Mary Shelley (Muriel Spark, 1987)
The micro-genre “biographies written by novelists” is, now that I think about it, kind of a favorite of mine. There’s Sylvia Townsend Warner on T.H. White (the GOAT), Penelope Fitzgerald on Charlotte Mew, Sigrid Undset on Catherine of Siena, Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Mellville, probably others I’m not thinking of…. And now I can add this book to my list, a biography of Mary Shelley that (apparently) helped begin a revival of her reputation outside of Frankenstein. I was turned onto it by Charlotte Gordon’s book Romantic Outlaws and read them almost back-to-back.1
Mary Shelley (which is itself a revision of an earlier work by Spark) is split into two parts; the first part is a fairly straightforward biography, the second part is her argument that Mary Shelley counts as a significant writer in her own right, not just as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s wife. Both are showcases of Spark herself as a reader—first of people, then of literature. Her dry comments on the real life people who populate the first part of her book made up much of my notes (certainly, they were the most fun bits of my notes). Some highlights:
On why Mary Shelley might have encouraged extramarital flirtations she did not really want: “But people seldom act from one motive alone; if they do they are said to be obsessed.”
On pseuds: “There is a type of person who, having glimpsed the glories attendant upon the life dedicated to creative achievement, and who is yet unqualified to create, pursues in a vague sort of way not the achievement itself but its accoutrements. Such a person was Claire Clairmont, the type of young woman who today would be known as ‘arty.’ Brought by her mother’s marriage into a society of luminary spirits, she envied the high pitch of their existence but lacked its justification, a capacity for vision and performance; and there can be no more insidious or inconvenient company for the truly creative mind than this parasitic type of manqué individual.”
On William Godwin: “As with many people to whom reason becomes a god, his emotions played dark tricks with him.”
On falling in love with a somewhat boring person: “To a great extent, Shelley wrote Emilia out of his system with the Epipsychidion, and although early in January 1821 he had told Claire, ‘She continues to enchant me infinitely,’ by the middle of that month he was writing, ‘There is no reason that you should fear any mixture of that which you call love. My conception of Emilia’s talents augments every day. Her moral nature is fine—but not above circumstances; yet I think her tender and true which is always something.’ In other words, Shelley was getting to know Emilia, and to do this is always to partly solve a mystery.”
On the positive influence of alcohol: “Why then, we may ask, was she not more often a little tipsy? But Mary Shelley was never drunk, not by wine, nor literature, nor love, nor virtue. I suppose it is the function of a biographer to diagnose, and not to indulge in vain retrospective proscribing. None the less I seriously suggest that if there had been more wine in Mary’s life there would have been fewer tears. But Mary was reared abstemiously, so to say, first on Godwin’s iced water, and then on Shelley’s self-generated health salts. So the whimsical tippling of her ‘sad confession’ remained no more than a vicarious indulgence.”
But I also recommend the second half of the book because in addition to being full of sensitive and precise readings of Mary Shelley’s work, it is an excellent example of how to make the case for somebody’s artistic significance without resorting to hyperbolic claims about their unparalleled greatness. Spark finds Shelley’s artistic limitations to be as much a part of her story as her achievements.
“She was one,” Spark writes,
in whom contrast, and therefore conflict, was perpetual, and in this respect she is not unique within the artistic species. If we are to see the whole woman, we must witness the conflict.
More on Mary Shelley… later (maybe) (we’ll see).
Cowboy Carter (Beyoncé, 2024)
I respect Beyoncé, but I am not a huge fan outside of Lemonade (which I love). I like her self-titled album fine and I also like Cowboy Carter, but when it comes to the stuff before her self-titled album—i.e., her big hits—I always just feel like she’s calling me, personally, a worm. Even “Single Ladies” makes me feel like I’m dropping the ball on proposing to some mythical girlfriend. I know the vibe it’s supposed to conjure is that I’m partying with Beyoncé in the club after shaking off some useless man but instead I just feel like I’m the useless man. I’m not even a man! I don’t have a girlfriend!!
All that aside though, I think it’s interesting that after putting out several hitmakers Beyoncé basically seems to have decided she was done with that and now she puts out albums that you really have to listen to in one piece. If I’m listening to Lemonade I’m basically always listening to it from start to finish, not dropping individual songs into playlists (or even putting them on loop)—except for “Daddy Lessons,” about which more later. She still has hits but she’s not really making singles anymore. Or something like that. Which is (part of) why I respect her; she strikes me as artistically restless and unwilling to subside into being a greatest hits act, even though she could do that very easily (and lucratively).
Cowboy Carter, to me, showcases a lot of what makes Beyoncé an impressive pop artist but also what can make her a frustrating pop artist. She’s right to call this a Beyoncé album and not a country album, in both good and bad senses. She sounds amazing and showcases her wide range, even dipping at one point into opera. A lot has been made about how weird her cover of “Jolene” is and it is indeed very weird, turning Dolly Parton’s pleading song into (basically) a threat to beat up Jolene. I actually don’t have a huge problem with this insofar as I think this cover is the moment Beyoncé intends to make it absolutely clear that this isn’t a country album, and she does this by nailing the sound of “Jolene” while completely altering its meaning. It is preceded in the tracklist by a very played-straight cover of “Blackbird” and then followed up later by “Ya Ya,” a new song with a Nancy Sinatra sample that is introduced to us as a “tune stretches across a range of genres.” So it’s supposed to turn “Jolene” upside down and it works in the album, even if it’s worse as a song.
But I also really don’t think Beyoncé needed to spell all this out in the album, and she does spell it out in things like that that introduction to “Ya Ya” (not to mention literally saying, let me make myself clear, in the first track). Cowboy Carter is a very fun album and I think I’ve listened to it from beginning to end at least three times and imagine I will again before the week is out, but it’s also like one of those Disney theme park rides that drags you along a track and stops in front of each animatronic. You can’t just wander off and make your own thing of it or interpret it in your own way or whatever else. Unlike “Daddy Lessons,” nothing in this album feels like it could be a little messy. There aren’t even that many messy (as in, conflicted) emotions, though there are some (“Alligator Tears” comes to mind).
Much like how the abject position of the original “Jolene” is outside of Beyoncé’s emotional range—at least as a performer—there’s a liveliness and ambiguity somebody else2 might have given this project that I don’t think she really can. Cowboy Carter shows what’s great about somebody who has a sense of (and need for) total control tackling a very ambitious artistic project… but it also shows what’s limiting about that, too.
Capsule review of Romantic Outlaws: fine.
I don’t have anybody in mind, to be clear.
The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell is a great novelist biography. I should read more of these and will be putting spark on Shelley on the list for sure.