If you put Sounes, Miles, Cherkovski, Brewer, Fox, et al and all the chapbook memoirs by people who knew him into a blender with all the information in this forum, you start to get within pissing distance of a real picture of the man.
But no single book has done it, and I don't think one book could do it.
yep. the last part of the last sentence tells it.
No one can put
a whole life into a book. ever.
Even if someone came, would take
ALL information from
ALL sources - HOW will you ever pack a whole life into a given number of pages?! This will Never work.
But - what we CAN do is, trying to verify or falsify claims, trying to prove 'facts' and thus add to the whole picture.
If one writes a biography then (and I AM intending to do so someday, since in Germany we only have the Neeli-book), it has to be inside a certain frame.
[ e.g., the most valid bio of Nietzsche is a 3-volume piece by one Curt Paul Janz. But it also is obvious, that when one has to write a bio inside the publishers frame of 90-110 pages (like, say, in Germany the 'rowohlt-monographie', which is usually a
VERY good start into the life of someone) you Never can cover all important things, even if you know them, even if you want to tell. ]
Besides, I do not like biographers who think they should force their writing to being 'creative' like the one, they're writing about. Their writing may look a little 'dry', but I prefer that to any 'I-want-to-write-different-and-original'-biographer. By far.
sure, that's a matter of taste.
and of target-group.