Roald Dahl and Kingsley Amis

One of the many interesting meetings featured in Craig Brown's One on One that I'd not previously heard of is between Kingsley Amis and Roald Dahl, who met at a party thrown by Tom Stoppard in 1972. Craig tells how, thrown together by chance with Amis, Dahl professes himself a big fan, then starts asking about money:

"So you've no financial problems."

"I wouldn't say that either, exactly, but I seem to be able to . . ."

Dahl, frustrated, cuts to the chase: "What you want to do is write a children's book. That's where the money is today, believe me." Amis, knowing his limitations, demurs:

"I couldn't do it," says Amis. "I don't think I enjoyed children's books much when I was a child myself. I've got not feeling for that kind of thing."

"Never mind," replies Dahl. "The little bastards'd swallow it."

The story is told, both by Amis in his memoirs and by Brown in his book, as a sort of inadvertent revelation by Dahl of a calculating cynicism, and that's certainly how it would seem if it ended there. But Brown relates the conversation's conclusion, which to my eye changes its whole tone:

In his account, Amis goes on to say that children are meant to be good at detecting insincerity, and would probably see through him. . . .

"Well, it's up to you. Either you will or you won't. Write a children's book, I mean. But if you do decide to have a crack, let me give you one warning. Unless you put everything you've got into it, unless you write it from the heart, the kids'll have no use for it. They'll see you're having them on. And just let me tell you from experience that there's nothing kids hate more than that. They won't give you a second chance either. You'll have had it for good as far as they're concerned. Just you bear that in mind as a word of friendly advice."

That apparently sincere sentiment complicates the anecdote, and, moreover, when its sincerity about hard work and commitment is combined with the bluntness of his earlier statement, seems to represent the Dahl we know.

But good god, imagine what a children's book by Kingsley Amis would have been like. Ghastly to think about, isn't it?

The gossipy bits of literary biography

I'm still scrambling a bit to stay on a reasonable blogging pace amid the demands of work and travel, so the next few days will likely see me simply sharing some passages from two books that have been my regular companions for the first half of this year, Craig Brown's One on One and John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists. I've written already about both; suffice it to say that if, like me, you enjoy the gossipy bits of literary biography, you should have these books on your shelves. (For a more in-depth consideration of Sutherland's book, you can't do much better than this post from Open Letters Monthly, which addresses the book's weaknesses as well as its obvious strengths--and offers the added bonus of Sutherland himself responding in the comments.)

The pleasure of Sutherland's book lie largely in its scope--the sheer number of eminently forgettable authors whose oeuvre he's apparently read is astonishing. (Of forgotten American hack J. H. Ingraham Sutherland writes, "The most interesting novel of his third, holy phase is The Sunny South.") Then there are his pithy turns of phrase. Of Poe he writes,

The skull on the desk, that standard Ignatian aid to meditation, is common enough in literature. With Poe, the warm flesh is still slithering off the bone.

and

It was the pattern of his life to succeed brilliantly, then move on before getting bogged down in the consequences of his own brilliance. If necessary he would drink himself out of the sinecures friends were willing to set up for him.

Of Mark Twain, he writes,

Mark Twain, we may say, made American literature talk--unlike, say, Henry James, who merely made it write.

Melville, in the midst of a full entry, elicits this eye-popping sentence about his seafaring years,

Communal onanism was called "claw for claw"--sailors going at each other's privates like fighting cocks.

Of Anne Bronte he writes,

Anne survived her brother by only a few months, dying decently, but tragically early, of the family complaint. One imagines she met her end more dutifully.

And of Emily,

Emily is the most enigmatic of the writing sisters. No clear image of her remarkable personality can be formed. Branwell sneered at her as "lean and scant" aged sixteen. She, famously, counselled that he should be "whipped" for his malefactions. She evidently thought well of the whip and used it, as Mrs Gaskell records, on her faithful hound, Keeper, when he dared to lie on her bed. A tawny beast with a "roar like a lion," Keeper followed his mistress's coffin to the grave and, for nights thereafter, moaned outside her bedroom door.

Readers, this book is for you.

Brown's book, meanwhile, follows a daisy chain of chance encounters between writers, artists, and other cultural and historical figures from the nineteenth century to the present. Dozen of old favorites turn up in its pages, including Tolstoy, Raymond Chandler, Mark Twain, and many more, but the scene that has remained most vivid in my mind these many months is from a chance meeting between Evelyn Waugh and Alec Guinness in 1955. They're both at St. Ignatius chapel to witness the confirmation of Waugh's god-daughter, Edith Sitwell, and they're joined by, in Waugh's words, "an old deaf woman with dyed hair," who, according to Brown, "walks unsteadily with the aid of two sticks." Her "bare arms are encased in metal bangles which give [Guinness] the impression that she is some ancient warrior."

In attempting to sit, she falls, and her bangles go flying:

"My jewels!" she cries. "Please to bring back my jewels!"

Waugh and Guinness dutifully get down on all fours and wriggle their way under the pews and around the candle sconces, trying to retrieve "everything round and glittering."

"How many jewels were you wearing?" Waugh asks the old deaf woman.

"Seventy," she replies.

Under the pews, Waugh whispers to Guinness, "What nationality?"

"Russian, at a guess," says Guinness, sliding on his stomach beneath a pew and dirtying his smart suit.

"Or Rumanian," says Waugh. "She crossed herself backwards. She may be a Maronite Christian, in which case beware."

The two men start laughing, and soon, according to Guinness, get "barely controllable hysterics." They pick up all the bangles they can find. Guinness counts them into her hands, but the old deaf woman looks suspiciously at the pair of them, as if they might have pocketed a few.

"Is that all?" she asks.

"Sixty-eight," says Guinness.

"You are still wearing two," observes Waugh.

That story rivals the story of Guinness's premonitory warning to James Dean--also included in Brown's book--as the best Alec Guinness story I know.

The King . . . and the Mad Monk

Pressed for time, today I'm simply going to share a single sentence that blew my mind and that, while not representative of the book it came from, could at least stand for some of the pleasures to be found in its pages. Herewith, from Craig Brown's One on One:

Elvis is staying in a Frank Lloyd Wright house he rents from the Shah of Iran.

Reading that sentence, all I can think is, if only there were more parts to it! Couldn't the house have a garden designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, surrounding the tomb of Howard Carter, and its tenancy be shared with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Adlai Stevenson? (Then there's the mind-boggling attempt to imagine Elvis's over-the-top aesthetic crammed into a Wright house. It's probably good for Wright to roll over in his grave every once in a while, and I suspect when the King started gold-plating everything and stacking TVs in every room, he surely took some righteous spins.)

Brown's book, which daisy-chains casual encounters between 101 writers, artists, and cultural and historical figures, building anecdotes from memoirs and biographies, really is a lot of fun. I'm finding it well suited to the kind of reading I've been giving it since I brought it home from London in January: two stories at a time every once in a while. That method allows you to always carry one figure forward--P. L. Travers, for example, worships Gurdjieff, who then briefly controls the aforementioned Frank Lloyd Wright--then close the book knowing you'll start back up with one of the people you ended your last reading with.

And now that I've mentioned semi-mystical control, I don't think I can end this post without drawing on another of Brown's chapters, this one on a meeting between Noel Coward and Prince Felix Youssoupoff. Youssoupoff, a Russian exile, comes across as a character that Anthony Powell would have had great fun with: his claim to fame, and--title aside--ticket to society, is that he is one of the assassins of Rasputin, and, even more, was the person who lured him to his death. Brown writes,

Until his death at the age of eighty in 1967, Youssoupoff knows full well that his murder of Rasputin is the signature tune that accompanies his entrance into any gathering. He embraces his notoriety. In his Knightsbridge home in the 1920s he regularly entertains guests with increasingly melodramatic renditions of that fateful night in 1916. He even submits paintings of bearded men with evil grimaces to an art exhibition. So identified are he and his wife Irina with the death of Rasputin that a New York hostess mistakenly introduces them as the Prince and Princess Rasputin. Around the same time, Helen Izvolsky, the daughter of the Tsar's former ambassador to France, visits Youssoupoff and notices "something Satanic about his twisted smile. He talked for several hours about the assassination, and seemed quite pleased to reminisce, going over all the horrifying details. In conclusion, he showed me a ring he was wearing, with a bullet mounted in silver. He explained that this was the bullet that had killed Rasputin."

Now, we've all got stories we break out in certain company, old favorites with a track record as proven crowd pleasers. But good god--re-enacting the murder of Rasputin in your parlor? Who could possibly hope to top that?

"Frank Lloyd Wright will not hear a word against the sauerkraut," Or, People are strange

{Photo by rocketlass.} I make no bones about the fact that one of the things I look for in books, and particularly in nonfiction, is simple human oddity. Oh, sure, there are other things to be learned from reading about the lives of others--facts about other times and places, information about how others have grappled with problems or questions we may be facing ourselves--but at base, what I tend to be looking for is the entertainment afforded by the strange ways people behave.

And, having encountered a number of good examples lately, the time seems ripe for a roundup. Lariats away!

1 Will Friedwald's Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (2010) is such a jam-packed, endlessly fascinating book that it makes me wish that I had a similar guide to every field of culture that interests me. I suppose that Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstract (2000), if he would ever update it again, would almost suffice for baseball, while John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists (2011) will do in a pinch for literature. But neither book makes the claim to completeness that Friedwald's guide does, nor does either offer nearly as much biographical information or critical analysis as Friedwald's book. It's a true joy, the product of decades of attending to vocalists, leavened with a distinct aesthetic and accompanying opinions, clearly stated but not intrusive.

And then there are the great lines, ranging from aphoristic descriptions (Tony Bennett is "the Pangloss of pop") to moments of insight, like "More than anyone else, Garland was Jolson's greatest heir." Though Bobby Short grew up in the Midwest and first became a star in Los Angeles, he nonetheless "embodied the Californinan's idea of New York elegance." "If there's such a thing as Anglo-Saxon soul," Jo Stafford's folk recordings are it. Chet Baker's singing

is, from the first note, utterly disarming. Yes, you can qualify a word like "disarming"--it may be true that either it is or it isn't, but some things are more disarming than others, and Baker's singing is one of them.

But I'm getting off topic! I was to focus on human oddity!

So you get this, from the part of the entry for Mary Martin that covers her time in Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun:

It's been said that Martin is a more feminine Annie than Ethel Merman--which is kind of unfair. La Merm, blustery and brassy as she was, never struck me as butch. Could there be a more extreme way for a woman to prove her heterosexuality than to marry Ernest Borgnine?

Okay, so it's not exactly odd behavior: that wasn't really the reason Merman married Borgnine. But oh, the thought!

2 I've written about James Lees-Milne's charming biography Another Self (1970) before, but, prompted by a beautiful Slightly Foxed edition, I've been paging through it again. I think you'll enjoy this wonderfully bizarre portrait of an aged widow at Lees-Milne's boyhood church who served as bell-ringer:

Although really far too old and frail, Mrs Hartwell refused to relinquish the bell rope with its fluffy stripes in red, white and blue, called I believe the "sally." She regarded the pulling of it as her sacred duty, which she would surrender to no one, until the breath, as she put it, was out of her body. The act was sometimes attended by alarming manifestations. For bell ringing, even with one rope, necessitates a sense of rhythm in the ringer. Mrs Hartwell lacked this sense. Occasionally she would pull too soon, or too late. The rope thereupon gave a jerk and if she failed to let go--it was not in her nature to let go of things--she would be swept up the belfry. When this happened she would either cling to the rope until it came down again, or she would swing on it until her feet touched a ladder kept permanently fixed to the wall to enable workmen or builders to go up the tower. With astonishing agility for a person of her years she would scramble down the ladder and resume ringing as though nothing had happened.

The line that makes the picture is the aside, "it was not in her nature to let go of things."

3 For a fan of, a Michael Dirda once put it, "the higher gossip," Craig Brown's One on One (2011) is a great resource. Brown builds a daisy chain of 101 incidental meetings between prominent figures--most of them artists or writers, but also including religious figures, movie stars, and even Hitler--offering a brief, quote-rich account of A's meeting with B, followed by the same for B's meeting with C, C's meeting with D, and on. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and thus far the highlight, easily, is Evelyn Waugh's encounter with Alec Guinness, about which more sometime soon. Today, however, I'll share a bit from Frank Lloyd Wright's encounter with self-styled religious guru George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff doesn't come off well in either this account or the preceding one, which finds him meeting devotee P. L. Travers. In that entry, Brown writes about Gurdjieff's "unseemly" personal habits:

In his palatial flat at his institute in Paris, he often didn't bother to visit the lavatory, preferring to defecate willy-nilly. "There were times when I would have to use a ladder to clean the walls," recalls one of the residents."

The encounter with Wright is less disgusting, but only just. By invitation, Gurdjieff came to Taliesin, where he succeeded in roping in Wright within twenty-four hours; this famously stubborn and strong-willed man bowed to Gurdjieff in almost every realm. Including the kitchen:

Before his stay is over, he has made everyone cook great quantities of sauerkraut from his own recipe, involving whole apples, including their skins, their stem and their cores. Even his most devoted disciples find it hard to swallow. On his departure from Taliesin, he leaves behind two fifty-gallon barrels of the stuff. In the first flush of discipleship, Frank Lloyd Wright will not hear a word against the sauerkraut. He insists the barrels must be transported to his Fellowship's desert camp in Arizona, watching attentively as they are loaded onto a truck.

Wright's control only extends so far, however: somewhere in Iowa, the crew driving the truck dumps the barrels in a ditch.

4 The trip to Wright's kitchen serves nicely to bring us to the oddity that got me going on this theme today in the first place, a moment from Frank Brady's Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall (2011). Twelve-year-old Bobby Fischer is watching a high-profile tournament, with all the Cold War trappings, between a US team and a Russian team. Brady writes,

And then there were the players, gathering onstage, waiting for the signal from the referee to take their places and commence their games. Soviet player David Bronstein asked for a glass of lemon juice--no, not lemonade, but real lemon juice, he insisted--which he downed in what looked like one gulp.

Surely he at least made a face?

US Open champion Donald Byrne, on the other hand,

said he was so on edge that he spent the entire day before the match trying not to think of chess, reading the romantic prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Which seems like an error, no? Is anything quite black-and-white in Hawthorne?