Books |
Stuart
Alexander Masters
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Biography
Stuart: A Life Backwards
Alexander Masters
Stuart reads the manuscript of his biography. He doesn’t like it. And now he has to tell Alexander Masters, his biographer, what the problem is.
Stuart begins gently: "I don’t mean to be rude. I know you put a lot of work in."
And then Stuart gets specific. He’d like more "jokes, yarns, humor" and less research. In fact, he’d like a different book — a bestseller, "like what Tom Clancy writes." Then he drops the bomb: "Alexander, you gotta start again. You gotta do better than this."
Please understand who’s talking: a 30-odd year-old formerly homeless ex-junkie who has been in and out of jail, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, who was repeatedly abused as a child by his brother and a teacher. In short, a loser. What qualifies this disaster of a man to deliver literary criticism?
But one of the many great things about Stuart is his honesty. And his originality. "Do it [the book] the other way round," he advises. "Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards."
Alexander Masters takes that advice. As he says, at the end of the first chapter:
So here it is, my second attempt at the story of Stuart Shorter, thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopath street raconteur, my spy on how the British chaotic underclass spend their troubled days at the beginning of the twenty-first century: a man with an important life.
I wish I could have done it more quickly. I wish I could have presented it to Stuart before he stepped in front of the 11.15 London to King’s Lynn train.
Well, that’s starting at the end, isn’t it? The absolute end. And Stuart was right — it worked better that way, and on every level. First, as a reading experience: This book is, literally, like nothing you have ever read. And then, it has been praised by just about everyone with a byline. In England, where it was first published, it won the Guardian First Book Award and, in the category of biography, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. It’s being made into a television movie — in death, everybody wants to be Stuart Shorter’s friend.
Which is ironic, because, when it mattered, almost the only person who consistently showed up for Stuart was his unlikely biographer — who was his exact opposite. Masters, born in New York, is of Mayflower stock. His parents were accomplished writers. He had a "really, really nice childhood." After college, he entered a PhD program in the philosophy of quantum mechanics. Then he started working with the homeless and — on a grate on a London street — met Stuart.
"Introduce Stuart to readers as he is now, a fully-fledged gawd-help-us, and he may just grab their interest right away," Masters notes. "By the time they reach his childhood, it is a matter of genuine interest how he turned into the person he is." Well, how’s this for catching our attention: At the beginning of the book, Stuart announces that he’s planning to kill himself. But it has to look like murder. "My brother killed himself in May. I couldn’t put me mum through that again. She wouldn’t mind murder so much."
That lack of sentimentality is the great strength of this biography. You want to feel sorry for someone? Look elsewhere. Terrible things happen to Stuart, but he, at least, is clear — he did a lot of terrible things too. An unfiltered take on reality is what he’s after, and an open-minded look at the way the world really works. For a screw-up, he’s fearless. And smart. And brilliantly verbal.
But Stuart is angry, that’s the worst of him. And when he goes over the edge, he robs. Hurts anyone in range — once, he threatened to kill his son. Gets beaten by cops. He is — and he knows it — "a lawless, grade-one, society-loathing bastard." Do not be surprised by how much time he spends in prison. Or the botched suicide attempts.
Whose "fault" is all this? Well, Stuart is withering on the stupidity of Social Services. They want you to be drug-free, so they give you drug tests. But you’re going to take drugs, right? So, what do you take — mild, sweet cannabis, which hangs around in your blood for nine days? Or heroin, which disappears in just three? Why, heroin, of course. Which is how the Government, in effect, promotes hard-care drug addiction. Stupid? Very. But only a "straight" person — that’s you, dear reader — would ever think the Government could be smart.
Better to peel away the layers. Stuart is 15 and snorting glue; five friends die, and yet he lives. Go earlier, when his illness is diagnosed. Or, finally, consider him at nine, abused by his brother and the babysitter. Stuart can’t really talk about this. But Masters gets it: "In the last two years alone, my friend Stuart has on three occasions been sitting quietly alone in his flat when he has been suddenly overwhelmed by the resurrected agony of these memories, grabbed the nearest implement and butchered himself."
It wasn’t so long ago that I wrote about Come Back, another story of childhood sexual abuse, followed by drugs and self-destructive behavior. But that family had money and access and an awareness, however belated, of what had happened. Stuart hid the shameful events of his childhood. Or turned them into violence, which was a judgment on him. Almost no one ever knew what had happened to him. So how could he get help?
Why does Masters say Stuart had "a very important" life? Because he went to emotional zones we avoid like the plague, and he came back and made his report on what he’d seen there. For the last two years of his life, he was more settled. And for all his modest hopes, he never didn’t know that Doom hovered over him: "Homelessness — it’s not about having a home. It’s about something being seriously fucking wrong."
Maybe Stuart didn’t fight for his life as we — the drama critics in the audience, sitting in our heavily mortgaged but generally comfy homes — might have liked. But as you read this book, your reactions matter less and less. You drop your judgments, you see things as Stuart does. And although this book is ultimately a heartbreaker, you find yourself laughing with him far more often than you’d thought possible.
As I say: like nothing you’ve ever read.
To buy "Stuart" from Amazon.com, click here.
