| Norman Mailer arm wrestling with Muhammad Ali, 1 August 1965. |
The Naked and the Dead author was a brash and infuriating personality, but he deserves better than this dismissive biography, published to mark the centenary of his birth
| Charles Dickens and Prince |
Hornby draws parallels between the Victorian novelist and the musician in this heartfelt homage to these brilliant, driven individuals
At the start of this heartfelt exercise in hero worship, Nick Hornby gathers together a throng of what he calls “My People” and ushers them into a VIP room in his head. They make up an eclectic pantheon, with Arsène Wenger jostling Joan Didion and the sitcom scriptwriters Galton and Simpson next to the gloomy painter Edward Hopper. Dickens and Prince are “two among many” in the gilded crowd, but Hornby singles them out for special homage. Dickens rescued him from the stupor of adolescence by showing that books were an escape route for the mind; Prince, with his keening falsetto, the prestidigitation of his guitar-playing and his hyperkinetic dance moves, delivered a physical excitement that is music’s special prerogative. Dickens made Hornby laugh, while Prince thrilled him by seeming to offer “hours of erotic ecstasy”.
| Francis Bacon |
BOOK OF THE DAY
Despite the painter’s lack of ‘epistolary fluency’, this collection of his writings – from drunken interviews to begging letters – offers some insight into his working methods and private life
Francis Bacon composed his autobiography in paint, not words. His portraiture laid bare the skull beneath the skin, the beast pregnantly housed inside the human form, and all of the figures he painted – copulating men, hybrid monsters, bystanders at a crucifixion, many of them trapped in chrome cages or sadomasochistic cellars – were fractured images of himself. The verbal self-portrait that Michael Peppiatt has assembled could never match that lacerating self-scrutiny; in his correspondence, his scrappy memos for paintings and his repetitive interviews, Bacon hid behind evasive banality or wilful obscurity.
| Lord Byron |
Andrew Stauffer conveys the vigour and pace of the poet’s escapades with brio, but stumbles when he suggests Byron anticipated modern celebrity
Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, but in Byron’s case the unstoppable overflow consisted of a more vital and potent bodily fluid. “Is it not life?” he asked about his comic epic Don Juan, the annals of a globe-trotting seducer; he added that his qualification for writing it was that he had “tooled” in a post chaise, a hackney coach, a gondola, against a wall, and both on and under a table. He claimed to do his rhyming, as he nonchalantly called it, “at night / When a Cunt is tied close to my inkstand”, and on receiving royalty cheques from his publisher he vowed that “what I get by my brains I will spend on my bollocks”.
After rereading the entire works of the great Victorian novelist during the pandemic, Peter Conrad became convinced – whisper it – that Dickens is an even greater writer than that other British literary giant, the Bard
Early in 2020, as society shut down, I retreated behind closed doors with Charles Dickens, who kept me company and cheered me up throughout the pandemic. Carried along by narratives that Dickens thought of as speedy locomotives and warmed by a combustible imagination that he compared to an industrial forge, I soon felt no need for tame timed circuits of the local park, and I even stopped fretting about the imminent end of the world. But although Dickens saved from me one disease, he infected me with another: escaping Covid-19, I contracted an incurable monomania instead.
| Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward |
A painfully revealing memoir, taken from transcripts of reminiscences Newman recorded in the 1980s, lays bare a candid, complicated star
Movie stars, bemused by their own magnified faces, don’t usually have much interest in self-analysis. Paul Newman turns out to be the ruthlessly candid exception. In the late 1980s, between beery binges, Newman recorded endless hours of reminiscences, trying finally to understand the insecure, inadequate stranger who skulked behind his handsome facade. Probably alarmed by what he’d revealed, he later destroyed the tapes. But after his death in 2008, 14,000 pages of transcripts were discovered in his musty Connecticut basement and in a storage locker; these have now been cut and pasted into an autobiography, supplemented by contributions from colleagues and family members. The result is startling: Narcissus breaks the mirror, leaving only some cruelly jagged shards.
| Paris Hilton |
With its dizzying spirituality and devotion to ‘sacred’ skincare, Paris Hilton’s memoir exposes a culture in which the self only exists if validated by a selfie
Twenty years ago, Paris Hilton was the stiletto-heeled embodiment of the zeitgeist. With a chihuahua called Diamond Baby kennelled in her designer handbag, this nepotistic partygoer juggled five mobile phones while cantering across continents to sell branded merchandise to the fans she smarmily addresses as “my Little Hiltons”. Now, in her early 40s, she has published a memoir, which for ephemeral, unreflective celebrities like her is usually a way of fending off imminent obsolescence.
| The left bank of the Lower Rio Negro, near the Anavilhanas archipelago, from Sebastião Salgado’s ‘superb’ Amazônia. Photograph: Sebastião Salgado |
Spend six years in the Amazon with Sebastião Salgado, five decades with Helmut Newton, long months on the road in America, and a year in Covid world
In colonial times, Brazil’s European settlers referred to the malarial, snake-infested jungle of the Amazon as a “green hell”. Sebastião Salgado’s superb Amazônia (Taschen) sees it as a black and white heaven, or as a paradise in the process of being lost – not closed to unworthy human beings but whittled away by farmers and churned up by mining. Salgado mythologises the landscapes he photographs, and his documentation of six years in the Amazon looks like a reprise of the first week in Genesis. As drenching rainstorms retreat from the steaming, apparently molten earth, dry land solidifies; tribal people clamber out of the river and begin to increase and multiply; the creator’s covenant with his biodiverse creation is renewed by a rainbow that arches over the mountains.
Salgado depicts the indigenous Amazonians as noble savages, innocent but startlingly elegant with their feathered headdresses and patterned face paint. Ejected from Eden, their latter-day descendants perform eroticised war dances in Helmut Newton’s Legacy (Taschen). Newton, who enjoyed reducing his sophisticated female subjects to a primitive state, saw clothes as fetish wear that revealed the body rather than covering it. Models were stripped nude after the catwalk parade ended, then ordered to reassume their strutting poses: is their bare skin also a disguise? Jerry Hall squeezes a slab of bleeding beef against her face, and another model shows off the Bvlgari jewels on her wrists and fingers while chopping up an uncooked chicken. In Newton’s perverse tableaux, beauty is an act of violence, an armed assault on nature.
Matt Black’s American Geography: A Reckoning With a Dream (Thames & Hudson) is a tragic atlas, documenting long months on the road in impoverished tracts of the country. The palette is stark, inky black and icy white, with flights of baleful Hitchcockian birds blotting out a washed-out or ashen sky. If the sun shines, it glints from junked liquor bottles, and the music that accompanies Black’s halting progress is made by the squeaking of plastic seats in a Greyhound bus. When western horizons open up, the space looks desolate, not grandly primordial like Salgado’s Amazon. Yet the photographs confer a stoical dignity on these exiles from America’s glossy promise, and notes from Black’s journals reveal how compassionately he listened to their jaunty tales of woe.
The Year That Changed Our World (Thames & Hudson) chronicles the pandemic in bright, sometimes lacerating colour. It begins by exposing something no one wants to see, as a passing cyclist in Wuhan pointedly ignores a corpse slumped in the street. Surreal oddities soon beguile the eye. An Indian policeman wears a blow-up of the spiky red coronavirus as a helmet; in Virginia, shop window dummies in evening dress occupy alternate tables in a fancy restaurant to enforce social distancing. Near the end, the nave of Salisbury Cathedral becomes a vaccination clinic, while in the Barcelona opera house a string quartet serenades an audience of 2,000 potted plants. Both spectacles are post-apocalyptic but somehow reassuring: religious faith gives way to medical science, and greenery reinherits the abused Earth.