Frank Zappa once said “most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.” However true that might be, Paul Nelson was one who most definitely could write. And he interviewed people who could talk, and plenty of people read what he wrote.

Kevin Avery certainly read what Nelson wrote, and has now written Everything Is An Afterthought (Fantagraphics, who usually publish comics), which is both a biography of Nelson and a collection of his work, including some pieces that have never been published. The book is covered in praise for Nelson, both on the jacket and throughout the book, from other people who read his work and were inspired by it. They’re from the people he wrote about, his friends, colleagues, fans or some combination of the three: Jon Landau, Robert Christgau, Jackson Browne, Greil Marcus, Rod Stewart, Cameron Crowe and Bruce Springsteen are just a few of the people quoted.

Nelson was born and raised in Warren, Minnesota, a town in the northwestern corner of the state with a population of around 2,500. He went to the University of Minnesota where he started The Little Sandy Review with Jon Pankake. It covered folk music, which Jon loved. They reviewed new releases from national folk labels like Folkways and Prestige along with local artists like Tony Glover (who later joined the ‘zine as a contributor), Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray and Bobby Zimmerman.

Nelson’s work caught the eye of Irwin Silber, the editor of the magazine Sing Out! Nelson moved out to New York when he graduated in 1962. He covered the folk scene in Greenwich Village, populated by the same folks he wrote about in Minneapolis, including Zimmerman, who by now was going by the name Bob Dylan. He wrote for Sing Out! until 1965, when he parted ways with them over Dylan going electric at Newport. He was one of Dylan’s few defenders from within the folk community.

Nelson moved to Mercury Records where he worked as an A&R man. His most famous act there was to sign the New York Dolls for their first recording contract. He also released the album 1969: The Velvet Underground, the band’s last album.

He then moved on to Rolling Stone, where he took over the mantle of the reviews editor from Jon Landau. He stayed at the magazine until 1982. For the next 24 years until his death in 2006 he ran a video store, worked on projects and his name hardly appeared in print. One of the few exceptions was a 2000 interview he gave to Steven Ward which starts with the same question that the press release for Avery’s book starts with: ‘What ever happened to Paul Nelson?’

Avery fills in these missing years, describing what Nelson had been up to, much of it pieced together by works collected from Nelson’s apartment after he died. Among the things he worked on were long articles about Clint Eastwood and a biography of Neil Young called Rust Never Sleeps, which he never finished. He co-wrote a book about his good friend Rod Stewart with another good friend, Lester Bangs. He also labored over a screenplay, something he had wanted to do ever since he started his writing career.

In these, Nelson shows himself as a first-rate writer, who didn’t stand at a distance when critiquing artists. All too often he was – or would become – friends with the people he reviewed. They provide intimate portraits of the artists and Nelson shows an immense respect for his subjects. He held an intervention for Warren Zevon, who was suffering from alcoholism, and described the experience in his famous 1981 Rolling Stone Piece ‘How He Saved Himself from a Coward’s Death.’

Like the best critics, Nelson was primarily a fan of what he wrote about, subjects that struck a chord with him. And here’s a bio and a collection of his work written by a fan of his.

Note: Avery has another book of Nelson’s collected writings that came out around the same time as this one, Conversations with Clint, (published by Continuum) which collects a series of interviews he did in the late 70s early 80s with Clint Eastwood.

Long relegated to history’s vast nether regions of obscurity, the twentieth president of the United States, James A. Garfield is best known for two things: he was the last of the American presidents to be born in a log cabin (in Ohio in 1831), and he was the second American president to be killed by an assassin’s bullet while in office (the first being Abraham Lincoln, sixteen years earlier in 1865).

Candice Millard does her best to lift this once highly regarded, entirely self-made paragon of late-19th-century American politics out of anonymity in her new book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. Millard traces Garfield’s rise as a poor yet precocious child whose father died before his second birthday to his reluctant ascension to Republican presidential nominee and victor of the election of 1880.

“I have never had the Presidential fever; not even for a day,” Garfield said at the time, but in a day when the Republican Party was rife with conflict between the old guard “stalwarts” who believed in the patronage system of rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies, and reform-minded “half-breeds” who favored a government and civil service based on merit, Garfield did not back down from what he saw as his noble duty for his nation.

Solidly behind the “half-breeds” Garfield appointed his former rival and fellow reformer James Blain as his Secretary of State (after he made Blain promise him that he would never again run for president, a promise that Blain, ultimately, broke) and aimed to take Washington by storm and shake up the stagnant and corrupt political system that had washed over the government of late-nineteenth-century America.

While much of the United States was behind Garfield’s reformist agenda, fate unfortunately was not. Less than four months after he assumed the presidency Garfield was shot, at close range, by the fantastically deranged eccentric Charles Guiteau in a Washington, DC train station. Less than three months later Garfield was dead.

Millard, who expertly sets the stage leading up to Garfield’s assassination on July 2, 1881 by introducing her readers to a cast of vivid characters – from the famed and dogged inventor Alexander Graham Bell, to the flamboyant stalwart Republican senator Roscoe Conklin and his toady Chester Arthur (who also happened to be Garfield’s Vice President thanks to a compromise that the stalwarts and half-breeds entered into at the Republican convention), to Lucretia Garfield, the president’s shy yet keenly intelligent wife who Garfield had grown to adore over the years. Yet none of Millard’s characters are as remarkable as Charles Guiteau.

Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction and Millard seems to relish her opportunity to write about a subject who, if created for a novel, would seem completely unbelievable. After an odd childhood Guiteau attempted to gain admission to the University of Michigan but when he couldn’t pass the entrance exam he instead joined the Oneida utopian society in upstate New York, famed mostly for its acceptance of free love and the fact that its members included two presidential assassins (the other being Leon Czolgosz who killed President William McKinley in Buffalo, New York in 1901).

Despite its free love mentality, the women of Oneida did not warm to Guiteau (in fact, as Millard notes, they took to calling him Charles “Gitout”) and after five years in utopia he left and later filed a lawsuit against Oneida leader John Noyes. After floating around New York and Chicago, Guiteau, who was an expert at sneaking out of hotels without paying his bill and “borrowing” money from distant relatives who he never intended to repay, somehow obtained a law license and began practicing, first in Chicago and later in New York. Never very successful, he regularly enraged his clients by making nonsensical arguments in court that had little to do with their cases.

After abandoning the law, Guiteau dabbled in theology briefly before finding his true calling around the stalwart Republican fringes. This is where Guiteau is at his most fascinating and where Millard shines at capturing his chilling persona. It was during the 1880 presidential campaign that Guiteau convinced himself (and likely nobody else) that he had helped to elect Garfield president by delivering an uninspiring (and little-heard) pro-Garfield speech one time in New York City. It was also during the campaign that Guiteau struck up a one-sided “friendship” with the vice presidential nominee Chester Arthur and other members of the Republican Party, writing largely unanswered letters to them – including Garfield – that took a familiar tone as if he had been friends with them for years.

Once Garfield was elected, Guiteau was convinced that he would be given the ambassadorship to Vienna as his prize for electing the president (later deciding that he preferred Paris instead). Despite the fact that Guiteau never did anything to legitimately help elect Garfield, and that neither the president nor any member of his inner circle had a clue who Guiteau was, he continued to write chummy letters to Garfield and members of his administration. He even joined the throng of office seekers who flooded the White House (a common practice in the19th-century political landscape) after Garfield took office to make sure that the president was aware of his request.

One day, while visiting the State Department to inquire about when he could finally take up his new post in Paris, Guiteau crossed paths with the new Secretary of State himself. Blain, in no uncertain terms, told Guiteau to get lost and abruptly walked away. Crestfallen yet undeterred, Guiteau decided that he had to warn the new president about his Secretary of State who clearly wasn’t aware of how important Guiteau had been to Garfield. But when his warnings went unanswered, Guiteau concluded that the problem ultimately rested with Garfield himself and, with the full backing of God – whom, by this point, Guiteau believed wanted him to kill Garfield – his task was set.

The assassination itself was a relatively simple task in the days before presidents had a protection detail and walked around openly in public places. Guiteau shot the president in the middle of a crowded train station minutes before Garfield was scheduled to board a train to the seacoast of New Jersey and he was apprehended moments later by police.

But what Guiteau thought was his crowning achievement – indeed the very work of God – was actually just the beginning of the end for Garfield and an American public shocked at the news of their mortally wounded leader. Millard then enters the next phase of this tragedy, describing in vivid detail how Garfield, ever cheerful even while enduring extreme pain and facing death, had his recovery thwarted by the antiquated medical practices of a particularly arrogant physician.

While the assassination of James Garfield has largely been lost to the passage of time, Candice Millard’s page-turning new book has brought it back to life in a remarkable way. Adeptly weaving together the stories of fascinating characters to create movie-like scenery, Millard reintroduces us to this truly American tragedy.

Greg Houle is a freelance writer who lives in New York City. Find out more at www.greghoule.com

Many may find the sheer weight of this tome wrongly flattering of its subject, regardless of content. Why should such a figure merit 700 pages? Surely this was, at best, a nearly-man in British politics? He may have risen to Cabinet level certainly, but then so did hundreds of others. The grimy pack of thugs he came to lead once his mainstream ambitions failed may have caused a splash as they bashed enemy heads in, but no-one voted for them. Surely, ultimately, they and he were an irrelevance? Dorril’s expertly researched account gives the lie to such a view and leaves no doubt that the story of Mosley is inexorably entwined with the story of twentieth century politics as a whole, mirroring the highs and the lows, ricocheting from the machinations of high society to the violent desperation of the underclass, and taking in every major Parliamentary player in between.

Sir Oswald “Tom” Mosley was a pure-grade scion from a northern branch of the old land-owning aristocracy (Mosley Street in Manchester takes its name from the clan), of the type still rolling in money but comparatively side-lined politically in the bourgeois twentieth century. With a boorishly uncaring, neglectful father, and indulgent mother, his defining character traits were shown early on at boarding school and elsewhere. A narrow, directed charm, rampant ambition, intellectual laziness, sexual incontinence, untrustworthiness, and a tendency to brow-beat and bully. Above all, a narcissistic sense of self-adoration, belief in entitlement and complete lack of self-doubt, of the type so often found in his caste. But taken just that one degree further.

After service in the air-force during the First World War, where he performed with distinction and enthusiasm, impetuous Tom managed to secure a position as a Conservative MP by the age of 22, the natural home for a man of his class and connections. He soon became renowned as a powerful orator in the Commons for his party. But this “man in a hurry” was impatient with the old guard still running both party and country, those who had allowed the calamity of war to decimate the young men of the nation fighting abroad, and who allowed an untrammelled laissez-faire capitalism to terrorise them with poverty once they had returned. Dorril goes into expansive and exacting detail about the clashing political and economic trends amongst the elite of the time. This in itself provides an unfaultable Parliamentary political history of the period, a vivid picture of the flux at work, which formed the background of the contradictions which made up Mosley’s outlook. He at first identified wholesale with the “social imperialists” in the Tory Party as against its free trade faction. He supported those who, in wishing to save the existing social order, believed in economic protectionism to protect a relatively decent living standard for the British working-class, bolstered by the exploitation of Empire. Such a world-view was entrenched in a romantic conception of England, with the foreign (and, sometimes, Jewish) “other” as its symbolic foe. This paternalistic ethos was the basic core of Mosley’s philosophy from thereon, but his contempt for the Empire Tories’ lack of innovation made him seek his cause, his following and followers, elsewhere.

Mosley was as much a figure in “high society” as in politics, very Tatler fodder. Those he ran with were rich, young, louche, promiscuous, glamorous and shallow, of the type Evelyn Waugh at once admired and despised. As Mosley married his first wife Cimmie, this “dashing”, charismatic figure dazzled many. While gentle, warm Cimmie was liked by most who met her, quite as many people were as put-off by Mosley’s boundless self-importance as were taken in by his charm. While praise came from many, his Tory rival Stanley Baldwin spoke for many more by remarking “He is a cad and a wrong’un and they will find it out,” before he left the party. Cimmie’s delicate nature was in turn tested to immense distraction by her husband’s countless, remorseless affairs – including with her sisters.

Mosley would never be content as anything less than the biggest fish in the pond. The Tories disappointed him so he joined Labour, seeing that as the party more capable of delivering the change -still amorphously defined- that he craved. For a while his “radicalism”, advocating wholesale economic reorganisation to achieve full employment led a few on the Left, even the great Bevan for a short time, to see him as a potential leader. Indeed, it is distinctly unnerving to see both the respect Mosley was shown by sections of both the Labour Party Left and the Independent Labour Party, and the seeming ease with which his rhetoric of renewal could blend with theirs.

As Mosley made his way into the Cabinet of Ramsay McDonald’s doomed Labour government and expounded his economic programmes to tackle unemployment (Keynesianism with an authoritarian kick), their rejection by McDonald was due to the latter’s timidity rather than any genuine opposition to creeping dictatorship. Mosley was enraged as his proposals were ignored, and immediately split with the Labour leadership. As this schism occurred, it is a testimony to both the man’s demagogic charisma and his ideological vacuity that many in both main parties now saw him as a possible leader. The ambiguity was such that for a very brief time Churchill and Bevan alike were keen for him to lead their respective parties. But impatient Tom had his own ideas. He had taken his ball home. He would have his own party. The New Party.

The New Party was formed in early 1931, it soon became clear just what its founder’s forever trumpeted radicalism amounted to. Fierce rhetoric about change and national renewal (and the clamour of a throng of restless, violent young men to drive this home) masked a dangerous and ringing hollow at the party’s ideological core. Its launch was a huge media event at the time, and figures of the stature of Bernard Shaw and H G Wells were initially sympathetic (both being Fabian socialists but with a disturbing penchant for Mosley’s coldly elitist, authoritarian and technocratic attitudes). The initial boost was short-lived however, and the New Party’s lack of clarity, together with a poor showing at their first by-election in Ashton-under- Lyne, saw it heading nowhere in electoral terms. By 1932, the New Party had already changed its name to the British Union of Fascists.

The BUF was never less than an unabashed personality cult from the beginning, the logical conclusion of the overweening toxic brew of narcissism and megalomania that animated its founder. Massively over- represented by ex military men like Mosley himself, he found it easy to run the movement as army rather than a party, dominating every aspect of members’ lives. They even had their own uniform, they were the Blackshirts, aping Mussolini’s crew before them. Ex-member Colin Cross recalled the faithful “Even saluted him when he went into the sea to bathe at the Movement’s summer camps at Selsey”, and “they whispered his name in religious awe………he was presented to the public as a superman. Criticism was taboo and humour nearly so.” At last the man had found the captive audience he had always craved. Now all he had to do was enlarge the audience to encompass the whole nation.

The BUF was always clear in its violence, but it was far from ideologically coherent, even less so than the man himself. He took a fair-sized gang of old Labour comrades with him, but to the great majority of Labour and trade-union men and women, the Fascist movement was not just a mistake, but a sickening anathema. This was a party based on a movement that massacred their brothers and sisters in Italy, directly supported by the capitalist class in that country. They knew the enemy where they saw it. The organised working-class were forever, fervently opposed. Many more members came from elsewhere, including pre -existing smaller UK Fascist movements. Amongst them were the British Fascists, an old group of simplistic upper-middle-class reactionary blimps who had previously been active in trying to break the 1926 General Strike. Joining them were more recent and more vicious groups of Nazi cheerleaders, whose chief motivation was a pathological hatred of “Jewry”. Of equal importance and greater number were natural Tories driven to a new radical dynamism against the perceived socialist threat. This contingent was personified by Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere, a friend of Mosley’s who threw his paper behind the new movement wholesale. Meanwhile, the movement was secretly, and illegaly, receiving a large chunk of its funding direct from Fascist Italy, and, increasingly, (as the anti-Semitism increased) from Nazi Germany too.

The degree of the extent of Mosley’s anti-Semitism is central to the conundrum of his character. It is interesting to contrast his personality with that of Hitler, the man he so desired to emulate, failing so spectacularly. There is no doubt that Mosley was not possessed of the overwhelming personal hatred of Jews that so engulfed Hitler. He had several Jewish friends prior to the BUF. His rival, the hysterically overwrought anti-Semite Arnold Leese, leader of the tiny, ultra-fanatic Imperial Fascist League taunted Mosley as a “kosher Fascist” for this very reason. Amusingly, one of Mosley’s early New Party stalwarts was a Jewish East End boxer named Ted “Kid” Lewis, who exited the movement with a punch to Mosley’s nose when the latter confirmed that yes, he did intend his movement to be anti-Semitic. Furthermore, Oswald explicitly did not sign up to the facetious and insane pseudo-science the Nazis used to justify their race hatred, casually denouncing it as gibberish. He mocked the notorious forgeries the Protocols of the Elders of Zion too.

The very fact he could then lead a movement openly engaged in repeated violence against this scape- goated racial group shows the black-hearted, gangster opportunism at the core of his being. The hatred of the Jewish enemy was a galvanising myth to a movement which otherwise had little to tie it together, and he knew it. With characteristic dishonesty, Mosley dismally pleaded self defence in his campaign against the Jews, claiming “they started it.” Mosley came to advocate the expelling of all Jews from Britain who had shown “disloyalty.” Where they were to go was unclear, Madagascar, or possibly Uganda (“very empty and a lovely climate” helpfully offered Mosley’s second wife Diana, formerly Guinness, formerly Mitford.) It is an interesting rumination of what constitutes a truer evil, the deep-felt fanaticism of a Hitler or the gutter-shallow opportunism of a Mosley. It is however, much easier to see which was more successful.

Adolf met Oswald on several occasions but was never fully convinced of him, doubting his commitment, sensing his lack of whole-hearted zealotry. Goebbels was even less impresed, dismissing him as “an outsider of small political significance.” Hitler was however genuinely taken with Mosley’s wife Diana. He was even more taken by her sister Unity, and the feeling was mutual. Mosley married Diana at a secret ceremony in Goebbels’ house, having already carried out a long affair with her. The contrast of kind-hearted if naive Cimmie with the coldly ruthless Diana was seen by some as emblematic of Mosley’s journey to the dark side. While her portrayal as a Lady Macbeth figure even more malignant than her husband may have a toe in misogynist myth, he had certainly met his match with her in amoral callousness. The Mitfords were the epitome of high society elan, and Hitler himself, for all his railing against “British decadence” was far from immune to the charms of this glamorous set. Diana and Unity, regular and welcome visitors to Hitler, acted as a conduit between Mosley and his new benefactor, while the intelligence services were more concerned with the Mitford pair than Mosley himself as a threat to the state.

The BUF was to change its name to the BU at the end of 1934. Short for the British Union, though its full new title was the rather less innocuous British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, reflecting the increasing influence of the Fuhrer. The thuggishness was thrown into sharp relief at an infamous public gathering at Olympia in June 1934. The mass meeting was held in a theatrical, explicitly Nuremburg style, the movement’s new Lightning-in-a-Circle symbol (wittily dubbed “the flash in the pan” by opponents) dominating the hall just as the swastika did to the Nazi faithful in Germany. The Blackshirts deliberately attracted as many opponents as possible to this meeting, and then, with a variety of home-made weapons, pulped into bloody submission anyone who heckled The Leader. Many serious injuries resulted. Mosley was attempting to prove his control of “the street” once and for all, yet this one meeting probably did more than any other act to convince potential followers of his ruthless, sadistic nature. His unpredictable nature too – probably a greater anathema to the British business class.

The BU suffered a severe propaganda blow with the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when a massive crowd of local working-class youths, Jews, Communist and Labour activists violently prevented Mosley (resplendent in a new uniform explicitly modelled on that of the Nazi SS), from provocatively marching down the street in the heart of the Jewish East End. As the Blackshirts were protected by police, (many sympathetic to Mosley, or at least distinctly hostile to his leftist opponents), the fight was between demonstrators and police rather than the barricaded Blackshirts themselves. But the victory was real, They Did Not Pass. As Dorril shows, in some areas of London, notably Hoxton and Stepney support from sections of the East End working-class was actually to rise afterward – but the psychological defeat struck deeply amongst its followers, and seemed emblematic of the movement’s wider failure. The early membership height of 50,000 had fallen to under 10,000 by this point. The movement was losing money continually, despite being bankrolled by both the foreign Fascist powers and Mosley’s own landed estates. Uniforms, banners, headquarters and truncheons do not pay for themselves. Intellectually he was without capital too. The writers of the day were overwhelmingly Left. The strangely acidic Wyndham Lewis was one of the few artists who were taken in for a time by the movement, but even this support did not last the distance. Dorril recounts Lewis and Mosley met on several occasions in the late 30s, but the former was increasingly alarmed by the latter’s talk of the sad practical necessities of machine gunning the movement’s foes in the street “when push came to shove”. When Lewis came to write the ironically titled “The Jews – Are They Human?” in 1937 he was sardonically repudiating his past Fascism. The only noted author to back Mosley by then was Henry “Tarka The Otter” Williamson. With even his few intellectual allies now taking the piss, who would take Oswald seriously now?

When Britain went to war with Mosley’s ideological masters in Germany and Italy, it was the cataclysmic close of any last lingering chance of a revival in his movement. Unity Mitford shot herself in the head, yet failed to succeed in suicide, dribbling on for years afterward. While Mosley and his wife claimed they were still loyal to Britain (whilst agitating for “negotiated peace”) the authorities had different views, and imprisoned the pair in Holloway Prison. Sympathy was not widespread. Nancy Mitford was one of those who denounced sister Diana and her infamous husband to the security services. Several BU members either fled to Germany or had moved shortly before war was declared, to fight for the Nazi cause. Some were propagandists like “Haw Haw” Joyce, others like John Amery joined Waffen SS divisions. In keeping with the stomach-wrenching nature of their treachery, none saw active combat against soldiers, yet several were active in murderous atrocities against unarmed Jewish civilians. By association, Mosley was seen, by the vast majority of British people, as the most venal kind of traitor.

Churchill, one of many who once saw Mosley as a potential leader of his party and country, decided to release the man and wife in late 1943 in what he saw as a humane gesture in relation to the Blackshirt’s ill- health. The decision sparked mass popular protest and outrage. The working-classes in particular were prominent in street demonstrations demanding that the key should be thrown away, or the noose brought in. The would-be Leader of Britain was really – truly – loathed the length and breadth of the land. Oswald and Diana seemed to bear this hatred with an attitude beyond the straightforward arrogance which was their defining nature, and into a whole other worldly nether-realm of bitter fantasy. It was the Jews who hated them, the establishment, the government – certainly not the good old British people. These demonstrations were the results of the Jewish cabal that had Britain in its grip…..surely?

His solipsism increased by incarceration, Mosley took to writing at greater length, honing his philosophy in ever more verbose terminology. He claimed to have now moved “beyond Fascism”, and propounded that that he had found a unique “synthesis”, beyond the both capitalist and socialist ethic, fusing Christianity and the ideals of Nietzsche, combining dictatorship and democracy. But the schism between his feigning of esoteric high mindedness and the squalor of his day-to-day political activities became starker than ever when he began his new party in 1947- the Union Movement. The same gang of dysfunctional Jew baiters were to continue their street fighting, to a mixture of disgust and indifference from the general populace (gaining for instance less than 2000 votes in the whole of London during local elections in 1949). The full extent of the Nazi horrors, the millions of innocent souls butchered in the camps, was now evident, discrediting Mosley’s mob as never before. Accordingly, the calibre of the UM member was even lower than that of the BU before them, a selection of gangsters, psychopaths and street thugs, with the odd loopy Lord thrown in.

This sorry pack were eventually to find a new scapegoat, and a short-lived new lease of life with the “coloured immigration” of the 50s. As tensions grew in sections of the white population towards the novel new migrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent, the UM had some success in actively encouraging race riots, in particular the Notting Hill riot of 1958. Their success in leading to smashed windows and broken bones did not translate into votes however, and the fetid nature of their street activity stood in starker contrast than ever from Mosley’s increasingly abstruse theorising. His new vision was of a United Europe, national boundaries broken down among the great White brotherhood, who would in turn go to plunder what they needed from Africa, using their superior colonial know-how. Ironic that a movement now recruiting on an anti-immigrant platform should have as its ultimate goal the large scale immigration of a white master class to the African continent. This was grotesque racism sure enough, but it was neither populist nor popular. Even amongst rising anti-immigration feeling, the UM could not truly take off.

Ultimately it was to be Mosley’s intellectualism that was the final death knell of his movement. The issue of race did indeed strike at the core of British political life by the late 60s, and immigration became a key electoral theme. But the UM’s abstract ideas of White European Unity did not accord with the xenophobic mood ignited by the “Rivers of Blood” speech of the Conservative Enoch Powell. The sentiment he unearthed and tried to harness was as strongly anti-European as it was anti-black. Those who didn’t like the “niggers” and “pakis” didn’t tend to be too keen on “frogs” and “krauts” either.

The Mosleys were livid that Enoch had succeeded on territory where they had failed. In an amusing glimpse of the couple’s snobbery and delusion, Oswald dubbed Powell a “middle-class Alf Garnett”, while Diana denounced him as “far-right” as opposed to their “hard centre”! A truly Fascist party was to gain from the racist rhetoric of Powell. This was not the Union Movement however. It was the National Front.

The NF was inspired by the same Nazi and Fascist ideas that Mosley first fermented in the country. Its first chairman was A.K. Chesterton, formerly a leading figure within the BU and a close confidante of Oswald. But its simplistic, xenophobic approach was far more adept than the UM at tapping into the visceral, base hatred that keeps such a movement going. It was blacks and Asians who were getting the beatings and firebombed houses now, with the added advantage they were much easier to spot than Jews. The boot- boys of the NF were every inch the descendants of the Blackshirts before them, but they had moved on and left their spiritual grandpa and grandma Oswald and Diana behind. Bitterly jealous of the NF’s success, Mosley remarked to his private circle, in a statement beyond the parody of the most gifted satirist, that the Front was “funded by Jews.”

The pair moved to France, and lingered on as bitter remnants, their reputation rotting in a pleasing reflection of their withered souls, cursing the cosmopolitan conspiracies that had kept them from greatness, never seeing the fault in themselves. No matter that most saw a malevolent opportunist, in his mind’s eye he would always be the great, lost, put-upon prophet. Mosley would periodically attempt to reappear with attempts at self-justification. Following one such appearance on The Frost Report in 1967 interviewer David Frost remarked.

“He saw everything through the distorting mirror of his own fantasises, and was irretrievably consumed by them. He would never see himself as others saw him.”

Oswald died in 1980, and the vaguely sympathetic obituaries he received in certain quarters such as The Times revealed for the last time that the solidarity of the ruling classes will out in the end.

Dorril has produced the definitive Mosley biography, superseding the absurdly sympathetic soft-soaping work of Robert Skidelsky, which centred on Mosley’s Parliamentary career and treated the BUF as an epilogue (a bit like a biography of Fred West which focussed more on his earlier career as an ice cream salesman.) This is a fascinating story, both for anyone interested in British political history of the last century, and anyone intrigued by the tragic tale of a truly diabolical man. Dorril has done an unfaultable job on the research, and brings the narrative to life well with his grotesque menagerie of characters. There are flaws to the book. The author has a background as an analyst of the machinations of the intelligence services of Britain and abroad, and while this eye for detail has undoubtedly made this work the powerhouse of research it is, the endless recanting of certain details, the exact nature of how the BUF obtained its funding for example, can sometimes drag the story’s flow. More directly, he concentrates a little too much on the nature of MI5′s observation of the movement, when this is very much a side-show to the main narrative. This dry style can sometimes cloy over such a long length. Further, while Dorril is great on the detail, actual analysis is very thin on the ground. The one time Dorril does attempt an analytical overview, it is with some rather tenuous observations about Messianic leaders toward the end, claiming that one Tony Blair shares the traits of this style. Maybe so, but the point is made clumsily and without satisfactory justification.

Ultimately however, Dorril’s stance in going for the research style, dispassionately observant, pays off into a great narrative by nature of the sheer dramatic scope of the story he so meticulously examines. Scene after scene and figure after grotesque figure linger on the psychic retina. The drawing room parties of the man playing host to every major political figure of the early part of the century, one by one falling away as he fell into disrepute. Mosley’s seaside frolics with his patrician pals, offset against the pogrom style excesses of his nastiest East End thugs, breaking into Jewish houses and attacking children within. Mosley’s relentless psychological torture of his first wife, the most poignant of his bullying victims. Diana fending off the accusations of sister Nancy that she had had supported a movement that murdered six million Jews with the remark “But darling, it was the kindest way.” The London BUF headquarters that doubled up as a knocking-shop, underlying with grim humour the movement’s crossover with organised crime. The UM hijacking the teddy-boy youth cult just as the NF did with skinheads two decades later. The sheer gall and lack of self-awareness in Mosley’s late-life attempts to rehabilitate himself, attempting a “truce” with Jewish leaders without any pretence of apology.

This is a grim tale that needs only clear explanation and examination to be one of fascination. This is a task Dorril has performed with enormous success with this eye-opening and exhaustive work.

Burksey: The Autobiography of a Football God – Peter Morfoot

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This has got cult classic written all over it. Burksey is the spoof autobiography of Tristan Stephen Burkes, a world-class footballing genius and monstrous idiot. Although a fair amount of football knowledge over the past few decades is assumed, Burksey isn’t about football per se, it’s also a broader satire on celebrity and contemporary society, from new age therapies and rehab to BritArt and fandom.

Burksey is a savage indictment of the greed of modern-day football (Burksey signs a new 110k a week contract for his new club, Sporting Meriden, on World Poverty Day) and is also very, very funny. One of the brilliant conceits is that the book has been ghostwritten by about seven people, each one presumably unable to continue working for such an ego-maniac; another is the hilarious and outrageous plugs for one of his sponsors, the Stelsat Corporation of America.

A lot of the fun of Burksey is the all-too-plausibly preposterous situations he finds himself in, such as partially sacrificing a goat and putting Ossie Ardiles into a hypnotic trance. Zelig-like, Burksey is involved in most of the major sporting and social events of the past couple of decades, of course drawing all the wrong conclusions (he’s a big fan of “Mrs T” naturally). But somehow, much as with other certain footballers who you know to be venal, money-grabbing bastards, you can’t help rooting for Burksey.

Another joy of the book is trying to spot the bits that Morfoot has made up, interweaved as it is so seamlessly with scarcely credible factual stories. I’m not entirely sure, for example, that the biscuit rota at Chelsea supposedly brought in by Glenn Hoddle is untrue. And the spoof Chris Morris programme, Brass Knuckles, in which Burksey fulminates on behalf of the children attacked by underwater bees is worthy of the great man himself.

Morfoot is obviously, despite everything, a huge footie fan and one senses a deep disgust at the way in which the game has developed. The only downside is that I won’t be able to look at Delia Smith’s ginger sponge ever again.

Suicide: No Compromise – David Nobakht

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Just finished the top notch hardback edition of David Nobakht’s biography of synth-rock pioneers Suicide. I would have loved to have written this book. Very much a band biography rather than a personal history of Suicide’s two members, Alan Vega and Martin Rev, Nobakht assembles a wealth of material that traces Suicide’s genesis. From the first tinkerings with primitive electronics in the early 1970s, endless confrontational, blood-smeared gigs, through to the release of their seminal self-titled debut album – "up there with the first Stooges or Velvet Underground album" – the extreme reaction they provoked touring with The Clash at the height of punk in the UK (one night someone threw an axe at the stage. A fucking axe!), the involvement of Ric Osacek from The Cars who spent a good chunk of his own popstar earnings on them, through to their gradual acceptance during the 1990s and their triumphant string of gigs that they’ve been playing since 1997 to an increasingly enamoured audience – Nobakht covers it all, and it’s one of the strangest and most fascinating pop history stories I’ve read.

Over 30 years, Suicide have not simply survived, they’ve thrived, and now they are getting as much acclaim as they used to get abuse. It’s just as well, given that both Rev and Vega must be getting on towards 60 now – and having seen them live twice at London’s Garage, it’s evident that age won’t stop them from generating some of the most beautiful and vicious noise you can ever hope to hear. For all their supposed influence on industrial music, Suicide have an intense warmth and humanity to their music – even when they’re sonically scaring the crap out of you – which is wholly absent from the more po-faced knobtwiddlers that came after them. Suicide are still as vital as ever within an increasingly moribund music scene, still outside it even as they become accepted and assimilated into it.

What’s interesting from Nobakht’s book is how aware of their own position in pop history Vega and Rev are – much of the book is written in their own words, and they are reluctant rock stars. Clearly they’re quite thrilled at finally getting some recognition and earning some money to support themselves – because despite being hugely influential, no one actually bought their records – but equally, after 30 years of scraping together enough money to get on to the next album, their new success only comes from doggedly sticking to what they wanted to do. At one point, Vega talks quite poignantly about his 1980s solo career, where he became huge in France of all places, had a major label deal with Elektra – and then suddenly got dropped. He admits it felt really painful to be kicked off the label after struggling so long to get paid anything for making music – but also reckons it was for the best. It’s not often you hear a musician openly admit he misses the money that a major label brings.

Nobakht does a sterling job of chronicling Suicide’s rise over 30 years with a cast of thousands describing what a huge impact listening to or seeing the band had on them – Marc Almond, Henry Rollins, Moby, Michael Stipe, Bono (eh?) – among many others. You’re left in no doubt about the huge impact they had. There’s the received wisdom that the first Velvets album sold very badly, but that everyone who bought a copy started a band – and Jim Reid from The Jesus And Mary Chain says as much about the first Suicide album. People like Marc Almond say it was the second, more heavily produced and disco-tinged Suicide album that actually laid the blueprint for many of the one keyboardist, one singer synth bands that were to follow – either way, neither album had much success at the time of their release. Either way, while Suicide’s records are great, they simply don’t capture the sheer euphoria of what they do live.

Beyond Suicide themselves, No Compromise provides an evocative description of decaying Seventies New York and the emerging punk scene around Max’s and CBGB’s, mixed up with the artist lofts where Vega and Rev first hung out and played their first tentative gigs alongside the likes of the New York Dolls. If Vega and Rev seem like New York cliches at times – summoning up death, darkness, lust and disgust, all the usual motifs of that city’s music – it’s because they were the ones helping create that now-overused vocabulary to begin with. And, as several people point out in the course of the book, others may throw the same shapes or try to adopt the same postures, but very few get near the intelligence that radiates from Suicide’s own sardonic, sonic howl.

Nobakht himself stays pretty much out of the text – he doesn’t really talk about Suicide’s own impact on his own life or the process of writing the book – it would have been interesting to see a more personal slant at times and some "behind the scenes" comments on talking to so many pop stars about Suicide’s influence on themselves. Likewise, the personal lives of Alan Vega and Martin Rev remain firmly out of the spotlight, which is both good and bad – reading the book, you do develop a certain affection for them both and it naturally leads you to want to know more of their traditional biographical details. On the other hand, maybe it’s just better to preserve the mystique. On a pedantic note, I bristled at the one word mention of The Sisterhood, a side project from The Sisters Of Mercy on which Vega guested, as I would have loved to have heard more about how that was recorded. The Sisters were huge fans of Suicide, regularly covering "Ghost Rider" as a set closer when they played live.

Nobakht’s book is definitely an essential for Suicide fans – it’s perhaps a little too reverential, but then, Suicide deserve a bit of reverence after all the shit they’ve been through. (Although there is a hilarious moment when one person describes seeing Suicide as "One guy playing a crappy Farfisa badly and another guy hitting himself with a microphone and falling down a lot"). Vega and Rev prove to be fascinating interviewees, unafraid to try and grasp for the big ideas when talking about their sound but not taking themselves too seriously either. Their self-awareness of their place in musical history, and their depictions of what came before them and after them, makes for a unique perspective on how music has changed from doo-wop to rock’n'roll to punk.

More importantly, though, No Compromise is not an eulogy for a band that was great once but is now just playing the circuit cashing in on their reputation – what’s life affirming about Suicide is that they are a band who are still going strong, still experimenting, still playing. (See a Suicide gig and the only time you might actually recognise a song is during the encore). While the audience has changed and become a lot less hostile, Suicide themselves continue doing just what they want. True, they still don’t sell many albums, but royalties for covers of their songs appearing on soundtracks for The Crow and The Sopranos have apparently earned them more cash than their entire 30 year career of record sales. That such unexpected luck should befall Suicide is a skewed vindication of both their influence and their sound – 30 years old, rooted in the past, playing in the present, still sounding like the future.

The Underdog: How I Survived The World’s Most Outlandish Competitions – Joshua Davis

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Joshua Davis set out to win. At anything. Living in a crappy apartment with a crappy job and a loving but long suffering wife, Davis set out to prove himself. So runs the premise of his book, which is one of those hard-to-classify mixes of travelogue, biography, meditation and jokes about dwarves.

The Underdog starts off weakly and doesn’t really hit its stride til the third chapter. The lead-in time is worth it though, because the outlandish competitions Davis takes part in not only take him all over the world but also bring him into contact with some truly remarkable people. As Davis’ confidence grows in between becoming a pro arm wrestler, a matador, a sumo wrestler, a backwards runner and a sauna endurance competitor, so his prose manages to capture the euphoria, absurdity and the despair of the training process of each challenge. Davis continually grapples with the vertigo of impossibility that opens up in front of him and lays it wide open for the reader to understand his own feelings as he goes through each training regimen. Where Davis really succeeds here is in his lightness of touch – he’s serious about what he’s doing, but he’s not earnest. Similarly, he avoids the tedious “isn’t this oh-so-wacky” route too – although, admittedly, he does have a page about midget matadors.

It’s the people he meets that are the real stars of this book – Maru the Hawaiian Sumo Grand Master, at the end of his career at 32 and treated like a near-diety in Japan, which makes for a somewhat lonely existence; Mr Veerabadran in Chennai, India, the world backward running champion who focuses on the face of his wife to cut through the excruciating pain; and, of course, the midget matadors. There’s a host of other characters that Davis manages to describe concisely and eloquently, cutting to the heart of what they are about within a few pages and connecting their seemingly odd pursuits to the importance it holds within their lives. Veerabadran is my favourite person here, utterly resistant to his life being defined by others, nuts about his wife, contemptuous of money and the person who articulates what lies at the core of this book: “Everyone make meaning. That is what you must do. You make your own meaning”.

Davis never uses that byline of parents everywhere – “It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part” – but this book provides a hugely entertaining and quite moving affirmation of exactly that. By doing something that’s important to you (provided it’s not illegal), you still win indirectly even if you fail, just through the people you meet and what you experience along the way. Certainly, for Davis, his competition quest opened the door to writing for Wired magazine, where he remains a contributing editor, including recently spending time in Iraq. It beats sitting in front of the telly anyway. [See joshuadavis.net for more details]

Davis lost every single competition he took part in but it would be dimwitted to say that somehow invalidates the value of what happened along the way. Davis is refreshingly unanalytic in that sense – he doesn’t try to extrapolate self help theories for his readers to follow – instead, we get to see him helping himself, moving from competition to competition realising he can do anything with some help and good will from others. The reason why we think these things are funny is because they make no sense on the surface. How can a tiny guy like Josh Davis becomes a sumo wrestler? The answer seems to be: simply by deciding to do so. Like PJ O’Rourke says, “You learn to work around huge areas of inability”.

What I enjoyed most about this book is that Davis covers a lot of ground here very concisely. His prose is amusingly self-deprecating but full of confidence; he runs the usual humour of American abroad culture shock while showing huge respect for those he meets; he shows a curiosity about the world from the vantage point of someone who knows nothing and is not afraid to admit it. He captures the wonder of learning something new – and the frustration and self-doubt that inevitably goes with it – and the way that such learning is never wasted. Even if you don’t win.

The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules Of Business And Transformed Our Culture – John Battelle

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John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted history of Google, although that company looms large throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of online contextual advertising which has irrevocably changed the nature of advertising itself. Battelle recognises that the real story about the search engines is actually outside the admittedly fascinating geek arms race between the big players: what’s important is what the very act of searching for information on the Internet means for business and consumer alike. The simple act of keying in a phrase to a search engine is carried out billions of times a day and in totality provides an unprecedented map of human desires. The commercial ramifications are obvious, but our culture and our access to information are also being transformed by the nature of search. Put it this way – once the Net becomes a daily part of your life, it’s hard to imagine doing without it.

It’s difficult not to sink into hyperbole when discussing search engines, given the frankly insane stats generated by Google’s meteoric rise (from zero to $1.3 billion annual revenue in five years, biggest IPO in Silicon Valley, shares at $300 a pop, trimester profits of $300+ million, and so on). But Battelle points out in his introduction that he didn’t want to write a straightforward business biography of Google for the good reason that business biographies don’t get read. There is a lot of coverage in here about the rise and fall of different search engines, to be sure, and Battelle has conducted hundreds of interviews with every key player in the industry to piece together an excellent overview of the industry’s audacious growth. But Battelle is primarily interested in the implications of what the massive leaps in search engine indexing and intelligence mean for the future. The Search, then, isn’t simply a business book or a geek book, although it will be marketed as such: it’s actually tackling one of the most profound but almost invisible cultural influences on our daily lives: how search engines organise and present information in response to our queries. As more and more of our lives moves to being managed through the Net, the companies who can correctly analyse what we are looking for and give it to us in the most hassle free way are the ones who will prosper. And, as a by-product of that, the more users they have, the more they can analyse what’s been asked for before to anticipate what will be asked for in the future. Battelle calls it the Database of Intentions, and mastering the analysis of all those billions of queries is where the money lies.

The most obvious example of the commercial gold in search queries is contextual advertising, those text ads that turn up next to your search results that are related to your query. Still in its infancy, contextual advertising has revolutionised online advertising and had a huge knock-on effect on old media. The targetted nature of contextual ads – they only get served to someone who’s interested in that subject; the ad buyer only pays when someone clicks the link – has meant thousands of businesses that couldn’t afford to advertise can now do so and, crucially, get results of real money-in-the-bank business driven by those ads. Shoestring businesses have enjoyed massive sales boosts as a result of this approach, without having to spend vast sums on marketing. The joy here is that everyone wins – the customer finds what they want, the business gets business, and the search engine makes money for connecting the two together. Advertising becomes – shock, horror – useful and even valued, rather than an irritant. That’s the ideal scenario, anyway, and Battelle provides case studies showing both the up and potentially disastrous downside of relying on search engines to drive business your way.

Contextual ads have not only helped advertisers but also website owners too. The Net’s free culture has always meant that paying for content has been a thorny issue – surfers loathe registering for access to newspaper archives online, much less paying for it. Google’s Adsense program provided a way for sites to have relevant ads to their content appear on the page and in doing so, allowed site owners to earn some handy pocket change too. (Of course, I’m biased here: in the two years I’ve been running Google Adsense on Spike, its monthly revenue has steadily increased as Google tweak the system to display more relevant ads).

As Battelle has pointed out on his Searchblog, now is a great time to be a publisher on the Net, because there are more and more easy ways of earning cash from content. Blog networks like Weblogs, Inc which earn over $2000 a day from Adsense, or probloggers like Darren Rowse who recently earned $15000 in one month from Adsense, show that there’s real money to be made from providing top quality, regular content. Indeed, Battelle has recently launched Federated Media Publishing, which will be teaming up with selected sites to manage matching ads to their content. Battelle, a former editor of Wired and founder of the Industry Standard, is already “band manager” for leading blog BoingBoing, and has considerably increased that site’s revenues since coming aboard.

As founder of the Industry Standard magazine and a co-founder of Wired, Battelle has been round the block in both old and new media, and much of The Search’s vitality stems from his own hands-on involvement in the industry. There’s little of the usual business pomposity about Battelle’s prose. Instead, Battelle writes in a lucid and informal style, clearly in command of his material but confident enough to not deluge the reader with extraneous info to demonstrate his research. The Search is, in short, refreshingly bullshit free.

The same can’t be said for the future of search engines. With the realisation that the potential of search has only just begun, there are real dangers ahead too. Ownership of personal information is the major concern, with some beginning to see the likes of Google not as a benign info provider but a Big Brother like monitor of all online movements. Criticism of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” moral code has also begun, with the company’s current leadership of the search field making it walk point for the whole industry. Gaming contextual advertising is also an increasing problem, with clickfraud and spam blogs on the rise, clogging search results with poor quality websites. Each of the engines is working flat out to find ways to counter these emergent problems, and no doubt as they deliver solutions a whole new set of crises will arise; given the industry’s flux and mutability, it’s hard to imagine a point at which there will be no clouds on the horizon.

For now, though, search remains a huge success story – Google may well be about to have its own stock bubble popped, but the company is profitable and unlikely to be knocked off its leadership perch by Wall Street alone. Yahoo and MSN are moving into the contextual ad field, each looking to get the competitive edge to make advertisers and publishers alike use their particular system. Most importantly, all three are continually trying to find better ways to slice and dice the Database of Intentions to give you what you want quicker, simpler and faster. Google, to my mind, still remains out in front for innovation, constantly testing business boundaries and received wisdom, putting the user experience first and working backwards. In the last five years, it has continually gone its own way and managed to take the industry with it. But Yahoo and MSN and, indeed, people and companies we’ve never even heard of yet, are not to be underestimated. John Battelle’s The Search provides a brilliant illustration that within five years everything in the search world can change absolutely. It has done so already once – it probably will do again.

Field Of Vision: The Broadcast Life Of Kenneth Allsop – Mark Andresen

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Biography is often the most satisfying of all literary genres; other people’s lives frequently prove more fascinating than most fiction and the palpable, if inevitable, sense of beginning, middle and end provides a natural plotline and structure. Where most fiction is reality badly rendered, biography has the opposite problem of having to deal with too much reality. The biographer must sift and select the salient points of his subject’s life, discarding the dead days and trying to find coherency and meaning in the others. A good biography does not merely recount its subject’s life as a narrative but attempts to provide insight and analysis of its subject to the extent of provoking empathy in the reader. Mark Andresen’s biography of Kenneth Allsop succeeds on all these fronts.

Usually reviewers of biographies are meant to have an understanding or expertise about the subject to verify the accuracy or otherwise of what’s written. I had never heard of Kenneth Allsop until encountering Andresen’s book, which made engaging this particular reader all the harder. But Andresen’s economic prose, evident enthusiasm for his subject and lack of sentimentality combine to produce a compelling portrait of a remarkable if troubled man.

A Fleet Street journalist and one of the first anchormen for BBC current affairs programmes, Allsop died by his own hand in 1973. Having lost a leg to tuberculosis during the Second World War and battling daily tubercular-related pain for the rest of his life, Allsop produced a vast quantity of journalism and numerous diverse books, as well a Broadway play. His early love of ornithology grew into passionate campaigning for conservation at a time when Friend Of The Earth barely existed. This lifelong love of nature also provided a lengthy and troubled friendship with Henry Williamson, author of Tarka The Otter, Allsop’s childhood hero and a befuddled Fascist sympathiser both during and after the war. Allsop’s disability drove him to continually seek extra-marital affairs in a form of self-validation which continued for all of his life. Indeed, Allsop’s writing pseudonym “Percy Redcar” was named after his two most precious possessions — his automobile and his penis.

Andresen captures the complexities of Allsop’s character, from the gung-ho sports-car–and-sexual-conquests to his outbreaks of self-pity, his overwrought poetry to his longsuffering wife Betty, his perfectionism and his lifelong love of nature. A remarkably self-centred man, Allsop was obsessed with work and would frequently forsake family, friends and flings in order to churn out more words.

With Allsop coming of age just before WWII and then scrabbling for work in Fleet Street in the lean post-war years before finding a new career in the nascent BBC’s current affairs programmes, Andresen’s biography provides an absorbing insider view of how both those veritable media institutions functioned and changed through the Forties and Fifties. This is, then, also a biography of the media, of the turbulent changes wrought upon Fleet Street by the post-war shift in sensibilities and, most dramatically, by television.

From a literary perspective, Allsop’s relationship with Henry Williamson is the axis around which his life turned — having found his work as a teenager, Allsop remained obsessed with Williamson’s portrayal of nature throughout his life, cultivating a friendship that continued until Allsop’s suicide. Andresen rightly spends several pages describing Williamson’s own life, which fits with the mould of bohemian, somewhat otherworldly writer. Williamson’s flirtation with fascism, including a visit to pre-war Nazi Germany is compelling for its record of contemporary attitudes.

The other key figure in Allsop’s life, his wife Betty, sadly remains a shadow through much of the book, her stoicism continually noted but never explained. More detail on her own pursuits and interests — she was an active political campaigner — as well her coping with Allsop’s numerous affairs would have been welcome. I found it difficult to understand why she stayed with him. Similarly, more detail on Allsop’s love affairs, especially long term ones that were proper illicit relationships rather than brief couplings, would have been good. Maybe it’s just my prurient interest, but the sex drive goes a long way to defining not only a person’s outlook but actions too. But these are minor quibbles and perhaps biographically impossible to satisfy through lack of source material.

Having never heard of Kenneth Allsop before this biography, I am now sufficiently interested in his work to want to track down two of his novels (unfortunately most of them are currently out of print). If it kindles or reignites an enthusiasm and interest in its subject then a biography has done its work. Field Of Vision, then, is a fitting tribute to Kenneth Allsop.

Billy – Pamela Stephenson

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Pamela Stephenson faced a real challenge in the writing of this book: the viewpoint. She came to public attention as the peroxide-blonde Australian comedienne in ‘Not The 9 O’ Clock News,’ famous for its off-the-wall sketches. So should it be a funny woman’s take on the funny man’s rise to fame?

But she’s also his wife, which gives her a unique insight into his life . Maybe a family portrait, with intimate revelations about the Connolly household?

Her third hat is as a clinical psychologist, practising in the inexhaustibly fertile setting of Southern California. So perhaps a ‘notes-from-the-couch’ approach?

It appears she never got round to making the decision, and the result is a remarkably uneven book that changes tone more often than Billy changes costume.

The story itself is truly inspiring: born of humble Irish Catholic stock in Glasgow, Connolly survives abandonment by his mother, sexual abuse by his father and psychological torture by his aunts. He ends up working as a shipyard welder, but buys a banjo and starts playing gigs on the side. Music leads to a stand-up routine – by accident, it appears, as he forgot the words to a song. The venues got bigger and bigger, the act more and more outrageous, and before long Billy was a household name nationally. And then a worldwide phenomenon.

It’s a classic rags-to-riches story, spiced up with a startlingly frank revelation of child abuse. It ought to make compelling reading, and it does, to a point. But there’s just one problem: Stephenson’s writing. Time and again she resorts to tired old clichés: audiences ‘roar with laughter’; Billy is ‘pleased as Punch’ and ‘tickled pink’; his grandmother is dressed up ‘like a Christmas tree.’ It’s all very pedestrian, and constantly intrudes on the telling of the tale.

But it’s not even consistently pedestrian. Every so often, Dr Connolly (Stephenson, that is – confusingly, Billy is also Dr Connolly, having received an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University) emerges to make an observation: ‘As Carl Jung explained, denial of our shadow side will often cause it to rise up against us,’ she notes of Billy’s father. Billy’s cousin suffers from ‘an Oedipal rage.’ These forays into the world of analysis sit uneasily with the jocular tone in the rest of the book.

In one breathtaking lapse, she refers to a ‘mentally retarded shipyard sweeper’ who worked with Billy. Worse still, she tells us that Billy’s aunt, Mona, suffered from ‘crazy paranoia.’ And this from somebody who insists on ‘African-American’ instead of black, and ‘Native American’ instead of Indian.

And so it proceeds, veering wildly from a matter-of-fact chronology to a jokey, conspiratorial isn’t-my-husband-naughty routine, to a quick lesson in pocketbook psychology.

A quick run through the chapter names ("In search of a duck’s arse", "That Nikon’s going up your arse", "There’s holes in your willie") prepares you for what’s to come, and told by Billy Connolly himself, it would be funny. Very funny indeed. But the problem is that Stephenson isn’t nearly as funny as her husband. Indeed, his brand of humour works only when delivered by him personally. Perhaps it should have been an autobiography.

The book if packed full of swish Hollywood parties with A-list celebrities. The name-dropping borders on the tedious in the end: Eric Idle, Eric Clapton, Cher, George Harrison, Richard Burton, Judi Dench, Ralph McTell, Al Pacino. The book is peppered with such phrases as ‘Germaine Greer once told me…’, ‘the occasion is a birthday dinner for the actor Sylvester Stallone’ and ‘I’ve noticed that the former President, Ronald Reagan, is dozing off..’ You are left with the distinct impression that ‘Pamsy’ is far more starstruck than the plain-talking Billy.

And yet, in the end, it is possible to see past the tortured prose and the self-conscious name-dropping. After all, this is a book about Billy Connolly, not Pamela Stephenson. From the early days, racked by insecurity (he thought he’d one day be exposed as ‘just a welder’), through the almost-obligatory battle with alcohol, to worldwide success and acceptance, he’s retained his humour (obviously) and a down-to-earth approach that endears him to the reader.

From whatever viewpoint you take, it’s a story of triumph over adversity. Despite the patchy writing, the seductive cocktail of celebrities, risqué humour and sexual revelation makes it a sure-fire success.

What if everything we can be depends on playing a role? Where would that leave us? Well, first of all, it would mean that the public self, the one presented to the world, is not “a mask” but the original; the thing itself. Behind the scenes, alone, we live the mystery of self-consciousness. We wonder who it is that wakes at four to soundless dark. Alone, we dream of another life; the one in the biography. Perhaps the oppressive climate of our culture – as seen in the triumphant exposés of the press and the prurience of Reality TV – is due to our frantic need to remove in others what we see as a façade in ourselves. And as art is seen as an adjunct of this removal (“expressing the inner self”), so the inevitable disappointment in its resistant playfulness leads to a shift in preference to revelatory biography and memoir. Could this be stage fright on our part?

Early on in Thomas Bernhard: the making of an Austrian, the first English biography of the Austrian novelist, playwright and poet, Gitta Honegger says the apparatus of the theatre is an “annoyingly overused existential paradigm”, and she’s right. I’ve only used it once and it’s annoying me already. However, it is clear that her subject is the paradigm’s essential figure. There seems to be no private Thomas Bernhard. As such, Honegger says he is a particularly Austrian phenomenon. The nation, she says, transplanted the baroque theatrics of the old Hapsburg Empire into its cultural life, notably the Salzburg Festival, the state run Burgtheatre, and one man: Thomas Bernhard. Each provided an arena for Austria to conjure its self image.

In Bernhard’s case, it was invariably a negative image, as if Austria needed an impression of embattlement against a hostile world. For example, when Bernhard received a state prize and made critical remarks about the state in his acceptance speech, a Government minister stormed out and slammed a glass door so violently that it smashed. And just before his death in 1989, he was verbally attacked by the President (an ex-Nazi), and physically attacked on a bus by an old lady wielding an umbrella. Since his death, however, Bernhard has become a national treasure. His vitriol has been rebranded, Guy Fawkes-like, into a fireworks display. As a result, his description of Austria as a place with more Nazis in 1988 than in 1938 (the cause of the President’s and the old lady’s wrath) is safely consigned to history. Like the “Anschluss” and the President’s SS uniform, it is part of Austria’s rich cultural heritage. Perhaps this is why, in his will, Bernhard refused to allow the publication or performance of his work within the Austrian state for the duration of the copyright; he foresaw his place in the state circus. (The lawyers have since got around this.)

However, the important thing to remember is that it wasn’t Bernhard who said Austria was still full of Nazis, it was a character in his play “Heldenplatz”. And while everyone assumes Bernhard meant every word as his own, those words are part of a whole that, as JJ Long explains in his book The Novels Of Thomas Bernhard: form and its function, demands to be experienced not in isolation as preferred by the culture-vultures, but in real time. If this is done, irony leaks into the hyperbole and all attitudes become unstable, even irony. In effect, even after death, Bernhard still performs, refusing to become a museum piece. The man himself remains a mystery. So what, in fact, did Thomas Bernhard think? Who was he when alone, no longer dancing before the appalled Viennese bourgeoisie? These are questions for a biography.

But don’t get your hopes up. As Honegger’s subtitle indicates, there is a plea of mitigation. She says her book is a “cultural biography”; as much about Austria as about Bernhard. While this is disappointing, it is also understandable. Most correspondence is unavailable, and friends do not say anything particularly intimate. In fact, the one clear sexual revelation doesn’t alter the image of a performer: Bernhard liked to masturbate in front of a mirror! We’re told this on page 10, so it’s all over pretty quickly. Instead of a chronological narrative, we’re given themes in which Honegger makes frequent (and wearying) digressions into cultural history and their relevance to Bernhard, such as the notion of “Heimat”, and the significance of the theatre in Austria.

In connection with the latter, Honegger rightly makes much of Bernhard’s staging of his experience. In his compelling memoirs (written in five short volumes but collected in English as Gathering Evidence), Bernhard recalls events through the eyes of his younger self while he (the younger self) is also observing or reflecting. He observes his younger self observing from a vantage point separate from the “action”. One observation point leads to another and then another. We might see this as a prime example of Chinese-box Postmodernism where all facts are as hollow as the next, but in Bernhard’s memoir the gnawing question of origin is always there. The facts are plain: Bernhard’s father abandoned his mother before Thomas was born, and died during the war years in mysterious circumstances; he either killed himself or was murdered. He never met his son. Bernhard was later punished by his bitter mother who saw her humiliation in the inherited features of her boy. No amount of virtuoso storytelling and opinionating could prevent the author from being thrown toward the bitter facts of his birth, and its consequences, much as we wonder, whilst vomiting, what we had eaten to cause it.

Bernhard’s early life was also blighted by the Nazi era. He saw at first hand the terror of Allied bombing raids on Salzburg. Barely a teenager, death closed in from all sides. And after the war, when he tried to make his way in the world as a trained singer, he was struck down with tuberculosis after working in freezing conditions in a grocery store. In hospital, with his lungs full of breathtaking sputum, he was given the Last Rites. Miraculously, he survived when all around were dying. Honegger says he wrote the memoir as a record of his victory over that death and the attempts at metaphorical suffocation by his upbringing in particular, and Austrian society in general. Victory was the result of a decision to become himself, to live despite all that suffocated him, even though it was futile. I say “futile” because all that suffocated him also provided the oxygen. It is no coincidence that, despite the oppressive details, there is a sense of freedom pulsing out of the pages of Gathering Evidence. Later, the existential energy of Bernhard’s neurasthenic narrators will also emerge from this outrageous, paradoxical act of will.

Perhaps it because Bernhard provides the most useful guide to his life that Honegger does not attempt to take us through the minutiae of his daily existence. Yet while the analysis is very interesting, one longs for that minutiae. Recently, a BBC Radio 3 documentary on Bernhard revealed that his record collection consisted almost entirely of the 19th Century Romantic repertoire. One might have assumed this great Modernist would have preferred Schönberg and Webern, Bach and Haydn over Schubert and Brahms. Apparently not. (Curiously, this is similar to Beckett). I don’t recall Honegger mentioning anything like this. Nor does she mention the novel Bernhard had sketched out before his death. She prefers to skim over the surface, taking what is necessary for her themed coverage. When it comes to Bernhard’s sexuality, for example, there is an exhausting bout of Freudian analysis arising from his father’s absence and his mother’s maltreatment. It is unconvincing only because it is so persuasive. Actually the same is true of the opinions expressed by Bernhard’s narrators. Perhaps Honegger is having a laugh as our brows sweat over the complexities of Oedipal anxiety? I would like to think so. In the rest of the book, Freud gets barely a mention. It is very odd.

It is also vague. We don’t get a definitive answer as to whether Bernhard was hetero-, bi- or homosexual. Honegger says he “came between couples”, which suggests one conclusion, but what she means is that both sexes were drawn into an ambiguous relationship with the writer. It’s a living example of Bernhard’s elusiveness, and proof of nothing else. Another is the one major relationship outside his family. It was with a woman 39 years older than himself. She was a widow who befriended Bernhard when he was a young writer. She provided a home and material support when he was struggling. He called her his “Lebensmench” (Lifeperson); a word he invented. Understandably, Honegger doesn’t have much to give us on the details of this partnership. All windows are opaque. The same is true, more or less, for other areas of his life. Indeed, Bernhard is a phantom in his own biography.

JJ Long takes a firmer route by concentrating on the novels. Bernhard, he says, was “a writer of considerable diversity, profoundly concerned with the problems and potential of storytelling.” Originally a doctoral thesis, The Novels of Thomas Bernhard: form and its function uses the technical language of Narrative Theory to understand the unique qualities of Bernhard’s writing. Reading it requires a high level of patience and concentration. Moreover, it leaves the lengthy quotations in German untranslated. This is regrettable as those most likely to be drawn to the book – Germanless Bernhard fans – will be hampered. Presumably the costs involved are prohibitive. Still, even monolinguists can gain a good deal from what’s left. Whereas Honegger bizarrely accuses Bernhard of being a solipsist – someone for whom the world is merely a projection of their own mind – Long stresses the “narrative strategies” and “hermeneutic sequences” employed to undermine such narrow interpretations of Bernhard’s monological prose.

For example, he writes that the reflective form of the great, valedictory novel Extinction allows “an excavation of the past even as it moves forward into the future.” The novel’s narrator fires at familiar targets – particularly the repression of the Nazi past – even as he himself succumbs to the same temptation to repress the facts of his own life in order to resist the impending extinction of the title. Indeed, the targets are not only familiar but familial. Long shows how most of Bernhard’s novels – like his memoir – are concerned with “transgenerational transmission” (that is, inheritance). The narrator’s family consists of ex-Nazi parents, both sad and monstrous people, whom he loves and hates in equal measure, as well as grotesque siblings who have not resisted the legacy of repression. As the eldest, the narrator inherits the family’s country estate in darkest Austria when the parents are killed in a car crash. As he also feels that he has not got long to live, he decides he must return from his sunny life in Rome to redeem the legacy. We don’t get to find out how he does this until the final page. As he goes forward to do this, he reflects on why it is required.

Yet the reason why the narrator’s predicament compels our attention, and gives us pleasure, is his spirited unwillingness to complete the task. He is forever delaying the end in both the action as described (stalling outside the gates of the estate) and in the act of storytelling itself (spinning variations of anecdotes and opinions). Long says these delaying tactics are achieved through “embedded narratives” and “retarding elements”. As a successful doctoral candidate, “pleasure” is not an issue for him, but for those of us who turn to Bernhard for this reason, it is interesting to note how these techniques create an experience similar to the reading of a thriller or detective novel. In those genres, pleasure comes from the growth of mystery and suspense before the inevitable denouement.

Extinction is similar in that one reads to find out what happens next. However, the distinction is that the thriller cannot reproduce the same pleasure on re-reading. A new story is required every time. Extinction on the other hand positively demands to be re-read in order to enjoy that delay again and again. In fact it becomes more enjoyable as we join with the narrator repeating stories and opinions in order to delay our return to the mundane world. Unfortunately for him, the delay has more serious import for the narrator. For a time, we feel more alive even if our noses are “buried in a book”. This is the great problem and potential of storytelling. Long’s analysis, which is richer and more complex than I have space (or patience) to detail, manages to elucidate Bernhard’s method and highlight his remarkable technical achievement. One cannot go away from this book and still believe, as so many do, that Bernhard is merely a ranting egoist. Those who already know better will perhaps understand more clearly how Bernhard maintained his high-wire act, though we would still like to know more in physical detail.

In one brief insight to his working process, Honegger quotes Bernhard as saying he wrote “with full commitment”; his entire body took part in the creative process. Perhaps this is why he preferred to call his novels “prose texts” as this suggests a script for performance. Indeed, Bernhard’s many plays are not greatly different from the novels. It seems Bernhard himself felt most alive when writing, like an actor on stage even at his writing desk. Honegger observes that each work was a reassertion of that early decision to live. Appropriately, some way into Extinction, the narrator reflects on the frustrated lives of those stuck in small-town provincial misery from which he, the narrator, had escaped. He says they fail to better themselves, to “get away from their real selves” because

“they lack the intellectual energy, because they have not discovered the intellect – the intellect around them or the intellect within them – and have therefore not taken the first step, which is the precondition for taking the second.”

So, we might assume that in writing, Bernhard got away from his real self. But “full commitment” means he did it with his mortal body as well as his intellect. Despite his early escape from death, Bernhard was always seriously ill. He expected to die before reaching fifty. His half-brother, a doctor, claims to have kept him alive for an extra ten years after that. Mortality was an over-riding theme and writing was at once the escape from death’s imminence and its enactment. Barthes’ Death of the Author was more than a concept to Bernhard. In fact, in a blessed piece of minutiae, Honegger tells us one of his favourite games was “playing dead”. It’s a nice idea to think of the novels as the place were Bernhard plays dead for us. Nowhere else is he more alive.