Memoir feels incomplete
By Ben Ratliff |
January 13, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
GIL Scott-Heron grew up surrounded by heroism. He distrusted empty promises and easy solutions. He also had a very hard time with himself. Whether you expect a memoir to explain how the third sentence relates to the first two will determine how you feel about this posthumous book.
"The Last Holiday," published eight months after Scott-Heron's death at 62, provides sharp oratorical examinations of the American social contract as well as a pop star's bathetic memories and celebrity encounters. At some point in the second half of his life, he became a crack addict; his career and ambitions and relationships suffered for it. This is all public knowledge, though it forms no part of his memoir except in very cloudy hints toward the end.
Scott-Heron tells us he respected "books and teachers and laws." He calls Thurgood Marshall "my candidate for Man of the Century." He was a Samaritan, a political activist who learned that symbolic gestures went only so far and a moralist who knew that nobody could be forced to believe anything.
Precocious in youth - at 20 a published novelist and poet, a teacher of literature at Federal City College in Washington a few years later - Scott-Heron might have made an excellent old man, one with much to teach us. Some of the problems he wrote about in the 1970s and 1980s have since intensified: environmental disaster ("We Almost Lost Detroit"); consumer stupor ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"); the triangle of addiction, family implosion and jail ("The Bottle," "Angel Dust," "Home Is Where the Hatred Is").
But he slipped away long before his death. In the last decade, what one mostly read about Scott-Heron was a post-history of a living person: articles about his drug sentences and jail time, a missed parole hearing, an alleged act of domestic aggression against a girlfriend.
He started this book in the 1990s although rewrote parts of it in 2004 at the editor's request.
It is good to know all this, because a reader quickly starts to wonder: What kind of book is this? When did Scott-Heron write each section, and what was he trying to prove at the time of writing it? Why do many stories slide into vagueness, as if the outcomes weren't important?
It would seem odd for someone like Scott-Heron to write a book purely trading on his own fame and notoriety, because he never seemed to be in it for the money. He was not a born superstar or a beautiful loser; he was a newspaper-devouring songwriter who didn't expect the success he got and took the time to be specific and engaged and curious in his work.
"The Last Holiday," published eight months after Scott-Heron's death at 62, provides sharp oratorical examinations of the American social contract as well as a pop star's bathetic memories and celebrity encounters. At some point in the second half of his life, he became a crack addict; his career and ambitions and relationships suffered for it. This is all public knowledge, though it forms no part of his memoir except in very cloudy hints toward the end.
Scott-Heron tells us he respected "books and teachers and laws." He calls Thurgood Marshall "my candidate for Man of the Century." He was a Samaritan, a political activist who learned that symbolic gestures went only so far and a moralist who knew that nobody could be forced to believe anything.
Precocious in youth - at 20 a published novelist and poet, a teacher of literature at Federal City College in Washington a few years later - Scott-Heron might have made an excellent old man, one with much to teach us. Some of the problems he wrote about in the 1970s and 1980s have since intensified: environmental disaster ("We Almost Lost Detroit"); consumer stupor ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"); the triangle of addiction, family implosion and jail ("The Bottle," "Angel Dust," "Home Is Where the Hatred Is").
But he slipped away long before his death. In the last decade, what one mostly read about Scott-Heron was a post-history of a living person: articles about his drug sentences and jail time, a missed parole hearing, an alleged act of domestic aggression against a girlfriend.
He started this book in the 1990s although rewrote parts of it in 2004 at the editor's request.
It is good to know all this, because a reader quickly starts to wonder: What kind of book is this? When did Scott-Heron write each section, and what was he trying to prove at the time of writing it? Why do many stories slide into vagueness, as if the outcomes weren't important?
It would seem odd for someone like Scott-Heron to write a book purely trading on his own fame and notoriety, because he never seemed to be in it for the money. He was not a born superstar or a beautiful loser; he was a newspaper-devouring songwriter who didn't expect the success he got and took the time to be specific and engaged and curious in his work.
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