JOE DIMAGGIO: The Hero's Life
By Richard Ben Cramer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684853914


Regardless of what Richard Ben Cramer thinks, he has thrown another curve into the realm of hero-worship. Perhaps we have Jim Bouton, Yankee alumnus and author of the classic BALL FOUR, to thank for this; perhaps someone else would have come along to show us that the emperor Joe DiMaggio's clothes were less than pristine. But JOE DIMAGGIO: The Hero's Life, this long-anticipated biography of the Yankee Clipper, could not, would not have been written 30 years ago. And even now, in this "enlightened" era, many readers might find this book a cruel intrusion into that place set aside for their cherished beliefs.

DiMaggio's talents on the field are never an issue. His career statistics include a batting average of .325, 361 home runs (against 369 strikeouts) and 1,537 RBIs. Joltin' Joe was the bridge between the days of Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle. He led the Yankees to championship after championship, appearing on 10 pennant winners during his 13 years. His hitting streak of 56 games is one of the records least likely to be broken. During his reign as baseball's best, he exuded a pastiche of class and elegance. Life magazine, in what they must have considered forward thinking at the time, featured him in an article proclaiming that he didn't smell of garlic or talk with an accent --- a true American!

Why did DiMaggio inhabit such a place as a legend in American history? "His very blandness, his lack of words...allowed us to put upon him what we needed at any one moment. As war was looming, he was the poster boy for victory. Joe was the one guy we could always look to."

When his playing days were over he remained on our minds: The husband of Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most glamorous movie star of all time; spokesman, in his golden years, for a coffee machine and a savings bank; voted the Greatest Living Ballplayer in 1969, during baseball's centennial celebration. No matter where he went, he was The Yankee Clipper, instantly recognizable, adored and honored. And when this country lost its way for a time during the late '60s, the question was asked "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" Where had our heroes disappeared to? Who could we look up to anymore?

Before television and sports-radio stations and million dollar contracts for .250 players were in vogue, before newspapers felt obligated to turn the sports pages into police blotters, athletes, for the most part, were role models. None more so than Joe. Everything about him was perfect, from his feats on the field to the clothes he wore to the women he squired. Much of his persona, especially in the early stages of his career, Cramer claims, came at the hands of the sportswriters who followed his every move.

In time, DiMaggio came to understand that regardless of how well he did, the team (and by extension the writers, who were quasi-employees of the club) called the shots. When he held out for more dough and returned to the team after spring training, rusty and battling injuries, the fans actually booed him, the writers were no longer complimentary. They "taught him a lesson, or confirmed a lesson he was already prepared to believe: They were fans, they were friends...as long as he was a winner. But that could be over in a day."

After Joe's second stunning season, Connie Mack, who managed the Philadelphia Athletics for half a century, suggested he could be the greatest ever. "At twenty-two, with a baseball lifetime ahead of him, Joe was money in the bank. So where was his?" Joe realized he would never get the money he felt he deserved. "If he was going to get the dough...he would have to take care of business himself, inside of baseball --- or outside. Outside, no one would have to know a thing."

Obsession is a most accurate description of DiMaggio, whether relating to baseball or his two ill-fated marriages or his feelings about money. Like Roy Hobbs, the protagonist in Bernard Malamud's THE NATURAL, DiMaggio desperately wanted to be known as the best who ever played the game. In the twilight of his career, Joe was asked why he still played so hard. His answer? "I always think, there might be someone out there in the stands who's never seen me play."

While Cramer's depiction of DiMaggio on the field is the very essence of the term superstar, it is Joltin' Joe's life away from the stadium that makes us shake our heads. The author goes under the surface, perhaps even getting under the reader's skin, as he reports DiMaggio's dark side. The transformation of DiMaggio, from a shy, awkward teen to a womanizing, misanthropic, selfish hermit is painful to behold. Yet Cramer's ease with the telling makes it like an accident from which you can't avert your eyes.

Off the field, DiMaggio is portrayed as a poor husband, a lacking father, a faithless friend, ready to toss off an old pal for the slightest faux pas, regardless of "years of service;" there was little forgiveness in the man. Cramer's tales of visits to brothels make one wonder if this was de rigeur behavior for males of the day in general, and athletes in particular.

When it actually came to stepping up to the bat when his country needed him, to go off to war, DiMaggio was anything but a leader. For whatever reason --- fear of death or injury or fear of lost wages --- DiMaggio simply did not want to join up, as many of his contemporary stars did (Bob Feller and Hank Greenberg, just to name two). It would seem the only reason he finally did enlist (in 1943, after Joe's local draft board had closed off enlistments) was to placate his wife, with the hopes of boosting their failed marriage. "Dorothy (Arnold, his first wife) wanted him in the Army --- she'd made that clear enough; otherwise it would be divorce... Still, if he gave himself over to the Army, then nothing would be in his control. Who could tell how long this war would go on? Or what they'd do with him? He could get hurt, and that would be the end of baseball for him. He could lose everything."

His courtship, marriage, divorce, and reconciliation with Marilyn Monroe is another part of the DiMaggio legend. An old-fashioned man at heart, he didn't want his wife to work, especially not if it meant that she would be the object of millions of male fantasies. And Marilyn, goodness knows, had her own problems. They had "one big thing in common. In fact, they may have been the only two people in the country, at that moment, who could understand each other." They loved each other but couldn't live with each other. Their marriage lasted less than a year, but he was still a major part of her life, a source of strength and comfort. That her death came just before they were to be remarried just adds to the sadness of their saga.

There is a 27-year gap between Marilyn's death and the "Earthquake Series" between Oakland and San Francisco, where the tale resumes. "When Marilyn Monroe died," said Cramer, "he was already sealed away from us." Her death confirmed Joe's suspicions and revulsion with what the hero's life meant. This was the emotional peak of the book, and Cramer felt he didn't want to put the readers through a quarter century (and a few hundred more pages) of Joe's quiet life.

For all these less-than-sterling qualities, Cramer still claims this is a positive book. He doesn't understand why excerpts and reviews dwell on the "salacious" items. To hear him talk, all of these foibles could and should be forgiven because DiMaggio was the hero we all wanted him to be. For such men, concessions are made.

Cramer has done a marvelous, exhaustive job of research, spending five years on his tome. But whether this research is worthy of a man who won a Pulitzer in 1979 for international reporting and the author of the acclaimed WHAT IT TAKES: The Way to the White House or is more suited to the editors of supermarket tabloids is another question. In either case JOE DIMAGGIO: The Hero's Life has that proverbial "something for everyone."

--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

RIMBAUD: A Biography
By Graham Robb
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 0393049558


The time I was introduced to French 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud was the time I was introducing myself to my future wife. We soon discovered we both liked Jim Morrison and The Doors. So, of course, I read up on everything Doors related, watched The Doors movie with her and so on --- so I would seem very knowledgeable about this area as to impress her. Jim Morrison, I learned, was influenced by a young boy poet named Arthur Rimbaud. "Hmm..." I thought to myself, "if Jim Morrison liked him, he must be great." So, of course, I read Arthur Rimbaud's poetry. I discovered that I, too, liked Arthur Rimbaud and have been enjoying his work ever since.

Now, after the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Total Eclipse (where he plays the young Rimbaud quite well), and Rimbaud's words have been printed and reprinted, a biography has been published. Graham Robb's RIMBAUD: A Biography is the definitive life study of the great Arthur Rimbaud and is quite possibly the best biography out this year.

Who was Arthur Rimbaud? He is certainly an enigma of sorts. He was a saint, a sinner, a madman, a lover, a tyrant, a browbeaten son, an explorer, a gunrunner, a romantic, and, of course, a poet. But why did he stop writing poetry in his early 20s? Where did he go when he dropped out of French poetry circles and his torrid love affair with the married middle-aged poet Paul Verlaine? Why did he leave Europe for remote Africa? Was he a slave trader? Did he earn a fortune? How was he brought up? Who was his family? Did he ever write again after moving to Africa? Graham Robb, author of the biographies of Balzac and Victor Hugo, certainly answers all these questions and more.

Rimbaud was born in the small French village of Charleville, the son of a middle class soldier who ran off when Arthur was a child, and a demanding, oppressive mother. He was a gifted student through his schooling, always wanting to push the envelope, always wanting to see how far his intelligence and wit could take him. It took him to Paris where he fell in with the French poetry elite. There, he shook it up and violently. His words always inspired other poets, yet his antics made them shake their heads, wondering who was this mad man, this boy with a golden pen?

A startling, shocking relationship began between Rimbaud and fellow poet Paul Verlaine. Their relationship was stormy at best. Spiced with violence, sex, and alcohol, their madness escalated to the point that Verlaine shot Rimbaud with a pistol. Verlaine was sent to prison. Rimbaud left Europe. Verlaine stayed loyal to Rimbaud, promoting his poetry while he was away in Africa and even after his death. At the age of 21, Rimbaud was done with writing poetry; for his remaining 16 years he lived in exile, ending up as a major explorer and arms trader in Abyssinia (today's Ethiopia).

Robb succeeds in giving life to a man who lived two separate lives. The first life was his rise to fame in literary circles. His poetry, "The Drunken Boat," "A Season in Hell," and "Illuminations," illuminated his own life --- the deep, unknowable well of his most intimate thoughts. This life is well documented. His love affair with Verlaine, his influences on the Symbolists and Surrealists and gays and anarchists can all be found in this book or that. But his second life is just as interesting as his first (if not more so) and it has been left in utter obscurity. Graham Robb casts a brilliant light upon it and writes with passion and with the details that make biographies rich.

"By the end of 1888, most of the foreign trade in southern Abyssinia revolved around Rimbaud. He was an importer and exporter, a prospector and financier, a middle-man for the principal arms importer (Savoure), an agent of the oldest trading firm in Aden (Tian & Co.), and the main supplier of the man who was masterminding King Menelik's new nation." These accounts were fascinating to me, the reader of his poetry. I had no idea what kind of influence Rimbaud had in Africa --- his travels made him the first European ever to enter into many areas of Abyssinia.

RIMBAUD: A BIOGRAPHY is a compulsive read. It is the story of a young poet boy and a business man. It is the story of someone who turned poetry upside down and a man who traded camels in the deserts of Africa. It is the story of a turbulent childhood and a successful young adulthood. Robb has given us Rimbaud's life in its entirety, and it will be the bench mark for Rimbaud biographies for quite some time, if not all time.

--- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley

THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH
Edited by Karen V. Kukil
Publisher: Anchor Books
ISBN: 0385720254


The late Ted Hughes spent a great part of his life not just being a poet but acting as the living executor of the will of poetess extraordinaire, Sylvia Plath, who left him a widower in 1963. In 1982 he allowed a seriously abridged edition of Plath's journals to be published, after she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for THE COLLECTED POEMS. At the time, Hughes remarked that it was for the protection of their children that he allowed only segments of Plath's 20-plus journals to be made public at that time. Later, he passed the journals on to his children, hoping that they would eventually find a publisher for the journals in toto. They were successful. Now, THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH marks the first time that all 23 journals, including 2 that had been unopened until Hughes himself passed away in 1998, have been bound into one very thick and very expansive volume. THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH is a beautifully rendered portrait of the woman behind the poems.

The journals were obviously an important piece of the Plath puzzle. It is in them that she explicitly records all the great moments of her life, from her days at Smith and her hopes for her career to her meeting Hughes, moving to England, becoming a mom, suffering the slights of a not-quite-ready publishing world as well as the depression that made her life end so soon. As with the recent publication of THE MEASURE OF LIFE: Virginia Woolf's Last Years, this book allows us to peek behind the dark black curtain that stood between Plath and the world outside her head.

Plath was a poet, first and foremost, regardless of the success of THE BELL JAR, her only novel. Her journal musings on everything she experienced make for fascinating reading: each section is a beautifully rendered moment out of her life, explained with the utmost care to get the words right, to express emotional highs and lows with her poetic powers at their fullest. It is frightening too, since the more you read, the more you see her as an aggressively calculating career girl, a part of her persona that is not too widely considered. She was an ambitious woman, a sincere woman, hardworking and studious as well as manipulative and desiring. In her journals, she seems never to be afraid of herself. Instead, she really 'lets it all hang out,' for better or for worse. These journals are perhaps the most dedicated looks at any 20th century poet's life, and what they reveal about Plath only helps us appreciate and understand the personal and painful revelations that her poems obviously were.

THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH is a hell of a piece of work. Although the ultimate result of them is that she never got past the pain and hurt that would eventually end her life, Plath is worthy of our praise for her introspective and revealing work --- clearly, she worked long and hard to get it right, and these journals are important testaments to her dedication and craft. If only she had been able to bend and mend her emotional life as she did her poems, these journals may have been ongoing.

DEREK JARMAN: A Biography
By Tony Peake
Publisher: Overlook Press
ISBN: 1585670669


Sometimes the best way to find out something about someone's life is to ask their friends to tell you a story. That is essentially what DEREK JARMAN: A Biography by Tony Peake is --- a story about an artist's life by someone who knew him well and often collaborated with him on the works that made him famous. From Jarman's English boyhood to his randy days as a fine artist and then filmmaker and AIDS activist, Peake offers up tiny slices of the man's history with a generous and gracious spirit, filled with love for a complicated human being who offered the planet his very soul in his work.

Jarman was a rampant homosexual playboy at a time when it wasn't exactly in vogue. He was also a sensitive and talented gardener whose cottage landscape became a famous stopping-off point for gardening enthusiasts (of which there are many in England). He covered the lives of other famous, complicated men in his work, with films about Caravaggio and Edward I and St. Sebastian. At the end of his life, blind and ruined by AIDS, he made a film called Blue, in which the screen is bathed in blue colors and with a soundtrack that mirrored the way he saw the world at the time. Jarman was a renegade whose every move reflected the place he was in his life --- he was truly a working artist.

Peake's writing isn't exactly the type of sophisticated reportage you would expect from such a lengthy and detailed biography of a recent art world star. However, it is just that perspective that makes DEREK JARMAN: A Biography such a compelling read. Again, it is as if you were sitting around a coffee table in a homey kitchen with an old friend telling you stories about someone who isn't there anymore who added so much to the world when he was; and whose voice, through his work, would linger after him forever.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

JEFFERSON DAVIS, AMERICAN: A Biography
By William J. Cooper, Jr.
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0394569164


Both a devoted American and a wealthy plantation owner who thought slavery to be a moral and social good, Jefferson Davis is one of the most complex and compelling political figures in the nation's history. Davis's duplicitous nature is at the heart of JEFFERSON DAVIS, AMERICAN, William J. Cooper's exhaustive biography of the former president of the Confederacy. Cooper bases his work on the extensive archival record left by Davis and his family and associates. JEFFERSON DAVIS, AMERICAN is a critical and sympathetic account of the controversial statesman.

HO CHI MINH
By William J. Duiker
Publisher: Hyperion
ISBN: 0786863870


Inarguably, Ho Chi Minh is one of the most important and controversial political figures of the 20th century. In recognition of this, William Duiker, has written HO CHI MINH, a comprehensive and riveting biography of the Communist leader. He chronicles Ho's rise to power in the Vietnamese Communist movement, his years of travel fomenting revolution, and his lasting influence on the process of national reunification. Whether you are a critic of admirer of Ho's politics, HO CHI MINH is a fascinating read.

NATURAL BLONDE: A Memoir
By Liz Smith
Publisher: Hyperion
ISBN: 0786863250


A veritable page-six fixture, Liz Smith is the eyes and ears of New York, if not the country. Whether you love her or loathe her, you have to admit she has an enviable profession --- she's paid (quite handsomely) to hobnob, lunch and gossip. In NATURAL BLONDE: A Memoir, the queen of dish takes the reader inside the parties, bars, private jets, yachts, boardrooms, newsrooms, and bedrooms that we regular folk would otherwise never get to see. A fun read, NATURAL BLONDE: A Memoir is a gossip-hound's dream.

---Reviews by Lazarus Penultimate

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