Vol. 31 No. 12 · 25 June 2009
pages 33-34 | 2677 words
Queening It
Jenny Diski
- BuyNina Simone: The Biography by David Brun-Lambert
Aurum, 346 pp, £20.00, February 2009, ISBN 978 1 84513 430 3
The life of Nina Simone, who died at the age of 70 in 2003, doesn’t make for a happy tale, but then if it did, who would have written it? Given the melodrama and the perfect fit with the troubled-intolerable-her-own-worst-enemy diva cliché, it’s quite strange that there has been no substantial account of her life until now, apart from a highly unreliable ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the resistance of Simone’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk about her mother, and many former friends and colleagues who refused to be interviewed or give on-the-record information. But David Brun-Lambert, seeing a perfect subject with a classically imperfect life, didn’t let a lack of new primary sources stop him. He had a story ‘of inconsolable solitude, of an artist wracked and torn by destructive forces. Under life’s blows and her depression, she became her own worst enemy, a woman singing of lost love and revolution who would find neither the man of her dreams nor peace.’
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 14 · 23 July 2009
From David Stannard
Jenny Diski, in her review of David Brun-Lambert’s biography of Nina Simone, quotes a stunningly racist passage from a 1963 New York Times article: ‘Miss Simone has a very developed sense of the dramatic and of contrast, as when she plays a popular song with a primitive, repetitive and sensual rhythm. She’s a highly talented animal on stage’ (LRB, 25 June). This so startled me that I went to the Times website to read the entire article. The quotation is a fabrication. The first of the two sentences (quoted without ellipses) is a botched rehash of a much longer sentence. The sentence as quoted contains language that is not in the original, and it omits language that is, resulting in an entirely different tone and meaning being conveyed. As for the second sentence in the quotation – ‘She’s a highly talented animal on stage’ – neither it nor anything like it appears anywhere in the article.
David Stannard
Honolulu
From Editor, ‘London Review’
Jenny Diski took the Times quotation directly from Brun-Lambert’s biography. As she put it when we showed her David Stannard’s note, ‘I’m not sure it’s my job, or the LRB’s, to check the sources of quotes in a published book.’ Still, we did look into the matter a little further. The original passage in the New York Times reads:
Miss Simone has a highly developed sense of the dramatic, both the sneaky type that emerges from initial understatement and the direct type that comes from striking changes in costume and hair-do (or wig) or the contrast of singing a pop tune, ‘But Beautiful’, over a repetitious and sensuous primitive rhythm. She is a performer who is blessed with both talent and a strong sense of showmanship.
Brun-Lambert’s book was originally published by Flammarion in 2005. The passage from the Times will have been translated into French for that edition. We haven’t seen the French version, but it’s easy to imagine that when the biography was translated into English for the Aurum edition, the Times quotation was translated along with it, instead of being taken from the original source. We’re just guessing. But swapping in and out of French may have introduced the differences in tone and meaning that Mr Stannard has noticed – and something else besides.
Editor, ‘London Review’
From John Danziger
A slip in Jenny Diski’s fine article on Nina Simone. It was Medgar Evers, not Evans, who was assassinated by racists in Mississippi in 1963. His name should live for ever.
John Danziger
Trieste
