Book review: A restless creative soul’s legacy

Arthur Russell — born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in 1951 — spent his career in anonymity and penury before dying prematurely. 

• Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell A Life 
• Richard King 
• Faber,  £30

Across popular culture biography, the use of personal archives as a primary source has been key to the best recent work in this space.

Last year’s excellent profile of Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack would, for instance, have been a far lesser concern were it not for the author’s access to his elusive subject’s letters and diaries.

Like Drake, Arthur Russell — born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in 1951 — spent his career in anonymity and penury before dying prematurely. 

A niche figure during his years spent releasing music in a variety of styles to deaf ears, his considerable body of work has assumed far greater relevance in the decades since his death in 1992.

From a rural background, he inhabited the fringes of an avant-garde scene in New York during the 1970s populated by the likes of the poet, Allen Ginsberg, composers Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass and the emerging art-pop group, Talking Heads. 

His career — like that of Nick Drake, with whom he has much in common — was consistently subsidised by his parents.

A classically trained cellist, he was a prodigious note-taker and scribbler as well as a prolific collector, his hunger for work matched only by his creative restlessness and his fondness for late-night recording sessions in his favourite, low-rent New York studios.

Richard King reveals Arthur Russell’s talent, drive, and adversity with touching testimonials. Picture: Eva Vermandel 

Arguably best known for the dance music he issued using the handles Dinosaur L and Loose Joints, Russell only ever released two albums under his own name, the best-known of which is 1986’s World of Echo. 

Minimal, spartan and experimental, much of his work is difficult and incomplete: some of it is impenetrable.

Like Russell himself, Travels Over Feeling resists the idea of genre and eschews the standard approaches to biography. 

Beyond a brief introduction, critical commentary from the author is non- existent.

Instead the book uses a series of untouched first-person testimonials from family, lovers, friends, and collaborators as a base on which it constructs a nuanced photo-fit. 

To this end it is more of a carefully curated art installation: a profile by stealth.

Arthur Russell was a gay man who died from an Aids-related illness.

Venerated now within New York’s queer cultural history, he carved out a meagre existence from his base in a series of semi-derelict apartments in Lower Manhattan. 

He lived from day to day and from hand to mouth in a part of the city becoming increasingly blighted by drugs and violence, his social circle faced with a vicious serial killer among its number: the HIV epidemic.

Written by Richard King, a veteran of the British alternative music circus, it’s a beautifully assembled piece of work that on first reading is just a platform for Russell’s vast body of ephemera.

But in the weeds of those distinctively hand-written letters, drawings, photographs, postcards, and posters, a fractured picture emerges, not just of a relentless writer but of the brutal cityscape in which he was attempting to drive on. 

He performed frequently to audiences numbering 20 people or less.

Beyond its stylish veneer, Travels Over Feeling is a fresh take on a centuries-old trope: the enduring struggle of the wilful artist and would-be genius to be heard.

 But the devils — and there are many — are all deep in the detail.