‘Parallel Lives’
By Jeffrey Meyers
Louisiana State University Press, 288 pages

“Parallel Lives” is a capacious book that ranges across Europe and America, as well as the lives of numerous distinguished figures: Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, Anne Frank, Audrey Hepburn, Thomas Mann, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, Randolph Churchill, Robert Frost, Kay Morrison, Scott Fitzgerald, Balthus, John Huston, Gary Cooper, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky, Diane Arbus, and Sylvia Plath. 

The book encompasses acting, directing, poetry, fiction, travel writing, painting, translation, literary criticism, politics, and photography.

Anyone familiar with Jeffrey Meyers’s writing — biographies of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gary Cooper, and many others — expects to read an astute and crisply written book. “Parallel Lives” is no exception. Writing about the city that helped to shape the lives of Hitler and Freud, Meyers observes: “Vienna represented a state of mind in a state of siege.” 

Freud treated patients in a curiously comfortable climate of personal anxiety; Hitler addressed the political dimension of that anxiety, and Mr. Meyers pins it all to a phrase: “People lived in security, yet they were all afraid.”

The Wyndham Lewis/T.S. Eliot coupling works especially well. Mr. Meyers dismantles Eliot’s impersonality theory deftly, and shows that it is, in part, a matter of his upbringing and has little to do, actually, with an understanding of how writers create: “All these New England puritans brought up to maintain superficial propriety—no matter what passions thrashed beneath the surface.” One virtue for Eliot of the impersonality theory is that he could keep those passions repressed.

Mr. Meyers sums up the tortured dynamic between poet Allen Tate and critic Edmund Wilson in a way that shows the plight of each man: “Both writers opposed capitalism that had caused the Depression, but neither had a viable alternative—Soviet or Southern.” Here is the paradoxical appeal of Gary Cooper, who had English parents and “spent three years at an English public school” that resulted in the creation of “a new film persona by combining an English gentleman with a Montana cowboy.”

Here is another wonderful summing up of the Wilson-Nabokov battle over the best way to translate Pushkin: “Wilson and Nabokov—like two bishops  speaking ex cathedra—each had a strong didactic streak, a stubborn tenacity of opinion, a fierce pride, and a grand manner that rejects challenges and contradictions.”

Mr. Meyers is not reluctant to pass judgment. He quotes Hemingway’s comments about Faulkner selling out to Hollywood. Well, okay, though it is hard to see how Hollywood weakened the novelist, and Hemingway could talk since he had all sorts of ways of making money and his books sold, while  Faulkner’s did not. My own hunch is that Hemingway was in fact afraid of going Hollywood, afraid it would corrupt him. Faulkner had no such fears: He just needed the money.

Some of the comments on Plath seem deterministic, leaving no room for contingency: “Plath, who needed some kind of punishment to assuage her guilt for hating her parents, had a morbid taste for the extremes of experience.” This reductionism obscures her desire to compete with men, to be as bold as her male contemporaries and to transcend the prohibitions that women struggled against. 

On Plath and Arbus, Mr. Meyers says “their existence was doomed.” Sounds like a Poe short story. Again, a little too neat, too pat. Mr. Meyers evidently does not acknowledge that events sometimes are determinative, not human character per se. Doomed, in fact, is one of the biographer’s favorite words, and it occurs periodically across a range of subjects.

Nonetheless, the range of Mr. Meyers’s interests and his authoritative command of his subjects is impressive, and he does something that Plutarch does not manage: Mr. Meyers does not just do a chapter about two figures and then move on. Instead, we have Waugh and Robert Byron; Waugh and Randolph Churchill; Wilson and Tate; Wilson and Nabokov; Wilson and Balthus; Hemingway and Huston; Hemingway and Cooper; Heaney and Lowell; Heaney and Brodsky — so that the parallels and matchups illuminate more of Waugh, Wilson, and Heaney than would otherwise be apparent in a single chapter.

This is an astute book, expansive and incisive at the same time. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Essays in Biography.”