Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject

by Meryle Secrest

The first rule of biography, wrote Justin Kaplan: "Shoot the widow." In her new book, Meryle Secrest, acclaimed biographer ("Knowing, sympathetic and entertainingly droll" The New York Times), writes... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307264831
• ISBN13: 9780307264831
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

An Almost Autobiography and Luminary Chase

With 4000 books coming out every couple of months, finding a good read beyond the Greshams and Ludlum's or fiction in general keeps busy people like moi moving swiftly through the NY Times Book Review section, lamenting deeply the loss of the Washington Post's Book World, and consulting with the bright light employees at my neighborhood book store, Politics and Prose, America's leading independent purveyor of such goods. But living in DC, I also have an unfair advantage. I meet a number of fascinating people. In this case recently the author, Meryle Secrest, who it turns out shares some political views with me. So she sent me a copy of her latest book, "Shoot the Widow", which otherwise I surely would have missed in the welter of my travels, other work and in the flooding river flow of other prose. Don't miss this great fun almost autobiography. I had no idea in my short acquaintance with Secrest of her astonishing array of associations gleaned through her successful life of creating commercial biographies. She brings great erudition about so much of European and North American culture and language to her task. In a most engaging way, Secrest tells a lot of the kind of clay feet dirt readers want to learn about some of the famous characters of the art, music and architecture world, Kenneth Clark, Dali, Frank Lloyd Wright, art dealer, Joseph Duveen, Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers, dropping other famous names like Hansel and Gretel did on the way into her penetration of the deep forests of her subjects's innermost secrets. Her main modus vivendi is don't talk directly for the most part to her all but one male subjects, but mostly to those who knew them. One, like her first and only woman, Romaine Brooks, was already deceased, but others were close to the end of their lives, such as Clark and Dali. This process for Secrest has proved to be a bit like panning for gold, since most of their family members and pals are elusive, mute or evasive, making the finding of nuggets very hard. Hence "Shoot the Protective Widow"! But the detritus from one book seems often to have lead her to her next subject. Having visited her native city, Bath, in the UK several times, I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of its history, skillfully interwoven into her account of a relatively humble upbringing and her surprising escape from what could well have been a humdrum life. That she did took both pluck and luck, but mostly the former. Her route to becoming a biographer will fascinate the reader. She will tell you a lot about her pursuit of such luminaries, but as all of us learn if we choose to travel any professional path, anyone's success involves 90% hard work,10% genius. And clearly in her case, what I would call "guts" and a moderate kind of chutzpah! I won't outline for you her own biography, other than to say her persistence in the face of endless frustrations and monumental hard work can only suggest her sheer joy at the ch

How to write successful, but not great biography

Writing a biography is extremely difficult. It takes a great deal of effort and time, and the results usually do not please the people closest to the one written about. I know this from personal experience having spent more than five years writing a biography which I hoped would make the world want to know more about one who in my judgment was a great Jewish leader, Rabbi Shlomo Goren. Meryle Secrest is the author of among others biographies of Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, Salvador Dali, Frank Lloyd Wright, Steven Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rogers. In this memoir she describes her experiences as a biographer, though there is too much autobiographical information which tells how a Secrest worked her way to an honored place both in journalism and as a biographer. Among the secrets of the trade she reveals is the one suggested by the title. The close relatives, especially the widow can be the bane of the biographer in denying access to important materials, letters, archives, etc. Family members want to see their honored representative in a good light and do not want the skeletons in the closet revealed. Here the most instructive story relates to Secrest's writing of the Kenneth Clark biography. All was cooperation and sweetness at first but then when it became apparent that the story of Clark's first wife's alcoholism, and his frequent dalliances were going to be part of the story the tone and situation changed. Here Secrest herself became a bit two- faced in her dealings. It is interesting that Secrest presents herself as a certain kind of biographer, what might be called the 'commercial biographer'. There are biographers who become so devoted to the study of their subject that they virtually give their life-work to it. One thinks of Leon Edel with his five- volume biography of Henry James. But Secrest clearly explains it is not her absolute devotion and desire to understand to the depths which motivates her but rather a combination of real interest and commercial prospect. Her subjects are people who have been very successful, who there is a great public curiosity about. Another element in her work is what be called finding the 'secret element' often the 'dirty secret element' This is the set of facts which is the great revelation of the inquiry the new stuff which then leads to the marketing hype around the book. But as Louis Menand points out in an instructive article on this book in the 'New Yorker' explaining the apparent gift, the valuable public thing by the secret small private one is an extremely dubious practice.. Secrest is considered a very respectable, workmanlike biographer. She is not aiming to be Johnson's Boswell, and she does not perhaps go deep enough into her subjects to give us the great and memorable work. But she is a hard- working, inventive, and amusing story-teller who has written an instructive and entertaining book.

Teller of Tales

I read this book on a recent jaunt to LA and believe me, I didn't want it ever to end. I kept hoping that Meryle Secrest would reveal more and more data about her methods as a biographer. That review from PW by James Atlas was just offbase in every possible way, culminating in his snidely separating Secrest from his precious rank of "great biographers" (note that every example he lists is a male writer, and this is said to have been "at random"). He's just way off base. Over the years I've read many of Secrest's biographies (though not all) and one has to admire her range, though Atlas says this is a sign of weakness and she should have stuck to a very limited cast of characters. If she had just stuck to Kenneth Clark and Berenson he would have had more respect for her I assume. But in reality, it is orecisely her willingness to jump in with both feet into a field she had previously left alone that makes her unique. When she wrote about Dali people said, "She knows nothing about surrealism," and when she turned to Frank Lloyd Wright there were complaints that she knew little about architecture. I hear people say that she knows nothing about musical theater and should have stayed away from Sondheim and Richard Rodgers. Well, maybe so, maybe not. But in SHOOT THE WIDOW we can now discover what gave Meryle Secrest her zest for the unknown. For she tells the story of her own life and sensitively, yet persuasively, makes you feel what it must have been like for a poor English girl uprooted out of a humble yet safe life in the UK and brought over on a troop ship and dragged halfway across Canada (to Hamilton) on a cross country nightmare train voyage, and set down in a lakeland paradise completely despoiled by steel mills. There your Meryle learned the ABCs of journalism, as a way of escaping her personal and emotional circumstance. This part of SHOOT THE WIDOW is a real inspiration, as is her account of the great discovery she made while writing the life of the painter Romaine Brooks: in her entire mansion Brooks kept only one picture of a man, but who was he? Through amazing luck and a cool head, Secrest discovers a painting of the exact same guy, and when she reproduces them on adjoining pages we can see they're identical, and so she was able to solve the single biggest conundrum in Brooks' life. As a biographer myself I give her sleuthing four stars. As for her qualms about the family of her subjects, and how the family can reach in and try to quash the biographer's revelations (as happened to her with Kenneth Clark's family), it is a sobering possibility. Apparently those in Clark's family who gave her grief are all now dead, and she is having a fine old time dancing on their graves! A friend told me some years ago that Meryle is the mother of Ryan Seacrest from AMERICAN IDOL but this is apparently not the case. No worries, she has accomplished plenty without having to depend on siring a famous son for validation.