Amanda Vaill's Blog, page 2

Helicopters and Headlines

Saturday, September 21, 2013


Anyone who thinks that helicopter parents and headline-seeking paparazzi are phenomena unique to the late-twentieth or the early-twenty-first centuries should go and see The Winslow Boy, a play by the English playwright Terence Rattigan which is being revived at the Roundabout Theatre. A kind of drawing-room legal drama set in the years immediately before the First World War, The Winslow Boy tells what happens when a thirteen-year-old cadet at the Royal Naval College at Osborne is accused – wrongly, the boy maintains – of stealing a five-shilling postal order. His upper-middle-class family believe him, although his sister, a suffragette, may do so out of reflexive cynicism about the authorities, and his father, a recently-retired banker, seems almost more concerned with his family’s honor than with his son’s feelings. He resolves to hire the sharpest legal knife in England to defend his son and demand the government retract its accusation: a resolve that proves costly indeed. The family lose their privacy as reporters harass them by telephone and lie in wait outside the front door; the father’s health is broken; the expense of pursuing the case eats up a substantial portion of his life savings; his elder son must drop out of Oxford because there is no money for tuition; and his daughter’s fiancé, dismayed by the loss of her dowry and by the notoriety the case has brought on the family, backs out of their engagement.

Read the whole thing here: http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

Cloak and Dagger

[image error] On July 18th, 1936, a short, balding, barrel-chested man in a grey suit, carrying a Spanish diplomatic passport in the name of José Antonio de Sagroniz, boarded a private seven-seater de Havilland Dragon Rapide aircraft that had been chartered for the substantial sum of £2000 ($156,000 today), anonymously deposited into a special account in Kleinwort’s Bank in London, then flown under conditions of greatest secrecy from Croydon Aerodrome in England to the Canary Islands. The pilot, Cecil Bebb, a sometime British military intelligence officer, had been instructed to make sure of the identity of his passenger by giving him the bottom half of a playing card and asking the passenger to supply the top half, which would have been peculiar orders if the passenger were an ordinary diplomat, and this were a routine charter flight.

In reality, however, Bebb’s passenger was Francisco Franco Bahamonde, at forty-four the youngest general in the Spanish Army and former commander of the fearsome Army of Africa during the ill-fated Rif rebellion against Spanish and French rule in Morocco. A vocal critic of his country’s five month old Socialist government, he had been sequestered on the Canary Islands as military commandant after being dismissed from his post as military Chief of Staff. And he was on his way from exile in the Canaries, almost a thousand miles by sea from Spain, to rejoin his old troops in Spanish Morocco and lead them to the mainland as part of a carefully plotted military coup against Spain’s democratically elected regime.

This story, with which the prologue to my new book, Hotel Florida, begins, is almost too good to be true. In its expanded version it involves clandestine meetings, money laundering, even a pair of blondes being used as camouflage. In my telling I pared some of these details away (this is just the introduction, after all); but the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere they evoke nonetheless permeates parts of my narrative. There are smuggled papers and disappearances and midnight visits by the secret police; but although I hope these elements make Hotel Florida readable, I haven’t added them just to manufacture suspense. In fact they’re integral to the story itself, because in the Spanish Civil War the shadow line between truth and falsehood often became faint indeed. Your friend could be your enemy. Honesty could get you killed. And one of the things Hotel Florida is about is the way its protagonists navigated their way through that perilous new landscape.

I’ve just received the edited manuscript, on which my editor, Jonathan Galassi, has lavished the kind of fine-grained attention that is supposed to be (lamentably) obsolete in today’s publishing world; and I’m now creeping through it responding to his queries. I’m also starting the painstaking process of clearing permissions for quotations and photographs; tidying my (voluminous) notes on documentation, of which more in a separate post; assembling helpful additional matter, such as a glossary of Civil War acronyms (to remind readers of what UGT, CEDA, POUM, and other abbreviations stand for), a map, and so on. All of which goes some way to explaining why, although the manuscript is now complete, the book will most likely not make an appearance until early in 2014. In the meantime, though, I’ll continue to post short snippets on this blog. Stay tuned. For now, here’s the ending of the prologue, which follows a three-and-a-half-page summary of the events leading up to the military coup that touched off the war:

The stage was now set for a carefully orchestrated military uprising, first in the colonial outposts of Melilla, Ceuta, and Tetuán in Spanish Morocco, then in garrisons around the Spanish mainland. The plotters apparently envisioned a quick military takeover: not a prolonged civil war that would last nearly three years; cost five hundred thousand lives; destroy villages, towns, and substantial parts of cities; put thousands of citizens in political prisons for decades; lay waste to the country’s economy; and leave scars in the national psyche that still cannot be spoken of more than seventy years later. But they did intend – unilaterally, by force -- to overthrow their country’s legally elected government and replace it with one of their devising.
So when the hired Dragon Rapide safely crossed into Spanish colonial airspace, Francisco Franco opened his suitcase and changed from his gray business suit into a khaki uniform, winding around his waist the red-and-gold tasseled sash of a general in the Spanish Army. Shortly thereafter, the plane touched down on the tarmac at Tetuán, where rebel troops had already stormed and secured the airfield, and Franco proceeded by motorcade between lines of saluting Moorish soldiers to the office of the High Commissioner. Soon all the world would hear his proclamation:

Once more the Army, reunited with the other forces of the nation, has found itself obliged to respond to the wishes of the great majority of Spaniards who, with infinite bitterness, have seen disappear that which unites us in a common ideal: SPAIN. At stake is the need to restore the empire of ORDER within the REPUBLIC…[and] the principle of AUTHORITY, forgotten in these past years….
To execute these tasks rapidly
I order and command:
Article 1. Martial law is declared in the whole territory and all armed forces in consequence are militarized….

Ten days later an American newspaperman, Jay Allen, who had happened to be in Gibraltar when the uprising began, managed to get to Tetuán and interview Franco in the High Commissioner’s mansion. “There can be no compromise, no truce,” the general told Allen then. “I shall advance. I shall take the capital. I will save Spain from marxism at whatever cost.”

“That means,” Allen asked, for clarification, “that you will have to shoot half Spain?”

Franco smiled. “I said whatever the cost.”

The Spanish Civil War had begun.

None But a Blockhead

[image error] My friend the biographer/playwright/librettist.critic/blogger Terry Teachout recently posted an entry on his blog, "About Last Night," discussing the pros and cons of authors publicizing their work. What sparked his discussion was a series of posts by other bloggers criticizing the practice: Patrick Kurp, of Anecdotal Evidence, found it distasteful and quoted from the poet L. E. Sissman, who urged "serious" writers to abjure any self-expression except through their work; D. G. Myers (responding to Kurp's post) further deplored it, concluding that "It is impossible to live wholly for literature, but it is disgusting that we cannot."

Terry sympathizes up to a point (“If you get to where you prefer peddling books to writing them, then you’re in the wrong line of work”); but as a writer who does television and radio interviews, makes bookstore appearances, and promotes his work on Twitter, Facebook, and his blog, he can't and won't join the ranks of those who deplore such things. "Why do I do them?" he asks, and answers: "I work for a living. Writing is the work that I do best. It's my job, not my hobby." He goes on:

Marketing my work--peddling it, if you like--is part of that job. It doesn't embarrass me to tell people why I think they might enjoy reading my books or seeing my shows. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes wearying, sometimes both. On occasion it can be ludicrous. (Yes, I've given interviews to TV twinkies who didn't have the least notion of what the book that we were purportedly "discussing" was about.) But I know that if I don't do the bad part faithfully, I won't get to do the good part anymore. I wish it were otherwise, but as Jimmy Durante used to say, "Them is the conditions that prevails."

As the great Dr. Samuel Johnson (indubitably a “serious” writer) observed, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." To which the corollary should be: if you’re a professional, you have to do your job – all of it.

There is, however, another and arguably more important reason to post those blog entries, make those appearances, and do those interviews; and that is to connect to the readers who are your audience. Without readers, are you really writing at all? If you have something to say, don't you need someone to say it to? Writing is very lonely work, and loneliest when all you hear is the sound of your own voice. So it's heartening, even – sometimes – exhilarating, to make contact with those invisible readers for whom you've been doing the work, to hear their reactions or questions, to know that you've delivered the goods, not just for yourself, but for them.

The rest (to paraphrase Patrick Kurp, and both Hamlet and the Talmud) is solipsism.

None But a Blockhead

[image error] My friend the biographer/playwright/librettist.critic/blogger Terry Teachout has just posted an entry on his blog, "About Last Night," discussing the pros and cons of authors publicizing their work. What sparked his discussion was a series of posts by other bloggers criticizing the practice: Patrick Kurp, of Anecdotal Evidence, found it distasteful and quoted from the poet L. E. Sissman, who urged "serious" writers to abjure any self-expression except through their work; D. G. Myers (responding to Kurp's post) further deplored it, concluding that "It is impossible to live wholly for literature, but it is disgusting that we cannot."

Terry sympathizes up to a point (“If you get to where you prefer peddling books to writing them, then you’re in the wrong line of work”); but as a writer who does television and radio interviews, makes bookstore appearances, and promotes his work on Twitter, Facebook, and his blog, he can't and won't join the ranks of those who deplore such things. "Why do I do them?" he asks, and answers: "I work for a living. Writing is the work that I do best. It's my job, not my hobby." He goes on:

Marketing my work--peddling it, if you like--is part of that job. It doesn't embarrass me to tell people why I think they might enjoy reading my books or seeing my shows. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes wearying, sometimes both. On occasion it can be ludicrous. (Yes, I've given interviews to TV twinkies who didn't have the least notion of what the book that we were purportedly "discussing" was about.) But I know that if I don't do the bad part faithfully, I won't get to do the good part anymore. I wish it were otherwise, but as Jimmy Durante used to say, "Them is the conditions that prevails."

As the great Dr. Samuel Johnson (indubitably a “serious” writer) observed, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." To which the corollary should be: if you’re a professional, you have to do your job – all of it.

There is, however, another and arguably more important reason to post those blog entries, make those appearances, and do those interviews; and that is to connect to the readers who are your audience. Without readers, are you really writing at all? If you have something to say, don't you need someone to say it to? Writing is very lonely work, and loneliest when all you hear is the sound of your own voice. So it's heartening, even – sometimes – exhilarating, to make contact with those invisible readers for whom you've been doing the work, to hear their reactions or questions, to know that you've delivered the goods, not just for yourself, but for them.

The rest (to paraphrase Patrick Kurp, and both Hamlet and the Talmud) is solipsism.

R and R

[image error] So this was my view last Saturday, just before I boarded a northbound jet from the Turks and Caicos islands to snowy New York City, where a foot of snow (nothing to the three feet that battered eastern Long Island and New England) was waiting for me.

This was my second trip to one of the most perfect island getaways you can imagine. It would have been idyllic under any circumstances but was made more so because I had just sent off the (more or less) finished manuscript of Hotel Florida to my editor and my agent, and could finally exhale after months of pedal-to-the-metal writing; and my husband (the Thought Leader) and I were spending our holiday with two dear friends whose lovely beachside condo we were staying in, and who are the best company in the world. This is what we did: We got up very early in the morning, so as to swim or walk the beach while the sun was rising (if you’re prompt you can watch a flock of plovers wake up, run around and rouse one another, and then fly off twittering over the sea). We did the New York Times crossword and read the news stories and talked about them. We lay in the sun (OK, I lay in the sun -- everyone else sensibly sat in the shade of the coral beach umbrellas) or swam in the impossibly blue and gentle sea. We read (I took William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise, perfect brainy beach reading). We talked. We bought fish from the fishermen who bring their catch to a roadside parking lot. We cooked. We had people to lunch, and to dinner. We talked some more. We watched all the award screeners I’d brought with me to catch up on and talked about them. It was completely delicious. And it was hard to tear ourselves away, particularly to the blizzard-struck northeast.

But we did it; and imagine what happened? I got back to my desk and two new potential projects materialized, both as different as could be from the material I’ve been dealing with in the past months. I guess it was a signal that my mini-break was over and it was time to get back to work – which I will have to do in any case when I get my editor’s comments on Hotel Florida. But instead of feeling overwhelmed, which I might have just a month ago, I was excited and invigorated by the prospects of each, and eager to explore where they might take me.

Before I go further with them, or with Hotel Florida, though, I’ve got one more mini-break planned: tomorrow the T.L. and I head north, to the Adirondacks, for our semi-annual visit to two other friends who live on the banks of the Ausable River. We’ll cook and cross-country ski and talk and watch the Downton Abbey finale. Then it will be time to return to reality. I guess.

Soundtrack

[image error] I like to write to music. Not just any music, though: complex, knotty modern pieces, or highly-colored Romantic orchestral music, pull my concentration away from my work, as does (for obvious reasons) anything with words I pay more attention to than the words on the page. Sometimes, too, the texture or the rhythm of the music is wrong for what I'm trying to write. But when I hit the sweet spot, the music I'm listening to doesn't just help my syntax flow more freely, it puts me in the mood I need to be in to capture what I'm writing about.

Trying to find that sweet spot was a fairly easy process with my two previous books, Everybody Was So Young and Somewhere, my biography of Jerome Robbins. In Robbins's case, there was music I needed to listen to as I wrote, the music Robbins was making ballets to, the music that was in the Broadway shows he was directing and choreographing. I had a shelf of CD's in my office and just kept popping the disks in as I wrote: Chopin piano music, Fancy Free, Fiddler on the Roof, Philip Glass. Everybody was a slightly different proposition: my subjects, Gerald and Sara Murphy, weren't composers or choreographers, so they didn’t have an obvious playlist. He was a painter; she was, for want of a better word, a muse – to many creative souls in the modernist movement, from Picasso to Scott Fitzgerald. But music was the sea both Murphys swam in: they painted scenery for Stravinsky's Les Noces and Pulcinella, they introduced Erik Satie to African-American spirituals, they danced at Bricktop's and Le boeuf sur le toit, they named their yacht after Louis Armstrong's classic, "Weatherbird," and sealed a recording of the song into its keel. So when I was writing about their lives I listened to Armstrong and his Hot Five, and to Satie and Stravinsky and "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."

While writing my most recent (and, to my great relief, just completed) book, Hotel Florida, I had a wider array of characters and landscapes to work with than ever before. Six people, three couples – two Americans, one Hungarian, one Austrian, one Pole, and one Spaniard – whose paths cross in Madrid during the dangerous days of the Spanish Civil War. Their stories were full of tension, drama, romance, and tragedy, and unfolded not only in Spain but in Vienna, Paris, New York, and Moscow. What would I listen to when writing about them? Obviously some Spanish music, something that would evoke for me the look of the country's landscape and the poignancy of its history; but also American popular music of the time, which was played on the radio and broadcast via loudspeaker across enemy lines. Schubert lieder, because one of my subjects, Ilsa Kulcsar, played and sang them; and French jazz and music hall songs – from Django Reinhardt to Maurice Chevalier and in between – because my subjects spent a lot of downtime in Paris. Chopin mazurkas, again – because Hemingway used to play them on his Victrola during enemy bombardments to drown out the noise. And of course the songs of the International Brigades.

I put all this music into a playlist that I could run on my computer as I wrote, adding items as the narrative suggested them. In the end, I realized, I'd constructed a kind of soundtrack to my own private interior film of Hotel Florida. I'm not yet ready to share the manuscript – books need to settle, like a roast, after you take them out of the oven; but anyone wanting an aural preview of it can go to Spotify and click on Hotel Florida.

In coming weeks I think I'm going to write a little bit about the selections in the list – their background, the reasons for their inclusion; but for now, happy listening!

Forever

[image error] I’ve just received a delightful email from the Dallas Museum of Art, repository of two seminal paintings by Gerald Murphy, and one of the hosts to Deborah Rothschild’s brilliant Murphy exhibit of a few years ago, “Making It New.”

Here’s what the email -- a press release, really -- said:

DALLAS, TX, December 12, 2012 – The Dallas Museum of Art’s iconic 1924 Razor painting by Gerald Murphy is one of twelve works of art featured in a new “Modern Art in America” Forever® stamp collection produced by the United States Postal Service (USPS). The sheet of twelve adhesive stamps will be available through the USPS in early 2013.
 
The “Modern Art in America” stamp collection commemorates the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show in New York and features work produced between 1913 and 1931. The 1913 Armory Show International Exhibition of Modern Art introduced modern art to America on a large scale, influencing American artists. The twelve works include Stuart Davis’s House and Street, Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, Aaron Douglas’s The Prodigal Son, Arthur Dove’s Fog Horns, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Marsden Hartley’s Painting, Number 5, John Marin’s Sunset, Maine Coast, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II, Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche, Charles Sheeler’s American Landscape, Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge, and Gerald Murphy’s Razor.
 
Razor entered the DMA’s collection in 1963 through the Foundation for the Arts Collection and was a gift of Gerald Murphy. The bold, simplified forms of the matchbox, safety razor, and fountain pen showcase Gerald Murphy's training in mechanical drawing, as well as his interest in the flattened space of cubist painting. His depiction of consumer products—particularly the recently invented safety razor—precedes the later use of commercial imagery by pop artists of the 1960s. Murphy was a member of the Lost Generation, the group of artistically minded Americans who colonized Paris between the two world wars. His exposure to modern art at gallery exhibitions—and subsequent friendships with Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Igor Stravinsky—convinced him to become a painter himself. After studying with the Russian painter and designer Natalia Goncharova, Murphy embarked upon a short-lived career.
 
In 2008 the DMA presented the nationally acclaimed exhibition Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy. The exhibition featured keepsakes, letters, memorabilia, and the paintings of Gerald Murphy. The DMA’s Razor and Watch, two of the eight remaining paintings in Murphy’s oeuvre, were featured in the exhibition. 
 
For additional information on the stamp collection, visit USPS.com.

Murphy renounced painting in 1929 when his youngest child, Patrick, was diagnosed with tuberculosis (the whole tragic story is in my book Everybody Was So Young), but in the late 1950’s he came into prominence again, much to his own surprise. “I’ve been discovered -- what does one wear?” he said when he heard his pictures were to be included in a group show. In 1964, when he was near death from cancer, his friend the poet Archibald MacLeish gave a Murphy painting from his own collection, Wasp and Pear, to the Museum of Modern Art, pressing them to formalize the acquisition quickly so that Murphy could die “thinking of himself as a painter.” When the news was relayed to him, Murphy was too weak to say more than, “How wonderful!”

Now one of his most characteristic works will be on what the Postal Service calls a “Forever” stamp. How wonderful, indeed.

As I Was Telling the Cats

[image error] For many, many months I've been working more or less nonstop on Hotel Florida, to the exclusion of almost everything else, certainly of any extra-curricular writing. While I'm still keeping my foot to the floor (do you hear that, my most excellent editor and publisher and agent?), I don't think it will hurt to give public utterance to some of the things I've been sharing mostly with my cats. (They sit in my office with me all day. Who else am I going to talk to?)

For one thing, I've been reading. A lot. When you're writing all day you need to hear someone else's page-voice. And while not everything I've read needs comment here, I do want to mention a few titles that have given me pleasure lately.

Such as The Hare With Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal. Here's what I wrote about it on GoodReads:

This is just an extraordinary book -- part elegiac memoir, part detective story, part cultural history, it brings a vanished world to life through that world's objects. The objects in question are a collection of netsuke, tiny Japanese carved figures of animals and people, originally made to hold the knot on one's obi, which were collected by the author's great-great (?) uncle, a model for Proust's aesthete Swann. The netsuke passed from him to his nephew, a scion of one of the great Viennese banking families, and then -- well, we all know what happened in Vienna in 1938, and especially what happened to Jews in Vienna in 1938. But wait! That's not the end of the story.... What Edmund de Waal found out about the netsuke, and about the members of his family who owned them (and also about himself) makes a book as alluring and finely wrought as its subject. I loved it.

Stay tuned for more thoughts about my recent reading (I want to say something about Olivia Manning) and playgoing and other things... but don't hold your breath,

Everyone’s a Critic

[image error] Last week The New York Times Book Review ran a feature in which six contemporary critics attempted at some length to justify their calling in what the TBR called an “age of opinion” that often mistakes “contentious assertion” for criticism. The essays were interesting, some even eloquent. But something seemed missing from their protestations: a clear, concise statement of what criticism is, or should be.

By purest coincidence, later in the week I stumbled on a passage that seemed to be just that -- a quotation (in a book by the English novelist Susan Hill) from David Cecil’s Library Looking Glass: A Personal Anthology.

Cecil -- formally Lord Edward Christian David Gascoigne-Cecil, younger son of the Marquess of Salisbury -- was an English aristocrat and friend of upper-crust glitterati from Cecil Beaton to Dame Edith Sitwell; professor of English Literature at Oxford University, where his pupils included John Bayley and Kingsley Amis; and a critic of wide-ranging tastes and gifts whose many books include studies of Jane Austen, Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and the painters Augustus John and Edward Burne-Jones (talk about strange bedfellows).

Here’s what Cecil says about critics: their “aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and to help readers to appreciate it, by defining and analyzing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of vision from which its beauties are visible.”

However, he says, “many critics do not realize their function. They aim not to appreciate but to judge; they seek first to draw up laws about literature and then to bully readers into accepting these laws...[but] you cannot force a taste on someone else, you cannot argue people into enjoyment.”

That’s it, in an elegant nutshell -- the thing that separates criticism from snark, or tendentious analysis.

Everyone's a Critic

[image error] Last week The New York Times Book Review ran a feature in which six contemporary critics attempted at some length to justify their calling in what the TBR called an "age of opinion" that often mistakes "contentious assertion" for criticism. The essays were interesting, some even eloquent. But something seemed missing from their protestations: a clear, concise statement of what criticism is, or should be.

By purest coincidence, later in the week I stumbled on a passage that seemed to be just that -- a quotation (in a book by the English novelist Susan Hill) from David Cecil's Library Looking Glass: A Personal Anthology.

Cecil -- formally Lord Edward Christian David Gascoigne-Cecil, younger son of the Marquess of Salisbury -- was an English aristocrat and friend of upper-crust glitterati from Cecil Beaton to Dame Edith Sitwell; professor of English Literature at Oxford University, where his pupils included John Bayley and Kingsley Amis; and a critic of wide-ranging tastes and gifts whose many books include studies of Jane Austen, Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and the painters Augustus John and Edward Burne-Jones (talk about strange bedfellows).

Here's what Cecil says about critics: their "aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and to help readers to appreciate it, by defining and analyzing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of vision from which its beauties are visible."

However, he says, "many critics do not realize their function. They aim not to appreciate but to judge; they seek first to draw up laws about literature and then to bully readers into accepting these laws...[but] you cannot force a taste on someone else, you cannot argue people into enjoyment."

That's it, in an elegant nutshell -- the thing that separates criticism from snark, or tendentious analysis.