But the section on performers just seems to grow by itself. It may be that many people like to read biographies of musicians because no other kind of writing about music has meaning for them. But there is also a positive attraction that draws people to the lives of musicians, and that is a sense of intimacy with favorite performers and a fascination with the performing life. Composers as such just don't fascinate in the same way. Of course, the division of musicians into composers and performers is hardly more than a convenience of library classification systems, even in classical music, as Bernstein's career attests.
Performance creates a one-sided intimacy that biography purports to round out.
Yet they don't know Streisand at all, just the voice, the look, the act. To read a biography of a well-known performer is, in a sense, to investigate what it would be like to turn one kind of acquaintance into the other, and it is no accident that the writers of these biographies give pride of place to the testimony of their subjects' friends. But I was also struck that in the end I didn't feel as close to either Vaughan or Bernstein as I feel to a character in a good novel. The authors' moralizing stands in the way. Both books, in fact, begin with the subject's death, and both authors dwell on the role of cigarette smoking in causing that death.