Two More Favourites: S Simmons and G Plimpton

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These two favourites in my top ten are both biographies. And, thinking about it now, the thing that links the two and makes them a bit different to most books of their type, is the fact that they're full of talking. They're full of life and air and actual voices. A lot of even very good biogs can seem a bit weighed down with research and the fanciness of the author's style. In fact, that's been a vogue for a number of years in life-writing, hasn't it? The show-off biographer who's there to dazzle us with their own stylishness and brio. The subject becomes just an excuse for some showing off.

But both these books aren't like that. George Plimpton's 'Truman Capote' is quite extreme in the self-effacement stakes. The whole thing is a vast arrangement of quotes from conversations and written testimonials by those who spent time with Capote. Not a single word of linking text is provided by Plimpton to orient us or to try and tell us how to interpret the quotes or the story we're piecing together.

He said at the time, I think, that he wanted it to feel like we're at a party, overhearing all these brilliant conversations. Each chapter feels like a different party - from the early, breathtaking years when Capote is starting out with his short stories and can't put a foot wrong. I love all the stuff about those residences he did, writing in these fantastic places all undisturbed. (How do you get onto these residencies? Why did I never find out?) All the stuff about the glamorous parties and balls in NYC are amazing. You can see the crash looming before it happens. You can feel the canker coming when he starts knocking about in high society. He's gone from pretty, brilliant boy to some kind of jester goblin hopping about and bitching on yachts. The ending comes way too soon and it's like rushing to the end of a breathtaking, suspenseful mystery. Plimpton teases us along with the promised revelation of Capote's final, mysterious project.

I've read that one again and again. I love the swarming voices and the conflicting viewpoints. Why hve no other biographies followed this lead? I'm bored with the measured pace of most biogs. Most biographers are like detectives or doctors, weighing things up, calmly diagnosing. Or weighing in with spurious opinions or flights of fancy, or patches of 'fine-writing' of their own. Plimpton chucks us in at the deep end and seemingly leaves us to it.

My other favourite biog has another fantastic maverick for its subject: Serge Gainsbourg. This must be about ten years old, too: Sylvie Simmons' 'A Fistful of Gitanes'. This is a book by someone who obviously adores her subject. The fannishness of it all comes through unashamedly. She also uses her original interviews really well, too, in that she lets Jane Birkin take centre stage, verbatim, so much of the time. And so she should. Birkin comes across wonderfully like a batty old aunt, blithely telling us about what they all got up to back in the early seventies. Some of it's gorgeously outrageous stuff. Simmons writes best about those bits of Serge's life when he couldn't put a foot wrong. Every record was brilliant. Every accident turned out to be amazingly fortuitous. He annoys Bardot and she tells him to write her a love song to make up, and he writes her 'Je T'aime.' He careers about the place, stumbling drunkenly, spilling his red wine, dropping fag ash everywhere... but everything he recorded seemed sublimely effortless.

I suppose both biographies here are about men who rattled about, sometimes disastrously, through ramshackle lives, sometimes damaging themselves and others around them. But who both made the wonderful things they did look easy. These two books about them are filled with that same kind of buoyancy and gracefulness. They're compulsive reads.

Just edged out of my favourite ten - Maria Riva's amazing book about her mother, Marlene Dietrich.