C.S. Burrough's Blog, page 8
November 12, 2024
My review of Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, by Laura Thompson
After finishing this biography, I flipped back to the first page and began again (something I almost never do), so much did I love it.
The key to its "un-put-downability" lies not in just the intriguing Mitfords, but in Laura Thompson's biographical prowess.
Her vivid character studies, the immediacy of her situational narrative, are beautifully sealed with Thompson's passion of tackling this astonishing family's history, as a group and as separate people (each of which are entrancing).
As with only those few, special biographies, this work transcends its primary purpose - the study of notable persons - becoming a literary achievement in itself.
A key question facing any biographer must be: how to explain the inner world of such notables? (Because regardless how 'public' these may seem, their most private complexities underlie their outcomes).
The answer is surely, besides the formal research and some speculation, that innate understanding of human nature, that unteachable talent for explaining it away. Such is the difference between voices like Thompson's and the dread drone of academia.
So glued did I remain in my instant second reading, I was compelled to order-in Thompson's earlier work, Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford which, whilst containing certain 'stock' Mitford fare in Take Six Girls and endless other works, I similarly golloped up in just days.
Take Six Girls is my favourite biographical read in years.
Delicious!
My review of The Pursuit of Laughter, by Diana Mitford
Diana Mitford Mosley, tagged on this book's cover 'The Most Controversial Mitford Sister', died in Paris in 2003 aged 93.
The onetime associate of Adolph Hitler, who attended her 1936 wedding to British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley at Joseph Goebbels' Berlin home, was famously 'unrepentant' to the last about political leanings that led her to Holloway Prison without charge or trial, on MI5's advice, for most of WWII.
'They'll go on persecuting me until I say Hitler was ghastly,' she said in a late life interview. 'Well, what's the point in saying that? We all know that he was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible things. But that doesn't alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure.'
'It was fascinating for me, at 24, to sit and talk with him, to ask him questions and get answers, even if they weren't true ones. No torture on earth would get me to say anything different.'
This brave, frank singularity was her lifelong hallmark, besides her aristocratic standing, two highbrow marriages and legendary beauty, which her novelist friend Evelyn Waugh said 'ran through the room like a peal of bells', with author-friend James Lees-Milne declaring, 'she was the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen'.
But with her sisters seemingly vying for notoriety, rationalising their race with 'Diana started it', her role as instigator of this famous contest would always have had strong readership pull, even had Diana herself never written or published a word.
A selection of diaries, articles, portraits and reviews, introduced by youngest sister, Deborah Mitford, The Pursuit of Laughter (the title a homage to oldest sister Nancy Mitford's 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love) is testament that Diana did write: prolifically, on a mind-boggling range, with extraordinary eloquence and despite her lack of formal education.
The six Mitford girls were home schooled, some as infants by their mother under the Parents National Educational Union (PNEU) scheme, but mostly by governesses. An Edwardian upper-class prejudice lingered, that saw public girls' schools middle-class, even common. (Their brother Tom prepped with them until aged eight, then boarded at Eton, eventually reading law in Berlin).
The basics their parents thought customary for gentlewomen were reading and writing; basic arithmetic for keeping household books; French, deemed essential for their class; enough geography and history to avoid seeming ignorant in polite society; music, needlework and deportment.
Their advantage over peers, however, was free-range access to their Batsford Park home library, the repository of a remarkable collection made by their grandfather, Algernon Freeman-Mitford 1st Lord Redesdale, whose country estates their second-in-line father inherited when his older brother died at war.
This library, which moved house with them to Asthall Manor, their father set up away from the Asthall house, in a barn with armchairs and grand piano. It became their autodidactic meeting point, where the foundations of their intellectual lives were laid.
Unimpeded by adults, they relished being left here to their own devices. While Nancy Mitford and Jessica Mitford longed to be sent to public schools, most of them, especially Diana, shuddered at the thought.
Diana was later a day student at Cours Fénelon finishing school in Paris's rue de la Pompe, the year's enrollment including lectures from visiting Sorbonne professors. In Paris she was painted by her mother's old family friend, Belle Époque portraitist Paul César Helleu, who lived near her hotel and took her around. One such painting appeared in L'Illustration, making her the envy of the school.
Far from home unsupervised, Paris was her first taste of independence.
Her Cours Fénelon year was cut short, however, when she was kept home in disgrace one recess, having left open her diary. Her parents found details of an unchaperoned afternoon cinema date with a young man, which she admitted was 'a frightful disobedience and an almost unforgivable crime.' She wrote 'I learned more at the Cours Fénelon in six months than I learned at Asthall in six years.'
Back in rural England, with the crowding Mitford brood and parents, her London escape would be marriage, sooner the better.
So, her higher education was at the school of life, embraced by those 'Bright Young People' of the Roaring Twenties. The literati. Etonion, Oxfordian and Cantabrigan alumni. Writers, artists and great intellectuals who flocked to her and first husband Bryan Guinness, himself a lay poet-novelist, heir to the barony of Moyne and one of England's richest men.
The radiant newlyweds, having wrangled for parental nods to marry so young (eighteen-year-old Diana a freshly presented Court debutante) with the groom's exceptional wealth, were instant leading Society figures. Evelyn Waugh dedicated Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to the couple. Diana's portrait was painted by Augustus John, Pavel Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb.
They drew various sets: aesthetes, like Harold Acton, Robert Byron, Brian Howard, Henry Green, Roy Harrod; pre-jet jetsetters, such as Emerald Cunard, Duff and Diana Cooper, and Lady Violet Astor's daughter; cerebrals, like John Betjemen, Lytton Strachey and his girlfriend Dora Carrington; and Noël Coward's theatre crowd.
Only the dimmest soul could fail to soak much of this up, Diana the antithesis of dim. Not writing about it would have been a far worse crime than anything she might later face suspicion over.
Mitford sister buffs have favourites, mine the eldest Nancy, who mythologised her kin as 'the Radletts' in autobiographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate after Diana 'started it all' by scandalously dumping her besotted millionaire spouse for the much older, married, alpha male political livewire Mosely (who refused to divorce for Diana but, soon prematurely widowed, became marriageable).
(Diana's actions were thought a catalyst of competitive sister Unity's public ingratiation of herself to Hitler. Diana even first brought the pair together, on a German trip to visit their brother Tom, Unity tagging along. Both events were thought catalysts of sister Jessica's infamous reactionary elopement with Communist cousin Esmond Romilly, nephew of Winston Churchill.)
Yet most Mitford buffs read outside their favourite sister, drawing comparisons, cross-referencing the sources of this highborn sibling rivalry. Jessica Mitford's 1960 autobiography Hons and Rebels I found confirmative of Nancy's fictional Mitford/Radlett family portraits. Similarly with the priceless 2010 memoir Wait for Me! of Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, friend of the Kennedy's and restorer of historic Chatsworth House. Then I read Diana.
Whilst I find Nancy's playful sophistication the most entertaining, with Deborah's warm recollections the most easily digested, Diana is surely the most articulate, her intensity sometimes hard going perhaps due to her more studious genres – she never wrote fiction and her 'portraits' of high-profile loved ones have a distinctly more scholarly tone than any other Mitford memoirist.
To dub her a widely read intellectual firebrand, cultured beyond words, would be gross understatements – she was formidable. In equal measures too, charming, witty, audacious, at times teasingly funny. This intoxicating mix makes her prose irresistible.
Having moved to France a post-war pariah with husband Mosely, the couple established publishing company Euphorion Books. There Diana translated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's two-part magnum opus Faust.
Other Euphorion publications under her aegis included La Princesse de Clèves et autres romans (translated by sister Nancy Mitford, 1950) and Hans-Ulrich Rudel's memoir Stuka Pilot. She also edited several of her husband's books
In 1965 she wrote the regular column 'Letters from Paris' for the Tatler. She edited fascist cultural magazine The European for six years, contributing her own articles, book reviews and diary entries.
She specialised in reviewing autobiographies, biographies and the occasional novel, with commentary of her own experience of the subject, for The Daily Mail, The Times, The Sunday Times and Books & Bookmen.
She was the lead literary reviewer for the London Evening Standard during A.N. Wilson's tenure as literary editor (he called her the 'most beautiful, most intelligent, and most beguiling of the celebrated Mitford sisters.') The Standard resumed publication of her book reviews from 2001 until her death in 2003.
She wrote the foreword and introduction of 1975 biography Nancy Mitford by aesthete and family friend Harold Acton (on whom Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder character Anthony Blanche was based).
In 2007 The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters was published, a compilation including many to and from Diana, edited by her daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley.
Diana's own books included: A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography (1977), The Duchess of Windsor and Other Friends (1980) and her memoir Loved Ones: Pen Portraits (1985). From these she built a considerable fan base.
Strangers with the worst preconceptions, on meeting her liked her despite themselves. Called 'effortlessly charming' by all, from early acquaintances to wartime Home Office interrogators, to late millennium media interviewees, she was loved by each Mitford sister of whichever ideological bent.
Many held blind to her dazzle, unable to reconcile her old association with the Nazi regime, never dropping her old moniker 'the most hated woman in England'. But in a 2001 letter to sister Deborah, she maintained: 'Being hated means absolutely nothing to me, as you know.'
Some people are simply more than their politics, Diana Mitford Mosley a pure gold example. I was spellbound by this collection of her writings.
My review of Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, by Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys died aged 87 in 1979 before completing her autobiography, which she had started dictating only months before. Later that year the incomplete text appeared posthumously under this title.
After years of reading and rereading Jean's fiction I, like many, was doubtless it was all pieces of her own life. That was irrelevant to me, yet so relevant too. That presumption - that she needed to borrow from herself rather than create - felt disloyal, insulting to her writing ability. Yet I also feared that by reading this I may be disappointed discovering that her fiction was not, after all, dressed up (or down) fragments her own life.
Such was the dilemma underlying my prevarication in reading this, a slow self-torture not unlike Jean's own which I knew so intimately from her stories. When I mustered the courage to read this it was the milestone I hoped it would be.
Yes, Jean's fictional books were distinguishable here in her real life. But thankfully, as the saying goes, 'truth is always stranger than fiction'. So I was saved, my dilemma redundant.
I had a reticence that this felt intrusive, like rummaging through her drawers when she had gone. However, I consoled myself, she would not have disclosed here what she chose not to, nobody was forcing her to say anything. My mother once said, 'I taught you everything you know ... but not everything I know!' Here was my favourite writer inferring likewise with those deliciously pregnant narrative gaps.
As devotees and biographers have noted, Jean bared her soul in her writing but kept some to herself. I was relieved she did likewise here, retained some small, precious dignity after the literary world had bellowed at her, in her dotage, for forever baring her most intimate truths veiled in gossamer thin fiction.
Many have concurred it was not just what Jean wrote that was so brilliant: it was what she did not write, those gaps left for the reader's mind to fill. Indeed, one biographer who researched her old drafts revealed that Jean always underwent a severe, almost self-lacerating editing process, originally taught her by ex-lover and mentor Ford Maddox Ford. Here she does it one final time as she grinningly waves us farewell, leaving us longing to know what else happened in between these episodes she so tantalisingly punctuates.
In this Jean includes her first poem, penned the first time her adolescent heart broke. It comprises three simple words written three consecutive times: 'I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.'
I will not desist revisiting her works whenever I get those Jean Rhys blues. That would be unthinkable. I need to know her words await me.
This, her last word, was not for this fan the end of Jean Rhys, not something that left me with any disloyal finality or closure on her. Rather, it confirmed that I should start over and read her books from scratch. Again. And again. And again.
My review of Jean Rhys: Life and Work, by Carole Angier
Having read the thin earlier version and this subsequent thick-as-a-brick edition, I strongly recommend the latter if time is on your side.
Life was brutal to Jean Rhys, and she let us know it in her deliciously wry, self-deprecating, sometimes hilarious way. Her incompetence at life was magnificently offset by her profound talent for expressing and rationalizing that experience so succinctly in writing. Hence her being described by one literary contemporary as 'one of the finest British writers of this century'.
Some Rhys devotees are prone to the notion that there sits within each of us a 'touch of the Jean Rhys'. Such aficionados may argue that Jean's critics are merely expressing their own insecurities, displaying denial of their own vulnerabilities, by deriding Jean's absurdist take on life.
Indeed, Rhys detractors who have tagged her work a 'gloomfest' seem simply out of their depth to her adherents.
But frivolous pulp fiction was just not her brand, she would rather have starved (and almost did). She wrote not for the light entertainment of the masses. Her artistry remains, in parts, heartbreakingly beautiful. Her 'underdog' themes remain universal. Her poignant narrative is timeless, despite the evocative sense of the times she lived and wrote in (born 24 August 1890 – died 14 May 1979).
With a rare compassion, Carole Angier explores Rhys's fin de siècle white West Indies childhood, her time as an Edwardian London chorus girl, her devastating first love affair with one of England's wealthiest men, her bohemian life in 1920s Rive Gauche Paris, her all-too-fleeting 'money phase' in post WWI Vienna, her three bizarre marriages and the misfortune awaiting her husbands.
We understand Jean's loathing of the cold, grey early 20th century England she was sent to as a teenager, seen through her Caribbean-creole lens.
We feel for her in Holloway jail in middle-age, empathize with her being forgotten and thought dead by the literary world after going out of print in WWII.
We despair at the run-down country shacks she inhabited in her solitary, dirt poor old age prior to the chance rediscovery and wide acclaim leading to her CBE (of which she remarked drily: 'It came too late').
Here was an alien who never quite adjusted but could never turn back. Forever displaced. We explore her compulsive drinking and its short- and long-term effects on herself and those around her.
The biography examines every Rhys work published, chapter and verse, plus much of what she wrote but did not publish. It analyses Jean's distinctive deep and narrow themes, her instinctive sense of form and astonishing use of imagery. It documents how each story and episode mirrors her own history.
It's always great finding a biographer who loves and understands her subject as passionately as you do. But nor does Angier balk at calling a spade a spade when it comes to Jean's glaring character flaws. I felt Angier's lay psychoanalysis went into overreach. I disagreed with certain of her secondhand findings. But I remained hooked and fascinated.
My strongest issue is her coverage of Wide Sargasso Sea. As maddening as Rhys herself in tainting her exquisite body of work with this conceptually anomalous novel (loathed beyond words by some devotees), Angier allocates it an exasperating 42-page analysis chapter.
As Wide Sargasso Sea remains my one Rhys bugbear, Angier's ramblings on it just reawakened the torment. As with the novel, I climbed walls getting through this dissertation on it. The biographer pithily concedes that: "Some readers may feel, on the contrary, that Wide Sargasso Sea is too full of incident, that it is a Caribbean 'Gothic Novel', too close for comfort to melodrama" [p 556]. That tokenistic nod to us is frustrating. With critics and biographers duty bound to some modicum of objectivity, here we instead get just Angier's gushing subjectivity on the often-contentious topic of Wide Sargasso Sea.
(Angier at least explains why she admits this novel's Part Two is not 'quite' as successfully executed as it could be, though that's little consolation if you feel the novel has no place in Rhys's body of work.)
Naturally, those on the opposite side of the Sargasso Sea opinion divide will revel in this chapter I despaired of. But those who disfavour the novel care not that it was Rhys's most commercially successful piece, the one to reawaken her in the public eye after decades of obscurity, making her briefly a bestselling phenomenon on the eve of her death, then a global industry posthumously. We care not for its raft of commercially driven awards. Or for the hoi polloi romance readers' accolades of it being the Rhys 'masterpiece'. This group likely never read or understood her wider, defining body of work.
Regardless, this chapter's academic relevance is incontestable for students of Rhys literature, who should read other opinions for comparison anyway. My differing with its overall take on Sargasso is merely opinion and taste.
Since first reading Jean Rhys: Life and Work, I have returned to it numerous times after reading other works seemingly inspired by it, most notably Lillian Pizzichini's wonderful The Blue Hour (2009). There is always something I had not fully digested previously. Incomparable in length and coverage, Angier's work remains the definitive Rhys biography, well deserving its 1991 Whitbread Biography Award shortlisting, and winning of the 1991 Writers' Guild Award for Non-Fiction.
Not to be missed. Stock up on gin and luminal. Draw shut the curtains. You won't move until you've read every word.
My review of The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, by Lilian Pizzichini
A thoughtful friend overseas bought and posted this book to me, unaware of my having read it twice – once after buying it before giving it away, the second on loan from my library. Without hesitation on rereading the life of my favourite author, I became immersed a third time.
Lilian Pizzichini draws much from Carole Angier's Jean Rhys: Life and Work (1990), producing a more condensed product. Her other main primary source is Rhys' Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979).This piece focuses on Jean the person, without the extensive theoretical commentary on her literary technique that so protracts Angier's earlier biography to its 792 printed pages. (The Blue Hour contains basic coverage of Rhys' writing but in a comparatively slender 336 printed pages.)
Indeed, Pizzichini's word economy and 'instinct for form' (among Rhys' own key trademarks) make this biography also a stylistic tribute to Rhys.
On all three readings I was struck by its leaning towards the commentariat's judgmental take on Rhys the dysfunctional woman. Though this seems inescapable, documenting such a broken character, Rhys' staunchest fans would applaud volubly if someone, someday, wrote more sympathetically, less condescendingly, showing a more strident alliance with this unique literary voice.
Admittedly, Pizzichini doesn't go as far in this respect as Carole Angier, who even concludes with a second-hand posthumous diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. She touches, like Angier, on Rhys' positive character traits, while gesturally rationalising Rhys' dysfunctional side.
Yet I found myself leaping to Rhys' defense at each derisive inference. If still here to comment for herself, Jean would almost certainly call all of her biographers 'smug', 'respectable' and 'sneerers'.
Despite those personal issues I remained hooked by this biography. Where it triumphs over Angier's is in its pace and concision - for those seeking a faster, shorter read, that is. It makes no pretense of supplanting Angier's more fleshed-out 1990 study, still the undisputed definitive model for Rhys aficionados.
Like Rhys' prose, The Blue Hour is captivating, poignant and in parts exhilarating. Though an often patchy echo of Rhys and Angier combined, Pizzichini's work is slickly executed, sticking to factual historic elements, avoiding dry academic commentary and styled in the tradition of its subject: Jean Rhys. Hence my four stars.
Overall, nothing could give me greater pleasure than reading about this extraordinary woman, of whose life and works I have read far less engaging accounts than this.
Absolutely worth a read by any Rhys fan.
My review of Quartet, by Jean Rhys
Published in 1928/9 and set in Paris's bohemian café society, this was Jean Rhys's breakthrough novel. It was her first published piece (other than her 1927 The Left Bank short story collection completed under the tutelage of her then lover, Ford Madox Ford). In America Quartet was titled Postures.
This is thought to have been an autobiographically derived revenge piece based on Rhys's stormy affair and bitter break up with Ford Madox Ford. That real life affair occurred in France under Ford's roof, with the knowledge of his common law wife, Australian artist Stella Bowen, twenty years his junior, who turned a blind eye to his affairs.
Rhys and her first of four husbands, Jean Lenglet, a French-Dutch journalist, songwriter (and spy) had wandered through Europe, living mainly in London, Paris and Vienna. Lenglet had been arrested and jailed on murky 'currency exchange' charges, leaving Rhys alone, destitute and stranded. At Lenglet's protective urging from behind his prison bars, Rhys allowed herself to be 'taken in' by Ford and Bowen, whom she knew socially as a couple. An affair developed with Ford, which his wife winked at, seeming to condone. When that affair ended and Ford cast her off, Rhys was alone and deserted in a foreign place. When her husband Lenglet discovered the course of events, he felt betrayed and left her once he was released from jail.
Rhys was embittered ever thereafter, considering Lenglet the great love of her life, a soul mate with whom she had a daughter, Maryvonne. Rhys and Lenglet remained close friends for life, but always from afar, never reuniting romantically. This episode, one of her great regrets, was paradoxically perhaps her greatest creative catalyst.
Rhys's inference in Quartet is that the Ford-based character was a monstrous predator exploiting the vulnerable young Rhys-based female protagonist, and that she was not his first such victim. That he serially chews up these young women, ruins their lives then spits them out. And that his wife, passively complicit, remains partly in denial for self-preservation.
Having read every word Jean Rhys ever had published, I see she's still not quite formed in this work. Yet there she is, a legend in the making. Her incisive take on this heroine's plight gives an alarming first glimpse of the Rhys we'll come to adore in later books.
Her disturbingly close-up look into this, her first protagonist's lot, is something rare and unique, leaving us wanting more and forgiving of Rhys's not-quite-there-yet form. The parallels to the novel's real-life basis are bold:
Stephan, a fly-by-night European art dealer, is charged with selling stolen artwork and sentenced to a year's jail. Mado, his wife, finds herself stranded, alone and destitute. At Stephan's urging, she moves in with wealthy Englishman H.J. Heidler and his painter wife, Lois. H.J. has a history of inviting young women to move into his and Lois's 'spare room' and initiating affairs with these female houseguests under Lois's nose. Lois permits it, wanting to keep H.J. happy. Mado visits Stephan weekly in jail, which H.J. and Lois complain about and discourage her from continuing. As Mado succumbs to H.J.'s intimate advances, it is unclear how willing or reluctant she really is. When Stephan is released from jail, he leaves France without Mado. She is left alone, stranded and destitute and we wonder what will become of her.
The title Quartet refers to these four main characters. Each of their real-life counterparts wrote and published their own version of this affair, all fictionalised except Stella Bowen's in her 1940 memoir Drawn from Life. In Rhys's, this first published of the four accounts, we see one of the most underestimated twentieth century greats first granted a voice that resonates with incomparable clarity and realism.
The 1981 Merchant Ivory film of this, starring Isabelle Adjani, Maggie Smith and Alan Bates won Isabelle Adjani the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actress award and Maggie Smith the Evening Standard Awards Best Actress award. Like other screen adaptation attempts at Rhys's writing, it failed to impress her fans.
No other writer would ever come close to this one, with her unmatched, unique and marvellous voice. Jean Rhys will forever remain in a league of her own. There was no one like her before and has never been since.
After you've read this first one, be sure to move on to her later works and witness the magnificent development.
October 19, 2024
My review of Honey Trap, by Anthony Summers and Steve Dorril
The Profumo affair – one of Cold War Britain’s most famous political scandals – is an indelible flash in my early childhood. Framed by so many vivid, epochal images of my formative years, this fiasco became a defining mark of my generation. For this reason, reading Honey Trap was an irresistible lure down memory lane.
A neighbour passed on to me the browned and curling paperback, which he had scored for fifty cents in a leisurely browse through our local op shop. Two distinct passages of time come into play here: the twenty-five years approx. between the events the book covers and its publication, and the thirty years between its publication and my getting around to reading it. As if two lifetimes divide the present from the story of Honey Trap.
This staggered chronological detachment sets an intriguing and reflective context from which to revisit the scandal, which saw Britain's War Minister John Profumo and Soviet Embassy naval attaché cum spy Yevgeny Ivanov sleeping with the same woman, 19-year-old Christine Keeler. The affair's exposure and alleged resulting friendship between Profumo and Ivanov forced Profumo’s 1963 resignation from Government.
As with other such investigative books, I saw the movie it inspired ('Scandal' 1989) long before reading this. Sir John Hurt stars as sleazy but lovable Establishment scapegoat, bon-vivant Dr Stephen Ward, who introduced the lethal Profumo affair trio and was later hounded to suicide. Sir Ian McKellen plays disgraced War Minister John Profumo. Joanne Whalley is showgirl-turned unwitting spy mistress Christine Keeler, with Bridget Fonda shining as Keeler's sharp cohort Mandy Rice-Davies. Authentic '60s & '70s glamour puss Britt Ekland is fellow seductress Mariella Novotny. Veteran screen legend Leslie Phillips graces the project as Conservative hack Lord Astor. Its haunting soundtrack includes the delectable Dusty Springfield/Pet Shop Boys hit 'Nothing Has Been Proved'.
The movie's scenes, paired with the original media events they depicted, replayed through my visual memory as I turned each moldy page in wonderment, sneezing at the confetti of dust sprinkling my pillow yet compelled to pursue this nostalgic trip, kept awake into the small hours of three gruelling, impetuous nights.
As per its genre, Honey Trap is more a gripping factual account than a literary experience, so I had adjusted my expectations accordingly (these pieces I find intersect for comfort and convenience with heavier/fictional reads).
While devouring it as I might a cold pizza on a Sunday morning, I could only ponder in astonishment at what a fuss was made of this tawdry diplomatic bedroom farce, while feeling so sad for Stephen Ward. Of course, certain classified intelligence files would now be accessible that had not yet become so when Honey Trap was penned, outdating various lingering question marks. Yet we hear very little in this wake, as if this book's authors had indeed concluded all there really was to conclude. In that sense, Honey Trap may never become truly outdated. *
Whilst I found Honey Trap's incessant meandering back through certain characters' darkened pasts irksome, along with the sheer volume of these incidental characters, this loss of momentum is often the price for the requisite thoroughness. Even so, the authors (or publishers, or both) seem set on burdening us with the bedroom quirks and petty agendas of a whole establishment rather than three of four main characters. This is my common issue across much reading, non-fiction and fiction alike. If more authors would just stay focused, instead of rambling off track with scarcely related trivia that consumed them in their quest for background padding! We, the reader, are unconcerned with such superfluity. We don't want to be led in pointless circles just to hear about some secondary character's spouse's sibling's boss's partner's irrelevant part-time sexual fetish, just for that extra shot of shock value.
These gratuitous muckraking delays border on cheapening the effect of the mighty yarn that is Honey Trap. Such, however, is the gossipy nature of this beast. It's perhaps inevitable that the telling of a scandal will be over-embroidered with such, like an ornate cake with too much icing (is there such a thing, some might argue). There's an art to gauging enough titillation then stopping, before tabloid quality looms.
That said, anyone who remembers these times may well tut along with me at Honey Trap's vaguely tacky sentiment, while hypocritically slurping it up anyway. I plead guilty as charged. I'll read it again too.
An essential retrospective read for those who remember these events, a great modern history lesson to those who don't!
*A more recent publication, Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Cambridge historian Professor Jonathan Haslam published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, reveals how the Profumo affair was a higher threat to UK security than previously thought. It finds that the Russian, Ivanov, was able to photograph top secret documents left out by Profumo after being shown into Profumo’s study by his wife, actress Valerie Hobson. Those documents concerned US tactical nuclear weapons and vital allied contingency plans for the Cold War defence of Berlin. Yet little else has emerged, especially concerning the MI5 and MI6's possible roles in Stephen Ward's 'suicide'. Nor has it ever been clarified whether Ivanov aimed to use Keeler to entrap or obtain information from Profumo. Haslam's new research shows Ivanov did not need to use Keeler thus, ultimately being able to steal information directly from Profumo. This resulted from Profumo's lack of office organisation and security protocol. Profumo left top secret documents visible on or in his home desk while out of his study, failing to secure the room or instruct family members to guard against entry. Consequently, when Ivanov visited Profumo’s home socially, Mrs. Profumo invited him to wait alone in her husband’s study. Ivanov merely needed to pull out his spy camera and take snaps, including of highly classified specifications for the X-15, a top secret experimental high-altitude US spy plane. But that's another book, decidedly more academic and less concerned with the sordid lust triangle that Honey Trap focuses on.
My review of Sybil Thorndike: A Star of Life, by Jonathan Croall
Though a name seldom heard in today's popular culture, Dame Sybil Thorndike lives on in the theatregoing psyche with the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry, considered by many as one of the 20th century's greatest actresses.
A quintessentially English figure, she was a humanitarian of global proportion, working tirelessly offstage and on, bolstering endless philanthropic causes and mentoring an entire generation of great classical actors - Lord Laurence Olivier called her his surrogate mother.
A staunch unionist, she was involved in the early days of British Equity. A visionary and an innovator, she was involved in establishing The Arts Council, The Old Vic, the National Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre and the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead.
The First British actress to appear on a postage stamp, her ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.
Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan for her, in which she starred to major acclaim in London in 1924, not long after the Roman Catholic Church's canonisation of Joan of Arc. Having first played 19-year-old Joan at almost 32, Sybil reprised the role periodically for various recitals throughout her long and distinguished career.
Made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1931, then Companion of Honour in 1970, she was awarded an honorary degree from Manchester University in 1922 and an honorary D.Litt from Oxford University in 1966.
Never a raving beauty, she was known for her loathing of dressing-up (yet also for mingling with royalty). An arch-eccentric, she was a self-proclaimed 'Socialist-Royalist' (a contradiction in terms, some argued), who lived on a pittance for most of her life whilst quietly becoming an arts legend.
Though perceived from afar as a formidable force, she had no airs or graces close-up and knew everyone's name down to the lowliest understudy or stagehand she worked with. She was in her element performing in the open parks and ancient ruins of Britain, Europe, Africa and the East without so much as a curtain, costume or stage.
Most notably a great tragedienne, she also loved smaller, 'interesting' roles, light comedy and experimental theatre. Unlike many of her great contemporaries, ego was not her defining feature and it was to Sybil that many a teary, bullied greenhorn thespian turned for succour and encouragement.
Irrepressibly ebullient, she saw only the best in people, places and situations. A whirlwind of positivity with distinctively precise diction and a voice like a great bell that readily filled any arena unamplified (this acoustic power, despite having damaged her voice on a 1905 US Shakespearean tour, with recurring vocal problems plaguing her for her remaining working life).
Jonathan Croall's enthralling 584-page biography sits among the finest I have read of anyone. Riddled with priceless anecdotes both hilarious and heartwarming from start to finish, this theatrical time capsule is pure gold. Croall's historical research is meticulous, his literary craftsmanship sublime. His strong theatrical background shines through each rich paragraph.
Why he has not been more prolific in this field in which he so excels is baffling. His talents have perhaps been well spent elsewhere, as co-founder and editor of Arts Express magazine, editor of the National Theatre's magazine StageWrite and Programmes Editor at the Old Vic. Croall's other works are now absolutely on my to-read list, headed by his extensive work on Sir John Gielgud.
But Sybil ...
Born in Lincolnshire in 1882, this daughter of Rochester Cathedral's Canon lived and worked into her 90s, gracing the world's stages with some of the finest classical drama seen, often appearing with her husband Sir Lewis Casson.
She had first trained for classical piano, commuting to London for weekly lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. At 11 she debuted publicly as a pianist, but by 18 piano cramp had forced her to abandon that vocation. Only then, encouraged by her brother, actor-author Russell Thorndike, did she train formally in drama – though the sibling pair had since toddlerhood acted recreationally, hamming it up along with their younger sister.
At 21, Sybil had her first professional contract, touring the USA with actor-manager Ben Greet's company. In four years she played some 112 roles. By 1908, understudying the title role of Candida in a production directed by that play's author, George Bernard Shaw, she met Lewis Casson, whom she married that December. The couple had four children, several grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren, many becoming actors, directors or tutors.
Sybil went to Broadway in 1910, then joined London's Old Vic Company from 1914–18 playing leading Shakespearean and other classical roles. She played Hecuba in Euripides' The Trojan Women (1919–20), then from 1920–22 with her husband starred in a British version of France's Grand Guignol directed by Jose Levy.
Thorndike and Casson were active Labour Party members with strong Leftist views. They preferred living in or around abject poverty to remain true to their craft rather than take on commercial success, which nevertheless constantly beckoned.
Sybil especially preferred being away from London, touring the British provinces, kipping in their familiar seedy digs, performing to adoring throngs of miners and other unlikely labourers - regularly extending this ritual to far flung places like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, relishing giving live recitals to natives in fields, pubs, historic sites, libraries, barns and civic halls.
As a pacifist, Sybil was a member of the Peace Pledge Union and gave readings for its benefit. During WWII, she and her husband toured in Shakespearean productions on behalf of the Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, before joining Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson in the Old Vic season at the New Theatre in 1944.
At the end of WWII, it emerged that Sybil was on "The Black Book" or Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. list of Britons to be arrested in the event of Nazi invasion!
Though she mostly shunned the big screen, favouring live performance, she had made her film debut in Moth and Rust (1921), appearing in numerous silent films the next year, including Bleak House, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice and The Scarlet Letter. Her most notable film roles include Nurse Edith Cavell in Dawn (1928), General Baines in Major Barbara (1941), Mrs. Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby (1948), Queen Victoria in Melba (1952) and the Queen Dowager in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) with Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, for which she was awarded the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress. She made her last film appearance – in a version of Uncle Vanya in 1963.
Her last live performance was at the Thorndike Theatre (built for and named after her) in Leatherhead, Surrey, in There Was an Old Woman in 1969, the year Lewis Casson died. She continued with radio and TV recordings, her final screen appearance in the TV drama The Great Inimitable Mr. Dickens, with Anthony Hopkins in 1970.
I became so intensely hooked with this book, for several ecstatic weeks, I was reluctant to finish it. I shall certainly reread it, probably more than once. A reading treat to top all others, this is one of my all-time favourite biographies.
Can't recommend it highly enough.
June 24, 2015
Historical Novels Review
"... Or Forever Be Damned is more than a novel; it is as much an enlightening commentary on the vast change time brings to society and how attitudes, values, formalities, expectations and conventions break down, to the great joy of some and the great heartbreak of others. It is certainly painstakingly researched and meticulous in its detail, and the characters are so wonderfully and richly crafted that one wonders if they correspond to people who once lived extraordinary but unknown lives. A highly recommended example of historical fiction at its finest."
https://historicalnovelsociety.org/re...
Sydney Morning Herald review
"... astute characterisation and detailed evocation of the theatre world ... an impressive novel, written with great energy, featuring a good family-saga plot ..."Sydney Morning Herald review of my novel Or Forever Be Damned.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/b...
