The sheer serendipity of search engines (try saying that three times fast) never ceases to amaze me. In the process of confirming my vague memory that it was Samuel Johnson who observed of John Milton's Paradise Lost that "None ever wished it longer than it is," I came across a wonderful op-ed from the July 30, 1995, New York Times: "'None Ever Wished It Longer': How to Stamp Out Book Inflation."
In it, critic Terry Teachout deplores a trend that has only accelerated over the subsequent 24 years: mounting page counts without concomitantly greater pleasure for the reader. He theorizes that this is rooted in the belief that "books about books are more important than the books they're about."
But Teachout does praise one book we've discussed: "John Lahr's 302-page Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (1978), for example, is as good as literary biography gets. Spoilsports who insist on pointing out that Orton didn't live very long or write very much should take a look at A.N. Wilson's C.S. Lewis: A Biography (1990), in which a man who published 38 books in his lifetime is summed up in 334 admirably pithy pages."
Just to be clear, I do not offer this commentary as any sort of pejorative comment about the many literary biographies we've read over the past 20 years—much less the three of them that have been nominated for our next reading list, one of which I've already read and enjoyed. (The other two sound good to me, too.) But I do subscribe to his main point.
See what you think.
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It's almost as though the biographer wished to inflict upon his readers all the pains he went through to produce the definitive life–record — as well as, more obviously, prevent there ever being another biography because no scrap of quotidian triviality had been left unrecorded! Titles as tombstones? or toadstools?
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