A Life in Progress

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

This book is both memoir and neoconservative credo, carrying Black from
his precocious youth to his aggressive adult quest for a global
newspaper empire. Perhaps the book’s most engrossing feature is the
countless cameo appearances by the rich and famous, from E.P. Taylor and
“Jimmie” Goldsmith to Richard Nixon and Margaret Thatcher. Each is
measured against Black’s conservative code and found either wanting or
praiseworthy. On Black’s Richter scale, liberal journalists and
socialist politicians barely register (except in degrees of contempt),
while conservative clerics (like his hero, Cardinal Carter of Toronto)
and politicians (like Ronald Reagan) create major seismic shocks.

Business aficionados will find more than cameos in the book. Black
devotes chapters to detailed reconstruction of his great corporate
campaigns—most recently, the battle for a piece of Australia’s
Fairfax communications empire. Like Beaverbrook, whose Daily Express
perfected mass-circulation tabloid journalism in the 1920s, Black seems
to understand what it takes to sell newspapers in the 1990s. His
chapters on the takeover and remaking of the Daily Telegraph may well
serve as an obituary for high-cost, old-style English journalism.

For all its boldness and sweep, A Life in Progress is overlong and
overindulgent, and needed far more rigorous editing. The writing is
choppy and the vocabulary and syntax often odd and overblown. One has
the sense that much of the text was written or dictated on long-distance
flights; the focus changes abruptly, the mood swings from moderate
egoism to insensitive, withering arrogance.

This insensitivity is the book’s least admirable quality. Memoirs are
meant to embody egos. But to be credible, egoism has to bear at least a
hint of balance and awareness of the worth of other perspectives. Black
instead presents a Manichean world: his good and others’ bad.
Antagonistic journalists are “vampire bats”; environmentalists are
“eco-geeks.” Gratuitous insults are freely dispensed: Claude
Wagner’s wife has a “cheese-paring face” and was a “flaming red
haired harridan.” Nobody expected Black to idolize Bob Rae, but are we
enlightened by an attack on Rae’s “sodomization of the private
sector”? A Life in Progress is an adequate title for Black’s memoir,
but a crib of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief would have been better.