Review by Ian Keogh
There’s an immense satisfaction to Peter Bagge’s biographies. He picks subjects who’re known to a degree, but perhaps not beyond limited circles, individuals and trailblazers who followed their own muse, and forced the world to acknowledge them. His loose limbed and exaggerated form of cartooning, all wild expressions and gesticulations, is somehow ideally suited to telling the lives of his subjects and they shine brighter through his attentions.
Zora Neale Hurston certainly shone, overcoming the poor background and restricted life accorded African Americans in the early 20th century, and having to fight all the harder for also being a woman. Bagge’s prolonged biographical notes explain personalities and locations, but from the beginning he emphasises Huston’s determination and individuality, and that’s she’s not a woman to be messed with. Nor is she above taking advantage of ignorance, finishing high school at 26 while claiming to be ten years younger, a path continued as she progressed to university.
Certainly a writer attuned to her background, Bagge brings out personality dazzlingly. His method of placing dialogue in the mouths of his subjects works extremely well in conveying Hurston’s unapologetic attitude about who she is. Her confrontational attitude shines through, and she’s never short of a pithy response to patronising comments, many of which are forthcoming when she moves to New York. However, it’s moving back to her hometown of Eatonville in Florida as an anthropological student that eventually makes her name. This isn’t without the initial mis-step of blowing the majority of her study grant on a car and a gun, as explained in Bagge’s introduction.
In addition to admiring her output, the impression Bagge gives is that it would be a hell of a lot of fun just hanging around with Hurston, and anecdotes from her life transform naturally into comedy interludes. Bagge, though, never downplays intellect for laughs, always portraying Hurston as extremely astute and ahead of her time. The comedy, though, can serve as a convenient transition between one location and another, and all occasions of dramatic licence are explained in the lengthy notes following the biography. He also shows Hurston as self-aware even as she repeats mistakes.
The overall result is a phenomenally entertaining biography of a life well lived with lasting statements supplied along the way.
