I've read several popcorn books in the past month - by which I mean, books that are brainless reads which you might be embarrassed to read on the train. At work I was sent a proof of the new Sex and the City prequel: Summer and the City, a teen novel featuring a pre-college Carrie Bradshaw which proved surprisingly readable.
Then, following on from a childhood reading the entire Sweet Valley High series and a previous incarnation as a Sweet Valley blogger, I read Sweet Valley Confidential, the sequel set ten years later, which came out in the UK this month. I'm interested in SVH, and in '80s and '90s juvenile series more generally, as subjects for academic discussion and would love to read and write essays about them. In particular, I've long fantasised about "doing something" on SVH as a spiritual descendant of eighteenth century conduct novels.
I don't want to talk about SVC too much here but I will say that as a sequel to the original books, I think that it failed in capturing their essence. As a novel in its own right, I also think it was poorly-written and thought-out; I would never recommend it to someone unfamiliar with the series. Still, as a slice of what-happened-next, it's of interest - I wouldn't say that it scratches an itch but it acknowledges that there's an itch to be scratched.
I also read Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, an alternative history which postulated what would happen if South African white supremacists from the present day travelled back in time to nineteenth-century America to provide the Confederate army with AK-47s, thus changing the course of the civil war. A ridiculous premise that actually works surprisingly well; I was quite impressed with Turtledove's depiction of Robert E. Lee in particular. Other than the too-lengthy battle scenes, it was extremely well-done.
As my discussion of any of these three books would probably become nerdy rather than scholarly, I'm forced by default to review Stefan Kanfer's recent biography of Humphrey Bogart, Tough Without a Gun.
I'll be frank: I don't think that it's a very good biography. Too be sure, it's readable - the introduction extremely so - but Kanfer shows all the typical biases of a biographer who's far too pleased with his subject. Bogart is introduced as a man whose life spans three centuries, which, though literally true (he was born in 1890s, found fame in the 1940s, enjoys a legacy stretching into the 2000s), is stretching the facts a bit. Really, we can hardly allow this to be an impressive claim, given that he was born in the nineteenth century's final year. In fact, had he been born just a week later, he'd have been born on the first day of the twentieth century.
Kanfer's characterisation of Bogart is also suspect. In his biographer's eyes, Bogart is the plain-talking man's man who's tough but fair; a complicated mesh of all the best characters he plays. The people he comes up against are unfair, or cruel, or misguided, or stupid. As represented by Kanfer, Bogart is rarely in the wrong in a given situation - a terrible attitude for a biographer to take. To brush over Bogart's more unpleasant qualities entirely; to see manliness represented in his alcoholism; to characterise him as a perpetual underdog, the prey of the deliberate vindictiveness of both Hollywood and his first three wives - is both distasteful and dishonest.
As a consequence, Bogart's humanity is veiled. For example, Bogart's first wife divorced him on the grounds of "neglect and cruelty" - Kanfer does not dismiss this but he doesn't go into further detail, either. And at times the desire to paint Bogart's nemeses in a bad light leads to pettiness. The woman responsible for him being summoned to court in 1949 is referred to as "a self-described 'model'" (143) - why not just call her a model, or an aspiring model?
Kanfer is also too obviously invested in the Bogart-Bacall relationship. I can sympathise - they were an iconic couple - but this results in Bogart's post-marital affairs being glossed over. Particularly puzzling is the case of his relationship with his hairdresser, Verita Thompson. Kanfer establishes them as having had a "lengthy affair" (95) between 1942-55 but she then receives only four, austere mentions throughout the book before her allegations of their relationship are dismissed as "unverified" (241). Why introduce her in such a way if she is only to be subsequently set aside?
Beyond Kanfer's cloying apotheosis of Bogart, the biography also concerned me in that it added little to my knowledge of the man that I couldn't have discovered for myself online. There were some amusing anecdotes that I hadn't heard before but there was otherwise little evidence of original research or analysis into either Bogart's character or Bogart as a standard of manhood during the 1940s.
This latter failure is particularly disappointing as the book does attempt some small scrutiny of this kind. A discussion of manliness is perhaps inevitable in any book or article on Bogart. After all, both the AFI and Entertainment Weekly voted him the greatest male screen legend of all time. There's a "Bogie Cult"; his image is synonymous with that of the private dick; his name is even slang for the monopolisation of a cigarette or joint. Bogart is associated with a certain kind of masculinity, yet all that Kanfer can do is wonder why "there never will, never can be another Humphrey Bogart". (252)
To my mind, this is a shallow question. A better one would be to query why Bogart's masculinity is still regarded by many as the epitome; after all, Sam Spade, Rick Blaine, and Dix Steele are from films now over sixty years old. It is true that the particular type of masculinity that they represent is no longer entirely fashionable, but it remains respectable. We remember his dry one-liners, his consumption of cigarettes and alcohol, his attitude to women as things to be admired as an ideal masculinity, even in this post-feminist world. Why is Bogart still cool, still highly regarded as a figure of masculinity, when his contemporaries Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, James Cagney and even Clark Gable (when was the last time you saw a Gable film that wasn't Gone With the Wind?) are forgotten or ridiculed?
In fact, we might ask why the version of masculinity exhibited by Bogart was ever fashionable to begin with. Kanfer writes: "In the early 1940s masculinity was defined by the appearances of men in uniform. Those who couldn't make the grade were defined as lacking in virility..." (88) This "definition" dovetails exactly with Bogart's breakthrough - when Bogart was forty-two. Why did this older actor, who had been relegated to bit-parts for the previous ten years, and was now being cast in noirs, find fame during a time when the other fashionable male stars were presented as young and belligerent? And why was he still successful in the early 1950s when the wave of Marlon Brandos and James Deans came along?
Kanfer does not attempt to answer these questions. Instead, he limits himself to occasional commentary on those habits of Bogart which do exude masculinity. At one stage, he concludes a passage on cigarettes with a commentary on the manliness of smoking in the 1940s, finishing with the wry aside: "After all, Adolf Hitler was the one who didn't use tobacco or eat meat." (116) In a book that has hitherto been distinctly lacking in jokes, I find this flippant remark bewildering. Is it a joke, the sole one in the book, about Hitler and in the context of cancer? If so, bad taste. Or is it a legitimate point? If so, it goes unexplained. Hitler's notorious conception of an ideal manliness is a fascinating subject; a discussion, however brief, of a western reaction to Hitler's manliness couldn't fail to capture my attention. Yet Kanfer leaves this avenue unexplored.
Without a sense of irony, he quotes from Jeffrey Meyers' biography of Bogart, that the star "survived twenty-five years in Hollywood without a drug problem, a nervous breakdown, or a psychiatrist." (244) He does not seem to consider that Bogart was hardly emotionally healthy, with frequent violent outbursts and an excessive alcohol habit - both of which Kanfer mentions earlier on in the book.
It's understandable that Kanfer adores Bogart, but I've long believed that the best biographies are those written with an academic neutrality. Mary Lovell's biography of the Mitford sisters is a good example of this, as are Lindy Woodhead's biographies of Harry Selfridge, and Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein. Bogart is one of my favourite actors; I like his voice, I like his one-liners, I like his left-wing attitudes, I like the idea of his relationship with Bacall. I appreciate that Kanfer loves him, too - and sympathy and admiration for the subject are both acceptable in a biography, provided that they are deserved and not overdone.
Kanfer, unfortunately, overdoes them, and consequently I think his book suffers for it. What I found strange was the fact that the first few chapters are interesting - even well-written. The story of Bogart's life up until the mid-1930s is presented with a comparative neutrality but Kanfer's love of his subject comes through in his writing. We anticipate the coming clash between Bogart the man and Bogart the celebrity.
Yet it is once Bogart begins to achieve some fame that the bias comes through. Suddenly the Bogart we are reading about is near-indistinguishable from the characters he plays. In the penultimate chapter - on the media inspired by Bogart since his death, which comes off as a simplistic literary review rather than an analysis of those works - he writes: "As American life coarsened...the curt, stiff-lipped men that Humphrey Bogart represented on-screen, and the sharp-witted individual that he was off-screen, took on a meaning far beyond sentiment. They stood for values that certain men and women - most of them far too young to remember him in his heyday - remembered and romanticized." (247)
What Kanfer doesn't understand is that this desire to cling to the romanticized version of Bogart is the very trap that he himself has fallen into. But can we entirely blame him for this? Bogart's success and legacy were founded on his celebrity image; Kanfer tells us that one of the reasons he continued smoking was because he was aware that it was part of his public persona (203). Kanfer's reluctance to relinquish the idealised, celebrity conception of Bogart is natural, given how much effort was gone into the creation of that celebrity. The veil drawn over its actors to present them with a new face fashioned by Hollywood is still active - and, I'd say, still effective.
