Review – Instant Lives & More by Howard Moss

Short Satirical Biographies by the Pulitzer Prize Winning Critic

Nov 11, 2009 Michelle White

From Jane Austen to Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, no artist is safe in this collection of satirical sketches by the late longtime poetry editor of The New Yorker, Howard Moss.

The biographies of composers, painters and writers have so often been dramatized in novels and film that it can be surprising to learn that some of them led thoroughly unromantic lives. Drawing on this idea, critic Howard Moss (1922-87) wrote Instant Lives & More, a collection of urbane short sketches, each imagining a brief moment in a famous creative person's life.

The core of the collection's humour lies in Moss's prose: overwritten, overwrought, and so learned as to be daunting. Take, for example, a sketch in which the Brontë sisters await their brother Branwell – it seems he's sequestered himself in the pantry. "He's imbibing again," announces Charlotte. "Estivating," Emily adds, "if one considers summer a mitigation."

Only Howard Moss, poetry editor of The New Yorker for nearly half a century, could craft a set of sentences so likely to send the reader running for a dictionary. An acclaimed poet and dramatist in his own right (he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971), Moss wrote 1972's Instant Lives toward the latter end of his career. Crawling with literary allusion, sly insight, and madcap humour, the collection acts as a light-hearted coda to his life's work.

The Pretence to Biography

Those familiar with John Aubrey's Brief Lives will see more than a titular similarity between Moss's book and Aubrey's. Where Aubrey embellishes his biographies of sixteenth century personages with gossip and hearsay, Moss builds on fact by simply making things up.

According to Moss, Emily Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed" is an allusion to her habit of drinking witch hazel–and Mary Shelley created a live monster of her own, if out of cloth. And Camille Saint-Saëns seems to have had similar habits; after all, how else could he have orchestrated Danse Macabre, save by digging up some bones?

Indeed, Moss seems to take a certain delight in placing history's greatest creative minds in increasingly ridiculous situations, and his sentences follow the same progression. Non-sequiturs abound ("the entire orchestra got up and applauded Mozart to the man, except for the harpist, who was a transsexual"), as do anachronisms of speech ("'You're so wordy, Jane,' said her sister. 'No wonder you have trouble with men.'").

Critical Insights

Moss, who was after all a critic, offers some scathing (and hilarious) criticism of the artists he eulogizes. Often he'll do so by mimicking the style of the author involved: Marcel Proust's chapter is one long, rambling sentence, and Oscar Wilde's (a highlight), is filled to the brim with half-sensical epigrams.

John Donne's section, on the other hand, takes the form of an inscrutable graduate paper analyzing a couplet allegedly written by Donne. It is, of course, a couplet by Howard Moss, constituting perhaps the most concise assessment of Donne's work to date: "If you would do what John Donne did / You merge the Clergy with the Id."

Publication

An increasingly hard-to-find little book, Instant Lives is currently being printed by the Ecco Press. Punctuated with Edward Gorey's delightfully laconic illustrations and sporting critical blurbs by artists who didn't get featured ("Leonard and I stayed up half the night. It took us hours to burn it." –Virginia Woolf), this allusion-heavy little tome makes a great gift for your favourite literature buff or art fanatic–or indeed, anyone who likes their wit very, very dry.

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Essays by Howard Moss, Author of Selected Poems