[Each of the last
few years, I’ve helped kick
off summer with a series on AmericanStudies
Beach Reads. If it ain’t broke and all, so here’s this year’s edition!
Please share your responses and beach read nominees for a weekend post that’ll put
its toes in the sand!]
On the
autobiography as big and messy and entertaining and pitch-perfect as its
author.
Almost exactly
four years ago, Clarence
Clemons passed away. Among a
few different posts in which I wrote about Clarence, I featured Bruce
Springsteen’s amazing eulogy for his lifelong friend and colleague and
partner in musical perfection. There’s a lot to love about that eulogy, but I
think what it does best is highlight three seemingly distinct but ultimately inseparable
qualities of Clarence’s: his larger-than-life, mythologized identity; his
undeniable flaws and mistakes (ones felt with particular potency, Bruce notes,
by family members such as Clarence’s sons); and his inspiring greatness, not
only as a musician and performer but as a man. Taken together, that trio of
elements doesn’t quite sum up Clarence—what details can sum up a life?—but it
does, perhaps, capture his essence.
Fortunately for
Clarence fans and the reading public, not long before his death Clarence
published an autobiographical book that likewise captured that unique and vital
essence: Big Man:
Real Life & Tall Tales (2009), co-written with longtime writer and
TV producer Don Reo.
As its subtitle suggests, Big Man is
as messy with the facts as was Clarence’s mythology (such as the many different
stories about their first meeting that Bruce told in concerts over the
years): featured throughout the book are stories that may or may not be true,
legends that can’t help but call into question the more ostensibly factual
stories from Clarence’s life with which they’re interspersed. All
autobiographical writing should be approached more as narrative and story than
as history, of course—but by foregrounding its playfulness with the facts,
Clarence’s autobiography begs the question of what we can expect to learn or
find about the man and his life even with such reasonable doubt in mind.
I don’t have any
answers to that question, and can’t say that I finished the book knowing any
more, definitively, about Clarence than I did when I began. But at the same
time, I felt that I knew Clarence himself, his voice and perspective, his jokes
and his passions, his relationships and his world, who the Big Man was, much
better. If that seems like a contradiction, well, all I can say is this: like
Clarence, and like that other great American artist Walt Whitman, Big Man is large and it contains
multitudes. Am I arguing that Big Man
is a work of American art on par with Whitman’s “Song of Myself”? C’mon, that’d
be crazy—a final act of Big Man mythologizing that goes way too far, that can’t
possibly stand up to the facts. Which is to say, hell yeah I’m arguing that—now
get yourself a beach read copy and, as my boy Walt put it, filter
it from your self.
Last Beach Read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Other Beach
Reads you’d share?
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