandal, and tattle about others. Not wanting to play that game, Joel cancelled the contract. Which was his right. Although he did co-operate with a biographer who published a biography of his life in 2015.
I was reminded of these issues because I just read “Searching For The Sound”, the autobiography of Phil Lesh, the long-time bassist for the Grateful Dead. This is a book that I had every right to expect would be interesting. Lesh was a classically-trained composer and trumpet player, who picked up the electric bass one day, and, lacking any background in small-band and rock music, adopted a unique style that emphasized complex harmonic movement and melody over “keeping time”, which was the prevailing bass playing style in rock and pop bands at the time. Then you have the total uniqueness of the Dead, and their uniqueness as a social phenomenon. All of this should have been more than enough for a cracking book.
Sadly, this isn’t it. The book starts brightly enough, with a lot of interesting detail about Lesh’s childhood, his attempts to make it in the classical music world, and how he fell into the acoustic and folk music scene in the mid-1960s, and suddenly found himself playing bass in an R&B band that then became the Grateful Dead.
Then, somewhere in the middle, the level of detail drops, and the second half of the book turns into a shallow gallop through 30 years of the Dead’s existence. The dialogue and description, especially about the band, becomes less and less substantive and interesting. You end the book feeling that you did not really get a good grasp of what was happening in the Dead in the 1980s and 1990s. Lesh does not flinch from admitting to his own demons along the way, primarily alcoholism, which left him in a haze for a dozen or more years and contributed to his liver failure and subsequent successful transplant. But the content of the book becomes increasingly one-dimensional. You feel like you are looking at a photograph of a table instead of sitting at the table eating dinner. The prose style tends towards the robotic.
The contrast with drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s autobiography is instructive. Kreutzmann’s book gives a much better and more rounded idea of the arc of the Dead, and the troubles that beset the band at frequent intervals. Kreutzmann, like just about every bad member, had his own demons, both drugs and drink. Yet, despite the classic image of the drummer as the meathead up the back banging on stuff, he comes out of his autobiography as a smart and deep-thinking person. In interviews, he also comes across as very thoughtful about the Dead’s history, and their troubles with drugs and drink. His comment “nothing good ever comes of cocaine” is a keeper.
Lesh’s book is like a good starter with a poor quality main course. Kreutzmann’s book is a well-balanced meal.
My diagnosis of the Prost bio is that Prost never revealed much of anything, being a canny person in all aspects of his life, so the editor may not have had much to work with.
The Phil Lesh book may have been a victim of editing to fit it into a certain size. Sometimes books appear to gallop after the mid-point, as if desperate to get to The End. I am trying to avoid that syndrome in my writing, since it hints that you may be running out of useful things to say. But, like the Prost book, it may be due to Lesh’s reluctance to spill absolutely everything. The members of the Dead have, relatively speaking, not been big talkers, especially not on a personal level. More than most bands, they always seemed to adhere to the high ideal that the music should do the talking. Leaving side Jerry Garcia, who disappeared 25 years ago, and the keyboards players, who have a disturbing habit of dying (except, Thank God, for Bruce Hornsby) only 2 band members have written autobiographies. I suspect that if he were still alive, Garcia’s autobio would be the best one of all. Garcia was a ferocious reader of all sorts of books and prose, and very articulate about almost any subject.
I think the key may be the collaborator/editor. David Crosby’s two volumes of autobiography are excellent, I think mainly because Carl Gottlieb does a good job of placing Crosby’s extemporizations into context, providing a good insight to not only what was happening in his life, but also what was happening around him at the time. As a result, the books paint a picture of a flawed man who still tried to do the right thing, unless he was too stoned or spaced out to behave normally.
The one thing I think there should be a law against is writing any autobiography before you turn 30. Tim Tebow, I’m looking at you.