A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius.
Plutarch’s Lives set the pattern for the biographical arts in the tumultuous second century, and formed a source of inspiration for everyone from Shakespeare to America’s founding fathers.
It seems to have fallen from grace in an age when projecting current values into the deepest corners of the past has replaced understanding, and history is rewritten to suit fleeting ideological obsessions.
But one of our greatest living biographers has brought it back.
Jeffrey Meyers draws on Plutarch’s principle of dual composition to shed fresh light on some of the figures who did so much to shape our world.
His new book is full of literary feuds, illicit romance, chronic alcoholism and sympathetic attachments between writers, artists, actors, directors, and thinkers —names you’ll recognize, and ‘greats’ you thought you understood.
Each chapter shifts back and forth between two subjects, evaluating similarities and contrasts, exploring intellectual influences and personality traits, and examining the complex motives behind irrational behaviour.
Why did Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate burn their friendship with a literary feud, while Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud avoided a similar fate?
How did the clash of two monumental egos — one of them the son of a prime minister — nearly derail a theatre of war?
What connected screen legend Audrey Hepburn to a teenage girl killed in a Nazi extermination camp a month before it was liberated by the British?
That’s what we’re talking about today. This is my second conversation with Jeffrey Meyers. He joined me on Episode 41 of Personal Landscapes to discuss the novelist James Salter. If you enjoy today’s episode, you’ll want to go back and listen to that one.
Jeffrey Meyers is the author of an astonishing 55 books of biography and literary criticism, including works on Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. He’s been translated into fourteen languages and published on six continents. And he is one of twelve Americans in the Royal Society of Literature.
His newest book, Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, is available now.
We spoke about Plutarch’s use of mirror images, literary feuds as spectator sport, and Audrey Hepburn’s connection to Anne Frank.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
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