Lost in the thicket of love

Joel Williamson is a southern historian of some note and author of a respected biography of Falkner. His take on Elvis is that Elvis was a southerner at a particular point in US history and that he must be understood that way. OK. That's fine, and when Mr. Williamson is talking about Elvis's upbringing and his southern family the story is well written and interesting.

But, Mr. Williamson made two decisions that affect the book's overall tone and content and I think that he did himself a disservice.

Mr. Williamson decided to write this biography in a popular style, rather than an academic one and Oxford University Press for some reason went along with it. Some negative reviewers contend that the popular tone is intended to hide Mr. Williamson's over-reliance on secondary sources. I am not an Elvis expert and will have to leave it to others to map that. I wonder, though, how much tolerance Elvis fans have for scholarly writing with lots of footnotes and whether Mr. Williamson's eye was more on the book's potential sales.

The second choice was to place women and their relationships with Elvis at the center of the book. Putting women at the center of the book works for the first part, which is roughly chronological (although the rest of the book is not, which is quite confusing). We learn about the influence of his mother Gladys and of teachers who encouraged his talent and provided opportunities for him to perform.

Mr. Williamson contends that teenage girls created Elvis, painting a picture of repressed teenagers seizing the opportunity to act out their sexual feelings in public and that this was revolutionary. Well I don't believe that for two reasons. First, Mr. Williamson reports that after the concert the girls reverted to their sweet innocent selves. I don't think female sexuality works that way. Sexual awakening is sexual awakening and the door of a concert venue is not a light switch. Years ago I attended a French dance performance presented to a couple of thousand high school students in Vientiane, Laos in the middle of the afternoon. The kids screamed the whole time as if they were at a rock concert. No one had explained (probably no one knew) that audiences at dance performances are silent. These kids had learned how to behave from movies and had a great time.

Which brings me to my mother's teen story of climbing over a fence to see Frank Sinatra perform in Philly a decade before Elvis. Teens went wild for Frankie and his blue eyes, and acted crazy too, screaming and yelling and becoming "aroused". Perhaps the southern teens Mr. Williamson writes about decided that if they could not see Frank Sinatra they could at least scream at Elvis. Who knows? Elvis's charisma, animal magnetism, and ability to connect with his audiences were legendary, and it is fun, and harmless, to be temporarily enthralled.

As the book goes on Mr. Williamson loses his way in the thicket of Elvis's sexual life and his relationships with the trashy men of his entourage.

Several other reviewers on this site claim to have family connections with Elvis and claim never to have heard of the constant stream of women in and out of Elvis's bedroom that Mr. Williamson describes in such excruciating detail. I found it all very tedious and skipped page after page of discussion of this affair or that one. A timeline would have helped, if, that is, we think these liaisons are important. Again, I am not sure. Elvis was a man of his time and culture. Fewer women offered unfettered sex in those days before reliable birth control, and if sex were offered, a manly man was obliged to accept. Those are the years during which famous men routinely reported sleeping with hundreds and nearly thousands of women. Similarly Elvis's supposed obsession with virginity might only be an artifact of the "good girl" "bad girl" dichotomy of the era, or a echo of the perennial notion that only an experienced man can treat a virgin properly. (Yawn here.)

I would have liked to hear a more scholarly analysis of Elvis's purported unwillingness to sleep alone and his ?preference? for cuddling instead of intercourse.

In the true southern way, if good women are to be the center of the book then bad men must be on the periphery. Elvis's father Vernon is presented as a ne'er-do-well and leech who, if we prefer to see Elvis as a closet homosexual ,is presented as the absent father to Gladys' ever present mother. Elvis' coterie of obnoxious male friends are his beard. Mr. Williamson only mentions homosexuality once in the context of Elvis. We can wonder whether Mr. Williamson thinks of Elvis's women as cover too. If so, Mr. Williamson lacks the courage to say so, perhaps again looking at sales projections.

I did not particularly enjoy this book and skipped over page after page in the later sections. Too much detail and too little evidence of a red pencil at Oxford University Press. One astonishing gap in the text is that after devoting page after page to the preparations for Elvis's Comeback Special of 1968, there was no discussion at all of the response to the show, which was supposed to be somewhat radical in mixing black and white artists. I found this passing strange.

I received a review copy of "Elvis Presley: A Southern Life" by Joel Williamson (Oxford University Press) through NetGalley.com.