At the moment there is a block on all new ratings & reviews of Hillbilly Elegy because of what GR has decided is "suspicious activity" but there isn'tAt the moment there is a block on all new ratings & reviews of Hillbilly Elegy because of what GR has decided is "suspicious activity" but there isn't a block on this combined book, so here's my Hillbilly Elegy review. (This is what's known as a work-around.)
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HILLBILLY ELEGY by JD VANCE
1) When JD Vance was chosen as Trump’s Veep I thought – wait, where have I heard that name, didn’t this guy write a book, which was some kind of famous? Well yes, he did, so I thought now I have to read it.
2) It’s the story about how occasionally one unusual hillbilly can become upwardly mobile and go to college and then Yale and make something of himself and have a stable marriage and stable kids and just live the American Dream whereas 99% of his childhood pals will be strung out on opioids with three illegitimate kids from three different mothers – you know the cliches. They’re in a thousand tv shows and movies. I thought : this book is not well written, his voice is flat, he generalises, even in the midst of the overdoses and incarcerations; but he was only 30 when he wrote it, so give the guy a break.
3) If there’s one thing this book is about, it’s the hillbillies dreadful self-destructiveness. According to JD, every day they live in a war zone of their own making, each family hates each other and all their neighbours with gusto, venom and a loony recklessness that takes no heed of any consequences, they were all born with one layer of skin missing, they all have hair-trigger volcanic tempers, they are really scary. Especially Mamaw, the grandmother. This leads to continual chaos in their lives, revolving doors of bad boyfriends, absent fathers, blah blah. There is probably nothing in this book about hillbillies that will surprise you. Except this :
4) In the middle of the Bible Belt, active church attendance is actually quite low. He says all the polls are wrong – hillbillies will always say they go to church regularly, but they are not telling the truth. And although they all fervently say they are Christians what they mean by that is some weird hodgepodge of bits and pieces which they add to and discard at will. This is what Roger Olson is talking about when he says that in parts of the USA Christianity is becoming a “folk religion”.
5) Can anything be done about this nightmare life-destroying culture? JD Vance says : no. The only thing you can possibly do is have a great supporting fierce Mamaw like he did and leave your hometown as soon as possible. He says
I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.
(But my guess is from here until November JD will be telling everyone who will listen that all America’s problems can be blamed on that disastrous worst president ever Joe Biden and his veep. )
6) When he gets to Yale Law School it becomes oppressively self-congratulatory and very dull. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is – a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences – I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States.
7) Online articles like one from Politico have gleefully dug up all JD’s past Trump-hating comments, like :
“I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, a clip used in both the new ads. “I never liked him.”
Since then, things have changed. We can imagine him ducking into a phone box and re-emerging as an Always Trump guy. He’s apologised. Heck, we all of us say silly things now and then.
8) The theory goes like this : Trump wins in November – in 2028 vice president JD Vance becomes the Republican nominee; he picks Donald Trump Jr as his VP; he wins the elections in 2028 and 2032; in 2036 Donald Trump Jr becomes the Republican nominee and wins the next two elections. Many a truth is spoken in jest!
Rating : 2.5 stars - a pretty interesting read but also a pretty repetetetititive one.
FURTHER READING (AND ALL LOADS BETTER THAN JD VANCE)
Educated : Tara Westover American Rust : Philipp Meyer A Childhood : Harry Crews Mostly Redneck : Rusty Barnes Trash : Dorothy Allison Knockemstiff : Donald Ray Pollock American Death Songs : Jordan Harper Demon Copperhead : Barbara Kingsolver...more
The good news is, you live with your family in beautiful rural Idaho and your parents are so cool that you never have to go to school! Yes – never! HoThe good news is, you live with your family in beautiful rural Idaho and your parents are so cool that you never have to go to school! Yes – never! How great is that!
The bad news is that you have to work from dawn to dusk in daddy’s scrapyard where you get outrageously dangerous stuff to do with horrific machines that quite often cripple or burn you and your brothers and eventually your mad daddy too.
The good news is – because of your parents’ loony religion you never have to see a doctor! No poking and prodding, no needles! Your mother can fix everything with her herbal remedies which are from God!
The bad news is – she thinks she can heal everything including severe burns. Mother always said that medical drugs are a special kind of poison, one that never leaves your body but rots you slowly from the inside for the rest of your life. This winds up with Tara believing that if her black toe is x-rayed and the x-ray shows that it’s broken, that will be because the x-ray machine broke it.
So Tara grows up with her crazy off the grid daddy expecting the end of the world next month at the very latest and telling her that the US government is run by the Illuminati. The kids don’t have birth certificates and the parents guess vaguely how old they are. Tara’s family and her own brain is full of what Blake called mind-forged manacles. The family was nominally Mormon but really were a family cult based on Mom and Dad’s lunacy.
Gradually Tara gets the urge for some kind of education. Strangely enough working 12 hour shifts in the scrapyard running forklifts and throwing huge lumps of metal into dangerous machines was unfulfilling for a 15 year old girl.
I felt rising tides of queasiness as Tara Westover guided me through her stumbling, weird college career. She is constantly discovering chasms of ignorance within her. They told people she’d been home schooled but that really meant home neglected. So she had never heard of the Holocaust, Martin Luther King, civil rights – most of the common furniture of the American mind in fact.
THE QUESTION OF BELIEVABILITY
We know there have been memoirs that were full of untruths – the poster boy here is James Frey and you have to admire his publisher – when they discovered his memoir A Million Little Pieces was a pack of lies they just rebranded it as a novel and carried on regardless.
But the pressure is on us readers to believe the victim/author. How dare you think of not believing the victim? You would surely be colluding in the abuse she suffered!
There were moments when my good angel turned green and flew away and my bad angel said – huh, a likely story, this could never have happened. I confess, there were several moments. Given all the cultish total ignorance of her first 15 years I couldn’t quite see how Tara could glide into college, get a degree, & then be wafted on clouds of intellectual admiration to Trinity College, Cambridge, England, no less, to do a PhD no less. That is the kind of vertiginous ascent a Cape Canaveral rocket would aspire to. But it seems that every tutor, lecturer or professor she encountered instantly perceived her excellent brain power and found a grant she could apply for and wrote a letter of recommendation to the next gilded seat of learning (ending in Harvard).
ESCAPE FROM IDAHO
Tara at the university is like Dorothy in Oz, but this Dorothy feels like she has to go back to Kansas every summer for more scrapyard shifts. There’s a huge, longwinded and (so sorry!) tiresome battle with the family about her memories of maltreatment and violence at the hands of one brother, and this dominates the last third of the book. Since she no longer talks to her family you can see how that all panned out.
I don’t know – this is a very uneasy book - I felt I was gawking at a roadside crash a lot of the time.
FURTHER READING
After reading her daughter’s memoir, the mother decided to self-publish her own version , called Educating. Here is a great review of that by Edmund :
A delightful survey and appreciation of the ignoble art of diary writing, which bleeds into the more pompous journal keeping, and is written entirely A delightful survey and appreciation of the ignoble art of diary writing, which bleeds into the more pompous journal keeping, and is written entirely and solely for the eyes of the diarist, except that it usually isn’t. They usually fancy that someone will come along and read this stuff years later and weep or realise you were a genius or both. The refuse incinerators of the world must have consumed a vast number of confessional diaries that nobody gave a monkey’s about.
Thomas Mallon scampers throughout all of literature to bring you a few pages each on many great names like Simone de Beauvoir, Byron, Degas, Anais Nin, Lewis Carroll, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Orton etc and a swathe of assassins like Arthur Bremer and Lee Harvey Oswald, sex maniacs like “Walter” and prisoners like Albert Speer. All of human life is here. Well, quite a lot.
ASSASSINS
The American ones just can’t spell. Here’s Oswald writing about his application to stay in the USSR being turned down.
I am shocked! I have waited for 2 year to be accepred. My fonde dreams are shattered because of a petty offial. I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain. Than slash my leftwrist. Than plaug wrist into bathtum of hot water. Somewhere a violin plays, as I wacth my life whirl away.
Fast forward to 1972 and 21 year old loner Arthur Bremer is frustrated, he can’t get close enough to Richard Nixon to shoot him. So reluctantly he picks someone easier to shoot – George Wallace. Here he is looking ahead and feeling pretty aggravated:
I won’t even rate a TV enteroption in Russia or Europe when the news breaks – they never heard of Wallace. If something big in Nam flares up I’ll end up at the bottom of the first page in America. The editors will say “Wallace dead? Who cares.”
“But he shoots him anyway” says Thomas Mallon laconically.
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NAMEDROPPERS
On April 8, 1862, the Goncourts note with a mixture of contempt and admiration that Victor Hugo “always has a note-book in his pocket and that if, in conversation with you, he happens to express the tiniest thought, to put forward the smallest idea, he promptly turns away from you, takes out his note-book and writes down what he has just said."
That’s a good example of some heavy namedropping there – yeah, as I was saying to Victor Hugo just yesterday – but that’s the way some of these folks roll. You should check out George Sand (aka Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil). She loves Alfred de Musset but she just can’t get no satisfaction, so as Thomas Mallon says
She gets advice from Liszt, Sainte-Beauve and Delacroix
Two years later she met Chopin and then everything was fine. But what a string of names there. It reminded me of reading Claire Bloom’s autobiography. Her first four romantic entanglements were 1. Richard Burton 2. Laurence Olivier 3. Yul Brynner 4. Rod Steiger
GO ASK BEATRICE SPARKS
Thomas drops a clanger on page 230 when he accepts without question that the well known book Go Ask Alice, published anonymously in 1971, was indeed the diary of a 15 year old girl who had died of a drug overdose. I never read this but just reading the short extract on p232 I thought – surely no 15 year old girl would write like this. Way too assured and stylish. Wiki explains that the person identified as the “editor”, Beatrice Sparks, was suspected fairly quickly of having written either most or all of it. GR now lists it as being entirely by her. And wiki describes her as a "serial hoaxer".
[image] But still, this book gives you a fast & furious tour of so many wildly different lives & situations from the 15th century onward – from the deeply melancholic to the luridly porny to the horribly obsessive to the silly to the profound, it’s the whirligig of life....more
The third in my Steven Moore trilogy – after the hilarious Alexander Theroux : A Fan’s Notes I had to get this slender memoir about his unhappy eight The third in my Steven Moore trilogy – after the hilarious Alexander Theroux : A Fan’s Notes I had to get this slender memoir about his unhappy eight years (1988-96) at the Dalkey Archive, hardcore publishers of avantgarde and translated fiction since 1984.
This tiny publisher was run by a certain John O’Brien, who died in 2020, so I guess Steven now feels he can at last give vent to his bottled-up feelings about the whole thing. On the second page of this memoir Steven tells us that John named The Dalkey Archive after Flann O’Brien’s last novel.
That was his first mistake…few people recognised the allusion or knew what it meant, plus it was hard to remember and often mispronounced – Donkey Archive being my favourite.
It turns out that John was… well, let Steven tell you :
He was a horrible example of a human being: arrogant, egotistic, vindictive, dishonest, condescending, hypocritical, captious, obstinate, maddeningly inconsistent and contradictory, hard-nosed but sometimes naively optimistic, insulting, thin-skinned and quick to take the offence when unintended, nepotistic, neurotic…and given to mindless exaggerations.
As regards the dishonesty :
One of the first things that turned me off was his habit of lying : he’s one of those people who feel lying is a normal part of social intercourse whereas I consider it one of the worst things you can do
But on the other hand, it was kind of a dream job – Steven got to publish lots of his favourite authors who everyone else had ignored, he then got to meet and even occasionally befriend the said authors, he was proud of the books he thinks of as “his” books, the ones he chose and piloted through the often painful publishing process. But on the other other hand, he hated doing the publicity, schmoozing stores and forcing smiles at annual trade shows, “visiting bored book review editors, giving them every reason I could conjure up to review our books, usually with no results”.
This O’Brien guy was a curious character – he sounds like a nasty piece of work but of course he was being nasty on behalf of publishing and keeping in print worthwhile but totally obscure authors who otherwise no one would ever have heard of. He was a one man rescue mission for the far out and the daring and the weird and, poignantly
O’Brien remained convinced, perhaps until his dying day, that there was a magic key to unlocking hordes of new customers for our rather esoteric books if only we worked hard enough to find it.
I also enjoyed Steven’s short essay included here “Remembering Marguerite Young” where he gets to meet her and quickly flounders :
Every question of mine was answered by a flight of fancy that was entertaining but not always informative.
Readers – I should say dispirited readers – of Miss Macintosh My Darling will say well, dear, what did you expect. ...more
First, let me say, this is a brilliant account of growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 when Liang Heng was 12 and laFirst, let me say, this is a brilliant account of growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 when Liang Heng was 12 and lasted until 1976 when Mao died. It was a very crazy period and Liang lived the life of a pinball in a political pinball machine. For anyone interested in this extraordinary period in China, this is a must read.
VIGOROUSLY CRITICIZE THE CAPITALIST ROADERS!
In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution children (young teenagers from 12 upwards) were encouraged to leave school and devote all their time to wildly enthusiastic and very often completely brainless promotion of “Chairman Mao Thought”. They were to “make revolution” against those elements of society determined to be “rightists”. Who and what was a rightist was the question, and the answer could plunge a person into years of Kafkaesque nightmare. Liang’s family were the perfect example. This is what happened. Warning : it’s hard to believe.
LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM; LET A HUNDRED SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT CONTEND. OR NOT.
In 1957 Mao launched the Hundred Flowers campaign. He wanted to stop the party becoming a smug intolerant uncaring ruling class and, as Liang says, “to correct its shortcomings by listening to the masses’ criticisms”. So everyone at their workplaces were urged to vent forth their views on how the Party could improve. Liang’s mother loved the Party and could not think of any criticisms – the Party had given her a job and saved her from poverty! But her boss told her she had to come up with something, so she finally said that her section leader sometimes used crude language, that he let his housekeeper sleep on the floor instead of giving her a bed, and that the bosses in general were sometimes unfair in giving out raises.
At precisely that point, the Hundred Flowers campaign was ditched and replaced with the Anti-Rightist Movement, designed to smoke out anticommunists. Maybe, says Liang, the Hundred Flowers campaign had been a trap all along. Every factory and office was given a quota of Rightists to deliver to the authorities, and Liang’s mother’s name was among them.
This was the original sin which pursued the whole family through the next ten years like Inspector Javert’s fanatical pursuit of Jean Valjean. Wherever they went, they were “rightists”. The father comes across as pathetically obsessed with the godlike figure of Chairman Mao, reading his Thought every day, earnestly studying, and praising Mao to all and sundry; this guy had been a perfect Mao follower since the revolution, but it didn’t matter, because of his wife he became a known rightist and was hounded and humiliated for years to come.
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STRIP AWAY THE SKIN OF THE RIGHTISTS! ANGRILY OPEN FIRE ON ALL REACTIONARY THOUGHT!
At first there was a point to the Cultural Revolution, it was used to thwart and confound those in the CP leadership who figured Mao had lost the plot after the Great Leap Forward, which didn’t work. Mao thought maybe they were going to give him the heave ho, so he sprang this weird wild cultural revolution on them – take that! See? I’m still lefter than all you stuffed shirts put together. But after a couple of years the wild Red Guard movement lost sight of what they were supposed to be doing and devolved into clans fighting each other, each swearing total devotion to Mao Zedong Thought. They were shooting each other. It was chaos.
A PROBLEM WITH MEMOIRS
There is a problem, I guess you’d call it, embedded in a memoir written by a 28 year old about his teenage years. There is an awful lot of (can we say) novelistic detail in here. This is from an account of a political meeting when he was age 15 :
Liu’s gold fillings sparkled in his expressive mouth, and a fine spray of saliva rained into the first rows at emphatic moments.
And from an account of some Red Guard fighting in the year before that :
The bullets whizzed through the air and, as if everything were in slow motion, the flagman fell in front of me and rolled over like a lead ball. The flag never touched the ground. Someone caught it and raised it, hardly breaking stride.
And
He had been in place less than a minute, firing in the direction of his vanished opponents, when he was struck in the belly with a shell and came tumbling down to my level, his guts spilling out in midair and falling back more or less into place as he landed.
There must be a strong desire to make your memoir as vivid and detailed as possible, to do justice to the events you are telling about, but alas, too much detail (and too much precisely recalled dialogue) I think can make a scene like the above one read like a movie, and therefore lessen us readers’ immediate belief. Maybe other readers are more indulgent than me. But this in no way takes away from Liang Heng’s frightening, bewildering account of his jawdropping teenage years. I would love to know what a modern Chinese person makes of all this.
His parents periodically beat him savagely, whether he had done anything or not, because all our parents said, a beating will loosePARENTAL DISCIPLINE
His parents periodically beat him savagely, whether he had done anything or not, because all our parents said, a beating will loosen a child’s hide and let him grow.
THE SEARS ROEBUCK CATALOG
We are in Georgia and the year is 1941. Harry lives on a poor farm in the middle of nowhere. Harry and his friends love to look at the Sears Roebuck catalogue. They are fascinated by the perfect people in the photos. They have never seen anybody like that in their lives. Everyone they know has teeth missing, a finger missing, an ear that a mule chewed, scars. Harry’s world is sealed off. They never go into the nearest town. They mostly don’t leave their own farm. They can’t imagine what life might be like in the city where you open your front door and see six other front doors opposite you. In Bacon County you can’t see any other houses from your house, and that goes for all the other farmers too.
This memoir is about Harry’s childhood but focuses on when he was five to six years old. He does seem to remember a lot of what happened when he was five, but we’ll let that pass.
INTIMACIES
Two things jumped out at me. One was the casually intimate was these poor white farming families lived with their black neighbours/tenants. And another intimacy was the always jarring – for a citydweller like me – relationship with farm animals. On a farm animals work or they get eaten. The farmers try not to be cruel when they’re slaughtering a shoat hog but if a thing has to be done they are going to get it done. So this short hypnotising memoir is not for vegans – there are pages of exactly what happens to every part of a pig after it’s killed. This is all tastefully mechanised in our world so we never have to think about it. In Harry’s world everyone ended up covered in blood, kids, grandmas, everybody.
Mules were very important.
There were mules in Bacon County that a blind man could have laid off straight rows behind. Such mules knew only one way to work : the right way. To whatever work they were asked to do, they brought a lovely exactitude, whether it was walking off rows, snaking logs, sledding tobacco without a driver, or any of the other unaccountable jobs that came their way during a crop year.
Recommended, but not for the fainthearted. It was a tough life.
You have never read such a warm, loving portrait of a monster. This is the memoir of a boy growing up in a Christian cult in the 1850s, the cult was tYou have never read such a warm, loving portrait of a monster. This is the memoir of a boy growing up in a Christian cult in the 1850s, the cult was the Plymouth Brethren, and the father of this son was a guy who had drunk the koolaid. In fact he drank a gallon of it every day. It was Jesus this, the Lord that, the blood of the Lamb everywhere you looked, day in day out. This was a sect which did not celebrate any Christian holiday – they looked upon Christmas with horror, because, as you can see, it includes the word “mass”. And this was interesting because the father was a scientist, a zoologist and botanist, a writer of the definitive book on British sea anemones, and many many others. Always with one eye jammed in a microscope, examining God’s tiny miracles. (By the way the father had a passing resemblance to Oliver Reed, but that is not especially relevant.)
The kid was groomed to be a living saint and the Second Coming was expected next Thursday at the very latest. When next Thursday rolled around with no Jesus the father rushed back to the Book of Revelations to figure out where he had miscalculated.
If you are wondering what the kid was like, the kid was a classic geek.
At other times I dragged a folio volume of the Penny Cyclopedia up to the study with me, and sat there reading successive articles on such subjects as Parrots, Parthians, Passion-flowers, Passover and Pastry, without any invidious preferences, all information being equally welcome.
Since this kid had literally NO contact with other children until the age of ten (!!) it is no surprise he was odd.
This is a beautiful book which I would never have thought would have entranced me like it did. It mostly deals with the author as a little kid, between ages 5 and 9. I was expecting a different book. I thought there was going to be a big fight between the son who realises Darwin and evolution was right and there would be great dingdongs over the breakfast porridge and furious debates about Genesis and where were the dinosaurs on the Ark and all of that juicy stuff. But no, not a bit of it. This is not a spoiler, because readers shouldn’t have the misconception I had, so I will say that the kid as he grows up to be 15, 16, 17 just mentally disengages and drifts away from the Christian cult. He loves his monstrous father, he doesn’t want to hurt him. Why should he?
As an example of the monstrousness of the father, he has a fixed belief that physical ailments were inflicted directly by God to chastise the sufferer because of bad behaviour or spiritual deviance, “and not in relation to any physical cause”. This guy who was a scrupulous naturalist believed something that normal people gave up believing in the 12th century. So when the kid gets a cold the father berates him for not cleaving his soul unto God’s grace more diligently, or some such nonsense.
As another example, when the son gets a job in London (unspecified but probably not as a song and dance man) the father bombards him with earnest beseeching imploring letters every day, literally, asking him for detailed account of the daily progress of his soul and the last conversations with God Almighty. The now teenaged Edmund regards each fresh letter at the breakfast table as the prisoner regards the thumb-screw.
One final word from the son about of the evangelical puritanism of his father – his father thought, naturally, that all non-Christians, all Catholics and 95% of all Protestants were condemned to Hell by the Almighty. Edmund comments :
He who was so tender-hearted that he could not bear to witness the pain or distress of any person, however disagreeable, was quite acquiescent in believing that God would punish human beings, in millions, for ever, for a purely intellectual error of comprehension.
TRIGGER WARNING
I’m not myself much of a snowflake but even so I was pole-axed by one single very racist sentence in this 250 page book. I will not quote it as it would put you all off this book. It comes up when the kid is wondering if when he grows up he will be sent to Africa as a missionary. You can guess the rest. Should one sentence capsize an otherwise great book? Should modern editions remove it?
However good and even important this long detailed memoir of working in the oil industry in Alberta, Canada between 2005 and 2008 may be, it ain’t an However good and even important this long detailed memoir of working in the oil industry in Alberta, Canada between 2005 and 2008 may be, it ain’t an easy one to recommend. You wouldn’t call it a misery memoir, but it is profoundly unhappy. Part of it is about rape: this comment by Kate Beaton on p 381 encapsulates the horror – the situation is a very common one and is surely not limited to the hyper-masculine world of the oilfields – people are getting wrecked at a party, the woman is drunk, the guy is drunk, but he’s not too drunk to push her into a dark room and assault her. Thinking back on it later Kate says to her friend
It felt like I had a second to decide and an eternity to live with it
Decide to resist, that is, to scream or to not scream. She doesn’t and when she inadvertently tells two guys about it later they laugh. We were there and y’all were both drunk as fuck, we all were. C'mon. In the afterword Kate says
I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.
So this whole book is about the moral Grey Zone, how women in a 99% male workforce get constantly sniped at and leered at and drooled over and every aspect of their being commented on and fantasized about and lied about and how they find themselves going along with it and putting up with such a lot they wouldn’t ever tolerate in the “real world” back home for one tiny minute. Kate makes it clear only half of the guys are gross pigs, but that’s still a lot. It’s also a story about her own acknowledged naivete about things like the widespread use of cocaine by the guys and – a big one this – how your own brother, your own father, should he be cooped up in an oil camp for a couple of years with no other company that bored rowdy men, might very well become just like one of the leering jeering locker-room nasty-comment guys. That was a sickening realisation for her.
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Given all of the above, this graphic memoir might not be for everybody....more
Do you want to read the journal of a guy with an irrepressible delight in all living creatures, a loving wife, a little baby, a brilliant way with ourDo you want to read the journal of a guy with an irrepressible delight in all living creatures, a loving wife, a little baby, a brilliant way with our English language and a fatal disease?
Let’s let Mr Barbellion describe himself :
I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body, even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of the gnawing I dare say could be heard.
He had what is now called multiple sclerosis, it killed him at the age of 30, but it had been slowly killing him for about ten years. So …. Well, this must be a misery memoir then? No – not at all. This is a book full of joy.
Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little coups d'œil, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on the keeper's gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path, the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree tops in the wind.
Well, all right, joy and pain, life grasped and dragged away by insidious treachery.
For a long time past my hope has simply been to last long enough to convince others of what I might have done—had I lived. That will be something.
He begins the journal as a 13 year old boy living in the countryside full of delight in birdsnesting and collecting stuff and forming a burning ambition to be a naturalist and work for the Natural History Museum. But father can’t afford university fees so he becomes a journalist for the local paper and meanwhile crams his brain with all botanical, zoological, biological and anatomical knowledge and applies to museums for jobs and gets ignored and tries again and finally one golden day he scores THE JOB at the great Natural History Museum
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which is still there in South Kensington and has a fabulous brachiosaur in the foyer
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(I have stood under this beauty)
Well, so he gets the dream job but then he is assigned to the crummiest most tedious section : lice. Yeah, lice. Taxonomising the leg joints of the common louse and some other species. You know, we can’t all be David Attenborough and swan around canoodling with gorillas in the mist. No, some of us have to count the number of joints on the legs of several hundred species of lice.
Anyways, this means a move to the big smoke, and he becomes a keen observer of London life – well, as much as a penniless bachelor can observe.
I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but hard to earn."
So he is 19, 20, 21, and the dread disease is beginning its grisly creep at precisely the same time that diplomacy in Europe is flailing and failing and troops are loading onto trains and trains are being pointed westwards… none of these terrifying events gets a mention until way after half way through the Journal, and then only in a few throwaway comments
How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all time?
Well, he is constantly eyerolling himself – he loves to skewer the banalities of civilised life this for instance -
Endured an hour's torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian Society and hear Bernard Shaw.
(he went to the Bernard Shaw lecture and didn’t enjoy it)
and this
I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul.
Eventually the disease and the war become the main subjects, he just can't avoid them any more. At times World War I and his horrible disease compete to see who can kill him first:
At lunch time, had an unpleasant intermittency period in my heart's action and this rather eclipsed my anxiety over a probable Zeppelin Raid.
This Journal ends at age 28 when he was too ill to write and was published in time for him to see it in print, then he died. Throughout its delightful pages he never stops asking himself well – why am I doing this? But it gradually becomes clear to him that his life’s work is not the counting of insect legs or the essays that keep getting sent back by the magazines or the longed-for contribution to biological science but this very Journal is his life’s work. And so it was.
You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless, paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.
The reader may be forgiven for snapping back well, excuse me, Barbellion – if that’s your real name (it wasn’t) - I do not envy YOU, you supercilious thing you. But, well, we can find ourselves almost envying him, when wandering with this strange, loveable man through the lanes recognising the wagtails and peewits or coughing through the streets on his way back to his sweet wife and baby, with ten thousand thoughts twangling in his never still mind, and it’s a mournful experience to turn the last page and say goodbye....more
This painful but I think necessary memoir by the mother of one of the Columbine shooters was written 17 years after the event and so contains a lifetiThis painful but I think necessary memoir by the mother of one of the Columbine shooters was written 17 years after the event and so contains a lifetime of anguished reflection. The results are disheartening. The preface by Professor Andrew Solomon says:
The ultimate message of this book is terrifying : you may not know your own children, and, worse yet, your children may be unknowable.
Or as a three minute song from the 1960s put it :
Nobody knows what’s going on in my mind but me.
LIKEABLE YOUNG MAN FROM A GOOD HOME
When you find out about Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, you can see there were enormous red flags all over, he was practically announcing I will be the Next One. Dylan Klebold was the opposite. He was the sweet loveable gentle teenage giant (6 foot 4) who only in his 16th year started doing a few sketchy things – the big one was breaking into a parked van and stealing some electronic equipment, with his dodgy friend Eric. Dylan didn’t do drugs but he was a secret drinker. But then he shaped up and got his applications in order when the time came to apply for university, and he was accepted. He wasn’t a weirdo loner, he wasn’t a bully. She says :
He wasn’t the pinwheel-eyed portrait of evil we know from the cartoons. …(he was) an easygoing, shy, likeable young man who came from a “good home”…he was easy to raise, a pleasure to be with, a child who always made us proud.
The story his mother tells is a horror story : her journey from denial and disbelief to ghastly realisation of the facts. On the dreadful day she thought at first he had been a bystander, then she realised he was some kind of perpetrator, but she told herself he couldn’t have actually shot anybody, then she found out he had, then she told herself he was on drugs, but he wasn’t, then she told herself he had been hypnotised in some way by that monster Eric Harris, and perhaps dragged into it at the last minute, and that was the belief she clung to until six months after the massacre the cops released the evidence they had collected and she was able to see the Basement Tapes for the first time, which you can believe she watched through her fingers, in total dismay. These were videos that Dylan and Eric made in the months before the shooting, and it was clear from them that the massacre had been carefully planned for eight months before the event. And it was also clear that the event that happened was a watered-down version of the event that was supposed to happen, which was the destruction of the whole school by means of propane bombs they put in the school cafeteria that morning. The idea was that they would sit outside and shoot the survivors of the explosions and fire as they ran outside. But the bombs failed to detonate so they changed their plan and went inside.
What was on the tapes was the sheer hatred Eric and Dylan had for the school and their lives in general. For Sue Klebold this was a revelation. Where did this hatred come from? Kids can easily have fantasies about burning their school down, hahaha, but to actually plan such a thing, go to the trouble of assembling the equipment bit by bit and then do it is a whole other thing. For Sue Klebold’s especial misery, on these tapes the two 17 year olds viciously mock what their parents will say after the massacre :
Dylan: If only we could have reached them sooner, or found this tape.
Eric : If only we would have searched their room. If only we would have asked the right questions.
Dylan: They gave me my fucking life. It’s up to me what I do with it
Eric: My parents are the best fucking parents I have ever known. My dad is great. I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn’t have any remorse, but I do. This is going to tear them apart. They will never forget it. [He then addresses his parents directly, if briefly] There is nothing you guys could have done to prevent any of this. There is nothing that anyone could have done to prevent this. No one is to blame except me and Vodka [Klebold’s nickname]. Our actions are a two man war against everyone else
HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW?
This sums up the general reaction to Columbine, and this book is the explanation.
I would never have told you that I had access to Dylan’s every thought and feeling, but I would have said, with confidence, that I knew exactly what he was capable of. And I would have been wrong… I had raised a murderer without knowing it a person with such a faulty moral compass that he’d committed an atrocity. I was a fool, a sucker, a dolt. … I had been a “I want o meet your friends and their parents before you spend the night at their house” kind of parent. What good had it done?
OKAY THEN, WHY DID THEY DO IT?
The explanation Sue finally comes up with sounds inadequate – it amounts to the toxic nasty culture of bullying and belittling that goes on in every school and has had countless movies and tv shows made about it. And the reader is inclined to feel this explanation is inadequate. I did. But then I thought – yes, in the same way that many people think that the idea that Oswald was the sole shooter of JFK is inadequate; hence the conspiracy theories. So maybe Sue Klebold is right. The other part of the explanation she has is that Eric was a psychopath who wanted to kill people and his suicide was a byproduct of that whereas Dylan was a depressive who wanted to commit suicide and killing other people was the byproduct of his suicide. It sounds a little neat to me. But really, who can explain these things? At one point Sue asks of her own son “Was he evil?” and says well, no, I don’t think so. She spends pages talking about mental illness, then says even if he was diagnosable that’s no excuse. She spins in these nets of words like we all do.
Since I only doled out a meagre 2.5 stars to Gabrielle Bell’s Everything is Flammable which I understand was her Long Awaited Big One, I probably shouSince I only doled out a meagre 2.5 stars to Gabrielle Bell’s Everything is Flammable which I understand was her Long Awaited Big One, I probably should have left it there, but no, a burst of clickmania brought this earlier collection to my door. Of the 13 stories in here, it could be that G Bell would be less than thrilled if I said that the two best are “One Afternoon” and “Tobermory” because the first is based on a short story by Kate Chopin and the second on a short story by Saki. So I think that would be a case of damning with faint praise.
Otherwise these slices of my life as the odd kid of odd parents were perfectly acceptable, nothing at all to complain about, the graphic novel as room temperature. But I was always feeling an enormous restraint in these stories, and that G Bell could be telling us SO much more if she wanted to. ...more
Maybe this was one glum memoir about a depressed-but-not-unsuccessful New York based therapy-attending graphic artist and her oddball also-depressed mMaybe this was one glum memoir about a depressed-but-not-unsuccessful New York based therapy-attending graphic artist and her oddball also-depressed mother too many. It had that strong indie movie atmosphere that I like* but there was just so much gloom, I think nobody smiles once in the whole 156 pages. And there were several pages of utter inconsequentiality too many
- Disposing of a bag of smelly fertilizer - Trying to figure out if they are looking at a star or a drone - Buying stuff and talking to pretty nice salesmen - Buying more stuff and talking to more pretty nice salesmen - Being slightly awkward with people - Mistaking a guy’s outerwear for camouflage gear - Asking for advice about a cucumber plant infestation
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And many more, that was just a quick random sample.
No offence intended but Gabrielle Bell paints herself as a sad person riven with social anxiety and finding everything a strain (except that she negotiates a complicated journey from Brooklyn to North California perfectly well, which I surely couldn’t do). Whilst she explores her relationship with her batty old mother (more offence not intended, but really, this mother would give anybody dangerously high blood pressure, beginning with setting herself on fire and burning down her own house) and other friends there’s a large empty space where a significant other might have been, and this is never alluded to. Well, a memoir is always partial.
I liked the bit where both she and her mother think at the commencement of this woebegone tale that she should make the complicated trip to California because it will give her some interesting material for her graphic novels. (And something to mention to her therapist.) But it turns out that burning down your own house can be quite a dull business.
Note to cat lovers : There is a horrific section where GB details the many terrible deaths of cats she has known in her life. It is like The Texas Chainsaw Cat Massacre. You have been warned.
2.5 stars rounded up because I am a nice person and I love graphic novels
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*Half Nelson, Trees Lounge, Me and You and Everyone we Know, Old Joy, Stranger than Paradise, and so on. ...more
As I was out walking on a corner one day I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay His face was all grounded in the cold sidewalk floor And I guess he’d bAs I was out walking on a corner one day I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay His face was all grounded in the cold sidewalk floor And I guess he’d been there for the whole night or more
I regularly walk from Victoria Centre in Nottingham to the train station. During the summer I would always see two or three apparently homeless men (no women) in empty shop doorways or just huddled with all their stuff against a wall. Now I see seven or eight of these guys. (This is excluding the buskers, there are always three or four of those.) It’s not guaranteed that these guys are homeless, maybe they are just beggars who go back to a spiffy semidetatched after their eight hour shift, but I doubt it. So there is definitely a problem, and it seems to be getting worse.
Down and Out is a hot mess of a book about homelessness in Britain now, how the way the state treats these people is a disgrace, a whole howl of pain from a guy who had a few spells of homelessness himself. It’s 60% scrambled-up confusing and alas repetitive memoir and 40% statistics and angry and alas repetitive expostulations.
Sincerity is not the problem here, the total denunciations of everything anyone ever tries to do for the homeless is. According to Daniel, the Tory government and their loathsome minions are at war with the homeless. They have devised an evil Kafkaesque system to trip up the poor blighters and trap them and steal their benefits and throw them back onto the streets.
There’s misery on our streets. The central government has shown nothing but callous disregard for it, local authorities haven’t been much better, and charities aren’t picking up the slack.
The “system” might be totally evil but Daniel does not paint the homeless as saints, very far from it. He is tireless, almost monotonously so, in his reminders to us that most homeless people suffer from “substance abuse” and mental health issues, bring many of their problems down upon themselves, and have a background of chaotic disintegrating family life, often ending up “in care”, which is the name given to children whose parents are considered too dangerous to be left in charge of them. But the care given to these desperate kids “in care” is nearly as terrible as the parents were dishing out. Instead of getting beaten and neglected, they just get neglected, so they start having sex at age 11 and try drugs age 12. That’s the picture Daniel gives of kids “in care”.
So by the time a person ends up as homeless they have a great many problems. They have become very difficult customers, unpredictable, wayward, obsessed with the next fix, unlikely to have a coherent career plan. They are not inclined to follow the rules set down by the homeless shelter or the local charity. Daniel does not flinch from harsh descriptions.
A blanket of newspaper covered his head As the curb was his pillow, the street was his bed One look at his face showed the hard road he’d come And a fistful of coins showed the money he bummed
So one of the problems of this book is that it’s way too bleak about almost everything. Wait – there is a remedy!
The final chapter, “Ending Homelessness”, says that
What’s most frustrating about the homelessness crisis is that we know how to solve it, yet we continue to throw money at things that don’t work.
We do? Sorry to say I have heard exactly the same sentiment from every radical campaigner about every issue for decades – if only people would realise, we could fix this problem at one tenth of the cost that we now spend perpetuating it! Why don’t they get it?
Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down To look up on the world from a hole in the ground To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame To lie in the gutter and die with no name
Daniel’s solution is something called Housing First which is as far as I can gather the idea that you give every homeless person a house – no ifs or buts - and then provide “wrap-around care” for their mental health and substance abuse problems. Also “we must build enough social housing” – something everybody agrees with. Sounds great. I’m not arguing for the destruction of capitalism he says. Finland did it (it’s always a Scandinavian country that gets things right, I just don’t see why all countries don’t simply copy all their policies) and guess what, they reduced their rough sleeping population from 18,000 to “a little over a third of that”.
After reading this I think I just confirmed a few of my prejudices. This was a jeremiad.
Only a hobo, but one more is gone Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song Leavin’ nobody to carry him home Only a hobo, but one more is gone
I wonder if Stephen King read this book – see if this reminds you of a famous chilling scene. A well-known writer has given Janet a little shed to do I wonder if Stephen King read this book – see if this reminds you of a famous chilling scene. A well-known writer has given Janet a little shed to do her writing in :
I was amazed and grateful at his acceptance of me as a writer doing daily work, particularly as I had not yet begun to write the novel I planned, and on some mornings I was so anxious to appear to be working that I typed The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.
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*
Autobiographies are claustrophobic books, you only get this one single perspective, that of the author about herself, and maybe you aren’t getting the full picture. There were several nagging things that Janet Frame was not telling me about how she ended up spending eight years in a New Zealand mental hospital and how she came very close to getting a lobotomy. It seems at certain moments of maximum stress she would like Hamlet pretend to be mad but she doesn’t describe exactly how. Once labelled as a schizophrenic it seems nobody, no doctor or nurse, ever noticed that she wasn’t actually schizophrenic, for eight long years! That is some remarkably indifferent lazy nasty medical staff. If you think of other autobiographies of psychologically damaged people, like Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen or God Head by Scott Zwiren, you’ll see a similar thing : the patient always think the doctors and staff are either uncaring or actually hostile to them. The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the same.
Psychiatric staff get this truly bad rap from all these books and films. The patients never think that the staff want to help them. They are always seen as malevolent. Surely they can’t all have been this bad?
I’ve ordered the biography of Janet Frame called Wresting with the Angel by Michael King in the hope that this will throw some light on the strange sad history of her terrible misdiagnosis. Meanwhile – this is a very poignant book which I rattled through in two days. It reveals in gruesome detail the chasms of ignorance a workingclass person has to cope with as they try to find their way up the educational ladder.
This isn't the cheeriest book, but it's strange and hypnotic and unique....more
Damn, I should have read some more reviews of this thing before reading it. My fellow goodreaders were quite correct, this is a very annoying, egocentDamn, I should have read some more reviews of this thing before reading it. My fellow goodreaders were quite correct, this is a very annoying, egocentric, maundering, treacly, sentimentalised wallow and it goes on and on and on about family history and stuff like teapots, photo albums, vacuum cleaners, photo albums, family history, spoons, napkin rings, furniture, photo albums and photo albums.
Why I thought of reading this : we have a friend who we have gradually realised over the past year is a hoarder. There’s a point where collecting a lot of stuff tips over into actual hoarding, and it’s hard to admit. I have watched the youtube documentaries on the subject and seen at least one tv series but on the tv they always want to turn this decades-long gradual mental deterioration into a story with a happy ending : look! Here is your house after our cleanup crew and interior decorator and gardener fixed it up! What about that! See how it sparkles! No more rat droppings in the kitchen! A brand new life! Cue tears and hugs for the family members and high fives amongst the jolly helpers.
Life isn’t like that. I wanted more insight, how it goes when your own mother (as in this book) is a hoarder. So that’s why I thought it would be good, but it really wasn’t. Avoid....more
Christ stopped at Eboli but I stopped at page 97. It was sooooo boring.
Goodreads is great for finding like-minded grouches willing to trash an adoredChrist stopped at Eboli but I stopped at page 97. It was sooooo boring.
Goodreads is great for finding like-minded grouches willing to trash an adored work of world literature such as this, and I resorted to reading two & one star reviews. This stiffened my resolve to jack in all this tiresome moaning and groaning from this so superior gentleman exiled to the back of beyond in Southern Italy in the mid 1930s to live with filthy toothless peasants. But not before I skipped forward and read chapter 16. Ah, chapter 16. Check this out – this guy is a doctor and in his spare time he does some painting, like they used to do. His housekeeper (even exiles get a house and a housekeeper) is a woman named Giulia and he thinks she will be an excellent subject for a portrait but she won’t pose for him. She thinks if he makes an image of her he will by magic gain power over her and be able to cast spells on her.
I realised that in order to overcome her scruples I should have to make use of a magic even stronger than fear, an irresistible power, namely violence. I threatened, therefore to beat her and made as if to do so; in fact I actually started… as soon as she saw my raised hand and felt the first blow, Giulia’s face filled with joy and she smiled beatifically…just as I imagined, she knew no greater happiness than that of being dominated
So he has no trouble from her after that. This might be a useful tip for all you amateur painters.
This memoir by actress Claire Bloom whose semi-glittering career stretches from 1951 to now (first major role : Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight) divides iThis memoir by actress Claire Bloom whose semi-glittering career stretches from 1951 to now (first major role : Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight) divides into two parts, pre-Roth and post-Roth.
Pre-Roth is eyebrow raising. This part is a decorously-phrased shag-and-tell session : first up was Richard Burton who was married, of course – they were secretly together for 5 years – she calls him “my first and greatest love” but he wouldn’t have said the same. Second guy was Laurence Olivier, who she just didn’t like (“we were both just using each other”). Third one was Yul Brynner who dumped her for Kim Novak. Could she possibly carry on shagging only top movie and stage stars? Sure she could – next one was Rod Steiger, this time she married him.
But alas, he was a depressive method actor :
When Rod was performing Benito Mussolini or Al Capone at a film studio, he seemed to think it necessary to play Mussolini and Capone at home.
I can see that just might become tiresome.
After a second marriage and a one night stand with Anthony Quinn, she met Philip Roth (they were in their 40s). This was the part I was interested in, and it was worth waiting for.
There were some years of happy harmonious famous actress and famous author luvviness, one book and play and film after another. But then the red mist came down over the Roth brain. It started to go wrong when he published Operation Shylock which he thought was his masterpiece. And so do I! It’s brilliant! But the reviews came in, especially a viperish bosom-biting by John Updike, and it kind of deflated and was overlooked and Roth was devastated. After that, no more Mr Nice Guy. Actually there hadn’t been much of Mr Nice Guy before then, but now it became nasty.
I never read such a harrowing account of mental torture. She was a feeble doormat with a needy daughter and an old mother, and he didn’t take kindly to any of that. In fact on various occasions he would out of the blue at breakfast present her an envelope containing a typed letter which would state categorically that her daughter was only allowed to stay with them for a maximum of three weeks per year, otherwise he would divorce her. That kind of thing. He was a freaky frightening freak. Clever and charming too, that always makes it worse. He would be all nice and loveydovey one day and ice cold, menacing and hateful the next day, the domestic version of Jeckyll and Hyde. I bet a lot of non-famous women have experienced exactly the same kind of behaviour.
There’s a great book called Roth Unbound by Claudia Pierpont, essential for all Roth readers. In that book she interviews the Roth himself and assesses all his voluminous fiction through the prism of his life, which is fair play because he was constantly writing versions of his life into his books. (Roth’s own version of his marriage with CB is in I Married a Communist which I have not yet read.) Referring back to the Claire Bloom saga in Roth Unbound I was quite shocked that whilst Claudia Pierpont refers several times to Leaving a Doll’s House she almost airbrushes all the really bad stuff out of the story. (I need to take a look at the big notorious biography by Blake Bailey and see how this poisonous material is handled there.)
Different voices telling the same story, books cross-examining each other, gossip, trashtalking, hearsay, scandal…
What’s in a name – this is described as a semi-autobiographical novel but it’s really a memoir, just that, written in the white hot anguish left behinWhat’s in a name – this is described as a semi-autobiographical novel but it’s really a memoir, just that, written in the white hot anguish left behind by Peter Handke’s mother who committed suicide at the age of 51 in 1971. This memoir was published the following year.
The very ordinary miserable story of his mother’s unhappy existence on earth –
For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of young men -a girl's future was a joke. No possibilities. It was all settled in advance.
is made quite out of the ordinary by Peter Handke’s almost-out-of-control almost-manic manner of writing. You might say this is not so much writing as very articulate shouting – “now, do you SEE what you DID?” this book is saying, over and over. This book also breaks the fourth wall and writes about its writing –
It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupations with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me.. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment.
Really the same spirit-crushing events happened to millions of working-class women during the 20th century, including my own mother (thankfully she had a nice non-alcoholic husband and didn’t have a nervous breakdown). Society’s rigid expectations of women were, it’s true, demolished for a time by World War Two but as soon as that was over women were herded back to the house and specifically the kitchen.
I’m not sure if I recommend this little book, it’s completely bleak, but it is a great feminist statement....more
Why is Jean difficult? Well, when David meets her she’s 85 if she’s a day and she is busy redefiningDavid meets three difficult women.
JEAN RHYS
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Why is Jean difficult? Well, when David meets her she’s 85 if she’s a day and she is busy redefining the word cranky. Sample dialogue :
“I hate men.”
“I hate women. You can’t trust them.”
“I hate England. It’s so mouldy.”
“I hate this ashtray.”
“I hate taxmen. Fascist pigs."
“I don’t understand anything.”
“I never understood anything.”
“I hate you.”
“Why haven’t you brought more gin?”
Here’s my favourite from Jean :
“I didn’t know, and I don’t know now, why my first and third husbands were sent to prison. I don’t know much about my husbands.”
Some kind of magic about that, there really is.
SONIA ORWELL
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She was George’s widow, she was married to him for three whole months before he died of TB. She redefined the phrase high maintenance.
She was talking so quickly I imagined her talk would break through the limits of human talk and become something else.
A motormouth in English and French, she’s a frantic brittle alcoholic depressive, rattling between London and Paris giving endless restaurant dinners, dinner parties, soirees, paying for everything, endlessly maintaining her friendships with every living famous person especially painters like Picasso and Freud, David says :
I saw Sonia as an unspeakably unhappy woman. I was in love with the unhappiness in her, and yet reassured that, no matter what I did, what I felt it my duty to do, to lessen that unhappiness, I couldn’t.
And
Sonia was naturally ill-tempered, as if just having to live, day after day, were reason enough.
GERMAINE GREER
[image] Well we all know the great terrifying Germaine, don’t we, so this is probably the less interesting bit, but still full of fun – David visits Germaine in her remote Italian villa where she has a houseguest, an American woman and her baby. Germaine asks the woman to feed her cats, then, looking out of the window :
“I knew it,” Germaine said, “She won’t do the fucking simplest thing I ask. She won’t even feed the cats. No one ever does the simplest things I ask for, but everyone asks me for the world, the moon, the stars, the whole universe, and my money.”
And later
“I always end up finishing, or putting right, or completely restarting what others do badly.”
To say that GG has an ego you can see from space is an understatement, but she backs up her highest possible view of herself by talking to the garage mechanic in the local Italian dialect and knowing all the names of car parts, and knowing everything about plants, and flowers, and pretty much everything else ever.
I found her at the table in the living room doing careful detailed drawings for a dovecot she wanted to build from brick and roof tiles.
Naturally she knows everything about the type of bricks she particularly requires. As well as renaissance poetry and the reproductive rights of women in Sudan and current Japanese literature and.... you get the picture.
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