Biography

Valerie and Yvonne Cohen were ‘artful’ in more ways than one. Both sisters were artists, and most of their friends and lovers were artists. They were ‘artistic’, seeking an unconventional life. For years they spent their winters on a tiny tropical island. And they – particularly Val – were artful dodgers.

It is easy to imagine book-buyers nodding with approval at the subtitle of this biography: ‘The making of a larrikin’. With ‘larrikin’ today applied to knockabout young men who are irreverent and mischievous but genuinely good-hearted, Bob Hawke seems a quintessential example. Yes, the myth goes, he used slipshod language now and then, and was quite a sight when he was in his cups, but generally Hawkie was a top bloke, a man who would call a spade a spade, a mate who could sup with princes and paupers but never forget who he was.

There might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.

Jews are central to narratives of the history of modern France. One narrative thread concerns a story of civic emancipation from the time when Jews were first granted equal rights during the French Revolution until the present, when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is not only France’s youngest postwar prime minister but also, like his predecessor Élisabeth Borne, of Jewish ancestry. The other narrative thread is of continuing anti-Semitism, most obvious in the Vichy government’s active participation in the deportation of Jews during World War II and still evident in the hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents reported in France every year. The Dreyfus Affair is pivotal to both narratives.

Werner Herzog is perhaps the only cinéaste from the epoch sometimes referred to as the ‘golden age of art cinema’ whose reputation as a pop cultural figure eclipses that of his films. One of the key members of the New German Cinema movement, and the director of celebrated feature films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Herzog has come to be known among internet users for his drawling Bavarian accent and his existential musings about solitude, despair, and the brutality of nature. However, as Herzog’s new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (translated by Michael Hofmann) reveals, behind this ironically morose façade lies a sentimental and deeply thoughtful man who is endlessly fascinated by the human soul and the superhuman drive to transcend what we thought possible.

Thirty years before the Australian career criminal Gregory David Roberts travelled to Bombay and sought to make for himself, in the words of critic Peter Pierce, ‘a good Asian life’, another socially alienated Australian pursued such a life, in Indonesia, one which in its own way was as remarkable as that novelised by Roberts in Shantaram (2003).

My one-woman show A Star Is Torn was a sung catalogue of the great women singers who had ‘taught’ me via their recordings. Having assembled a list of twelve, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday among them, I realised that they had all died young. The original draft also included a bunch of survivors, including Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. My assessment of Ella was based on scant information. When I premièred that show in 1979, she was in her sixties and still touring the world at a phenomenal pace. The rest was largely mythology. Judith Tick’s mammoth biography is authoritative enough to make me believe I now have something much closer to the truth.

Most people, at least in Sydney, have a story to tell about ‘Singo’. As Gerald Stone comments towards the end of this independent but enthusiastic biography: ‘Anecdotes about John Singleton, even the most affectionate, tend to swing between total admiration and head-wagging disbelief. He leaves no one feeling neutral.’

Reading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women: