Laura Kalpakian's Blog, page 4
September 9, 2020
Ready for My Close-Up
Research for my novel The Great Pretenders (2019) concentrated on 1950’s Hollywood, the Blacklist Era, its antecedents and repercussions. Free to random read again, I found on my bookshelves Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris (2008). Following that, I read John Gregory Dunne’s fantastic The Studio (1968) and finished it in one day.
Mark Harris’s is an exhaustively researched historical account of “the emergence of the new Hollywood” (now, of course old Hollywood). Harris focuses on the 1967 Academy Awards, positing that the five movies nominated for Best Picture heralded a revolution, changed the way that films were financed, and who made them, as well as their social and political content. Harris’s material is rendered in long, loopy, elaborate chapters, leapfrogging among all five films, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Doolittle.
Read Mark Harris before you go to a cocktail party and you will have enough anecdotes to fascinate everyone there for hours.
Dunne’s book is contemporaneous with the events he describes. In 1967 the Zanucks (father and son) overlords of 20th Century Fox—incredibly!—gave him carte blanche to wander anywhere, sit in on meetings, interview anyone for this book. Dunne’s material is given in short, sharp scenes, replete with flawlessly rendered dialogue (as only John Gregory Dunne could do) perfect pithy descriptions and a lot of droll, dry humor. I loved this book.
Both books support my conviction that authors who write about film are the very people for whom the term nerdgasm was invented. Read Mark Harris before you go to a cocktail party and you will have enough anecdotes to fascinate everyone there for hours. (If any of us were going to cocktail parties, that is.)
Among the many detailed tidbits: the two writers who originated the idea for Bonnie and Clyde were devotees of the French New Wave and in a series of comic encounters did everything they could to get Francois Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard to direct this very American film. Arthur Penn came to it late. However, you can still see the French New Wave influence in that steamy opening scene when Faye Dunaway, upstairs, alone in her bedroom, clad only in a slip rolls around on the bed, informing the audience without a single word spoken that she is horny as hell and ready for adventure with Clyde, Warren Beatty (who produced the film as well). In early versions—this will amuse you—Clyde was bisexual, and there was a threesome.
Bonnie and Clyde, and The Graduate were the first of the Indies, films created outside of the studios that made not just a splash, but a difference. Mike Nichols won Best Director for The Graduate and Anne Bancroft won Best Actress for playing Mrs. Robinson. But this revolutionary moment was a long time coming. Both films had long gestations, many disappointments, and so many obstacles to overcome—rendered in juicy detail—it’s a wonder they appeared onscreen at all. (Indeed reading these two books you marvel that anything gets to the screen.)
Harris’s discussion of the role of race in American films elicits the book’s most profound historical insights.
The other three Best Picture nominees in 1967, Doctor Doolittle, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, were studio productions. Sidney Poitier starred in both In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, films that seem polar opposites. The latter basically depicts a well-to-do dinner party. In the Heat of the Night is the story of the unwilling collaboration of a white sheriff (Rod Steiger) and a Black police detective (Poitier) in a small southern railroad town. Poitier was not nominated for Best Actor for either role.
But his career over this decade provides a useful prism for understanding the portrayal of race in American films. How could Black people be portrayed in studio films that white audiences would be able to accept? (A theme I explored tangentially in The Great Pretenders.) Scenes and dialogue were tempered, and tampered. Character and situations had to be finessed. Some of these pictures could not be shown on screens in the south, making them financial risks for studios who are notoriously averse to risk.
The studio wanted to shoot In the Heat of the Night on location in a Southern town. Sidney Poitier flatly refused to do it. They used as location, Sparta, Illinois. The film was made on the cheap, and in black-and-white. So cheap that in one scene where a character has to scoot out of the way of an oncoming train, the producers would not pay to have a special train hired for the shot so the actor had to hotfoot across the tracks with a real train oncoming. In the Heat of the Night, to the massive surprise of the 1967 Oscars audience, won Best Picture. Fifty years later is still a fine film. Rod Steiger won Best Actor for his performance, beating out Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a sentimental favorite to win. It was Tracy’s last picture; he died after he shot his last scene.
The young inter-racial couple are sexless as clams.
Screen legends, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn play liberal white parents meeting for the first time their daughter’s Black fiancé, a saintly doctor (Poitier). The young inter-racial couple are sexless as clams. (Compare this setup to 2018’s Get Out!) In its time, however, this was a brave picture. Inter-racial marriage was such an unthinkable scandal that (for context) in 1967 before the Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s daughter married a Black man, Rusk went to President Lyndon Johnson and offered to resign rather than embarrass the administration. (Johnson refused his resignation.) Remember too that 1967 was the year of the Supreme Court decision that struck down miscegenation laws.
Rex Harrison was not wholly to blame for the picture’s colossal critical and financial failure, but he was apparently a first class prick.
But the truly bloated, Last Stand of the Old Hollywood Regime was Doctor Doolittle. Its nomination for Best Picture was a bone thrown to a film that was a disaster in every way. Mark Harris’s scorn for the star, Rex Harrison, percolates off the pages. Never again will you think of Rex Harrison as charmant, urbane. Harrison’s ego, his temper tantrums, his insistence on being appeased at every turn like a giant, expensive baby, to say nothing of his and his wife’s tsunamic drinking (Mrs. Harrison would often start barking like a dog at restaurants) are given in one jaw-dropping anecdote after another. Rex Harrison was not wholly to blame for the picture’s colossal critical and financial failure. But the reader leaves with the impression that he was a first class prick.
For Dunne writing contemporaneously, Dr. Doolittle is center stage in The Studio, as indeed it was for the studio. Since Dunne reports only what he actually saw, Rex Harrison’s bad behavior gets no comment. But the hype! The hopes! The merch! The music! The edits! The cast changes! The billowing costs ($127 million in 1967!) The bizarre location decisions! The studio executives’ delusions rise to the level of comedy, but the ruination Dr. Doolittle inflicted on 20th century Fox was not funny. It is the stuff of legend.
Most unfunny (for this reader) was the plight of the hundreds of animals collected, trained, transported to the shooting locations (one, an English village where it rains sort of 340 days of the year) and made to perform. The animal “stars” were also trotted out for the various premieres, gussied up in evening clothes and tiaras. While no cruelty is related here, one feels certain that lipstick on a pig was the least of these animals’ travails.
After reading these two books, I revisited these films. All except Dr. Doolittle. That’s the only one I’ve never seen. I’m waiting till November when watching a fictional disaster unfold onscreen may be the only way to endure watching a real disaster unfold. That and tsunamic drinking.
The post Ready for My Close-Up appeared first on Laura Kalpakian.
August 12, 2020
Boswell’s London Journal
I met Boswell (so to speak) in a hospital bed. As an undergraduate, I somehow contracted pleurisy and spent a week in the campus health center’s small hospital. Pleurisy made every breath painful, coughing was excruciating, sneezing was torturous, and I would never have known how agonizing it felt to laugh out loud except that someone gave me Boswell’s youthful London Journal to read. Ever since, I have always had enormous affection for him. The book is occasionally uproarious, though often, and especially with regard to women, cringe-worthy. Still, Boswell is never dull. He and his prose are always well-groomed, and his pages pulsate with the life of the great city he loved, with youth, not just the high spirits, but intermittent bouts of longing, and doubt.
The London Journal takes place in 1763. Young James, the son of a somber Scottish judge, having done his father’s bidding at least insofar as he passed the Scottish bar exams was (reluctantly) given an allowance to live in London for a year. Here James ostensibly sought out professions other than the law. In truth, he frequented the theatres and coffeehouses, the bookshops, the tea tables of high society ladies and the boudoirs of high society whores as well as women who would do it on the bridges. He scribbled continually, faithfully in his journal, and made it his business to hobnob with the literary giants of his time.
In May of 1763 he met the great Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) Dictionary Johnson as he was known, an introduction James had longed for. In the London Journal his self-serving candor is almost endearing. At one point, like any star-struck fanboy, he writes, “We then talked of me.” Johnson and Boswell became great companions from the beginning, their lives intertwined forever after. For Boswell, Dr. Johnson was not only the greatest wit and savant of his age, but a figure who offered the paternal affection and approval that Boswell never had from his own father, Lord Auchinleck in Ayrshire.
Boswell was proud to be Scots, but he hungered for a place in the wider world, like, well, London.
Following that year in London his father sent Boswell to the Dutch city of Utrecht to study further in the law. Boswell, never a great student, but a lively traveler used the occasion to gallivant all over the Continent and ingratiate himself with the literary greats there, Voltaire, and Rousseau. (His adventures with Rousseau’s mistress are hilarious.) He also had political adventures with the now-forgotten Corsican patriot, Pascal Paoli. Though they are lively, the Holland and Continental journals never quite enlisted my affection. Perhaps because the London Journal’s exuberance was such a happy antidote to the pain of pleurisy.
In 1773 Boswell and Johnson undertook a walking tour of Hebrides, Scotland’s far western isles, a remarkable feat for a man as old as Johnson. (He was then 64, ancient by 18th century standards.) On this tour Boswell brought the Great Man home to Auchinleck House to meet his father. What a evening that must have been! Imagine the dinner with all three: stern, disapproving Lord Auchinleck, chronically melancholy Samuel Johnson, and between them, Boswell no doubt drinking heavily, hoping that Johnson’s presence will redeem him in the eyes of his father. Imagine them walking the grounds and gardens in the long Scottish twilight.
Lord Auchinleck
The house sat silent, a gloomy, glowering, forgotten place. Other than the wind, the only sound was my little boy’s voice.
I have been to Boswell’s home, Auchinleck House, years ago, in the 1980’s. I was living in Oxford with my husband and my little son, Bear, and Scotland was one of the long jaunts we took in our car. We didn’t go as far as the Highlands, but we traveled all round the Lowlands, and over to the West Coast. I remember staying at a farmhouse B&B where the farmer’s wife told us proudly that though they lived within ten miles of the border, they had never set foot in England.
Ah. That kind of pride of place was everywhere apparent in Lowland Scotland, Burns Country.
Poet Robert Burns (1759—1796) almost exactly Boswell’s contemporary, but the two could not be more different. Burns (“….my love is like a red red rose….”) is so beloved that Scots world-wide celebrate his birthday, January 24th. As we drove I noted all sorts of places where the poet Burns had lived or slept or perhaps merely dallied. Burns seemed to have graced every rock in Lowland Scotland, but Boswell was nowhere commemorated, nowhere mentioned. Unlike Burns, Boswell had a rather tortured relationship with his home country. Boswell was proud to be Scots, but he hungered for a place in the wider world, like, well, London.
Boswell’s first meeting with Samuel Johnson underscores this tension. In his Dictionary Samuel Johnson had described the Scots in an unflattering light: “Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” On meeting Boswell, he made some remark on Mr. Boswell’s origins.
The young man replied, “Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.”
The grumpy Johnson retorted, “That, Sir, is what I find a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.”
Boswell’s ambivalent relationship with Scotland continued throughout his life. As we drove around Ayrshire looking for any sign of him, I could not help but think that Scotland had certainly equivocated in return. At last, on an August afternoon of fine Scottish weather, which is to say, damp, gray and rainy, we came to Auchinleck village.
The ladies had told me they were hoping to collect enough money to have Auchinleck House restored. At five pounds a pop, good luck with that.
It was well after lunchtime and the one pub was closed, and when I asked a passer-by about Boswell’s house, he directed me to a Knitting Shop. I pushed open the door and a little bell rang overhead and there at the counter surrounded by shelves of colorful yarns sat three or four matrons, warming themselves at an electric fire. The light was dim, the windows were misty. The women were cheerful, though surprised to see an American here at all, though delighted when I asked after Boswell’s home. This knitting shop, as it turned out, was the Headquarters of the International Boswell Society, which, for five pounds for the whole year, I joined on the spot. They gave me a copy of their current newsletter (a two-page mimeographed number) and directions to the house, though they said there was no museum, and nothing much to see.
Late afternoon, our car finally pulled in sight of the place. The great house was abandoned, closed up and decayed. (The ladies had told me they were hoping to collect enough money to have it restored. At five pounds a pop, good luck with that.) The grounds were untended, overgrown, but there was nothing to stop us from driving right up to it, and we did. My husband amused Bear who was happy to be out of the car, frolicking on the grounds.
As I walked all around the house, I tried my best to imagine Samuel Johnson walking there with Lord Auchinleck after their dinner, and poor James feeling like a puppy in the company of two such august personages. I hoped to peer inside, but the windows were boarded up, or shuttered, vacant-eyed in any event. The whole place was in such disrepair that molding from the roof or windows had fallen to the ground here and there, and lay untouched. I kept thinking someone would show up and shoo us off the property, but no one did. The house sat silent, a gloomy, glowering, forgotten place. Other than the wind, the only sound was my little boy’s voice.As I wandered back to the car, I passed one of the fallen moldings lying there. I looked around. Who was there to care if I took it? So I did. I keep it now on a bookshelf in sight of the chaotic little cockpit where I write every day.
After his death, Boswell was almost immediately obliterated. His immediate relatives, and later his descendants were ashamed of him.
James Boswell eventually married well; he had legitimate children to go along with the illegitimate ones; he practiced law in Scotland, and England. On the death of his father, he succeeded to Auchinleck House. Despite the great literary achievement of his biography of Samuel Johnson, his was not a happy life. His wife died, and venereal disease, alcoholism, gambling debts, and a lack of success in the law in both Scotland and England dogged his later years. He died in 1794.
He was almost immediately obliterated. His immediate relatives, and later his descendants were ashamed of him. Perhaps, as proud Scots, they too looked sourly on his British enthusiasms. Perhaps they read some of his candid journals, and his shocking correspondence. As the Victorian Era dawned, his papers were scattered across the British Isles, secreted away by his remaining, still-disapproving descendants. Slowly, over more than a century and in a series of dramatic events—reminiscent of Henry James’ novella The Aspern Papers—eager wealthy collectors were able to court Boswell’s aging descendants, and save the papers from destruction. (Among other incredible stories. the London journal was fortunately recognized as the packing paper used in a shipment of goods to furnish a Paris flat!) The bulk of these papers ended up at Yale.
As a result Boswell’s vast trove of writing became an academic cottage industry. Over decades Yale published new editions of the journals and volumes of in-depth biographies. James Boswell’s enormous, lively literary talent was recognized at last, and he was able to romp into the 20th century.
POSTSCRIPTHappily Wikipedia tells me that in 1986 Auchinleck House was turned over to the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust and in 1999 bought by the Landmark Trust who restored it, though it is only occasionally open to the public. One wonders at the ghosts who must surely still haunt the place, none more restless than James Boswell himself.
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August 5, 2020
Olive Kitteridge
Particularly with a single character for the title, I assumed that, like the HBO production, the novel would be basically shackled to Olive. I waded into the book, unaware that it was a series of stories. To my surprise, it opened with Olive’s husband, Henry, probes Henry’s heart, his experience, and in the opening chapter, the title character is a but fleeting presence in the background. Henry’s life is rather static, but he has hungers and pathos, and when he dies midway through the book, because we know him so intimately, we feel his loss with a stab to the heart.
This crucially different reaction testifies to the singular power of the novel as an art form.
As the stories move forward–out and away from Olive and Henry–they grow more interesting, and the drama in these ultra-ordinary lives sometimes reaches a screaming peak, as in the story “Winter Concert” which is perhaps the best story I’ve read in recent memory. The dialogue is masterful. “Winter Concert” starts slow (a retirement-age couple leaving a restaurant and going to a, well, winter concert, what could be more ordinary than that?). Strout expertly balances present-scene with back-story as the couple moves through this quiet evening. The pace gathers momentum, though the tone never goes much above a placid monotone. It builds to a conclusion I can only describe as screaming. Not like a horror novel. But the horror of a life suppressed. At the end, you know these people’s lives are changed forever.
Olive Kitteridge, never mind its singular title, meanders. Various minor characters from other chapters emerge into their own stories. These characters have rich, sometimes tortured emotional lives, though outwardly unremarkable. Each of them blossoms slowly, pulling the reader deeply into their fates. Elizabeth Strout’s carefully plotted structure (very different than mere plot) allows readers the same sort of pleasures as getting to know someone over time, seeing them in different contexts.
In fact, the audacious structure of Olive Kitteridge creates a unique reading experience. Olive emerges out of the mists of other people’s lives, and only as the book moves forward does she come into focus on her own.
The novel as an art form can roam across time in a single paragraph, in a single parentheses for that matter.
The stories stay, for the most part, in the “present,” that is Olive is indeed a seventy-two year old retired teacher. We revisit her younger years only sporadically. We never altogether know what lies at the root of her estrangement from her son, her only child, though we know, through recurring “pings,” incidents revisited, that she and Henry were very different sorts of parents. She deeply feels the loss when the son’s first wife hauls him off to California, and then divorces him. He remarries and returns to the east coast, not to Maine, but to New York with a new wife and her small son. If Olive has any chance of mending fences, she must go to him. For me, those New York chapters were the great crescendo of the book. Olive, shaken by a series of uncomprehending what? what? moments, can only barely recognize the deep hurt her son harbors against her, hurt that will never be wholly breached.
I came away from the novel knowing that Olive’s is a lonely life, and will continue to be a lonely life. (Despite the concluding scene). Never mind all the people around her, all the relationships that have accrued, hers has always been a lonely life. And yet, unlike the HBO series, when I put down the book, I admired this flinty widow’s sturdy independence, and I knew her stubborn refusal to look inward was a sort of hard won heroism.
This crucially different reaction to the book (as opposed to the HBO series) testifies to the singular power of the novel as an art form. Film, as a medium, is far more fettered to time, to moving forward in time, and indeed to staying close to a single character. In the HBO miniseries we stick with Olive as a central character, and the story seems to take place over a couple of seasons. But in the book, back and forth in time, Olive flits behind the wallpaper of many other lives. And these many other lives have depths and shoals in the past. On the page the novelist can go anywhere she likes, as long as she can take the reader with her. That’s the sole criteria. Keep the reader with you, and the novel can roam across time in a single paragraph, in a single parentheses for that matter. The novel can invoke, explore, any number of orbiting characters and relationships. The novel can spin up up and away from one set of circumstances and in the next chapter (or paragraph or sentence) plop down in another. Often books that take these dizzying narrative chances demand that readers just succumb to the storytelling, that readers just allow themselves to be seduced and be done with it. The great achievement of this novel, Olive Kitteridge, is that Strout accomplishes all this without showy pyrotechnics, without ever raising the book’s narrative voice above a sort of Jane Austen modulation.
I can’t help but wonder if both Sherwood Anderson and Elizabeth Strout each set out to write a sort of single-stem novel that then blossomed into a full bouquet of characters.
I do not know if Elizabeth Strout took as her model Sherwood Anderson’s long ago Winesburg, Ohio first published in 1919, in which stories, taken together, formed a novel. Sherwood Anderson is mostly forgotten now, but in his era he was a giant of American modernism, and a generous soul, aiding writers who later came to dominate that landscape, among them, Ernest Hemingway. On the strength of my enthusiasm for Olive Kitteridge, I returned to Winesburg, Ohio for the first time since grad school.
The recurring character is a young man, George Willard, a reporter on the Winesburg newspaper who has hopes of being a writer. George Willard himself is not that interesting, and shows up only intermittently in chapters that peer behind the starched curtains of this c. 1900 town. The stories excavate lives that might appear outwardly Sunday Best, but inwardly seethe with sexual hungers, with delusion, with festering rage, or lope along with unknowing incompetence, men and women both.
In chapter one readers find the inference of a schoolmaster pandering to boys. Shockingly for 1919, words like “sex” and “bitch” appear here in print. (Even Hemingway, the tough guy, didn’t put the actual words on the printed page.). There’s a good deal of fornication. Winesburg, Ohio suggests that sex in the tidy confines of the marital bedroom is staid, wooden, and unrewarding except for procreation, that sex in the forests or the fields can be an experience to savor for years. For perspective as to just how shocking the book was upon publication (and it was) remember that the town of Winesburg is portrayed in the same era as Anne of Green Gables and think, if you will, of all that going on in charming Avonlea!
I can’t help but wonder if, for both Sherwood Anderson and Elizabeth Strout, if they set out to write a sort of single-stem novel that then blossomed into a full bouquet of characters. That in the writing minor characters perhaps cried out…..Over here! Look at me! Listen to me! Hey, look here! As a novelist this has certainly happened to me. More than once. In my 1999 novel, Steps and Exes, a side paragraph about the origins of an island B&B introduced me to Sophia Westervelt. She became so noisy, so insistent and demanding that I had to cut her out of Steps and Exes altogether, though I could only do so by promising that I would give Sophia her own book. Which I did, Educating Waverley, 2002. (Of those two novels, the latter is by far my favorite.)
Nearly a century apart Sherwood Anderson and Elizabeth Strout responded to these character-cries (if that’s what happened) by creating a new kind of book, unique storytelling in which one character’s deepest heartache or greatest failing is but a footnote in the life of another. What lingers with me is the oblique approach to character, to developing character out of bits of shared experience opening up into a broad vista of narrow lives.
June 9, 2020
Gene Fowler
Mitchell and Fowler both seem to have had the same gifts, instincts. Like magnets, they drew out the stories of eccentric, sometimes dubious characters who spilled their guts in generous, and usually garrulous detail while the writer would nod, bemused at the intrinsic folly of the human condition.
Joseph Mitchell (1908–1996) originally from North Carolina, worked for a number of New York newspapers before joining the New Yorker. His New Yorker pieces are famous for portraying people whose otherwise unsung lives he made memorable. In 2008 some of his work was published in a Vintage edition called Up in the Old Hotel, a book I loved. Fowler’s work has not had a 21st century renaissance. Fowler’s books you will more likely find in the library discard sale bin.
Gene Fowler (1890–1960) grew up in Denver amid the twilight of the pioneers. He began his reporting career with the Denver papers, and moved on to New York in the 20’s and 30’s, the Golden Age of Newsprint (note, I do not say journalism). In his era he was a successful reporter with friends up and down social spectrum, a prolific author of all sorts of books that went into many editions. He even wrote plays, and later, in the 40’s, he had a long, laudable career as a Hollywood screenwriter. The hallmark of his writing is his narrative voice, rambling, self-effacing, anecdotal, both amused and amusing, and his near-perfect-pitch in rendering dialogue.
Fowler’s memoir of his youth—the fantastically ill-named A Solo in Tom-Toms—has nothing to do with tom-toms.
His best known works are biographies, usually of likeable rogues, most of whom he knew, some he knew well. These biographies have no scholarly footnotes, no indexes, no bibliographies, no fulsome acknowledgments of accommodating librarians. They are chatty, anecdotal, full of empathy for the often less-than-stellar antics of his subjects. Among them:
Beau James chronicles the life of dapper Jimmy Walker (1881–1946) mayor of Prohibition era New York who was brought down in scandal. When Beau James came to the screen in 1957 Bob Hope (of all people!) played the lead role.
The fantastically gifted, and occasionally slimy New York attorney, William Fallon (1886–1927) is the subject of The Great Mouthpiece. Fallon, renowned for his oratory and photographic memory, represented mobsters and criminals. (I was happily surprised to see Fallon as a character in several episodes of the lavish HBO Prohibition series, Boardwalk Empire.)
Fowler’s best known biography, Goodnight Sweet Prince, chronicles the high life and good times of tortured actor, John Barrymore, as well as his slow but assured alcoholic decline. Barrymore’s many women do not come off well in this book.
Barrymore and Fowler were friends for decades, part of a cadre of hard-drinking, raucous compatriots who hung out in Hollywood in the 1940’s, a group that included W. C. Fields, and the unforgettable aesthete Sadikichi Hartman. With several other middle-aged Bad Boys, their less-than-stellar antics were the subject of Fowler’s last book, Minutes of the Last Meeting (1954). In his heyday, Gene Fowler himself was a likeable rogue.
Gene Fowler is a generous writer with boundless sympathy for human foibles.
But his childhood memoir, A Solo in Tom-Toms, has a serious, even wistful core: a young man, seeking a father, a boy hungry for approbation, and direction in life.
A Solo in Tom-Toms opens with the information that at the age of thirty Gene received a letter from the father he had never met, Charlie Devlin. These first few pages are far more poignant than the usual Fowler-fare. However, that done, he reverts to a long genial, rambling account of how he happened to be strapped for cash on his day off in September, 1920. He went into Manhattan, to the newspaper office just off the Bowery to wheedle an advance from the city editor. While awaiting the grizzled editor’s decision, Gene picked up his mail, and started leafing through it. Suddenly, the whole place was shaken by a loud blast. A bombing on Wall Street! Gene hotfooted to the nearby site of the disaster where thirty people were killed and one hundred injured. He forgot to bring paper, and so, was furiously taking notes on the envelopes he had just picked up. He soon filled up the envelopes, opened them so he could take notes on the letters, and came upon, “Dear Son……”
From there, the memoir returns to the beginning. Charlie Devlin falls in love with the church choir soprano, seventeen year old Dodie Wheeler. Charlie and Dodie married, but lacking funds they lived with her mother, the redoubtable Elizabeth Wheeler. Mrs. Wheeler and her son-in-law clashed, and Charlie was no match for this formidable woman. Just before Gene was born, they got into a standoff over a cup of coffee. Charlie lost, left, retreated to the mountains where he stayed for thirty years, never again face to face with his wife. Dodie remarried, a man named Fowler who legally adopted her son, but Gene lived with, was brought up by his grandmother. He never was quite sure what his last name was, Devlin, Wheeler or Fowler. Dodie died when he was thirteen, and she remained enshrined in memory ever after.
You will more likely find Gene Fowler’s books in the library discard sale bin.
The youthful Gene was full of high spirits, restless in school, and something of a delinquent. In his Denver years as man and boy, Gene crossed paths with a vast array of oddball characters, a connoisseur of tea, a spooky taxidermist, a sponging faux-colonel, the famous bandleader, Paul Whiteman (and his father), the con man who boarded at his grandmother’s house, the aging Buffalo Bill and the youthful Jack Dempsey. And many others. Fowler was the great collector and purveyor of anecdote.
One of my favorites goes something like this:
In his early twenties Gene was offered an interview with the editor of The Republican to be a cub reporter. He immediately quit his city job, and rushed home to tell his grandmother his great news! She wanted to know what it paid.
“Six dollars a week!”
“And you have thrown away a twelve-dollar a week job for one that you may or may not get?”
“Yes!”
“You are not, shall we say, an expert at figures….Believe me, Gene, twelve dollars is more than six dollars, incredible as that may be.”
“But I’m going to be a newspaperman!”
“You just never were any good at math.”
Even when I first read him in high school, I shared Gene Fowler’s enthusiasm for the writing life. And revisiting several of his books recently, I still find him an engaging storyteller with boundless sympathy for human foibles. In this grim pandemic spring of 2020 he can still make me smile.
May 5, 2020
The Club
How much more demanding, then—and more perilous—is the Collective Biography, the book that seeks not simply to re-create one life, but a dozen lives, their textures and connections, the world in which they fought and flourished. Such is Leo Damrosch’s The Club, now a Yale University Press paperback.
The Club, above all, expands on the famous Samuel Johnson quip: He who is tired of London, is tired of life! Leo Damrosch is certainly not tired of London. The book is generously illustrated and Damrosch’s effortless prose makes the reader feel truly present, not just around the Turk’s Head tavern table, but amid the thump and bustle of the 18th century.
Whatever else he did in his eager, vain and variegated life, James Boswell wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson.
The core of the Club were London wits, writers, artists, thinkers, actors, painters, politicians and philosophers, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and many lesser lights (all of them briefly, brightly illuminated). The Club began meeting in 1764, the mid-century heyday of Tom Jones and Henry Fielding, and continued for decades, well into the Age of Revolution. Their lively rounds of conversation, debate, drinking, eating, quarreling and quibbling were sometimes chronicled by the indefatigable note-taker, James Boswell. But the book expands well beyond the Turk’s Head tavern.
Each extraordinary member of The Club is introduced with vivid surrounding context. I have a special weakness for theatre, so my favorites were the actor, David Garrick, and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Any actor who strutted his hour on the stage in the eons before recorded sound necessarily vanishes without evidence of their art. But in these pages, even if we can’t actually hear David Garrick, Damrosch tells us the effect that Garrick’s voice, his mannerisms, his gifts had on others. Imaginatively speaking, he recreates what it was to be in that audience, to be in the wings, to be on the 18th century stage itself.
Readers of The Club should be warned, however, that the book has side effects.
Though the Club never admitted women, Damrosch does not neglect them. The hostess, Hester Thrale Piozzi and the author Fanny Burney, their insights, and relationships are lively and present.
Readers of The Club should be warned, however, that the book has side effects. (Like those television commercials for drugs where they rattle off quickly the nastiness that can befall you, and then soothingly advise you to tell your doctor you want the drug anyway.) The side effect for me was that I wanted to know more about many of these people, especially the women. I am now looking for good biographies of Hester Thrale and Fanny Burney.
Hester Thrale and her first husband, a wealthy, progressive brewer, hosted many of these Club men as guests at their beautiful home at Streatham Place, not just for tea parties, but sometimes for weeks or months. Hester’s contribution to the life of Samuel Johnson cannot be overestimated. In addition to her hospitality, and creature comforts, she gave the brooding, melancholic, childless old man the sort of affection and support that a daughter could give.
But Hester was not all tea and sympathy. Widowed while still in her forties, she married her children’s music teacher, Signor Piozzi. This headstrong act created a shitstorm (not Leo Damrosch’s word). Not only did her entire social set lash out, turn their backs on her, but her children did as well. Samuel Johnson’s dismissal was particularly cruel. But from what we know, the marriage was a happy one, and so perhaps the world was well lost for love.
Hester Thrale gave the brooding, melancholic, childless Johnson the sort of affection and support that a daughter could give.
For all the lively individuals who fill these pages (including Samuel Johnson’s wonderfully eccentric household) Samuel Johnson and James Boswell dominate. It begins and ends with Boswell. The vainglorious Boswell preens, and prances, whines and whores his way through London and the Continent; he is unfaithful to his wife, but he is never disloyal to Samuel Johnson. He sought from Samuel Johnson the paternal approval he never received from his own stern Scottish father, Alexander, Laird of Auchinleck.
If Hester Thrale gave Samuel Johnson the comforts of admiring daughter, Samuel Johnson gave James Boswell the ballast of good (though not uncritical) father. In some ways, these three were a sort of quarreling family. Certainly they enriched one another’s lives. Both the “son” and the “daughter” served Johnson with written chronicles of his life for which the world is grateful. Hester wrote a biography of Samuel Johnson that in its era rivaled Boswell’s masterpiece.
James Boswell, as a human being, will not endear himself to feminist readers, nor probably to masculine readers either.
James Boswell as a human being will not endear himself to feminist readers, nor probably masculine readers either. Leo Damrosch, however, clearly has affection for Boswell. (My own lifelong affection for Boswell would require a separate Random Reader to recount.) Damrosch’s chapter on Johnson and Boswell’s tour of the remote Hebrides in Scotland offers readers the many pleasures of the journey without the perils. The reader feels the excruciating tension when Samuel Johnson met Alexander, Laird of Auchinleck at Boswell’s ancestral home. Boswell’s father died in 1782, and he inherited the title, though his later years were not happy ones.
Whatever else he did in his eager, vain and variegated life, Boswell wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson. As a biographer he did give years of his life to his subject, though not in culling through dusty archives. For Boswell and Johnson those years were the liveliest, the most fulfilling, the most adventurous of their lives. We are all the richer for their friendship. We are all the richer for Leo Damrosch’s collective biography, The Club. Purchase on Bookshop.org
April 28, 2020
Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell By David Yaffe
The New Yorker rave review of this book haunted the internet for at least a year after it and the book were published in 2017. Joni Mitchell remains an enduring icon of American music. Ironically, she is Canadian. Perhaps she is the voice of the prairies, including the Prairie Provinces, a wistful, wispy, sprite of a voice singing witty, passionate lyrics in inimitable rhythms. To this day, when she is 76years old, the song people most want to hear, the song most associated with her is “Both Sides Now” written when she was 28. What happened to the other fifty years? RECKLESS DAUGHTER answers that question.
To me Joni Mitchell was the ever-wistful lady of the Laurel Canyon days, the sprightly voice of “Court and Spark.” Wisps of her songs lit like butterflies on my brain, and fluttered off, and then came another, and another, her fey, frail soprano seemingly chasing one emotion or another in arpeggios. I had no idea that artistically speaking, Joni Mitchell even lived through the 80’s and the 90’s. I forgot all about her in those years.
But in fact, she continued to write, tour, perform, and to record with increasingly lower-profile labels. RECKLESS DAUGHTER is a sad chronicle of two or three decades of frustration, tested resolutions, money problems, health problems, drug problems and abusive men.
Joni Mitchell was many things to many men. None of them–not husbands, not lovers, not occasional flings–could ever quite contain her, but more than one abused her. To read of Joni Mitchell showing up at sessions with visible bruises is painful for the reader. Imagine how it felt for her. This heartbreaking saga was the life of the woman who made brilliant the bittersweet “Chelsea Morning” when “The sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses….” Is there no justice?
If your curiosity about those years–really, those decades–extends to knowing every session musician who played with her, then, this is the book for you. Much of RECKLESS DAUGHTER reads like extended liner notes. (For the music-streaming era: liner notes were tomes that people like me used to pull from the LP album sleeve and devour as though they were romance novels.) But a whole book of liner notes? Not so intriguing. It is big on minutiae, but it never approaches the salient questions: Why would a woman who would repeatedly stood up for her music against executives, producers and anyone else who trampled on her vision, why would she not or could not stand up for herself?
The drink, the drugs, the sometimes aimless travel, the crappy men, the money woes, they’re here, but how she felt about any of this? No. For that you have to turn to the music.
RECKLESS DAUGHTER does not purport to be a biography, and it touches on her personal lives (plural intended) only glancingly. The early years, the ones that make for legend, they’re here, of course (pity the poor first husband, his first name lost, his last name now enshrined with a woman who left him). The story of her romance with Graham Nash and the spark behind “Our House” is a lovely, often-told vignette. But Yaffe quotes from Nash’s memoir; he adds nothing new or insightful. The drink, the drugs, the sometimes aimless travel, the crappy men, the money woes, they’re here, but how she felt about any of this? No. For that you have to turn to the music.
The trouble is (at least for this fan) much of the music of those years is opaque, and not especially moving or exciting and maybe that too reflects the drink, the drugs etc. etc. Even her album of standards seems to me a self-conscious channeling of Billie Holliday, as if to prove she could do the smokey thing too. She could do it, but it wasn’t memorable.
The blurb on the front cover calls RECKLESS DAUGHTER “A celebration worthy of the artist and her music.” But to me this book did not seem at all celebratory. Not that it was a dirge, but rather a long sad paean to a woman of formidable talent, steely standards, a difficult woman, troubled, defiant, and yes reckless, who went down still smoking three packs a day till she was felled in 2015 by an aneurysm, a grisly scene rendered vividly in these pages. Since then, news of her has only eked out.
In 2018 art house theatres featured a film called Joni at 75, a great big love-bath of a retrospective. The adulation! The reunions of musicians! The storied, fifty year career! However Joni, in the movie poster is shrouded under a hat, and draped in what looks to be a thousand shawls. In short, she remains enigmatic, unknowable.
I did not go see the film. RECKLESS DAUGHTER made me look at all that from both sides now. As the saying goes.
April 21, 2020
West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan
A novel of the last years of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Every time I re-read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, published posthumously after his death, I want to throttle him. I want to shake his shoulders. Why, oh why couldn’t you keep it together enough to finish this book? Why did you go on drinking, and die at the age of forty-four?
West of Sunset, the 2015 novel by Stewart O’Nan suggests the answer to that question.
West of Sunset fictionalizes the last few years of FSF’s life c. 1936 to 1940 when he had come to Hollywood to write for the pictures. He was always in desperate need of money; he supported a wife in a private asylum and a daughter in private school, and later Vassar; moreover his own needs were not modest. FSF’s letters have been published in several different volumes and if you know the letters (and I do) you can see that basically O’Nan has portrayed them scenically. The novel chronicles how truly desperate was FSF’s situation artistically, financially, physically, socially. FSF was, to borrow a phrase from H. G. Wells, a man at the end of his tether. This is not a pretty picture, made worse by alcoholism that is painful to read about. O’Nan imagines what it was like for people who knew FSF, those who cared about him, and those who didn’t give a damn.
Hollywood was good to a lot of writers, but then, as now, it chewed up and spat out the weak or merely unlucky. FSF was both. Nothing that he wrote for films ended up on screen, nor, as I recall, did his name ever appear on the screen. In West of Sunset you see FSF’s increasing despair as he writes for this film or that, only to have what he’s written snatched, deflected, handed off to someone else. This is the way Hollywood works; it’s a factory. It’s not the way a novelist works. FSF tries to go without drinking, but fails time and again. He alienates the studio heads just as he alienated magazine editors. He writes stories, but his work is no longer fashionable and the money and his reputation have all dried up. Mr. O’Nan portrays FSF as alternately manic, pathetic, whining, boasting, bullying; he shows both FSF’s drunken destructiveness as well as his fabled charm.
West of Sunset is generous, insightful with the lesser lives, people whose lives intersected his. In biographies these are often just names, buzzing like moths around the flaming Scott and Zelda. But here, for instance Zelda’s family are vivid, and the back-and-forth recriminations (who is responsible for Zelda’s insanity) that beset the whole family are sympathetically given. In this respect, the novel as a form of inquiry is better suited to giving these people depth, rounding out their motivations. A biography, of necessity, is shackled to primary documents and concerned with its primary focus.
Where Mr. O’Nan’s novel truly shines is toward the end, the whole Winter Carnival debacle.
People who admire FSF (and I have long been one of them) know the story. Budd Schulberg, son of the head of Paramount Pictures and FSF went off to Dartmouth to research, to so speak, the Winter Carnival for a light-hearted comedy they were going to make. (Budd was a Darmouth alum.) Winter Carnival in Hanover New Hampshire was basically a week-long debauch of drinking, sex, and high spirits with a beauty contest thrown in. Fine, if you’re a coed, or a fraternity boy. Fine, if like Budd, you’re a young man in your twenties with good health, and an assured future. But it was not fine for FSF who fell off the wagon almost immediately, fell off more than the wagon, nearly fell off the train. Bedraggled, frozen, drunken, he later fetched up in New York, miserable, sick and alone. The episode cost him the last of Hollywood’s goodwill, and certainly contributed to his death the following year.
Budd Schulberg many years later wrote a best-selling, thinly veiled account of this fiasco, 1951’s The Disenchanted. Perhaps understandably Schulberg lets his young first-person narrator off the hook for his role in the crash-and-burn of the FSF stand-in. I found The Disenchanted lackluster, but until Stewart O’Nan wrote West of Sunset, it was the only imagined account that we had of the Winter Carnival disaster. In West of Sunset it is harrowing: to watch a human being, thrash his way through this pathetic and destructive episode without pride, without any kind of dignity.
Years ago, a writer-friend of mine, in passing, asked me, “Oh, and what was the name of that drunk you so admire?”
“F. Scott Fitzgerald,” I replied, stung. Hurt to the core, actually. As if her words had casually trashed my brother, someone at least for whom I felt loyalty, compassion. Her words made me feel ashamed to have admired someone so fucking awful, as though I were a fool.
Well, I am still a fool. I still admire so much of his writing. Each time I return to FSF’s novels, his stories, his letters and essays I am saddened, even touched by the talents he squandered. If only….. hangs over the last dozen years of his short life. In some ways I marvel at what he did accomplish, given the self-destruction everywhere apparent.
What he finished of The Last Tycoon was published in 1941. Truly the book is just a remnant of draft, with some notes appended at the end, the whole edited by the critic, Edmund Wilson. And there was a recent new edition called The Love of the Last Tycoon. Lots of ink has been spilled lauding this novel, saying it would have been his best. I don’t think so. There’s not enough here to redeem FSF’s talent or his youthful promise.
FSF was best portraying young men like Dick Diver, Jay Gatsby, and Monroe Stahr, their impossible dreams, their sad, but foreordained trajectories.
Even had he lived to finish it, I do not believe it would have been a great novel. Yes, he absorbed Hollywood’s glamour and flash, but a lot of labor union types lurk in these pages, as do ham-handed studio executives. Though he would have been vividly aware of union strife in Hollywood, Fitzgerald did not have the proletarian touch. That torch was not his to pick up. FSF was best portraying young men like Dick Diver, Jay Gatsby, and Monroe Stahr, their impossible dreams, their sad, but foreordained trajectories. FSF was an arch romantic trying to make a living in an era when writers of gritty literature (Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, James M. Cain) shone and prospered.
This cultural shift also very much hurt, blunted the reception of Tender is the Night. By 1935 the world had other things to think about than the antics of a handful of rich people on the Riviera. By June 1940 the France that FSF had loved was under the boot-heel of the Nazis. He died shortly before Christmas, December 1940.
Ironically, The Last Tycoon got a bang-up presentation a few years ago in an Amazon Prime production. The showrunners opened up backstories of characters who barely featured in the novel. They even introduced a few characters not in the novel, people who added to the social context. Production values were lavish, the cast was fine, and the episodes built well on one another, a splashy, satisfying Season One that could have gone on, but alas it did not.
In the course of writing a novel the author moves in close with the characters, so close that their traits can grate and irritate like those of a spouse or roommate. I can imagine that at times Mr. O’Nan too wanted to throttle FSF. I hope that writing West of Sunset did not disabuse Mr. O’Nan of his admiration for FSF because his portrait here is scathing, but it is not without mercy and not without tenderness, and compassion. And god knows, we could all use a little of that.
The BooksWest of SunsetThe Last TycoonTender is the NightApril 14, 2020
Resurrected Women: Jean Rhys
After publishing a flurry of short, well-received, ephemeral novels in the 1920’s and 1930’s, after years of traipsing around the Continent, Jean Rhys fetched up in Cornwall, England. Here she lived in reduced circumstances, settled into thirty years of obscurity that ended only when an actress sought her out for dramatic rights to Good Morning, Midnight. Rhys had not published since 1939, but she had written. Wide Sargasso Sea.
Published in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea resurrected her career, brought her enormous acclaim. Her other books were reprinted. Accolades poured in. A. A. Alvarez declared her to be “One of the finest British writers of this century.” She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1978. “It’s all come too late….” she said in an interview.
And that, dear readers, is the perfect introduction to a Jean Rhys character.
Except for Wide Sargasso Sea, her women (the men are blurry, interchangeable) are the very sorts of people for whom the words louche, ennui and outré were created. You will not find in Jean Rhys’s work anyone plucky or spirited or witty or brimming with “agency.” Far from it. They the anti-heroines.
These women don’t get out of bed till late, and when they do, they’re aimless. They drift. They drink too much. They have hangovers. They care nothing for appearances, but they do like pretty clothes. They rely on men they don’t love. They don’t love anyone. They have sex, but there’s no coupling in these pages, only the effects of sex: the ennui, the disappointment, the 3 am taxis that are paid for. These women have no family, the occasional flat-mate, but no friends. They don’t much like women, and ditto men, though they need men to live on, though not to live with. These women are sharp observers of people and things, but have little interior life. They have no energy, no ambition, no affection. They have no empathy, no pity. They never ask for pity, though they appreciate being looked after when they are sick. They are frequently sick; they suffer from the cold. They shrug, but they don’t cringe. They don’t give a shit what the world, or the landlady thinks of them. However, they would prefer not to be evicted.
Her characters are not plucky or spirited or brimming with “agency.” Far from it. They are the anti-heroines.
Jean Rhys characters in the early novels—like those of Barbara Pym’s—all seem to be the same woman at different times in her life. They all fear aging. “I’m only nineteen,” laments Anna in Voyage in the Dark “and I’ll live and live and live.” In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) Julia, adrift, impoverished, is walking along a Paris street at night followed by a young man. He falls into step beside her, and she’s ready to go with him wherever he likes, but they come under a streetlight, and he sees her face clearly, and says, no, he’s made a mistake and hustles on ahead. She is thirty-six. Old.
Jean Rhys (1894–1979) lived to be very old. Born and raised in the Leeward Island of Dominica, she left at sixteen, sent to England to a school in Cambridge. She spent the rest of her life knocking about England and the Continent with various husbands and lovers, or on her own. (She married three times, had one son who died and a daughter who did not live with her.) All her life Rhys seems to have been the truly Displaced Person.
In her pages European cities, London and Paris, are not vibrant centers of art and commerce. She renders these places from a palette of taupe, beige, ashy colors—truly, shades of gray—and veiled with cigarette smoke. The rooms are always cold, claustrophobic, heavily draped, cluttered with knick-knacks and bad wallpaper.
But island life! The colors, the scents, the patois, the vegetation, the dangers and isolation, the jumbled cultures and faiths and races, the fruit, the bugs, the heat, humidity and sunlight seeping in through jalousies—that potpourri of sensation never left Jean Rhys. Layering recollections of the Caribbean over life in England informs many of her stories and novels, most dramatically, of course in Wide Sargasso Sea.
Wide Sargasso Sea demands of the reader that you succumb to it. Sort of like heat stroke.
Rhys never offers up her island life with dollops of nostalgia; there’s no Wish I Was in the Land of Cotton gooey sentimentality here. Carribean life is conveyed as sensation, that the reader (and the narrator) feels, experiences. That experiential portrayal gives Wide Sargasso Sea the dimension of poetry. At the same time it demands of the reader that you succumb to it. Sort of like heat stroke. Jean Rhy evokes atmospheres in a way that can only be called resplendent.
Sleep it Off, Lady (1977) might well be the perfect escapist antidote to the sad spring of 2020.
I caution against binge-reading Jean Rhys novels. Taken together (as we read them when I taught the Resurrected Women course) these characters so collectively exude “stale, flat, and unprofitable,” they will drive you to drink. Certainly do not binge on Jean Rhys novels in this fraught, claustrophobic moment we find ourselves in at present. However, her last book, Sleep it Off, Lady (1977) might well be the perfect escapist antidote to the sad spring of 2020.
The stories in Sleep it Off, Lady would probably not fare well in an MFA workshop. They are oblique, follow no tidy rules of storytelling. To hell with rules, they are magical! A girl displaced from the tropics shivering in the Cambridge damp. An old, observant woman in a nursing home. Habitually drunk, a woman confronts a demon in the garden shed. The stories of island life engulf and mystify the reader in the same moment. The last story, very short, “I Used to Live Here” is a fitting coda to this writer’s life. It is the most perfectly economical I have ever read. And in it, the bored, louche Jean Rhys character finds something to be excited about.
SELECTED BOOKS by Jean RhysThe Left Bank, storiesQuartetVoyage in the DarkGood Morning, MidnightWide Sargasso SeaTigers are Better Looking (stories)Sleep It Off, Lady (stories)April 7, 2020
Resurrected Women: Barbara Pym
In the 1980’s I spent a lot of time in England where I ran full-tilt, one might say, into books published by Virago Press. Virago, an upstart publisher, made a recent splash with their commitment to women writers, past and present. And what a lot of past there was! So many women writers had vanished not just from the canon, but vanished altogether, their names and books—until Virago started reprinting—lying under a caul of thick obscurity. To come upon these uniform dark green paperbacks with their arresting portraiture, was to be in heaven. I bought them by the armful and shipped home what I could not pack.
At the time I was struck by the parallels in the careers of Barbara Pym, Jean Rhys, and Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell) British authors who had lively, promising starts to their careers, and ….vanished. They failed to publish for about thirty years, only to be “resurrected,” that is rediscovered late in life. Their paths to this rediscovery were very different. Each published new work after she had been “resurrected,” and these new works were accorded all sorts of critical respect.
I was a Visiting Writer at a state university. To share my enthusiasm for these writers, I offered an Independent Study, English 500, called Resurrected Women. I neither got nor expected any further compensation for teaching English 500 which evolved into a sort of weekly book club where six of us shared our responses to the reading. Lots of reading. Four or five novels for each writer. Mercifully the novels of Barbara Pym and Jean Rhys are short. Molly Keane’s work was more difficult to come by as she was not at all known in the States. We read her last.
We began with Barbara Pym (1913–1980.)
Oxford-educated Barbara Pym published several books in the 1950’s, though by 1963 her publisher deemed her too old fashioned and declined her novel. (Remember that 1963 was the advent of the Beatles and Britain emerging from its wartime pall.) Her other novels fell out of print. In these years she also worked for the International African Institute in London as an editor. In 1977 the poet, Phillip Larkin and Lord David Cecil in an article in the Times Literary Supplement both declared her the most under-rated British novelist. Suddenly, ta-da! Her reputation shone, and her books returned to the public in smart, uniform trade paperbacks. (And to a brand new audience in North America.) She was touted and sought after, accorded respect and royalties that must have felt dazzling after such a long hiatus. Her 1977 novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Man Booker prize. Though she published two more novels, sadly, she hadn’t much time to enjoy her new stardom. She died of cancer in 1980. A book of her diaries A Very Private Eye was published in 1985.
Pym’s novels depict little lives. A dry and tidy world where the characters wear cardigans.
In general, Pym’s novels depict what one might consider to be little lives. Hers is a world of women, educated gentlewomen of meager means, some married, most single. They live in cramped flats. They have uninspired jobs. To quote T. S. Eliot, they measure out their days in coffee spoons. Their social activities and relationships center around the practices and holidays of the Church of England. That is, the forms of the church, the church calendar. Spiritual life is a given, but not explored. No St. Teresa of Avila in these pages. A dry and tidy world where the characters wear cardigans.
And yet, gentle reader, these books have enormous charm. They have wit, and understated humor. The little lives in these pages are invitational; the dialogue is crisp and confident. Pym never condescends to her characters. Her tone remains consistent from book to book, and whether married or single, her characters remain consistent as well. With the exception of the title characters in Jane and Prudence, the characters become a collective consciousness, as if, married or single, they are the same character at different stages of her life. (Pym herself never married.)
Rather like Maeve Binchy’s novels, there are no villains in a Barbara Pym book. No cads. No vile seducers. No Bitchy-Two-Shoes, though she does have a number of master manipulators and cunning schemers. She has been compared to Jane Austen, but Pym’s unmarried heroines are not young women seeking husbands. Sex plays no overt role in these novels. There are romances, celibate love affairs, wary kisses exchanged under the college gate in one’s youth. But the women in these novels marry houses; marriage is presented not in terms of passion, but security, and the pleasures of routine. (The unmarried Prudence in Jane and Prudence, visiting her married friend, Jane, complains to herself that her married friends never seem to give their guests a hot water bottle for their beds. Why is that?)
Though the heroines are not dashing, high-spirited unconventional girls, the fact that Barbara Pym creates heroines from these unlikely, cardigan-clad women, makes the novels themselves unconventional.
Pym’s books offer comfort, like a cup of hot strong tea on a winter day.
Pym’s brief bright moment in the literary sunshine has passed. I’d venture to say she’s not much read these days. But perhaps this moment, now, when all our lives are sequestered, made compact, cloistered, perhaps this is the moment to return to Barbara Pym. Following the November 2016 election, I scoured the house to find my old Barbara Pym paperbacks, all marked up from when I had taught the class. I reread every one of them. I read them before I tried to sleep. They assure the reader that small pleasures can, and indeed, must be mightily savored. Assurances much needed right now when all our pleasures are small, and all our days are fraught.
Barbara Pym Novels in order of appearanceSome Tame GazelleExcellent WomenJane and PrudenceLess than AngelsA Glass of BlessingsNo Fond Return of LoveAn Unsuitable AttachmentThe Sweet Dove DiedQuartet in AutumnA Few Green LeavesResurrected Women
In the 1980’s I spent a lot of time in England where I ran full-tilt, one might say, into books published by Virago Press. Virago, an upstart publisher, made a recent splash with their commitment to women writers, past and present. And what a lot of past there was! So many women writers had vanished not just from the canon, but vanished altogether, their names and books—until Virago started reprinting—lying under a caul of thick obscurity. To come upon these uniform dark green paperbacks with their arresting portraiture, was to be in heaven. I bought them by the armful and shipped home what I could not pack.
At the time I was struck by the parallels in the careers of Barbara Pym, Jean Rhys, and Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell) British authors who had lively, promising starts to their careers, and ….vanished. They failed to publish for about thirty years, only to be “resurrected,” that is rediscovered late in life. Their paths to this rediscovery were very different. Each published new work after she had been “resurrected,” and these new works were accorded all sorts of critical respect.
I was a Visiting Writer at a state university. To share my enthusiasm for these writers, I offered an Independent Study, English 500, called Resurrected Women. I neither got nor expected any further compensation for teaching English 500 which evolved into a sort of weekly book club where six of us shared our responses to the reading. Lots of reading. Four or five novels for each writer. Mercifully the novels of Barbara Pym and Jean Rhys are short. Molly Keane’s work was more difficult to come by as she was not at all known in the States. We read her last.
We began with Barbara Pym (1913–1980.)
Oxford-educated Barbara Pym published several books in the 1950’s, though by 1963 her publisher deemed her too old fashioned and declined her novel. (Remember that 1963 was the advent of the Beatles and Britain emerging from its wartime pall.) Her other novels fell out of print. In these years she also worked for the International African Institute in London as an editor. In 1977 the poet, Phillip Larkin and Lord David Cecil in an article in the Times Literary Supplement both declared her the most under-rated British novelist. Suddenly, ta-da! Her reputation shone, and her books returned to the public in smart, uniform trade paperbacks. (And to a brand new audience in North America.) She was touted and sought after, accorded respect and royalties that must have felt dazzling after such a long hiatus. Her 1977 novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Man Booker prize. Though she published two more novels, sadly, she hadn’t much time to enjoy her new stardom. She died of cancer in 1980. A book of her diaries A Very Private Eye was published in 1985.
Pym’s novels depict little lives. A dry and tidy world where the characters wear cardigans.
In general, Pym’s novels depict what one might consider to be little lives. Hers is a world of women, educated gentlewomen of meager means, some married, most single. They live in cramped flats. They have uninspired jobs. To quote T. S. Eliot, they measure out their days in coffee spoons. Their social activities and relationships center around the practices and holidays of the Church of England. That is, the forms of the church, the church calendar. Spiritual life is a given, but not explored. No St. Teresa of Avila in these pages. A dry and tidy world where the characters wear cardigans.
And yet, gentle reader, these books have enormous charm. They have wit, and understated humor. The little lives in these pages are invitational; the dialogue is crisp and confident. Pym never condescends to her characters. Her tone remains consistent from book to book, and whether married or single, her characters remain consistent as well. With the exception of the title characters in Jane and Prudence, the characters become a collective consciousness, as if, married or single, they are the same character at different stages of her life. (Pym herself never married.)
Rather like Maeve Binchy’s novels, there are no villains in a Barbara Pym book. No cads. No vile seducers. No Bitchy-Two-Shoes, though she does have a number of master manipulators and cunning schemers. She has been compared to Jane Austen, but Pym’s unmarried heroines are not young women seeking husbands. Sex plays no overt role in these novels. There are romances, celibate love affairs, wary kisses exchanged under the college gate in one’s youth. But the women in these novels marry houses; marriage is presented not in terms of passion, but security, and the pleasures of routine. (The unmarried Prudence in Jane and Prudence, visiting her married friend, Jane, complains to herself that her married friends never seem to give their guests a hot water bottle for their beds. Why is that?)
Though the heroines are not dashing, high-spirited unconventional girls, the fact that Barbara Pym creates heroines from these unlikely, cardigan-clad women, makes the novels themselves unconventional.
Pym’s books offer comfort, like a cup of hot strong tea on a winter day.
Pym’s brief bright moment in the literary sunshine has passed. I’d venture to say she’s not much read these days. But perhaps this moment, now, when all our lives are sequestered, made compact, cloistered, perhaps this is the moment to return to Barbara Pym. Following the November 2016 election, I scoured the house to find my old Barbara Pym paperbacks, all marked up from when I had taught the class. I reread every one of them. I read them before I tried to sleep. They assure the reader that small pleasures can, and indeed, must be mightily savored. Assurances much needed right now when all our pleasures are small, and all our days are fraught.
Barbara Pym Novels in order of appearanceSome Tame GazelleExcellent WomenJane and PrudenceLess than AngelsA Glass of BlessingsNo Fond Return of LoveAn Unsuitable AttachmentThe Sweet Dove DiedQuartet in AutumnA Few Green Leaves
