Fisher, Clive

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Fisher, Clive

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Attended Oxford University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—Bill Hamilton, A.M. Heath and Company, Ltd., Author's Agents, 6 Warwick Court, Holborn, London WC1R 5DJ, England.

CAREER:

Freelance journalist, critic, and writer. Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library in 2006-07.

WRITINGS:

Noel Coward, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Cyril Connolly: The Life and Times of England's Most Controversial Literary Critic, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Hart Crane: A Life, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including Financial Times, Punch, Daily Telegraph, Observer, World of Interiors, Catholic Herald, and the London Times.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Biography of Carl Van Vechten.

SIDELIGHTS:

Clive Fisher is an English-born literary critic who moved to New York in 1997. After working as a freelance journalist for many years, Fisher added "biographer" to his list of occupations. He has contributed to a number of periodicals throughout his life, including the London Times and Observer.

In 1992 Fisher wrote his first biography, Noel Coward. Coward was an English actor, playwright, and director, among other things, who first achieved notoriety in the 1920s. Fisher's unauthorized biography on Coward's life received mixed reviews. L.S. Klepp, writing inEntertainment Weekly, summarized the biography saying that Fisher "gives us a brisk and sensible biography well-suited to a man who aimed to be clever, not deep." Another critic's review inPublishers Weekly stated that the biography's main problem was "Fisher's virtually lifeless writing style." Klepp disagreed, however, calling it "a pleasure to read."

Fisher's second biography, Cyril Connolly: The Life and Times of England's Most Controversial Literary Critic, was published in 1996. Connolly, an Englishman who was almost an exact contemporary of Noel Coward, was a literary critic who edited the literary magazine Horizon during the 1940s. Connolly associated with many big names of the time, including George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and W.H. Auden, all of whom "Fisher dazzingly portrays" in his "stylish, disarming," and "spirited biography," remarked a critic in Publishers Weekly. Other reviews were equally positive. Robert Carver favorably wrote aboutCyril Connolly in the New Statesman & Society. He stated, "Clive Fisher's biography is a superb evocation of the lost era when gents ran literature and imperial Britain was beleaguered, but still universal in its interests." Concluding his review in Commonweal, Robert Murray Davis noted that Fisher's biography of Connolly was "just right … in the eloquence, urbanity, and wit of his prose."

After his move to the United States, Fisher published Hart Crane: A Life in 2002. Crane, an American poet who committed suicide in his early thirties in 1932, used his struggles with alcoholism, sexuality, and poverty as fuel for his writing and ultimately the cause for his death. Reviews ofHart Crane were mixed among the critics. Joanna Craig, writing in the Rocky Mountain Review, enjoyed reading the biography. She wrote that "Fisher writes of Crane with the greatest sympathy and manages to avoid being drawn into the poet's emotional maelstrom by balancing his sympathy with a cool irony and detachment that keep the biography balanced and contribute to the sense of an inexorable trajectory that holds its complexities together." Daniel Mark Epstein agreed with Craig in the New York Times Book Review,saying that Fisher's work "is a perfectly balanced literary biography, placing the poems in the context of Crane's life and times so that they illuminate his verses." A critic, reviewing the biography in Publishers Weekly, thought it was "less successful at sustaining a historical and intellectual trajectory" and that Fisher has a tendency to "ramble." Mark Doty disagreed, however, writing in theLambda Book Report, calling Fisher a "fine writer." Doty went on to write that Fisher's "sentences have authority and muscle, his comparisons are striking, and he keeps this heartbreaking tale moving along with energy and careful craft."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Austin Chronicle, August 9, 2002, Roger Gathman, review ofHart Crane: A Life.

Booklist, January 1, 1996, Alice Joyce, review of Cyril Connolly: The Life and Times of England's Most Controversial Literary Critic, p. 776; May 15, 2002, Will Hickman, review of Hart Crane, p. 1567.

Commonweal, June 14, 1996, Robert Murray Davis, review ofCyril Connolly, p. 28.

Economist, April 8, 1995, review ofCyril Connolly, p. 78. Entertainment Weekly, July 17, 1992, L.S. Klepp, review of Noel Coward, p. 48.

Lambda Book Report, October, 2002, Mark Doty, review of Hart Crane, p. 22.

Library Journal, May 15, 2002, Robert L. Kelly, review ofHart Crane, p. 97.

New Statesman & Society, April 7, 1995, Robert Carver, review of Cyril Connolly, p. 55.

New York Times, June 11, 2002, Holland Cotter, review of Hart Crane, p. B7.

New York Times Book Review, July 14, 2002, Daniel Mark Epstein, review of Hart Crane, p. 12.

Publishers Weekly, April 27, 1992, review of Noel Coward, p. 241; November 27, 1995, review of Cyril Connolly, p. 59; July 13, 1998, review of Cyril Connolly, p. 67; April 22, 2002, review ofHart Crane, p. 66.

Rocky Mountain Review, fall, 2003, Joanne Craig, review of Hart Crane.