Hesketh Pearson (1887–1964)

Not quite what I expected, I don't think. I knew this wasn't going to be a typical biography, just based on the slimness of the volume, but it sat on the TBR shelves for a few years because I really have to be in the mood for the tedium that comes with biographies. However, Pearson skipped the tedious bits and instead, this is more an overview of Conan Doyle's life. In that it's a great 'first look' at this magnificent author's life.

My problem, and hence the three stars, is that it's truly a mystery whether Pearson even liked Conan Doyle. This is not an unbiased look at a literary titan's life - it's totally biased. But which way? Throughout the text, Pearson is extolling Doyle's genius, praising his ability to write gripping tales, and at the same time calling him simple whenever he can. He uses the word 'simple', and I could give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he means 'free from guile' - which Doyle was - but he takes snipes at him in other ways too that makes me wonder.

Pearson continued to irritate me the further along in the text I went; he went off on a long diatribe about the difference between having an imagination and being fanciful. Apparently, Shakespeare had imagination, but Doyle was merely fanciful, as, apparently, was Edgar Allan Poe. He also kept referring to "the war of 1914-1918", or "the 1914-1918 war", refusing to call it World War I, or even the Great War. This bugged me more than it should have.

But the part that pissed me off the most was the last chapter where he tackles the elephant in the room - Doyle's embracement of spiritualism. It is, to put it mildly, extremely unsympathetic, unbiased and, frankly screw mildly, the man was sneering and contemptuous and couldn't have written it more condescendingly if he tried. He made me want to thump him right between the eyes for his extraordinary poor form. I could rant about this for ages, but I'll save time and just say, the last chapter cost him a star and a half.

It's an easy and informative read, but unless you can tolerate an author who talks out of both sides of their mouth in a completely biased fashion, there are probably better biographies of Conan Doyle out there.… (mere)

Boswell's memory is a considerable part of the portrait of Samuel Johnson's public presence. Mr. Pearson realized this and does give us the pair. so far as he could recover them. It is implied, as it is as well by Frederick Pottle, another researcher, that Boswell often prodded the irritable Johnson into some of his major quotes. Boswell provides the researcher into social history with a relatively in-depth portrait of an eighteenth century upper middle class life. Johnson's value aside from his collection of biographies of English poets of the period, and the cleverer definitions in his dictionary, seems slight in comparison.… (mere)

. . . In which Hesketh Pearson sets out to play Boswell to Shaw’s Johnson. The heft of the book reminds one of a standard “life and times” treatment, but the subtitle, Life and Personality, reveals that it is not. Instead, the style is more that of the “new” biography practiced in the first half of the twentieth century, although other examples of that genre are usually shorter.
The personality referred to in the subtitle sets the tone for the book. Shaw’s personality was his greatest work of art and flows into the most successful characters in his many plays. Pearson is clearly under the influence of that personality and is afflicted (unfortunately) by a love of Shavian paradox. For example: “No really intelligent person could possibly have taken an exception to a syllable in it [a war-time pamphlet of Shaw’s, Common Sense]; which must be why nearly everyone took violent exception to every syllable of it.”
In sum, this book both profits and suffers from the author’s close acquaintance with its subject. Much of it consists of anecdotes told by Shaw. Even parts not set off by quotation marks sound as if dictated by him.
This book caught my eye more than a half-century ago in the bookstore of one of the colleges I, a high school senior, had applied to. I bought it, made a couple of fitful starts, and have packed it with my other books and moved it several times. This year I decided to give it one last chance. It doesn’t take the place of a standard biography, even less the place of the best of Shaw’s plays (and prefaces) or music criticism. The abiding value of the book is in its character of “Bernard Shaw as I knew him.”… (mere)