It’s apt that “Suite for Barbara Loden” (whose original French title was “Supplément à la Vie de Barbara Loden”-“Supplement to the Life of. She died of cancer in 1980, at the age of forty-eight. She had other projects in mind (including an adaptation of Kate Chopin’s novel “The Awakening”) but was unable to find financing for them. But Loden’s place in artistic history is assured by “Wanda,” one of the best American independent films ever made. She won a Tony Award for her stage role in Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall,” from 1964.
She was already an actress, including in “Wild River” and “Splendor in the Grass,” both directed by Elia Kazan, whom she married in 1968. Barbara Loden directed one feature film, “ Wanda,” from 1970, in which she also starred. It’s all the more remarkable for doing so much in a mere hundred and twenty-three pages (in the translation by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon). The book is “Suite for Barbara Loden,” by the French author Nathalie Léger, which was originally published in 2012 and is recently out in English translation from the small press Dorothy. Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything-biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once, all out in front. Even if a biography appears to stick close to the subject’s life, its constellation of information subtly reflects not just the course of research but also the course of the author’s life long before writing a biography was ever in sight. All good biographies of artists are also books of criticism, reflections of the writer’s judgments, preferences, and passions regarding the work of the artist in question those guiding tastes and emphases provide the hidden but decisive structure for the information that the book delivers.
I wrote only the former, the one about the subject, and I kept my adventures out of it even so, they’re relevant in their absence, because, for a biography to be worthwhile, it must also be personal. Every biography (as I discovered in the course of writing one) can be two books: one about its subject the other about the adventures arising from the research.
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