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| Sep 08, 2009
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it was amazing
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A DIFFICULT BEGINNING Married at 19, father at 20, and again at 21. Became possessed with the mad obsessive desire to become a “writer” which his wife A DIFFICULT BEGINNING Married at 19, father at 20, and again at 21. Became possessed with the mad obsessive desire to become a “writer” which his wife amazingly agreed with – she thought he was going to be a great writer too (and she was right). Because the house was full of kids and Raymond and Maryanne were constantly working at this or that low pay job and moving from one apartment to another house and back again like flies trying to find a way our of a room (a room called poverty) novel writing was out of the question – it had to be short stories, that’s as far as RC’s concentration would stretch; and sometimes to get a moment to write anything he had to go and sit in his car which a friend described as “just beat to shit, an old rattletrap that looked like if we got in it would collapse around us”. But Raymond was one of those obsessive types. Nothing would stop him writing. AMERICAN EDUCATION IS STRANGE I guess the word is probably modular. In the UK you go to a university for three years & an extra year if you do an MA. Job done! In the USA you go to this college and pick up some credits, then that university and switch courses and grab more credits; then some teaching here; then there. And the years tick by and you still haven’t got, you know, an actual degree. So Raymond and Maryanne did ten plus years of that. Along the way they both became alcoholics and smoked a ton of weed. UPWARDLY MOBILE In 1978 (aged 40) Raymond Carver was dead broke. He’d never worked a job for more than 18 months, and he’d never made enough money on his writing to consider himself a full-time writer. …His children were living hand-to-mouth on the money they could make doing service jobs or manual labour. Ten years later Carver was the full or joint owner of three houses, two newer automobiles and a ten year old boat. Additionally he had savings totalling nearly $215,000. WHAT WAS HE LIKE? He was a huge shambling muttering mumbling chain smoking dope smoking drunk who couldn’t stand to be alone but needed to be alone to write and mercilessly used all his chaotic always-falling always-failing family’s most intimate moments in his sour funny stories. He loved to fish. [image] THE LIFE OF RAYMOND CARVER He said : You never start out in life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat or a thief. Or a liar. A friend who visited said he’d never seen a house so pockmarked by human conflict – holes in the plasterboard, the carpet and furniture tattered. Raymond said : this horrible, mindless poodle…she attacked our laundry and urinated on the living room rug every chance she got… we’d just laugh instead of cry. No furniture…. We couldn’t pay the light bill, and they shut the power off, and we were beaten. The author says : When both Ray and Maryanne were arrested, sixteen-year-old Chris was called to fetch her delinquent parents out of jail. And The unemployment checks were miniscule, the liquor bills were astronomical - $1200 a month, Ray once bragged (This was 1975) THE GORDON LISH PROBLEM Quite early on he got himself an editor called Gordon Lish who was as loud and assertive as Raymond was mumbly and shy. Lish had “aggressive” ideas about editing. I used to believe naively that the manuscript received from the author would be published pretty much as they wrote it. Okay we know that in some cases, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, another person (Ezra Pound) constructed the thing we now have from a heap of materials produced by the author. But I never came across as weird and radical a version of “editing” as what happened to Carver. His stories were sculpted and moulded and refashioned to the point where Lish would say Raymond Carver that was his creation. This is not a myth! It’s all true. (This was the part I was most interested in. ) As a sound engineer might bring up one instrument and play down another, Lish eliminated details that give characters a defining personal history or make settings specific and intimate… Sometimes he changed the emphasis of a sentence and, substituting a few words, made the stories louder and brassier. In others he enhanced the tones of loss and menace. But take a look at a remarkable example from a story called “They’re Not Your Husband”. Earl watches his wife as she works in her restaurant. She is scooping ice cream. The original version : The white skirt tightened against her hips and crawled up her legs, exposing the lower part of her girdle, the backs of her fleshy thighs, and several dark broken veins behind her knees. Lish edited this into : The white skirt yanked against her hips and crawled up her legs. What showed was girdle, and it was pink, thighs that were rumpled and gray and a little hairy, and veins that spread in a berserk display. Well, friends, this is not editing, this is rewriting. Carol Sklenicka says “that’s typical of what Lish did throughout What We Talk About When we Talk About Love”. She remarks : Carver was shocked. He had urged Lish to take a pencil to the stories. He had not expected him to take a meat cleaver to them. There was some back and forth between them but the eventual published version was Lish’s, who, by the way, is still with us, aged 90. So the great writer caved before the intimidating rewriting frenemy-editor. A GREAT EXHAUSTING BIOGRAPHY Almost you can follow the tortuous rackety life of Carver from day to day in this dense dense book. I thought I would be able to skip some of it once Raymond got successful but no, the dramas kept on coming. For Carver fans only, a must read. ...more |
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| 0060545844
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| 0060545844
| 4.26
| 536
| Apr 01, 2005
| Feb 21, 2006
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really liked it
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He was a very jolly, loud, enthusiastic guy, people liked him but they thought he was a bit naïve and a lot sentimental. He would cry at the drop of a
He was a very jolly, loud, enthusiastic guy, people liked him but they thought he was a bit naïve and a lot sentimental. He would cry at the drop of a hat. One person said about him at age 17 Ray was a rather boisterous young boy. He liked to imitate Hitler and WC Fields. It’s a wonder we didn’t strangle him. Like Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan, Ray Bradbury had a golden decade of high productivity – everything he got famous for was written at speed between 1947 and 1957, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles. A LOVE HATE THING He had a very conflicted relationship with science fiction. He loved the wonder but didn’t care a hoot about the science. Damon Knight said that though Ray Bradbury has a large following among science fiction readers, there is at least an equally large contingent of people who cannot stomach his work at all, they say he has no respect for the medium…that – worst crime of all – he fears and distrusts science. He was in fact a technophobe – never learned how to drive, didn’t fly on a plane until age 62, owned a computer but didn’t use it. In the 50s wrote for television but didn’t own a set. Author Sam Weller of the unlikely Dickensian name says Ray’s Mars was beautifully impossible. His planet had an atmosphere and it had blue hills. For the author, science was not the point… it was the metaphor that mattered. To sf purists he was an often-resented outsider and of course to purveyors of literature he was a lowly sf writer who should quickly be shown the door. When the beautiful fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles was published Ray wrote to his publisher I think we could have gotten more reviews from the big people on Chronicles if it hadn’t been for that science-fiction label… Can’t we do something about this, please, Brad? Must the light remain under the bushel-basket? FAMOUS FRIENDS His stuff was so good that hoity-toity intellectual types who wrote proper literary books noticed it and he got a good review from none other than Christopher Isherwood who invited him round to tea. Some time later at chez Isherwood who should turn up but Aldous Huxley. They offered our Ray some mind-expanding mescaline. They wonderd what effect it would have on the Bradbury brain. He declined and said : I don’t want to have a lot of perceptions. I want to have one at a time. When I write a short story, I open the trapdoor on the top of my head, take out one lizard, shut the trapdoor, skin the lizard, and pin it up on the wall. Ray was afraid that if he took mescaline, he would be unable to, as he put it, “ shut the trapdoor and all my lizards would escape”. As he got more famous (without having any massive blockbusters – but quite quickly stories and novels started popping up in syllabuses) famous people would be encountered quite regularly. Typical evening for Ray Bradbury : I went to the theatre and John Huston was there with his girlfriend Olivia de Havilland. SPEAKING OF JOHN HUSTON The tall booming Hemingwayesque director was his favourite and he longed to scriptwrite for him and lo! It came to pass in a highly be-careful-what-you-wish-for way. Mr Huston decided one fine day “Ray Bradbury will write a script for my film of Moby Dick!” And Ray found himself on a boat to Ireland (at this point he refused to fly). The reason Ray had been summoned to Ireland to work on a screenplay for a film that was to be shot largely in the Canary Islands was so Huston could make the foxhunting season. John Huston loved to roam the world shootin huntin fishin drinkin and womanizin and directin. He fancied murdering some Irish foxes and they did it in a very wild way, apparently, so Dublin it was for Ray, where he spent months of misery as the butt of Huston’s malicious unpleasant humiliating humour (think Joe Pesci in Goodfellas if Joe Pesci was over 6 feet high and a big shot film director). BRAND NAME RECOGNITION Sam Weller says Short stories. Novels. Radio. Comic books. Movies. Television. The stage. Architecture and design. Arguably, no other twentieth-century literary figure can claim such sweeping cultural impact. What he is saying is that After writing his handful of famous books (there is a larger armful of non-famous books because he never stopped) Ray Bradbury turned himself into a brand, and affixed his name to all manner of cultural enterprises involving world fairs, Disney, tall buildings, Apollo missions and whatnot. And all without going to college or university. His only college was the local library. It’s a rather large claim. If it’s true it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. I read this because RB was my first beloved author and I think I still love (some) of his stuff, and I realised I knew absolutely nothing about him. And I’m glad I found out. It’s not especially dramatic as life-stories go, but it left me with a warm glow. [image] ...more |
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| 4.16
| 1,544
| Feb 04, 2015
| May 19, 2015
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liked it
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There should be a guide for us poor readers of biographies. There are multiple biographies available for all famous people and the biographies differ
There should be a guide for us poor readers of biographies. There are multiple biographies available for all famous people and the biographies differ wildly. With this guy Stalin, I have recently tried Stephen Kotkin's massive first-of-three parts 900 page tome with its teenytiny typeface and it defeated me, there was wayyyyy too much detail for a simple soul like me - I drowned, even though Stephen has a wonderful racy style. He knows too much and he thinks you should too! So Kotkin takes 900 pages to tell Stalin's story up to age 45. In great contrast Oleg Khlevniuk takes 340 pages to tell the entire story. * HOW DID STALIN GET TO THE TOP Stalin undoubtedly deserved his standing and reputation as a prominent Bolshevik. His organizational and writing abilities, daring, decisiveness, cool head, simple tastes, adaptability and devotion to Lenin all contributed to his elevation to the top ranks. So, you see, hard work, talent and ambition sometimes will pay off handsomely. [image] WHAT WE DON’T GET TO FIND OUT Praise has gushed forth for this book, but I had some complaints. We are never sure what Stalin thought communism was, what the whole point of it was, how long it would take to achieve; what he thought of Hitler, when he realised the Nazis were lethal, is also unknown. The Stalin in this book is a valueless paranoid who endlessly signs orders for purges, for exiles, for transportations and for executions. He sees enemies everywhere so at some point the only purpose of his dictatorship is to maintain himself as dictator. Stalin becomes the point of the Russian revolution. Another great swathe of this book is concerned with the sterile jockeying of the top politburo cheeses for position, also value-free. Did these horrible bureaucrats think they were benefitting the Russian people? We must assume so, in some way, but really we have no idea. At some point it kind of looks like they’re doing it for themselves (see Animal Farm). So this book leaves out too much! He should surely have mentioned that one of Hitler's main obsessions was the destruction of Bolshevism - he made no secret of it - so what did Stalin think of that ? He doesn't even tell us what Stalin thought communism was for! I mean to say, if all it did was oppress the peasants, liquidate millions of innocent workers, create unintended famines by wrecking agriculture and eventually reaching a standard of living way below anything experienced in the west, what was it all for? You have to wonder. Did Stalin think revolution was possible in the west or in other countries? The Chinese revolution occurs offstage until 1949 when suddenly it happens without any warning and without any hint of what Stalin thought about this huge event. Instead of investigating all this our author keeps us in a claustrophobic space where all we can see is the endless jockeying for position and power amongst the politburo, enlivened by the endless recurring purges. WHY DID IT ALL GO HORRIBLY WRONG? He had no expertise whatsoever when it came to dealing with the economy and probably sincerely believed it could be forced into whatever mold politics dictated. [image] USSR WAS NEVER COMMUNIST It was state capitalist. Wikipedia gives us this definition : A state-capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts as a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. Indeed, the Stalinist version of communism seemed to have been the mirror image, at the level of the entire state, of the standard idea of the capitalist enterprise, in which the greedy bosses mercilessly exploit the workers, whose wages are kept as low as possible, strikes forbidden, no holidays. And all profits go to the directors who live their lives of luxury, spending their millions on vanity projects. According to the author, this is exactly what happened in the USSR from the 30s to the 50s. HOW IDEAS ABOUT AGRICULTURE DESTROYED THE USSR The main reason it all went wrong, it seems, is that Stalin and his mates had a deep loathing for the peasants. You might be thinking that the communism is all for the working class and you’d be right but wrong if you thought that the toiling millions of Russian peasants were considered to be working class. No! they were exploiters! The better-off ones, anyway. The working class were the industrial workers only. So it was perfectly okay, therefore, to maintain a kind of war on the greedy food-withholding peasants. As soon as he could, Stalin forced all the peasants into collective farms : “Communes” – agricultural and social utopias, the brainchild of socialist fanatics – were proclaimed to be the ideal form and goal of collectivization…. Peasant property became the property of the community, right down to family chickens and personal items. These insane and bloody plans fully reflected Stalin’s ideas and intentions. …. One factor in Stalin’s calculations was his belief (shared by many party functionaries) that a moneyless form of socialism based on the exchange of goods was right around the corner. They could never figure out how to make collective farms productive; they seemed to be crippled by a universal foot-dragging fueled by a gut-level hatred of the Soviet government. If your agriculture is on its knees for 30 years your country is going to fail. There will be regular famines in various areas. The USSR could never seem to fix it. THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS The Bolsheviks were committed to their revolution in the sincere belief that life in Russia was intolerable and communism would make things infinitely better. They didn’t intend to cause famines but they did. Because they had no knowledge of how to run an industrial state they made many horrible mistakes : Vast sums and resources were poured into undertaking construction that was never completed; into equipment for which no use was ever found, purchased from abroad out of Soviet gold reserves; into wasteful redesigns, the inevitable result of excessive haste; and into goods so poorly produced as to be unusable. This is heartbreaking. ** [image] HITLER/STALIN Though this gruesome twosome were the big dictator opponents in WW2 and ruled their empires with amazing cruelty they were utterly different. Hitler rose from nothing and nowhere by the power of his charisma and rhetoric, galvanising thousands with his iron dreams of glory. The German people were in love with Hitler. He had them in a trance, listening to him spit fire for an hour, all without notes, they thought they had caught a glimpse of German heaven. He was their great leader. But Stalin spent ten years toiling tirelessly for someone else's revolution; he slowly wormed and connived his way to the top, nothing was handed to him, he wangled and backstabbed and he also worked 25 hours a day. He hardly ever spoke in public, he was stumbling and rambling and dull. It took him another ten years after the revolution to eliminate his rivals and become supreme dictator. Hitler's cult of personality was spontaneous and heartfelt, Stalin's was manufactured by the Party - but it's true, eventually that became a deep heartfelt thing too. ***** *Compare this with the new biography of Sylvia Plath Red Comet by Heather Clark – 1154 pages on a life that ended at the age of 30. ** Grotesque errors made by democratic governments are of course not uncommon – there’s an entertaining book about the subject called The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King. But they are fairly mild compared to the Stalin gang’s mistakes. ...more |
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| 1400069513
| 9781400069514
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| 3.78
| 1,473
| 2010
| Jan 01, 2010
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really liked it
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He grew up as a rich entitled New York boy who failed at various schools and colleges and it being 1942 he gets drafted and assumes, why not, he will
He grew up as a rich entitled New York boy who failed at various schools and colleges and it being 1942 he gets drafted and assumes, why not, he will be an officer but he never was. But his classy upbringing gave him fluency in German and French and he became very useful to the US Army. Meanwhile at age 20 he had decided he would be a writer, beginning with short stories about rich privileged young New Yorkers. The magazines do not roll out any red carpets but he gets to slot one in here and there. Life in the army was 2 years training in the USA, not so bad, then WHAM off to England and the hell on earth that was D-Day. He was in a unit which was at the sharpest point of the sharp end of the invasion. It began with 3000 soldiers; in one month two thousand of them were dead. Salinger was lucky. The only damage he got was a broken nose and PTSD which wasn’t considered to be a thing back then. In the middle of the hell on earth, with body parts to the left and right, he would find a foxhole or an uncollapsed shack and write more short stories about effete young New Yorkers, and continue a surreal correspondence with his agent about whether Mademoiselle magazine would accept his latest one. After the shooting stopped he thought he would be going home but no, now they had the job of liberating concentration camps, so he got re-traumatised. In his teens he had stayed in Vienna with a family his father knew and had a chaste romance with the daughter. He took some leave and went to find them again, to see how they were, but he didn’t find them, they were all dead. Out of the blue he married a French woman named Sylvia and was living with her in Germany. They had a Skoda and a black schnauzer named Benny. He never gave anyone any information about Sylvia, his friends got the idea she was maybe an osteopath, or a psychologist. Actually she was an ophthalmologist who spoke four languages, and she was German. The problem was that US soldiers were forbidden to marry Germans, so JD got her a fake passport. He informed his family he wasn’t coming home; they were shocked and horrified. He was discharged from the army and transferred to the Defence Department. He now became JD Salinger: Nazi hunter. Also JD Salinger: Rescuer of Orphans. Finally in April 46 the happy couple took a boat to New York. Immediately his mother and his new bride began World War Three and by July Sylvia was on a boat back to Europe. He was finally getting somewhere with the stories and by 1948 he was HOT. Incandescent, you might say. The New Yorker gave him an annual contract (guessed to be $30,000 but this sounds crazily high to me) to be the first magazine to receive any new stories. About half of the first half of this book is a catalogue of which stories got rejected or accepted by which magazines and that is not remotely interesting. After Catcher in the Rye exploded (and reached the dizzying heights of No 4 on the bestseller list) the story becomes an equally dull list of tiffs and quarrels and snippy telephone calls with a parade of editors and publishers. If you skip that stuff this is a very nice account of a guy whose measurable life stopped in 1965 while he had another half century to go (he died in 2010). 1965 was the year of the last Salinger story. JDS might have been a well-heeled middleclass sophisticate seen at the nicest places where well-fed faces all stop and stare but he was in fact on a religious quest because he was a spiritual person. In 1952 he found what he was after : Vedantic philosophy as expounded in a book called The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna [image] and he wanted everyone to read this, come on, only one thousand pages of dense Hindu-Buddhist fusion. He got married again to a very young woman and at this point he decided to drop out and buy a fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire - there were no mod cons, there weren’t even any old cons, no running water, no phone, nearest hospital 20 miles of bad roads away. He grew organic vegetables and meditated, very solitary. He was ahead of the curve. He gradually fixed up the barn and put up a fence. Keep Out. He built a shack aka bunker aka hermitage away from the barn/house and would retire there every day for 12 hours writing the Glass family stories. He gradually assumed the shape of a guru himself in the minds of Young America, these were kids who in six or seven years would be at Woodstock. Photographers and reporters came around and he hated every single one of them. After 1965 there were no more stories and no more nothing. No photos, no interviews. This book takes 350 pages to move the story to 1965, then another 40 pages for the next 45 years, because in that almost half century there were only three known facts relating to JD Salinger. One conclusion the author reaches is that JD did indeed continue writing every day for the last 45 years but his writing became a form of prayer, a religious exercise, and merged, as it were, so completely with JD’s personality that it became far too personal to conceive of publishing, that publishing became the equivalent of assault. A fascinating American character and phenomenon. This is an excellent book if you skip the boring bits. ...more |
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| 4.24
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| Sep 02, 2014
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it was amazing
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26,000 YEARS There are a lot of books about racism in America. I read two, the blazingly angry Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, and The Wra 26,000 YEARS There are a lot of books about racism in America. I read two, the blazingly angry Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, and The Wrath to Come by Sarah Churchwell, also written with white-hot intensity; and I also read Manning Marable’s exhaustive terrific biography of Malcolm X. This excellent book fits perfectly together with those three, another piece in the difficult jigsaw puzzle of America in the 20th century. The story of Elijah Muhammed is the story of the Nation of Islam. He was the supreme leader from 1934 to 1975 . In these early years, everything the NOI did, everything it believed, was a reaction to the profound racism black people experienced every day – just to mention one statistic, from a peak of 161 lynchings in 1892, there were still 24 in 1933. Elijah Muhammed said that by the age of 20 he had witnessed three lynchings. He said : I’ve seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years So it is perhaps not surprising he preached a religion that condemned white people as devils and looked forward to the day when all black people could live lives in their own national homeland without any contact with white people. Sounds extreme, but the emotional logic is right there in front of your face. Muhammed called for a place in the Western hemisphere for African-Americans to establish an independent state. He admitted that the American government would probably not accede to this demand. IN THE BEGINNING WAS FARD The founder of the Nation of Islam was a very mysterious man named Wallace Fard Muhammed. They think he was born around 1877 and that in his life he used over 50 aliases. His first 50 years are obscure, then he arrived in Detroit in 1930 and over four years he created the movement known as the Nation of Islam, inventing its complicated and weird theology, renaming all his reportedly 8000 followers by X-ing out their slave names, and discovering his successor Elijah Muhammed; but then he got into some heavy trouble with the cops who told him to leave town and not come back in 1932. Two years later he vanished and no one since has ever turned up any information on what happened to him. You have to say it’s very impressive, starting up a new religion in three years with a complete radical ideology, one that still flourishes nearly 100 years later. [image] Fard Muhammed constructed an elaborate world history explaining how it came to be that once the black man (which he called the “original” man) ruled the earth and then the white man came along and enslaved him. Like, what happened? * The explanation he came up with sounded like science fiction – there was a renegade evil black scientist named Yacub who for murky rebellious reasons created by means of genetic experimentation a completely white race of people. (It’s way more complicated than that of course.) Professor Clegg tries so very hard to maintain a scholarly Wikipedialike neutral tone to his detailed exposition of the Nation’s beliefs, but he can’t refrain sometimes from comments such as this : The myth of Yacub’s creation of the white race and the murderous, deceitful and evil nature attributed to whites by the NOI has given it the distinction of being the most racially chauvinistic black organisation in the history of the United States… his [Fard’s] doctrines were a tragic variation of the ideas of Hitler, racist eugenicists, and other racial purists of his day…. To some, the Muslim history of the Black Nation made perfect sense and explained a great many things; to others it was sheer lunacy The author clearly states that this creation myth was a product of “the imagination of Fard Muhammed”. There was also an elaborate Judgement Day scenario in which the white race would be condemned and the black race saved by a giant spaceship called the Mother Plane. Professor Clegg says : Perhaps second only to the Yacub myth, the Mother Plane story was the most peculiar element of the theology of the Nation. Unless one was predisposed to believe in flying saucers, this tale could hardly be told without raising serious doubts even among the most open minded of listeners…. Another extremely bold element of Fard’s belief system was that Christianity was identified as the religion of the white devil and totally rejected. In Fard’s origin story Jesus was the second prophet sent by Allah after Moses, and he was a black man who built the city of Jerusalem and was killed by bounty hunters and was not crucified. The true teaching of Jesus was Islam but the white people falsified history. (The Pope was the head of that conspiracy.) The third prophet sent was Mohammed and then Allah much later saw that the black enslaved people in America needed a fourth prophet, and so sent Fard Muhammed. The point of this whole enterprise was to enable black people in America to regain their original culture, names, strength and intelligence, and rejoin the Tribe of Shabazz and prepare for the judgment of the white race which will surely come soon. ELIJAH He began life as Elijah Poole, seventh son of a sharecropper in a small town in Georgia in the year of 1897. He moved to Detroit, as thousands did, finally encountering Fard Muhammed’s group at the age of 34. He was converted and, for sure, although uneducated, and not a great orator, and a physically small man too, he must have had a quiet charisma, because in a short while Fard realised that it was Elijah who should lead the Nation when he departed the scene, in 1933/4. Elijah didn’t change much of what Fard taught except for one massive detail : he identified Fard as Allah himself (p123). That is, not a prophet from Allah, but Allah in person. Right there is why orthodox Muslims would reject the NOI teachings as blasphemous. But it took a long time for Elijah to get any grasp of what actual Islam preached, even though he used the Qu’ran all the time; and likewise it took a long time for orthodox Muslims to notice the Nation of Islam. When they did, neither wanted to fall out with the other, so most of the time they politely ignored a whole herd of elephants that were in every room. Occasionally there would be hotheads who would get mad at Elijah. One orthodox Muslim quoted by a Chicago newspaper “denounced Muhammed as a fraud and a convicted criminal who taught racial hatred contrary to the true teachings of Islam”. But mostly the heat that Elijah brought down was from the usual cops and FBI and hostile press, and that was because the fiery speechifying and the disciplined strength of the Nation of Islam made them all nervous. QUIET RADICALISM They were consistent and firm : the black people of America have to do it for themselves, no one is going to help them. They therefore built slowly and painstakingly a string of businesses and told their followers to buy only from those where possible. They got tremendous respect, even, grudgingly, from white opponents. They were a refuge for a lot of people who had been living dissolute lives. ELIJAH MAKES A HAJJ This was a big turning point – in 1959 he toured Middle Eastern countries for the first time and performed the hajj. His travels confronted him with some unpalatable facts, such as In Saudi Arabia and the Holy City itself, African blacks were being legally held as slaves by Arab Muslims p124 At the same time, the Muslim clerics who met Elijah realised that he was preaching some strange belief system that wasn’t Islamic at all. This was awkward all round. BACK IN THE USA By now it was the Civil Rights era. Black people “who had risked life and limb” struggling for civil rights and desegregation looked on with horror as Elijah Muhammed made it clear in speech after speech that integration was wrong, the races should be physically separate, Christianity was a trick and any dealings with the US government in the form of voting or education were useless. All other African American leaders, like Martin Luther King, were “hungry for a place among the white race instead of their own race” and had ”turned many potential freedom-fighting Negroes into contented, docile slaves” p131. Not too many people slagged off Martin Luther King, but Elijah did. This thinking culminated in a horrible period of rapprochement between the Nation of Islam and two white groups, the American Nazi Party and – believe it or not – the KKK. Well, once again, the logic was plain to see – the white groups wanted total racial segregation and so did the Nation. It led to several NOI meetings being attended by the Nazis (in full regalia) or the Klan. Elijah was trying to figure whether they could work something out. In the end, they didn’t. MALCOLM X This is where the story gets positively Shakespearean – the doting loving father sees his favourite son betray him, but the favourite son believes in his heart he is rescuing his beloved father from tragic error. Malcolm came to the view that Elijah’s resolute rejection of any political involvement was a big mistake, and essentially, the NOI was not fighting for black people as it should but was waiting for some kind of divine intervention, which was not going to happen. Elijah stuck to his principles – no dealing with the (white) devil. Aside from that there was a lot of paranoia about who was going to succeed Elijah. It was complicated. Well, in 1965 as we know, Malcolm was assassinated, and although three NOI members were later convicted of the crime, Professor Clegg is less than clear, unusually, about whether any order was given by Elijah Muhammed. On the one hand, nothing major happened in the NOI without Elijah’s approval; on the other hand, it was completely out of character, he was not a leader who threatened people with violence. His hair-raising rhetoric was in complete contrast to his gentle demeanour. He was unusual. THIS REVIEW IS WAY TOO LONG It is a most fascinating story, that’s my excuse, and this book is a brilliant piece of original detailed research. Highly recommended. [image] *I was reminded of a more succinct story from Jomo Kenyatta. He said : “When the white man came here we had the land and he had the Bible. Then he taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, he had the land and we had the Bible.” ...more |
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it was amazing
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This is not a difficult book. But it is not easy either; I’d call it un-easy. It’s a brilliant, careful, deadly, even-tempered, forensic dismantling o
This is not a difficult book. But it is not easy either; I’d call it un-easy. It’s a brilliant, careful, deadly, even-tempered, forensic dismantling of Freud and his palace of misconceptions. I was utterly impressed by Richard Webster’s huge task – all the stuff he had to read and absorb (“stuff” is a technical term), all the judicious filleting. So the short version of this review is : if you’re interested in Freud, read it now. REAL SYMPTOMS, IMAGINARY ILLNESSES Freud’s early career : patients present real symptoms which are diagnosed as imaginary illnesses to be cured, or most often, not cured, by fake procedures. In those late 19th century days doctors really didn’t know what most diseases were. So they blustered and theorised. You can’t blame them, they were doing their best. From the time of Plato onwards, physicians had frequently explained a particular set of physical sensations reported by patients by suggesting that it was caused by the womb moving upwards through the body towards the head. Imagine that! It was called, of course, hysteria. Of which Steyerthal said in 1908 “there is no such disease and there never was”. So it became a blanket term given to what we now understand as MS, syphilis and other ailments. Another “syndrome of convenience” was neurasthenia, invented in 1869. The term “neurasthenia” thus came…to function as a catch-all diagnosis which offered both physicians and patients a way of escaping from feelings of therapeutic helplessness. … It functioned both to protect physicians from having to admit the depths of their ignorance and to prevent patients from losing faith in the medical profession altogether. Freud was very big on both these syndromes. This was the diagnostic miasma from which he emerged. SOME QUOTES Walter Kendrick wondered why an egregious card-house like psychoanalysis, ready to crumble at the impact of any feather, was bought wholesale by an entire culture that still dwells in it RW adds the following remarks : Freud’s own internal and idiosyncratic logic is treated as though it were a real, external chain of causality. The most charitable observation we can make about this kind of reasoning is that it is neither odd nor abnormal. For it is exactly the kind of reasoning habitually encountered in necromancy, astrology, phrenology… As to why Freudianism was such a hit, RW answers (mildly, conventionally) that, mostly, it was because psychoanalysis so neatly replaced religious faith for generations of intellectuals. (Confession, which was ejected from the Christian faith as superstition by the Protestants, was reintroduced by Freud in the name of Science.) RICHARD WEBSTER TELLS IT LIKE IT IS Determined to categorise those who profess systematic knowledge as either scientists or charlatans, we find it difficult to believe that any thinker who makes a genuine contribution to scientific knowledge can either, simultaneously or subsequently, become the propagator of folly, error and misjudgement. In psychoanalysis human behaviour and human consciousness are treated as intrinsically misleading phenomena which are supposedly devoid of meaning until they have been illuminated by insights drawn from a secret inner realm – which is dominated by sexuality and which is supposedly accessible and intelligible only to those trained in psychoanalysis. The Unconscious is not simply an occult entity for whose real existence there is no palpable evidence. It is an illusion produced by language – a kind of intellectual hallucination. There was no method of testing out these theories or of assessing their worth which was not predicated upon the assumption of his own genius. Richard Webster's unflappable ponderous Johnsonian prose style is perfect for this kind of radical assassination. In the name of full disclosure I admit that the last section is not useful and can be skipped and the whole thing could be said to be somewhat too long. But ...... great read - 5 stars! ...more |
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I wanted to find out how Muriel Spark could be such a bundle of contradictions, writing very smart novels (Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
I wanted to find out how Muriel Spark could be such a bundle of contradictions, writing very smart novels (Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means) and very dim-witted ones (A Far Cry from Kensington, The Driver’s Seat); and also why an intelligent independent woman would convert to the Roman Catholic church which in 1954 wasn’t the dependable defender of feminist values it is today. She was puzzling. And after 536 pages pretty much still is. She had a family background bizarrely similar to Karl Marx – father was a non-observant Jew, mother was a gentile non-observing Christian. (Similarities kind of ended there.) She grew up poor and working class in Edinburgh. She had boyfriends, they would come round and meet her parents, drink tea and eat fruit and look at each other. They never had sex because there was nowhere to go. She went to sedate dances with her older brother and met a guy called Sydney Spark, another non observant Jew born in Lithuania (“Glasses. Not bad looking. Not good looking.”). She was 19, he was 32, she was flattered, he was a teacher. After a year he asked her to run off with him to Rhodesia, third class, so off they went and got married when they arrived. It was a total disaster. Sydney aka Solly had not been entirely frank about his severe mental illness. He was bi-polar and was violent. By the time that became apparent she had a son (Robin). In order to get away from Solly she had to leave her son in Africa (because it was the middle of the War and children couldn’t travel). She beat it back to Scotland and hardly ever lived with her son again. She spent 15 years doggedly chiselling away at making a career for herself as a writer, beginning with poetry and biography, not novels at all. She came from nothing and nowhere and became one of the most highly praised novelists of the last 50 years. The whole story is impressive. But also boring, once she hits her stride, that is. Because it just becomes a whirligig of fights with publishers (“she screamed at him down the telephone, threatening court proceedings”), fights with her many friends (“Goodbye. God bless you. Please never write to me again.”) & hangers-on, mad desires to be alone and write another slim volume, more prizes, more damehoods, sudden relocations to New York or Italy; jetsetting in all but name. And there is not much in the way of objectivity here. Martin Stannard is Muriel’s number one fan and he hardly allows one discouraging word, nay, not one slightly tilted eyebrow, about any of the 22 novels which he lovingly describes, each and every one. Mr Stannard also never told me what I was so interested in, the religious thing. He most unhelpfully says She did not think of herself as a Catholic when writing But he records that on her first visit to New York she insisted on visiting the shrine of Mother Cabrini, the first American saint, and after seeing it, said You’ll see now, something wonderful will happen because it always does when you visit a saint. As regards her private life, and she strove to keep it private, there was never a second husband, but there was a faithful female amanuensis Penelope Jardine, who lived with her from 1968 until 2006. And when Muriel died Penelope got everything and Robin, the son, got nothing. [image] ...more |
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I realised I knew nothing about Marx’s life except that it was a pity he couldn’t have lived to be 120 years old so he could have seen the big revolut
I realised I knew nothing about Marx’s life except that it was a pity he couldn’t have lived to be 120 years old so he could have seen the big revolution he was plotting and scheming for all his life. You can be sure of one thing, though, if he had been around in 1917. He would have DENOUNCED Lenin. He sure loved to denounce. Most days it seems he denounced three guys before breakfast, just to keep in practice. But you know it was a popular pastime in those days, and they dished it out to him too – one guy called him an intellectual customs agent and border guard, appointed on his own authority Well it turned out that his life wasn’t that interesting – not like, say, the life of the Marquis de Sade. That was a wow. Marx was one of the world’s great thinkers but all he ever did was 1) Ask for money from a) his mother; b) his friends; c) Engels 2) Form societies whose members he would immediately denounce and then he would resign dramatically 3) Write vituperative lengthy articles about the murky leftist politics of the day 4) Manage to get them published in obscure magazines and newspapers which a) didn’t pay him and b) went bankrupt after the second issue 5) Relocate to another city where he would repeat steps 1) to 4) Poor Karl. He never became a public speaker because he had a lisp and a thick regional accent, but still all who met him in person instantly knew he was a Great Man. And he would then fall out with them over some esoteric detail or another. He hardly ever had a foot of his own he didn’t shoot himself through. So the actual doings of his life became a dull affair, especially so because our author Jonathan Sperber is a dry as dust narrator and way more interested in KM’s thought and his mortal battle with the Young Hegelians. For long stretches I was kind of guessing what the heck he was talking about and I thought – this is for level three Marxist scholars, not Level 1! Why didn’t it say that on the cover? The account of the ideas in Capital are, I should say, cogent and enthralling for anyone who has some grasp of the basic concepts involved, but they were several feet above my head. WAS KARL MARX A JEW? This is a strange question. We all kind of think obviously Marx was a Jew, but - His family converted to Christianity (purely for practical reasons – it enabled Karl to go to university and join a profession) - He was a lifelong atheist and hated all religion - He married a Christian who then became an atheist - His children were born in England and grew up 100% English and atheist - Throughout his life he had nothing whatsoever to do with Jewish culture Professor Sperber says nobody commented that Marx was Jewish until the 1870s when it began to be thought that the Jews were not just a separate religious/cultural community but a separate race. From that point the antisemites always called Marx a Jew. (The author also deals with the unhappy question about Marx’s own antisemitic remarks which are strewn about his correspondence.) ORDINARY VICTORIAN TRAGEDIES I have disrespectfully described Marx’s life as dull but in one respect it was not. Karl and his beloved wife Jenny had seven children : 1. Jenny. Died aged 38 2. Laura. Had three children, all died in infancy. Committed suicide with her husband at age 66. 3. Charles. Died aged 8, the great heartache of Karl’s life. 4. Henry. Died aged 1. 5. Eveline. Died aged 1. 6. Eleanor. Was the first person to translate Madame Bovary into English. When she found out her husband of 14 years was a bigamist she committed suicide, aged 43. 7. Unnamed child who died on the day of his birth. THE WRONG BIOGRAPHY It’s not easy to pick the right biography when there are a lot of them but this was the wrong one for me. Could be a great one for those already marinaded in Marxist theory; but I was after a kindlier, less abstruse volume. So this was a three star read for me. My fault, not Jonathan Sperber’s. Although he could have been a bit livelier. Not asking too much. ...more |
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really liked it
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I read A Glastonbury Romance, all 1120 pages, and I was utterly flabbergasted – nay, gobsmacked. How did anyone write such an off the wall freaked out
I read A Glastonbury Romance, all 1120 pages, and I was utterly flabbergasted – nay, gobsmacked. How did anyone write such an off the wall freaked out book, how did he get it published, and what kind of lunatic was he anyway? I found out that Morine Krissdottir* kindly wrote this first biography for me back in 2007, to explain everything. When she was given the job of writing this biography of a widely unread novelist, “philosopher”** and all-out weirdo she wondered what material she would have to work from, since he died in 1962. What she got was 37 years of huge diaries, 800 letters to his wife***, many sacks of stuff from the family’s loft containing “in total disorder” hundreds of letters to and from the many brothers, sisters, friends and strangers, typescripts, manuscripts, photographs, old dog licenses, income tax returns, contracts and bills; and then the word got round that she was writing this biography so she started receiving sacks of other stuff from other people. I had to smile. The father was a vicar in leafy rural England. This vicar had 11 children so Morine is often overwhelmed trying to keep track of the other ten kids, their spouses, their children, their fallings out and illnesses through the decades. Ah, also, all these kids were known to each other by nicknames, so there’s that too. It’s a lot to keep straight. JCP fell into a job after university somewhat by accident. He became a lecturer in further education, first in Britain, then in the USA. You jump on a train and go to Hartlepool (or Minneapolis) and lecture to some randoms on the novels of Thomas Hardy then next day it’s off to Newcastle (or Little Rock) to do Chaucer – you get the idea. So it turns out he was brilliant at this, using the techniques later adopted by televangelists. He was wild, intense and unpredictable. They loved him! Once I heard him talk on Hardy for over two hours to an audience of over two thousand in a huge auditorium in the heart of Chicago’s slums; throughout those 130-odd minutes there was not a sound from his listeners save an occasional roar of applause or laughter; and when he finished speaking we rose like one person to our feet, demanding more. JCP described his lecturing : When I stopped, after lecturing for an hour and a half, I felt light, airy, frivolous, gay, and butterfly-like; whereas my audience were so wilted, so drooping, so exhausted, so wrung-out, that they were like people who had spent a night of the extremest form of erotic debauch! He was inclined to write about himself like this My vitality is so adamantine, my will is so strong, that it is difficult for people to believe that so galvanized a Jack-in-the-box, making such lively gesticulations, should be completely skinless and raw under its motley jacket. Now we must talk about his sex life. It started conventionally enough : As well as pornography, he also tried prostitutes, and at one point was sleeping with “three sisters of the same family”, one of whom was only twelve, in a Brighton flop-house. In 1896 at age 24 he conventionally married and was immediately unhappy. He discovered he could no longer stomach conventional sex, if he ever could. After 6 years Margaret, his wife, gave birth to a son. So here is a boggling account of how that came to be : Powys in later years assiduously prompted the myth that he was unable or unwilling to have normal sexual relationships, and that in any case, he was particularly frightened of sexual intercourse with a virgin. Margaret… went to a hospital to be surgically “deflowered”. Nonetheless, since even “the least reference to normal sex functions turned my stomach” he considered her subsequent pregnancy a “miracle”. Make of this what you will. Maybe it was the milkman! So in 1905 (age 33) he went off to be a lecturer in America and from then on abandoned his wife & son. No surprise you know, men do this all the time (see Brideshead Revisited for a contemporary example). He always sent a big chunk of his earnings back to them. And being very middle class in the early 1900s you couldn’t expect her household to function with anything less than two housemaids, a cook and a gardener (p153). When he was 49 he met a 26 year old American called Phyllis and they were together for the rest of his long long life. But he didn’t get a divorce, which in those days led to some awkwardness. His nickname for Phyllis was "the T.T." which stood for Tiny Thin as she was always tending to the anorexic, which he loved, because – of course – he had a thing for tiny girls who looked like boys. She put up with his thousand phobias, imaginary illnesses, bizarre choices of homes and self-invented religion all the way to 1962. And she did all the typing. Naturellement. [image] (didn't smile much - had all his teeth taken out and refused to have any false teeth) What with the First World War and the Depression his lecturing started to nosedive so he decided to write six vast (600-1200 pages) flowery mystical novels and what appear to be from this biographer’s description fatuous borderline incomprehensible philosophical treatises called The Meaning of Culture, In Defence of Sensuality, A Philosophy of Solitude, The Art of Happiness – most of which, believe it or not, sold well. Our biographer, who is a huge Powys fan, tells us that some of these books do not make “comfortable reading in our politically correct times” meaning that they are hugely misogynistic. That is not an assumption – in 1934 he wrote an autobiography called Autobiography which he said he was “going to make it the most original of all autobiographies by deliberately omitting all feminines in it” – that’s right, an account of his life with no mention of any women including his mother. Throughout his life he had a phobia of breasts which included a horror of himself growing breasts. This guy was a total mess. And yet, in the one novel I read A Glastonbury Romance there are many affectionately described female characters and I might have said before reading this biography he was a bit of a feminist. I think intellectual coherence and John Cowper Powys were complete strangers. You might guess that JCP hated modern life, never owned a car or a telephone, always lived in tiny cottages, most of which had no running water or electricity, loved to commune with Nature, especially rocks, was a fanatical anti-vivisectionist and vegetarian, and scraped by most of the time on hand-outs from his less deranged brothers. An interesting person, and a very cool biography. *An Icelandic Canadian, in case you were wondering **proto-New Age frother at the mouth would be a more accurate term ***only about 6 or 7 FROM his wife – was that a red flag? You bet! [image] ...more |
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| 6,468
| 1998
| Oct 30, 2001
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it was amazing
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The whole story is astonishing. You read 600 dense pages about how an obscure nonentity born in Austria became the absolute dictator of Germany and wa
The whole story is astonishing. You read 600 dense pages about how an obscure nonentity born in Austria became the absolute dictator of Germany and was worshipped as a demigod and after Ian Kershaw has explained in detail how it all happened you still want to know how did that happen??? Part of the explanation of this bizarre totally incredible story is that, according to the author, and he says this time and time again, the German people wanted it to happen. They were looking for, they were yearning for a Hitler. Maybe not Hitler, maybe not Adolf Hitler, but someone Hitlerish. Another part is that Hitler was lucky – for instance 13 years before he was born his father changed his name to Hitler from Schicklgruber. As the author says, can you imagine “Heil Schicklgruber!”? And another part is that Hitler was brilliant at one thing, he was a born rabblerouser, yelling and ranting about his vulgar extreme prejudices for two hours at a time, in public. And the people loved it. So, born in 1889, dropped out of school aged 16 and never went back, refused to get a job, said he was going to be a great artist, age 18 went to Vienna to sit exams and go to the top art school, they rejected him out of hand, he dossed around Vienna, tried again, failed again, ran out of money and sometimes slept rough in the streets. Hitler had now reached rock bottom. Some time in the weeks before Christmas 1909, thin and bedraggled, in filthy, lice-ridden clothes, his feet sore from walking around, Hitler joined the human flotsam and jetsam finding their way to the large, recently established doss-house for the homeless…the 20 year old would-be artistic genius had joined the tramps, winos and down and outs in society’s basement. A little later he left the dosshouse, having found he could do small paintings of street scenes and buildings and sell them and scrape a bare living. For years he lived in nasty cheap flats, had almost no friends, certainly no girlfriends. This was his miserable lifestyle for seven years until at the age of 25 he was rescued by the First World War. No one in their right mind would have guessed this poor broke-down failure would cause the Second World War. [image] (Hitler almost unrecognisable on the right) In the war he was a dispatch runner (if you saw the movie 1917 you know what they did, it was extremely dangerous, most of them died.) He was decorated twice for bravery and he was very lucky to survive the war. You probably know that towards the end he was gassed and was pretty much blind for two weeks. But what about when the war ended? Approaching thirty years of age, without education, career or prospects, his only plans were to stay in the army as long as possible. Someone described him at the time : “he was like a stray dog looking for a master”. That was in 1920. By 1933 he was the supreme leader of the Third Reich and was about to annihilate millions. **** This is part one of a great biography. Here are a few quotes to give you a flavour : Critical observers could remain uncomprehending at a melange of half-truths, distortions, over-simplifications, and vague, pseudo-religious redemptionist promises. But the 16,000 people jammed into the Sportpalast had not turned up to hear an intellectual discourse. They had heard what they had come to hear. 14 September 1930 : the Nazis advanced at one stroke from the 12 seats and mere 2.6% of the vote in 1928 to 107 seats and 18.3%, making it the second largest party in the Reichstag. 1932 : …travelling the length and breadth of Germany, and addressing huge crowds in twelve cities during the eleven day campaign. In Breslau he arrived four hours late, in Stuttgart two hours behind schedule. The crowds still waited. Hitler’s own actions were of only secondary importance in bringing him to power. …standing with outstretched arm for seven hours while the Hitler Youth paraded past him [What did the middle-class think of the Nazis?] The communists were revolutionaries, they would take away private property, impose a class dictatorship, and rule in the interests of Moscow. The National Socialists were vulgar and distasteful, but they stood for German interests, they would uphold German values, and they would not take away private property. Hitler’s party, with a third of the voters behind it, went further and advocated compulsory sterilization of the hereditarily sick. Some of Papen’s conservative friends also expressed their deep concern at the prospect of a Hitler cabinet. To one who warned him that he was placing himself in Hitler’s hands, Papen replied: “You are mistaken. We’ve hired him.” There was no inevitability about Hitler’s accession to power. Democracy was surrendered without a fight. Within a month [of Hitler becoming chancellor] civil liberties had been extinguished. …Within four months the once powerful trade unions were dissolved. In less than six months, all opposition parties had been suppressed or gone into voluntary liquidation, leaving the Nazis as the only party. Without any orders from above, and without any coordination, assaults on Jewish businesses and the beating up of Jews by Nazi thugs became commonplace. The reordering of German cultural life along Nazi lines was far reaching indeed. But the most striking feature was the alacrity and eagerness with which intellectuals, writers, artists, performers and publicists actively collaborated in moves which not only impoverished and straight-jacketed German culture for the next 12 years but banned and outlawed some of its most glittering exponents. The symbolic moment of capitulation of German intellectuals to the “new spirit” of 1933 came with the burning of 10 May of the books of authors unacceptable to the regime…the burning of books which took place at all German universities that night of shame had not been initiated by Goebbels but prompted by the leadership of the German Students Association….Local authorities and police had voluntarily assisted in clearing out the books to be burned from public libraries. The levels of hero-worship had never been witnessed before in Germany…Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1933 saw an extraordinary outpouring of adulation as the entire country glutted itself with festivities in honour of “the Leader of the new Germany”. However well orchestrated the propaganda, it was able to tap popular sentiments and quasi-religious levels of devotion that could not simply be manufactured. Cardinal Faulhaber, Catholic leader of Bavaria, in a handwritten letter : “What the old parliament and parties did not accomplish in sixty years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieved in six months… May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.” This review kind of defeated me... to do it justice I would have to write a thirty page essay - and no one wants that! But this book is RECOMMENDED ...more |
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| Jan 01, 2008
| Nov 04, 2008
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really liked it
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I’m not any kind of fan (even less so now) but he loomed large for decades and I never quite got what the fuss was all about. I heard that this biogra
I’m not any kind of fan (even less so now) but he loomed large for decades and I never quite got what the fuss was all about. I heard that this biography was a scandalous full disclosure, all kinds of nasty shocking stuff, so being a high-minded lover of literature I thought that’s for me. First point : it was written ten years before he died, so having read it, I gotta say, respect to Naipaul, he clearly didn’t give a flying flook about what anybody thought. *** He came from nowhere. Greatness strikes where it pleases, it really does. Born in a Hindu family half a generation from peasant farmers on the island of Trinidad, still a colony of the British Empire. If a guy only had his brains to get anywhere with, it was this guy. They were poor and there was a lot of them. The Indian community was a minority on Trinidad, it was a minority of a minority on an obscure island no one had heard of. From there to the Nobel Prize and being knighted and all. So there’s that. He wrote novels but mainly he turned journalism into high art. He rushed about the world interviewing and probing and cranking out 500 pagers summing up India (twice, one gloomy and the second optimistic), the Caribbean, South America, you know… the whole world. He had it on a string. He was never especially popular but there was a hardcore of critics who thought he walked on water. PAT’S STORY He made it to Oxford University on a scholarship and like a lot of timid young men he married his first girlfriend, Pat. They were both 22. It was 1955. When they got married neither family was informed and there was no wedding ring. He said later it was because "I had no interest in jewellery. I didn’t think it was important…. I had been in too deep with Pat, who did not attract me sexually at all…” Patrick French comments: A wedding ring represented all that Vidia wanted to avoid: expense, the trap of marriage, social expectation. He had chosen to marry Pat, but did not want to accept the consequences of doing so. Not a good start. And like a lot of young couples they could never figure out how to talk about sex, it was too embarrassing. In the summer of 1958…he started to have sex with prostitutes… he would visit them in the afternoon in secret while Pat was at work Pat’s story is nothing but sorry and sad. It turned out that she was the perfect doormat. Friend David Pryce-Jones commented: She would have done anything for Vidia. There is a human phenomenon called “a great man’s wife” and she was such a thing. Mrs Nabokov was another. They are absolutely convinced of their husband’s genius and will do anything the husband asks to promote that genius. Another friend said: She was awed by him… she had to do her bit to encourage the flowering of his talents: if that meant not creating a single creak when walking in the house, so be it. MARGARET’S STORY In 1972 at the age of 40 he was in Argentina and he met a hot Argentinian woman called Margaret. Margaret was Vidia’s ideal woman, a woman of a kind who had existed previously only in his fantasy life: he could string her along and mistreat her, with her abject consent. Margaret was unlike Pat in almost all respects: tempestuous, cynical and sexy. Their relationship, battered and disturbed, would endure for almost a quarter of a century. In the first couple of years after the affair began she had three abortions, saying each time it was VSN’s child. He commented later : Margaret was going to have a child. I was quite happy for it to be aborted. Wicked people have said it was someone else’s, but I think it was mine. Back to Patrick: He wanted her to behave like a nun and sometimes come to England or wherever he happened to be travelling – for eight or ten days at a time to be the object of what she called his cruel sexual desires….Vidia even expected her to pay for it At one point in a visit to India “he had a stormy falling out with Margaret.” “I had to send her back,” said Vidia later, as if she were an unwanted parcel. This was to be a pattern on their foreign tours : passion, dispute, dismissal. So this triangle went on for about twenty years. He would run about the world doing his journalism and dial her up and she would come a-running. Essentially Margaret became doormat number two. AS I LAY DYING Then Pat got breast cancer. While she was in remission, Vidia made some frank comments in an interview with Der Spiegel. He said When I was young, you know, I was a great frequenter of prostitutes. I found them intensely stimulating. And later said the same thing to the New Yorker (“I became a great prostitute man”). It became headline news, given the reluctance of men on this subject. Patrick says: For Pat, it was devastation… For Vidia, what he said was a memory of old days before Margaret; for Pat it was a gross revelation, and an insult to her status as his loving wife The next thing that happened was that in 1995 in Pakistan he met a hot 42 year old woman and immediately decided to ditch Margaret, wait for Pat to die, then marry this new lady. Which he did. DESERT ISLAND DISCS When I found he had been on Desert Island Discs I dropped this book and grabbed my phone and instantly listened to the whole programme. (You can do this too. They are all available.) On this programme the distinguished guest is gently interviewed about their illustrious career and chooses eight gramophone records they can have to take with them to the imaginary desert island upon which they have been deposited. Norman Mailer confessed when he was on this programme that he didn’t care much for music and he had chosen his eight records not on their merit but because they reminded him of the eight women he’d been married to. VS Naipaul likewise confessed he did care much for music. From a notebook : My detestation of music – the lowest art form, too accessible, capable of stirring people who think too little It was eerie listening to the old buffer after reading about him for so long. He sounded posh – no surprise. But anyone who doesn't like music is just a plain weirdo in my humble opinion. THE GOLD STANDARD GROUCH As awards and honours and hard cash showered down upon him, he just got grouchier. Typical passage from this book : With no family of his own, Vidia’s thoughts were often on his mother and siblings, nephews and nieces. This did not mean he felt benevolent towards them. Or When Vidia’s relations and foreign acquaintances visited Britain he did his best to avoid them. KEEPING FIT THE NAIPAUL WAY From a profile in Vogue, 1979 He keeps fit by flipping over backwards until the palms of his hands touch the ground behind him and whipping upright again 200 times a day. I can’t even visualise this. I have been trying, but… VS Naipaul doing this? [image] 200 times a day? Do people actually read what they write? LIFE BEFORE MOBILE PHONES On being told he had won the Booker Prize in 1971, he needed to confirm this exciting information. Philip French says Despite the cost, he made a daytime telephone call Later on, Philip French usefully reminds us that In the early 1970s, international calls were expensive rarities and a telephone was a single, fixed, bulky contraption kept in one place such as a hall or a sitting room, attached to the wall by a wire. This is I suppose for any reader who has never seen an old movie ...more |
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WAIT, WHAT’S THIS? YOU JUST READ AN ORWELL BIOGRAPHY Yes, this is a different one. This is the Authorised Biography. ARE YOU SERIOUSLY ASKING US TO BEL WAIT, WHAT’S THIS? YOU JUST READ AN ORWELL BIOGRAPHY Yes, this is a different one. This is the Authorised Biography. ARE YOU SERIOUSLY ASKING US TO BELIEVE THAT AFTER 600 PAGES OF ONE ORWELL BIOGRAPHY YOU HAVE NOW READ 500 PAGES OF ANOTHER ONE? No… I only read some parts of this one. EXPLAIN Well when I read the Bernard Crick one he added a chapter at the end where he gets into this big smackdown cage fight with the other guy, Michael Shelden. Harsh words are said and I became intrigued. With these hoity-toity literary nobs you usually don’t find them slagging each other off. I SEE THAT SHELDEN’S ONE IS CALLED “THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY” Yes – that’s the kiss of death for me. Why do they call biographies “authorised”? Isn’t it like saying “the widow and the family have okayed this snow job, everything embarrassing has been removed”? I always avoid authorised biographies. WHAT’S THIS FIGHT ALL ABOUT THEN? Well when Sonia Orwell decided there should be a biography she picked Crick to do it, in the late 70s. So he was the authorised guy. But when she read his book she hated it (“too political, too dry and too unsympathetic”) so she de-authorised him! And tried to stop him publishing it! But she had lost the contract she had with him! Literally! Couldn’t find it! So he went right ahead. Then she died. 11 years later Shelden popped up with his authorised one in which he trashed Crick, then Crick republished his book in which he trashed Selden. Pistols at dawn. WHAT DID CRICK SAY? He moans that Shelden engaged in “aggressive commercial rivalry”. “He acts as if scholarship is a boxing ring”. But more to the point this whole fight is between two incompatible ideas of what biography should be. Crick says I grew to be sceptical of much of the fine writing, balanced appraisal and psychological insight that is the hallmark of the English tradition of biography and more : readers should realise that they are often being led by the nose or that the biographer is fooling himself by an affable pretence of being able to enter into another person’s mind. And I realise that the externality of my method runs the risk that I appear unsympathetic to Orwell Crick thinks you should report what the person did and wrote and what happened to them. Psychology is out. This is why Sonia thought it was “dry”. Having read it I kinda see her point. There are juicy bits of Orwell’s life that Crick scuttles away from. For instance the embarrassing period after his first wife’s death when he went round proposing marriage to no less than four women, one time using the come-on “would you like to be the widow of a literary man?” and on more than one occasion physically grabbing and pawing them. This sexual harrassment is in Sheldon and not in Crick. WHY DID SONIA SCREAM AT CRICK “OF COURSE HE SHOT A FUCKING ELEPHANT”? Crick hemmed and hawed about whether you should take some of the essays Orwell wrote to be the literal truth – his memoir of his prep school was one he doubted, and “Shooting an Elephant” was another. Sonia Orwell once screamed across the table at Bertorelli’s (to the delight of other clients) “Of course he shot a fucking elephant!” I said that none of the old hands could remember such a remarkable incident and I’d searched the Rangoon Gazette in vain. “Bloody fact-grubber!” AH YES, SONIA She is included in the amusing memoir by David Plante called Difficult Women. He says Sonia was naturally ill-tempered, as if just having to live, day after day, were reason enough . Crick gives a great example She drank a great deal and was either shouting at me “Can’t we have lunch like two friends without your taking bloody notes all the time like a policeman?” or demanding “Why am I wasting my bloody time giving you all this when you are not taking a single fucking note!” There are ten or so pages just about Sonia in Shelden’s book – they’re fun but Crick is quite right to say that a biography of Orwell shouldn’t be about what his widow did after he died, should it? (Sonia was married to Orwell for a whole three months.) There’s something funny here though – Sonia thought Crick was too dry and unemotional; his replacement Selden takes his time to pretty much trash her as an obnoxious gold digger and that the marriage was a fairly cold blooded deal between the two of them (“He needed someone to take care of him and help him stay alive and the reward would be the income from his books”). Sheldon later says In the meantime Sonia tried to make a new life for herself, with the help of Orwell’s money. Her period of mourning was short. DEAR GOODREADERS It’s quite possible that Sheldon’s biography is way more amusing than the one I read. ...more |
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Tedious tiresome turgid tergiversating garrulous prolix dreary wearisome vague diffuse pompous endless unconcise unpithy depressing defeating willsapp
Tedious tiresome turgid tergiversating garrulous prolix dreary wearisome vague diffuse pompous endless unconcise unpithy depressing defeating willsapping dumped ditched discontinued jacked in given up ABANDONED
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| 4.27
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| May 15, 2016
| May 15, 2016
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liked it
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When I finished this book I was glad to be done with Harry Crews. I read The Gospel Singer, A Feast of Snakes and Harry’s memoir A Childhood, and love
When I finished this book I was glad to be done with Harry Crews. I read The Gospel Singer, A Feast of Snakes and Harry’s memoir A Childhood, and loved all three. But the more I read about Harry himself, the more I disliked him and I knew I would have paid good money to never be within half a mile of him. It made me wonder if I generally liked the people I read biographies of so I checked the last ten and the results were LIKED George Orwell Patrick Hamilton Janet Frame Andrea Dworkin Fyodor Dostoyevsky Lyndon Johnson DISLIKED Patricia Highsmith Huey P Long Grace Metalious George Washington [image] Harry for most of his life was the loud tattooed beefy obnoxious braggart in the bar who if he catches your eye might just pick a fight for no particular reason except that he’d already consumed a great deal of whiskey and beer. Before arriving at the bar that morning he’d got up at 5 am and started writing at 5.30, making sure he’d done his 500 words for the day before hitting the bars. He often lived in shacks without electricity whilst at the same time being a tenured professor at the University of Florida where he ran a rigorous creative writing course. As the decades rolled by, he became more an embodiment of Southern Gothic than a real person. (Harry’s fights, by the way, mostly ended with his being beat up – “despite all his experience, his karate training, his time in the gym, and his intimidating presence, he usually managed to come out on the losing end.”) [image] SOMETHING THAT RAISED MY EYEBROWS His first novel The Gospel Singer was published in 1968 and none other than Elvis Presley read it and “envisioned himself in the title role”, says Ted Geltner. Colonel Tom Parker vetoed the idea, no surprise, and Elvis Still thought the book was Hollywood material and passed the idea on to a friend and disciple of his, Tom Jones. Ted tells us that Tom also read The Gospel Singer and also “saw the potential in Harry’s book and decided it was his ticket into film production”. So a meeting was arranged and Harry met Tom Jones, where it seems “Tom was even more smitten with Sally [Harry’s wife] than he had been with the book”. (Yes, it’s that kind of biography.) Anyway, Tom bought the rights but then no movie ever got made. Whether The Bee Gees ever read The Gospel Singer is not stated. [image] HARRY’S STRANGE CAREER Harry’s career was like this : day job as creative writing teacher at the university – this paid peanuts. More importantly, madly productive novelist (eight novels in eight years). All his eventually 15 novels didn’t sell. The reviews were mostly excellent and he often made the “notable books of the year” lists but the public never caught on and after selling 3000 copies they all went out of print, and most of them are still out of print. Harry thought he was writing Literature with a capital L (and I think I agree). He didn’t care if his books sold or not. But somebody had to pay for his vast intake of alcohol, so he wrote a lot of screenplays for movies that got optioned but never produced – that was his biggest earner. Then finally, for ten years or so, he was the go-to in-depth reporting guy for Playboy and Esquire. They loved his penchant for horrible places where horrible things happened. WHAT HAPPENS IN CHAPTER 30 He opens Norman Mailer’s latest novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance and sees his name mentioned by a character Lydia Lunch, lead singer of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, forms an all-female band called Harry Crews. When Harry hears their music he really hates it. [image] Sonic Youth invite him to a concert & he meets the band. Madonna becomes a fan and invites him to the upcoming heavyweight fight between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks. He meets Sean Penn who was married to Madonna at the time (how could I have forgotten that?) and Sean naturally wants to do a movie from Harry’s latest book. And on and on it goes. But then the interest from these famous people wanes and Harry ends up drunk, broke and sprawled on the floor of his no-electricity shack in the woods. TWO TYPICAL ANECDOTES At Laurel Falls, right near the Tennessee-North Carolina border, Harry dropped acid with a suicidal Vietnam vet whom, later that evening, he saved from diving off the falls to his death by delivering an Okinawan reverse roundhouse kick, which he remembered from his karate training. On the last day of class, Harry showed up completely drunk, dressed from head to toe in a gorilla suit, toting a basket filled with bananas. He jumped up on his desk, thumped his chest, and scratched his backside. Then, one by one, he began pulling bananas off the bunch and throwing them at the students as they stared up at him in disbelief. “Life is just a bunch of bananas!” Harry bellowed. [image] Well, he might have been a pain in the ass, but I bet there's never been another author who could execute an Okinawan reverse roundhouse kick. ...more |
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| 0140058567
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| 4.06
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| Aug 26, 1982
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really liked it
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He was very tall. Not quite as tall as Clint Eastwood but taller than Sean Connery. He was the patron saint of telling people what they didn’t want to
He was very tall. Not quite as tall as Clint Eastwood but taller than Sean Connery. He was the patron saint of telling people what they didn’t want to know, and he was okay with that. He was a one man Awkward Squad. I didn’t realise how posh he was. His family was, he said, “lower upper middle-class”. His father worked as a manager in the (wait for it) Opium Department of the Government of India. Yeah, there was an Opium Department. As soon as Eric was born in India his mother took him back to England and he then only saw his father once before he was 8. Already you have material for many therapy sessions in later life! (Orwell was the last person on earth to have therapy, he would just have nailed up another sagging bookshelf.) [image] He lived a very interesting and at times dramatic life and died tragically, and this book tells the whole thing very well, almost too well, if you know what I mean. I’m exhausted! Because the Blairs didn’t have quite enough money, Eric (as he was originally) had to be clever and get scholarships which he did. So he went as a boarder to a Prep school, aged 8, and there he learned what cruel arbitrary dictatorship was. He hated it soooo much. Check out his essay “Such Such were the Joys”. At age 14 he passed the entrance exams (again) and went to Eton. Eton! The all time most aristocratic privileged and expensive school in the country, the place where such people as Boris Johnson and his fellow toffs learned that they were born to get all the top jobs. After being clever & passing exams to get to Eton he then stopped working and ended up bottom of the class. University was out. So at age 19 his father thought he should follow in his father’s footsteps and get a job in a far-flung colony of the great Empire. So he became a policeman in Burma. Of course! Well, at least it wasn’t the Opium Department. In Burma he became a deep and deadly hater of the imperial British Empire and all its evil works. When he got sick of Burma and came back to England, he lived with his parents, as you do, but then had a notion to cast off his entitlement and go and live as a tramp, a hobo, a down and out. This was a very radical, weird thing to do, a lot stranger than a beatnik or a hippy dropping out in the 50s and 60s. He would stash raggedy tramp clothes at friends’ houses and leave home and change from his good clobber and just disappear for two or three months. This went on for a couple of years. His parents must have thought he’d gone off his trolley. What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether. [image] He had a fixed notion that he wanted to become a writer but he didn’t know what sort of writer, so he started with conventional novels and got conventional part time jobs. This was after he wrote Down and Out in London and Paris and gave up the tramping. None of these early books sold. Spoiler alert, none of his books sold much until the famous last two, and he was dead before the big money from them started rolling in. He lived in a state of near poverty most of his life, therefore. In 1934 we read On the ground floor there was a tramdriver and his wife., and in the basement a plumber. George took a weekly bath in the public baths. Reminds me of the miner who indignantly said “I have a bath every Friday night, whether I need one or not.” He got married and moved from London to a teeny village and a little cottage without electricity which was also a grocery store, so he became a grocer and a keeper of hens and goats. They loved the goat. The called it The Holy Goat. Then came 1936 and the Spanish Civil War. Up till then he was a vague kind of leftwinger but didn’t pay too much attention to politics. That all changed. He went to Spain and fought in actual trenches. His daring adventures were terminated by a sniper’s bullet which went through his throat and out the other side. Sounds fatal to me but it wasn’t. It did damage his voice though. No surprise. There’s a feeling you get with Orwell that he did things to get a book out of them – Burma for Burmese Days, tramps for Down and Out, Spain for Homage to Catalonia. In one case he was paid to go and find out how the poor lived up North, and this became The Road to Wigan Pier. Well, all of this is what might be considered these days to be immersive journalism. But he got much more immersed than any journalist I heard of. In Spain he came upon the Heinz 57 Varieties of the left wing. There were communists and socialists and anarchists. But there were different kinds of each – there were Marxists who weren’t communists, for instance. Every group traduced all the others and called them vermin in the pay of Moscow or London. George figured out in Spain what he was – a democratic socialist and an anti-Communist. He wrote : “Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force.” The implication of that is that he believed in revolution himself. Well, you know, we all want to change the world. One thing he hated the Communists for was “betraying the revolution” (see Animal Farm). Meaning that the Russian revolution had been stolen by despotic Communists who were now practicing state capitalism and calling it socialism. Pravda, 16 December 1936: In Catalonia the elimination of Trotskyites and Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun. It will be carried out with the same energy as it was carried out in the Soviet Union. Aside from the bullet through the throat, Orwell had a bracing (= physically wretched and horrific) but thrilling experience: I was breathing the air of equality, and I was simple enough to imagine that it existed all over Spain. I did not realise that more or less by chance I was isolated among the most revolutionary section of the Spanish working class. Now that we know that the possibility of revolution in any country has faded to insignificance, these are long-dead arguments, but if you read Orwell’s biography you are going to get pages of them. (“Orwell’s opposition to centralisation or “oligarchical collectivism” came close at this time to some aspects of anarchist thought”). [image] He was amusingly described as an “intellectual anti-intellectual” and as “a fellow-travelling tightrope walker”. He struggled all the time trying to wrench the idea of patriotism away from the fascists and the conservatives. I really sympathised with this, it’s still a problem. (If I see the English flag displayed in a street march or outside a house I always assume they’re far right white supremacists.) When the Second World War rolled around and it was presented as a fight between the democracies and the dictatorships, Orwell was constantly reminding British readers of the existence of “six hundred million disenfranchised human beings” in the Empire. But nevertheless he decided “the bad must be defended against the worse”. He was a bit of a grouch and a puritan in some ways, hated all modern contraptions like the radio (!) even though he appeared on the BBC many times. (But there is no existing recording of any of his broadcasts, how sad.) He was dogged by the awful disease TB, which killed so many people back then, such as Jimmie Rodgers the country singer and my own father’s first wife. When he was on his deathbed he married his second wife Sonia, she was 31, he was 47, and he died two months later. That’s a whole other story! With Orwell you can go on and on… he’s always either saying something great or doing something interesting. UPDATE : It's possible I read the wrong biography.... see this non-review for further information https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
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| 0948238399
| 9780948238390
| 0948238399
| 4.20
| 83
| Dec 31, 1991
| Jan 01, 2008
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really liked it
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You couldn’t make it up or if you did people would say it was too outre, too ludicrous and frankly, too Freudian. The overbearing father inherited £10
You couldn’t make it up or if you did people would say it was too outre, too ludicrous and frankly, too Freudian. The overbearing father inherited £100,000 (= around £9 million in today’s money) when he turned 21 in 1884. On this auspicious 21st birthday he went out to celebrate and met a prostitute. This is probably not so surprising. But then he married her. That was surprising. And then later she committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. So he married again and had 3 kids. His younger son was Patrick and when he was 23 he met a prostitute and fell in love and would have married her except she finally ditched him. Patrick had a very intense relationship with his mother : My darling Mummie – Sweet One - … no woman on earth can come between me and my love and adoration of yourself. My love for you has been going on for 26 years and will never never abate. I shall never wander away, or regard you as any thing but the first and loveliest woman on earth. I mean this, my own. That is from a letter explaining that he had just got married without inviting her. Haha, how's that for passive aggression. There are so many eye-goggling things that happened to Patrick – the car accident that nearly severed his nose so that when they repaired it with plastic surgery he thought it looked like a clown’s nose; the wild success as a playwright at the age of 25 with Rope, and then another wild success 9 years later with Gaslight (the play that gave us the term gaslighting); his first marriage which turned immediately into an entirely platonic affair because his wife didn’t want anything to do with his bondage fantasies; and, of course, the total commitment to Marxism! Stalin was his man! All of which was floated on a gradually increasing alcoholism that by his 30s was up to three bottles of whisky a day. Given the fact that he also was a chain smoker, that he lasted to the age of 58 is a strong testament to the robustness of the human frame. He wrote three painfully funny novels in his 20s – • The Midnight Bell (1929) • The Siege of Pleasure (1932) • The Plains of Cement (1934) And later Hangover Square (1941) and The Slaves of Solitude (1947), both great. He was a miniaturist. No sprawling canvases, no ambition at all except to mercilessly pin human haplessness to the page, making the reader squirm uncontrollably as he recognise himself. In Hamilton’s books, love is the drug that smashes and wrecks everything. No one is ever loved by a person who loves them. When love comes, you should run, and not look back. After WW2 he wrote three short novels about a con-man, nobody liked them at all. When he died in 1962 he was almost forgotten. ...more |
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liked it
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This was truly bonkers. To be more accurate, a truly bonkers ridiculous borderline sub-literate totally compelling WTF sleazefest. Here’s a couple of This was truly bonkers. To be more accurate, a truly bonkers ridiculous borderline sub-literate totally compelling WTF sleazefest. Here’s a couple of facts. Grace died on 25 February 1964. This 190 page “biography” was issued about a year later. It was co-written by Grace’s ever-loving on-again off-again husband (he married her twice) and a lady with no other books to her name. It was only ever issued as a 60 cent Dell Original paperback, no other editions, meaning that proper publishers must have politely or impolitely declined this embarrassingly obvious rush-job cash-in. And it was never reprinted. I would have avoided this too except that the proper 460-page biography of Grace Metalious is really expensive. But I’m kind of glad I got to read this. It stretched my brain in unusual ways! Here’s an example of the prose style: “Hey, there’s Slats,” remarked one of the boys. “Slats” was a nickname that Grace had acquired during her early years in high school because her chest was absolutely flat flat. It had changed considerably during her senior year, however, and when she walked into the soda shop, her physical endowments were now quite noticeably prominent. (Yes, it does say “flat flat”. ) These perfectly recollected conversations appear throughout the book. Although George Metalious often comes across as a bit of a dimwit, his memory was keen. Later he is trying to explain their early relationship : He had to feel adequate somewhere in life, and so he tried to prove his adequacy with Grace. She responded to these needs because she, too, had to prove herself adequate George is a patient, completely adequate man. Here he is reminiscing about the good times: The only time they seemed completely happy was when they were in bed together. Grace, eager to learn all she did not know, and George patiently teaching her all he knew and much he improvised as the occasion demanded. The big revelation comes on pages 80-81. It turns out that Peyton Place was really written by both of them! After they come up with the idea of a racy novel about a small town “he lifted her yielding body into his arms and carried her into the small bedroom” – okay George, enough of that already – “they laughed, giggled, and once more became two teenagers very, very much in love. They made love to consummate the idea and the book was conceived that night” – really, George, there is just no stopping you! “We’ll write about life as it really is,” they both said. And later It seemed judicious to George for Grace to garner the full glory and therefore “find herself”, and besides, they had agreed that a first novel might not sell as readily if it was known to have been the result of a collaboration. Well, so, as you know, when PP was published America went crazy about it and almost endless gushing torrents of dollars then rained down upon the up to now poor couple and their three little kids. So what happened next? She ditched George immediately and took up with a local deejay. Then came the wild years of bad parenting and full time alcoholism, jetting out to Hollywood, suites at the Plaza, fountains of highballs, dubious contracts, thieving freeloaders. While all this was going on George listened to the radio and read the newspapers in his one room “suite” in Stow, Massachusetts But was he bitter? No, not at all. After her ghastly early death from alcoholism at age 39 he just wrote a weird, self-regarding tell-all quickie biography of his famous ex-wife, which very few people appear to have read. IN CONCLUSION While this is not to be compared with Richard Ellman’s majestic James Joyce or Leon Edel’s three volume Henry James, there is no doubt that this is a very memorable literary biography. If you can call it that. It’s hilarious. [image] ...more |
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| 0062571966
| 9780062571960
| 4.21
| 1,091
| Oct 23, 2018
| Aug 21, 2018
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really liked it
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It’s clear that some kindly authors sit around thinking “What is the exact book that Paul Bryant wants to read? Aha! Got it! I will now write that boo
It’s clear that some kindly authors sit around thinking “What is the exact book that Paul Bryant wants to read? Aha! Got it! I will now write that book!” Alec Nevala-Lee is one of those lovely writers. * His book is that perfect thing I never thought could exist, a kind of biography of John W Campbell who was the living embodiment of science fiction from the 30s to the 70s and whose life was entwined with those of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L Ron Hubbard. As a youthful SF fan I had wondered long about these guys and I never thought I’d ever get to find out what they were like, and what they did apart from type their sometimes brilliant stories. Lemme tell you, it’s a strange tale. A DIGRESSION ABOUT THE RECHERCHE NOMENCLATURE OF AMERICAN GOLDEN AGE SF AUTHORS I was always fascinated by their weird names : Cordwainer Smith L Sprague de Camp H Beam Piper Theodore Sturgeon Damon Knight A E van Vogt And not forgetting two famous editors Groff Conklin August Derleth Sorry to say that the science fiction community could not sustain this barrage of otherworldliness and modern writers have really boring names like Christopher Rowe, Colin Davies, Robert Reed and Pat Murphy. No offence, but really, how dull. WHAT DOES AN EDITOR DO? I thought in my ignorance that a magazine editor reads stuff and accepts or rejects it and sometimes suggests improvements. John Campbell was not like this. He did himself write one very famous story called Who Goes There? In 1938, which was filmed as The Thing, but he was not a writer. Instead he had a whole lot of tame authors at his disposal, and he would spin plots and ideas out of his brain, and tell them to write stories with these plots and ideas in them. Then he would demand rewrites, and then maybe he would publish them. For instance, he pounced on the starstruck overawed 22 year old Isaac Asimov and more or less made him write the Foundation series of stories & later novels, and also demanded more robot stories too. The famous three laws of Robotics were invented during long conversations between the two. Each said the other invented them. Campbell believed in SF to an almost painful degree, and this was a good thing. His magazine was the best and paid the best. But also, as we get to find out very dismayingly as we speed through this tremendous book, John Campbell was a total crank, not to mention a rightwing pro-Vietnam War anti-civil rights homophobic racist. I will come back to this in a moment. But first… THERE’S A SCIENTOLOGIST ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM The story of early SF and the personalities involved is a great story but Alec Nevala-Lee has to hang on tight because one of the three big authors orbiting Astounding magazine was none other than L Ron Hubbard, and HIS crazy mindbending story is way bigger than the main story Alec is trying to tell here. L Ron comes quite close to derailing this book because as soon as the epic mutant wierdness that was L Ron’s life starts to unfold the reader is like to say okay Alec, forget science fiction, this is WAY loonier and way more FUN! Trying to contain (some of) the story of the amazing fraud that was L Ron Hubbard in this book is like igniting some jumping jacks and then throwing them in a tin box. It began with the invented gibberish called Dianetics. Campbell was in on the ground floor, taking it all in and suggesting lines of enquiry to the madman Hubbard. It was trailed in an article in Astounding. Dianetics was going to be like the second coming, a new science of the mind which would replace psychiatry, which was totally wrong, and would fix everybody’s mental ailments in one go. Just purchase this slim volume, Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health, published in May 1950, yours for ten measly bucks. Campbell wrote to Heinlein about the life-saving properties of Dianetics: We have case histories on homos. One we worked on for ten days got married three months later. A fifteen year record of homosexuality behind him, too. Naturally the psychiatry industry did not take this seriously, when they noticed it at all they figured LRH was another in a long line of quacks. But of course this was at the time when the psychiatric profession was dishing out electro-shock therapy, insulin comas and pre-frontal lobotomies right and left to their poor customers. So who were the quacks? Well of course just because I’m wrong doesn’t make you right. So Dianetics became Scientology and for tax reasons Scientology stopped being a therapy and started being a religion, as you know. ASIMOV, THE LIBERAL-LEFT SCEPTICAL SEX PEST So Hubbard and Campbell involved Robert Heinlein in this dianetics/scientology mumbo jumbo, and Isaac Asimov, the other big name author of the day, immediately saw this was a crock and wanted nothing to do with it. Good old Isaac. Also, he always stuck to his socially progressive liberal left ideas when these three looming conservatives were wagging their fingers in his direction. Again, good old Isaac! I always loved his stories. Unfortunately this book reveals that he was an incessant abuser of all and every women that came within his grasp, and I mean grasp. He was the traditional octopus man. People made jokes about it. Women denounced him. But he never stopped. I hated reading all that. At another publisher, the women found excuses to leave the building whenever he was scheduled to visit …but if this treatment of women was often inexcusable, or worse, it did little to diminish the affection in which he was held by other men CAMPBELL THE TOTAL RACIST This is a warts ‘n’ all book and there is some serious racist shit you have to contend with from Campbell. For instance he defends using the n word, he defends slavery, he votes for George Wallace, he believed that some races had lower IQs than others… he was truly awful. CAMPBELL THE CLASSIC CRANK He ran the best SF magazine for decades but he was the guy who would believe like ANYTHING. Psi powers, the Dean drive (don’t ask), any flake that came in the door, he was Yeah! This will change all of human life! He was a really silly guy. ALEC NEVALA-LEE HAS ONLY GOT ONE PAIR OF HANDS As I was reading I kept saying hey Alec – tell me more about that guy, or more about this thing here, that thing there…. Bring some more of those old names to life for me… who was H Beam Piper?? But this book was already 525 pages long. 4.5 stars, a must for anyone with a fondness for ancient SF [image] *There’s the other type too, the one who think “What is the book that will fool Paul Bryant into thinking he will like it but when he reads it he will be driven half crazy with aggravation? I will write that book!” Thank you for nothing, Declan Kiberd and A O Scott. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 14, 2022
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Apr 19, 2022
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Apr 14, 2022
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ebook
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| 0330352776
| 9780330352772
| 0330352776
| 4.24
| 117
| Jun 04, 2001
| Jun 01, 2002
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really liked it
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THE GOTHIC HORROR OF JANET FRAME’S FIRST THIRTY YEARS ON EARTH 1924. Janet born to a poor family. There were four girls and one boy. 1932. Her 9 year ol THE GOTHIC HORROR OF JANET FRAME’S FIRST THIRTY YEARS ON EARTH 1924. Janet born to a poor family. There were four girls and one boy. 1932. Her 9 year old brother has his first epileptic fit. 1936. Her 16 year old sister Myrtle drowns while swimming. Turns out she had a heart defect. 1945. Janet’s first suicide attempt and admission to a mental hospital. 1947. Her 21 year old sister Isabel drowns while swimming. Turns out she also had a heart defect. Hamlet : I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on. In An Angel at her Table Janet Frame tells us she was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. For eight years between age 21 and 29 she was in (a lot) and out (not a lot) of mental hospitals and no one figured out that she wasn’t schizophrenic. Wait! What was going on? How could they not realise they’d made a mistake? Janet herself does not get into those details. According to her, what happened was that she attempted suicide by swallowing a packet of aspirin, then told her psychology teacher (she was doing a course) Mr Money, and then, that very evening her landlady called up and said "There are three men to see you. From the University." I went to the door and there were Mr Money, Mr Prince and the Head of the Department who spoke first. “Mr Money tells me you haven’t been feeling very well. We thought you might like to have a little rest… we thought you might like to come with us down to the hospital…just for a few days’ rest.” …And so I was admitted to the Dunedin hospital, to Colquhon ward, which, I was shocked to find, was a psychiatric ward. It all sounds heartless, almost brutal, and you think yeah, they would do that, it was the 1940s. But Michael King explains that it just wasn’t like that. In fact, this guy Money was like a one man Janet Frame Rescue Service, finding people to help, organising family members to visit her, and Janet was lying on his couch saying that her happiness was so acute and her misery was so unbearable that she had to die. After a week of this, finally he concluded she did need a short stay in a psychiatric ward. And he was kind and sweet and talked her into it. And then came the tragic comedy. When doctors attempted to interview her she became inhibited, elusive, sometimes overly dramatic, and subject to fits of nervous giggling. This behaviour, in conjunction with her suicide attempt and her interest in psychology, was subject to far more sinister interpretation than Frame could have known Meaning that they concluded she was schizophrenic. But wait! On that flimsy basis? JF explains in Angel that in fact she had read schizophrenic case histories and was able to put together a “repertoire” of symptoms which she would display for the doctors. In this way she was the main contributor herself towards her misdiagnosis. Why she would think that would be a good idea is left open. That is the heart of the mystery. She did have some type of mental illness, that is undeniable. She wrote I was growing increasingly fearful of the likeness between some of my true feelings and those thought of as belonging to sufferers from schizophrenia. Anyways, help was at hand. When she was 24 they decided that the new (for New Zealand) treatment called electro-convulsive therapy would be of great benefit to Janet, so she got many doses of that (two zaps, twice a week, for twelve weeks) , which in those days was administered without anaesthetic. You know what ECT is? Sure. But just to remind us all, Michael King explains It involved attaching electrodes to the scalp and passing an electric current through the brain of sufficient strength to cause convulsions and a short term coma. A couple of years later, back in the hospital, MK says Because of what her hospital notes describe as a “strong resentment” of ECT, medical staff attempted to reduce the severity of her symptoms by the prolonged use of insulin shock therapy. This treatment produced comas and convulsions, accompanied by writhings and moanings, and was believed to have beneficial effects for schizophrenics. But this new shock therapy didn’t work very well. So by December 1952 the doctors were brought to the conclusion that there was nothing left for her but a lobotomy. She was told “it would be good for me, that, following it, I would be 'out if the hospital in no time'”. She received this news with “a swamping wave of horror”. I am not surprised. She wrote about it to her old mentor John Money. He was working in another mental hospital. He replied At this hospital it is generally felt that lobotomy has not lived up to expectations : they do not perform it here. So if you have any choice in the matter… I would say no. Imagine that conversation – doctor, I’ve been mulling it over, and I don’t think, on balance, that I should have a lobotomy. Then came the couldn’t-make-it-up-twist. Days away from the operation the hospital superintendent Dr Blake-Palmer was reading his newspaper and saw The Hubert Church Memorial award for prose has been won by Miss Janet Frame for her book "The Lagoon and Other Stories". This was the country’s major literary award. Janet had no idea she had won the award, no one could contact her. Dr Blake-Palmer had no idea her writings were considered quite so highly. So made a decision. In view of the surprising evidence that his patient was actually a literary star, he took her off the list of lobotomies and said I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. MY FAVOURITE JANET FRAME PHOTOGRAPH In 1990 Jane Camion filmed An Angel at her Table, and Janet was played by three different actresses. Here she is with all three Janets. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 06, 2022
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Apr 09, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0804729220
| 9780804729222
| 0804729220
| 3.67
| 221
| 1984
| Jan 01, 2000
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really liked it
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This is the best terrible book I have read for years. It’s borderline unreadable but completely compelling. You know the expression you can’t see the
This is the best terrible book I have read for years. It’s borderline unreadable but completely compelling. You know the expression you can’t see the wood for the trees – when we read this book we can’t see the trees for the wood. Vast oceans of utter trivia wash over us, as Jiang Qing fights with a family member about funeral arrangements or a particular necklace or what she liked to wear to the beach, but when it comes to telling us why all these huge fights between communists broke out, hardly a word – they loved to call each other names like “leftist”, “ultraleftist, “counterrevolutionary”, but what was meant by these insults is anyone’s guess. Ross Terrill won’t tell you. And great events will go by in the blink of two sentences but the excruciating details of JQ’s one night stand with a football star will take five pages (see below!). If all that isn’t weird enough I would go so far as to say that this book is like to make you want to microwave your own brain (never do that) because of Ross Terrill’s ridiculous antiquated style that continually reads like a self-parody: Shanghai was a cauldron of contradictions, a city that wore its heart on its sleeve and took in its stride the epoch’s kaleidoscope of greed, thrills and death. Or She was a lurking unit of one whose charm did not conceal a metallic core of purposefulness. Or She did not torment Mao with impossible challenges…for she was genuinely bedazzled at being the philosopher-king’s lover. Or By the early 1970s, in the kingdom of Chinese communism, her smile was a bumper harvest, her frown was an earthquake, her indecision was a bureaucratic logjam. DRAMA QUEEN By the time she was 23 she had married and dispensed with three husbands, that is some going. She was a teenage stage actress then a movie actress under the name Lan Ping. She was fierce and loud and she always got noticed. She wanted to be a big star but she didn’t quite make it. She swanned around with the boho intellectuals, she was kind of a wild child. She would turn up at a famous theatre producer’s house and say well, I’ve arrived, here I am, now what? On more than one occasion she left a husband, moved to a new city and changed her name. She was doing very well as a movie actress in Shanghai in 1937 [image] and then the Japanese invaded and wrecked the whole industry so she did something very unusual. All by herself she left town and went to Yanan, a little town of caves, which was the headquarters of the Communist party. As she’d previously done with theatre producers, she just turned up unannounced. This time she said “I’m here for the revolution, what do you want me to do?” Mao Zedong took a look at this perky forthright more than somewhat attractive actress and divorced his wife. Reader, she married him – the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, the big kahuna, the boss of bosses, just like that. So that is some meteoric career. She was 24 years old. Was she a communist? Well, she figured she ought to be. It was the coming thing, kind of obvious. So, in Yunan they lived in caves – literally! That must have come as a culture shock, after the martinis and daiquiris of Shanghai. The old communists eyerolled and sneered. One said He’s a sex maniac, abandoning a comradely wife of long standing to marry a despicable actress. Mao said: Without Lan Ping’s love I can’t go on with the revolution. (Page 135). What a great quote! Do you believe it? No, I don’t either. So what we have here is a laser-focused go-getter who might have been figuring that if she couldn’t be the number one star in Chinese movies she could be the number one female star in the Chinese revolution. If she did think that, she must have been very disappointed, because the communists had other very boring ideas. The Party concluded that yes, Mao had to be allowed to keep his young sexy wife but she should be nothing but the usual self-effacing out of sight little home-maker. Title of Chapter 4 : Mao’s Housewife in Yanan (1938-49). It was not glamorous. A curious fact – because Mao was Chairman Mao and Lan could live together, which was very rare in Yanan, where most married couples could meet only on Saturdays. STUCK IN LIMBO Finally 1949 rolled around and the Communist revolution succeeded. A new phase for everyone – don’t have to live in no cave anymore for one thing! But alas, she still could not find anything to do with her ambitious energy. She wanted to DO something! Something important! Every position Jiang occupied during the 1950s she had to wrench from extremely reluctant hands. … Many women were happy to put their heads down at “women’s work”. But JQ was not. All her life she despised such activity… A humiliation was involved in women’s organisations that she never was able to endure The Party never could stand her, though, and they had a great excuse not to give her any responsibility. Your job, they said, is to take care of our great leader’s personal, nutritional and household needs. There is nothing more important than that. And the Party went further – they destroyed the evidence that she used to have a career: Prints of her movies, reviews of her performances, articles about her life as an actress, all were gradually tracked down and burned. During the claustrophobic 1950s she was ill an awful lot. Once they packed her off to a Moscow hospital for two straight years. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION This bewildering Chinese meltdown is explained by Russ Terrill as follows. After the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (Russ calls it the Great Stumble Sideways, he’s a laugh) the other top communists were thinking he was past his sell by date, there were mutterings. (He said : “they treated me like a dead ancestor”.) So to re-establish his star power he came up with this fantastical anti-old-fart campaign and like a big Chinese Pandora’s Box opener he unleased the pent-up energy of his pent-up wife AND the wild energy of Chinese teenagers at the same time. Take THAT, old farts. JQ was appointed Deputy Director of the Cultural Revolution Committee. Ka-pow! Just like that. From zero to You Have to Take Me Seriously Now. She rushed around like an usher in a theatre dividing everyone into left and right [image] For a chilling picture of life during the Cultural Revolution, see the movie To Live from 1994. A lot of people died in this period (1966 – 1970). Even approximate details are very difficult but probably somewhere between one and four million people. A whole lot of other people were “persecuted”. Although JQ was the number two person organising the whole catastrophe, Ross Terrill spends 40 pages telling us in excruciating detail how she spent the whole time tracking down and wrecking the lives of every single one of her personal perceived “enemies” going all the way back to the 1930s. There is no big picture here for the reader to grasp, It’s all feeble stuff. "Wang Guangmei didn’t sleep well for several nights after I gave her my advice on dress,” Jiang went on, “in the end she agreed with me and said she would not wear a necklace in Southeast Asia.” There are pages of this kind of stuff… do we really need it? Is that all her life was at the height of her power? ALMOST CHAIRMAN JIANG As Mao got very old and ill, naturally there were several guys who thought they might be the next Chairman. JQ had the barefaced audacity to think that SHE should get the job. Why not a woman? Just because it had only ever happened once before in China (Empress Wu Zetian, reigned 690 to 705). So she got herself a group of three true believers and together they were known as the Gang of Four. This was their best album: [image] I was expecting some exciting coup d’état fisticuffs at this point but no, the other guys organised their coup much more efficiently and the Gang of Four were scooped up without a shot being fired. There was a long ass show trial at which the judges and everyone received daily doses of the sharp end of her tongue. She was duly found guilty of sedition and sentenced to death suspended for two years pending prisoner’s good behaviour, then commuted to life. She was 67. She lasted another ten years, in prison and out on parole, then she committed suicide. CONCLUSION There’s a curious form of sexism, maybe, that emerges when the unusual women who become politically powerful are discussed – it’s like we say ah, of course we support women in politics in general, but not this particular one – Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Indira Gandhi, Jiang Qing – not these particular ones. Well, they are all going to be awkward customers, given what they’ve had to put up with on their way to the top. JQ was the boss’s wife and she took full advantage. She doesn’t come out of this book as anything other than a mean-minded arrogant footling self-loving prima donna, but there you see, I’m doing it. No reason why China couldn’t have a female leader. Just not that particular one. * PREVIOUSLY ON GOODREADS.... My I-can't-believe-what-I-just-read interim review: I am half way through this strange book but I can’t resist presenting this wonderful scene from the year 1935 when Lan Ping (the future Madame Mao) was 21 years old and a perky young actress in Shanghai. She is on a very hot date with a football player named Li. First they went to the movies. The author helpfully notes that “this teeming movie house was famous for its customer couples who came to sit close to each other as much as to watch the screen”. Unlike all the other cinemas in Shanghai, which insisted on couples sitting far apart from each other, I suppose. Anyway : Making a bid for the dashing football player, she was misjudging the degree of aggression suitable for the man and the moment. Oops, she was coming on too strong. Li plays it cool. He explained I was a man with some prior experiences…To her fantastic enticements I made no response. Lan plied her coquetry: “Perhaps you don’t care?” “No, no,” Li answered with a hiss. “I’m just absorbed in the movie and Hu Die’s great acting.” A moment later he cried out “Well done!”…as Hue Die saved the situation with a cunning maneuver. We have to assume that all this detail came from the lips of Li himself, remembering how he answered “with a hiss” years later. Well, Lan did not stop trying: Lan Ping pushed her “soft jade arm” around Li’s tight warm waist, trying to inflame him before the movie ended and the lights came up. After the movie ends, they go to a hotel room (Get a room!) Darkness found them in a fourth-floor room of the Hui Zhong Hotel… “All this added up to a suitable atmosphere for sexual activity,” Li noted with Chinese practical sense. Lan is an expert in the arts of erotic small-talk : "Are there any matches this week? Which team will you be pitted against?” The author comments: Her words were beginning to seem irrelevant. But now comes the bit you’ve been waiting for: “I love your vigour and courage on the field,” Lan said ardently. “Especially your skill at shooting,” she added with a gasp, her cheeks blushing…her body as hot as a bowl of steamed rice. Able, as always, to unstabilise a man with a shaft of mystery or outrage, she murmured as Li began to kiss her pink lips, “I am going to give you unsurpassable pleasure.” Recalling this date Li summed up the evening in what I’m sorry to say a rather churlish manner: “She rendered me great joy but not complete satisfaction.” * This extraordinary toe-curling hideously detailed precious prose style fortunately does not go on throughout the whole book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 10, 2022
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| 4.24
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it was amazing
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Apr 26, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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| 4.26
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really liked it
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Mar 09, 2024
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Mar 02, 2024
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| 4.16
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liked it
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Feb 23, 2024
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Feb 12, 2024
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| 3.78
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really liked it
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Jan 02, 2024
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Jan 01, 2024
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| 4.24
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it was amazing
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Dec 28, 2023
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Dec 20, 2023
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| 3.90
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it was amazing
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Feb 13, 2024
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Nov 24, 2023
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| 3.87
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liked it
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Nov 03, 2023
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Oct 09, 2023
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| 3.88
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liked it
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Sep 30, 2023
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Sep 01, 2023
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| 4.03
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really liked it
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Aug 18, 2023
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Jun 18, 2023
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| 4.15
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it was amazing
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Apr 12, 2023
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Mar 30, 2023
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| 4.15
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really liked it
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Jun 21, 2023
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Mar 27, 2023
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| 4.18
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not set
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Feb 25, 2023
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| 4.01
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did not like it
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Dec 19, 2023
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Feb 09, 2023
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| 4.27
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liked it
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Mar 03, 2023
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Jan 16, 2023
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| 4.06
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really liked it
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Feb 22, 2023
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Dec 30, 2022
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| 4.20
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really liked it
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Jun 02, 2022
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May 27, 2022
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| 3.93
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liked it
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May 03, 2022
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May 01, 2022
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| 4.21
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really liked it
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Apr 19, 2022
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Apr 14, 2022
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| 4.24
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really liked it
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Apr 09, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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| 3.67
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really liked it
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Apr 2022
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Mar 10, 2022
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