Biography: In this latest addition to Weidenfeld's 'Lives' series, Elvis Presley assumes his rightful place alongside Buddha, St Augustine, Mozart, Joan of Arc, Dante, Napoleon and Pope John XXIII. No doubt some of his fans will regard this as a bit of a come down, writes Terry Eagleton.
Like Jesus, with whom he was later to compare himself, Elvis was born dirt-poor, the son of a milkman and small-time sharecropper in Mississippi. It was, as the book comments, a childhood straight out of William Faulkner, who lived only 15 miles away. Presley's father Vernon, desperate for cash, falsified a cheque and was packed off to the state penitentiary, where he was probably whipped.
Young Elvis was an awkward, acned, stammering, easily embarrassed soul who was terrified of rejection and craved attention and hamburgers. He sleepwalked for years and found it hard to be alone, including at night.
That, anyway, was no doubt what he told the starlets.
Bobby Ann Mason, a Southerner herself, is astute about Presley's white-trash blend of outward subservience and inner resentment. He was always a good boy, who said "sir" and "ma'am", bowed his head to superiors, and regarded jeans as a costume rather than an everyday garment. He was later to be horrified by 1960s hippiedom and anti-war protest. The Beatles unnerved him, and he was riled by Lennon's iconoclastic cheek during their sole encounter. In later years, he even dropped in on President Nixon, dressed like a cross between Batman and Captain Marvel and almost certainly stoned, and hassled him into making him a narcotics special agent. He would sometimes pull people over for speeding in his siren-equipped car. He once bounded out of his limo to break up a fight (he was a karate black belt), and stopped to pose for pictures with the amazed belligerents.
Beneath all this, however, the anger of the abandoned continued to simmer.
It came out in his music, with its mix of sobbing, whooping and moaning, dimly resonant of the mournful work chants of black convicts. Even his famous splayed-leg stance, so Mason considers - a touch fancifully - resembles the posture of African labourers lifting heavy loads.
Like many an artist or actor, Elvis used the limelight to compensate for his shyness and subservience. He hated the patronising hillbilly label fixed to him early on, and referred scathingly to "Hollyweird". He shared his language and diet, as well as some of his sound, with the poor blacks around him. (The secret of cooking for him, his wife confided, was to burn absolutely everything). The Memphis studio which first recorded him also recorded a quartet of melodious prisoners who came in wearing leg-irons.
He was not always revered. The Alabama White Citizens Council denounced his music as "this animalistic nigger bop". TV stations cut his gyrating image off at the waist, while the media scoffed at his Southern habit of still living with his parents. He was, Mason comments, "rebel rocker and mama's boy, strutting sexual icon and polite, diffident son". Nobody in the heavily sedated 1950s had ever witnessed anything like his snarling sexual energy.
Everyone who saw him perform reported that he was unbelievably exciting to watch.
The role of his infamous manager Colonel Parker, a waddling ex-fairground worker who treated Elvis in a "roll up, roll up" kind of way, was to knock the James Deanery out of him and convert him into an all-American boy.
Parker set Elvis to work at a series of worthless movies, which even Elvis found embarrassing, and refused to have him perform at the White House because they weren't prepared to pay. Presley actually came close to bankruptcy several times. Mason misses the story of the English impresario who telephoned Parker and offered a truly astronomical fee for Presley to perform in London. "That's OK for me", replied Parker. "Now how about Elvis?"
Elvis enjoyed word-play. With an ingenuity which puts Joyce in the shade, he once called Rebel without a Cause "Rebel without a Pebbble". He was hungry to be educated, but not educated enough to know how to go about it. Like many in his situation, he sought earnestly for the Meaning of Life, and found it in the usual New Age junk. He hunted for secret messages in Shakespeare, had a vision of Stalin, decided for five minutes or so to become a monk, and was granted a revelation that he was really Elvis Christ.
His favourite book, however, was the Physicians Desk Reference, invaluable for laying hold of the 50 or so pills he popped each day. He was addicted to being Elvis, but at the same time devoutly wished he was someone else. He even considered stealing the identity of a terminally ill man.
Despite some dreadful lapses into tabloidese, this is an admirably balanced study, neither hagiography nor hate-driven. On the whole, Elvis emerges from it rather well: charming, humorous, modest, self-ironising. Graceland has a mere 18 bedrooms, which would hardly be enough for Madonna to swing a cat. And who would not have been driven to thinking he was Christ, wearing a nappy and swallowing 20 cheeseburgers in a row by those Hollyweirdos?
Terry Eagleton's last book, Sweet Tragedy: The Idea of the Tragic, was published last autumn by Blackwell
Elvis. By Bobby Ann Mason. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 200 pp. £14. 99