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1982144009
| 9781982144005
| 1982144009
| 4.39
| 342
| 2025
| Apr 15, 2025
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it was amazing
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[image] A STRANGE, ENTIRELY SELF-CREATED LIFE He went from being a 22 year old incel, whose contemptuous father said “He’ll marry the first one that com [image] A STRANGE, ENTIRELY SELF-CREATED LIFE He went from being a 22 year old incel, whose contemptuous father said “He’ll marry the first one that comes along” – and he did! – to a guy with a wife and kid, a girlfriend, another girlfriend, and various other liaisons that popped up wherever he happened to find himself. The trappings of fame. But what a bizarre kind of fame it was, like being on a beach and not realising how quickly the tide was coming in, suddenly it’s up to your knees. From years of pennilessness to lighting his cigars with a hundred dollar note and it all seemed to happen in about 18 months. I exaggerate, but only slightly. It was a scattershot, chaotic kind of fame – those ubiquitous Keep On Truckin’ cartoons were everywhere and he hardly made a dime off them. He hated the Fritz the Cat movie. Actually he was a genius-level hater. ATTITUDE PROBLEM He was the guy who proclaimed long and loudly how much he detested the hippies whilst living the most hippy life ever. He had not one but two open marriages and yes, his wives had their boyfriends while he had his girlfriends, and some of these gfs and bfs and exes became semi-permanent and all lived on and off in a sort of commune way out in California. Before that he lived in Haight Ashbury in 65 to 68 and gobbled a great deal of acid. But yes, he hated the hippies, and all things modern (rock music, television, long hair). Instead, he was in love with the style, the music, the look and the feel of the 20s and 30s. He was a contrarian. [image] MY PARAPHILIA AND ME But he invented a big chunk of modern art, and not just some of the most recognisable features of his time but the very concept of his art – comics - being art at all. And not being for children but for adults! Well… when I say he created comics for adults I mean comics for men who have a sniggering salacious puerile obsession about sex. He spent years making cutesy friendly cartoons about femicide, incest, paraphilias, that kind of thing. That was a big chunk of it, but not all. He also did careful and beautifully realised comics of Boswell’s London Journal, Kafka, Bukowski and Philip K Dick’s life. He was a sweet gentle guy whose art revealed a whole series of ugly misogynistic and racist fantasies. This is not me doing the fingerwagging, this is the author’s verdict. Often, says Dan Nadel, his art offers the ugliest vision of white male heterosexuality Ugliest? I could add in here a few panels to prove the point but they’d kick me off Goodreads in five minutes. Some of his stuff is really shocking. Should you require proof you could google Crumb “A Bitchin’ Bod” and that will be all you need. And it’s the kind of shocking where he would have said well, I just let my id flow out of my skull onto the page, with no filters, I’m totally honest, I don’t apologise, there it is, you don’t have to buy it. Trina Robbins (cartoonist from the East Village Other) The guys (and some of their gfs) continued to think Crumb was hilarious, but, suddenly, I didn’t get it. Rape and humiliation – and later, torturing and murdering women – don’t seem funny to me. Cute, endearing and vile. That’s Crumb. [image] EFFECTS OF FAME Robert formed an acoustic string band to play old timey music. It was called the Cheap Suit Serenaders. (Lasted a few years too). So, it’s 1974, at a Suits gig. Aline attended, looked around, and realized that Robert was sleeping with at least three other women in the audience, all also dressed as “Crumb girls” in plaid skirts, white shirts and knee-high socks. CRUMB KEPT IT REAL Now it’s 1977 : He refused plenty of other offers that year, including $10,000 from the Rolling Stones for an album cover. Robert just hated the music – noisy, full of faux authenticity, and corporate – too much to even consider it. TIMOTHY LEARY WAS NOT A FAN For almost two decades Crumb has put out more aesthetic pollutants, more glorification of ugliness, pessimism, derogation of the human spirit than anyone I can think of. He is more of a menace than nuclear plants. IN LATER YEARS As vast sums rolled in from the hifalutin art galleries of the western world (yes, he was "taken up") Dan Nadel will say stuff like The original drawings…were sold to the Lucas Museum of Narrative art for $2.9 million (in 2011) But also, he began to turn from curmudgeon to full-on crank, with an it’s-really-true plunge into astral projection, (Dan says with a straight face Robert achieved his last projection in 2005) and full on anti vax madness. At the same time as apparently truly believing the anti-vax conspiracy theories, he would draw a comic strip satirising his idiocy in believing this stuff. That's how he rolled. CRUMBLAND I can recommend The Robert Crumb Handbook The R Crumb Coffee Table Book Crumb (a brilliant documentary from 1993 – if you think this biography will be too much go with the doc) And Robert Crumb and the Cheap Suit Serenaders albums (there are three – music is nice but his voice is not good!) I LOVE BIOGRAPHY When you get a juicy psychological weirdo like Crumb a solid biography like this one is better than a novel. Andrea Dworkin, Jean Rhys, George Gissing, Elijah Mohammed – and how could I forget Dostoyevsky – all amazing characters, amazing lives. ...more |
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1
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Jun 16, 2025
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Jun 21, 2025
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May 23, 2025
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Hardcover
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0670025372
| 9780670025374
| 0670025372
| 4.36
| 4,568
| Nov 22, 2022
| Nov 22, 2022
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it was amazing
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An immense book in which stretches of yawnful dullness alternate with pageturning intensity. The biography of J Edgar Hoover is the biography of the F An immense book in which stretches of yawnful dullness alternate with pageturning intensity. The biography of J Edgar Hoover is the biography of the FBI. And I thought the FBI was all about fighting crime. Yes, they did that, but it seems that after the rough tough gangster stuff of the 20s and early 30s, featuring the big names like Baby Face Nelson and John Dillinger, it was all about the damn communists and their stooges : political surveillance. The fight against crime gets hardly a mention for most of this long long story. That was not what I expected. TAKING STALIN AT HIS WORD Hoover and many other rightwingers sincerely believed that the communists wanted to overthrow the US government (hey, I’m sure they did!) but further, that unless they were stopped they would do just that. Maybe this is hindsight, but those commies were never going to be able to overthrow the USA. Not in a billion years. They wouldn’t have been able to overthrow Omaha Nebraska if you gave them a month to do it. But there was a tremendous paranoia about them in the USA, and Hoover was the guy who believed every revolutionary fantasy he ever read. HOOVERING UP THE SUBVERSIVES He dedicated his life to subverting the subversives and like a lot of guys he thought that anyone who disagreed with his conventionally conservative point of view was just wrong. He believed in the American Way of Life ™ like a turtle believes in water. There was just no other way to be! Anyone who wasn’t living a God-fearing married with 2.4 children and a steady job life was a person of interest and he would probably bug you or write you down on a list which he would reread many times at the very least. In World War 1, Hoover was rounding up communists and undesirable aliens. During World War 2 he was rounding up different foreigners. Immediately after that came the bugeyed hunt for communists which morphed into the many battles with those aggravating troublemakers demanding civil rights for black citizens, they were obviously all dupes of communism, then it all got worse with the Vietnam War and all those long haired protestors and anarchists, and when he was an old guy who should have retired, along came the Black Panthers – what a total nightmare. HOOVER STYLE Hoover himself tried hard to stay in his office pushing papers around his vast desk and barking orders into a phone. He would have been happy to run a department which gradually turned police work into a pure science – he built the first fingerprint database, he was all about forensics. He wanted an elite force of good looking six foot tall impeccably dressed agents who would talk politely and would not be like those nasty rough cops you saw on the street. He went out of his way to separate himself from ordinary policemen, whom he depicted as a cabal of corrupt, undereducated, easy-to-deceive thugs THE FBI STARTED OUT PRETTY SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT The situation in 1930 : Outside certain limited areas of jurisdiction – auto theft, white slavery, crime on Indian reservations, antitrust work – the federal government was among the least important players in the criminal justice system. White slavery? Hoover’s agents were finally armed and allowed to make arrests in 1934. It was deemed necessary what with all those gangsters running around. Even after months of firearms training, they were woefully unprepared for this sort of work, a group of lawyers and accountants who suddenly found themselves involved in street battles and machinegun fire. MATCHING WHITE SUMMER SUITS There was a contradiction at the heart of all this, there usually is. He was gay so he himself was not living the All American Way of Life ™. Here comes the interesting part – although he had a lot to hide, and if his big secret had been revealed he would have been finished, times were maybe more compassionate back then than we usually give them credit for. He lived with his life partner Clyde Tolson out in the open and no one raised an eyebrow. Maybe there was a little bit of gossip here and there but really nothing. Edgar and Clyde were just two bachelors who happened to do everything together. When Hoover celebrated his twentieth anniversary at the Justice Department, Tolson posed with him for photos : two men shaking hands in matching white summer suits, surrounded by a sea of flowers. They made little effort to hide from the press, and joked openly about their adventures together. Richard and Pat Nixon regularly invited Edgar and Clyde for lunch or dinner. Well, everyone did. They were a couple. It was accepted. But this was the guy who conducted a hunt for dangerous homosexuals in the 50s, it was called the Lavender Scare, it ran parallel to the Red Scare. Hundreds of government employees were fired in this period, for being gay. McCarthy often referred to them as a single entity: “communists and queers” lurking side by side in the government The idea was that gay men could so easily get blackmailed by those awful communists and then they would be turned into spies and become Moscow’s puppets and before you knew it Omaha Nebraska would be part of the Soviet Union. JURISDICTION Even as Hoover was empire-building the FBI into a – well, an empire – he preferred to write lists and put them in a big file and he didn’t want to be dragged into something shambolic if he could get out of it. On 22 November 1963 there was an event. As Hoover would explain many times over the next twenty-four hours, the murder of the president was just that: an act of murder, falling under the jurisdiction of the local authorities. Yes, amazingly, he faffed about jurisdiction on 22 November 1963. MASSIVE RESISTANCE Mostly Hoover and his FBI were at war with the left, no surprise. But the racist right was all too unignorable. It is very clear that although Hoover loved a long list of commies and anarchists to ponder, the thought of tangling with the KKK brought on an instant migraine. He didn’t wanna have to do it. He didn’t want any part of the whole parade of lynching horrors that happened in the 20th century. Wikipedia tells me that the lynching of Emmett Till, aged 14, in Drew, Mississippi, was the last lynching, and that 4,733 people were lynched in the USA between 1882 (when stats began to be collected) and 1955. And there were murders of many black people and civil rights workers after 1955, as we know. Hoover had a huge ghastly problem with this situation. He hated the law of the land being ignored. But he couldn’t do anything about it. There was this thing called “massive resistance”. This meant that Washington could pass all the laws they wanted to, but it wouldn’t make no never mind in the South. The FBI could investigate a lynching (not because the victim had been murdered, but because his civil rights had been infringed – careful with your jurisdiction, Edgar); the FBI agents with their usual efficiency could usually find the murderers, but then they would have to turn them over to the locals, who would then footdraggingly finally put them on trial, and the juries would find them not guilty. Every time. Why didn’t Congress make a federal anti-lynching law? They tried, many times, and each time it was filibustered to death by a Southern senator. GUESS WHO? Over the course of nine hours, they discussed how to use wiretaps, bugs, press leaks, photographs, gossip-spreading, physical surveillance, tax inquiries, anonymous letters and other counterintelligence techniques against Did you guess Martin Luther King? Man alive, the last quarter of this book shows in painful detail how TOTALLY OBSESSED Hoover was with King, how he was convinced that King was a commie and was about to fuse together all the forces of evil in the USA and destroy all the goodlyhearted people. As I ploughed through this part I was looking forward to the arrival of the Panthers, who were even more frightening for poor old Hoov. AND IN THE END People got sick to death of him. After piling every last possible award onto him, after making adulatory speeches and hagiographical movies, after eight different presidents came to eat out of his hand, after they made a special exemption for him so he could carry on working for the government after the official retirement age, after 48 years as total dictator of the FBI, people finally got sick of him. The Man Who Stayed Too Long. On page 731 author Beverly Gage writes her conclusion : During his lifetime, Hoover did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking racial and social justice, and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible. His actions damaged the lives of thousands of people And his legacy was the idea that the government could not be trusted to protect the rights of Americans So no, she didn’t get to like J Edgar Hoover. * Yes, this book is WAY too long (just like this review), but it’s totally recommended! [image] ...more |
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1
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May 2025
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Jun 04, 2025
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Apr 02, 2025
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Hardcover
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0720613515
| 9780720613513
| 0720613515
| 3.71
| 49
| Jul 28, 2010
| May 01, 2011
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really liked it
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The father was a shopkeeper (china and sports goods) and a professional cricketer, he didn’t make much money, and the mother was 43 when HG Wells was
The father was a shopkeeper (china and sports goods) and a professional cricketer, he didn’t make much money, and the mother was 43 when HG Wells was born. There were two older brothers and a sister who had already died. He grew up in total obscurity, undersized and undernourished, left school at the age of thirteen; and he ended up one of the most famous writers on the planet. And when in his 70s he thought he would like to interview Roosevelt and Stalin, you know, put a few questions to them, well, that’s what he did. By that time, they wanted to meet him. Once he got going, he didn’t stop, it just geysered forth. He started with science fiction, which wasn’t even a thing then, of course. There was one original idea after another – 12 books between 1895 and 1899 ! Here are four of them - The Time Machine (1895). The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) The Invisible Man (1897) The War of the Worlds (1898) But he was smart and he switched directions and started writing comic novels, then serious novels.* Then another change – he swerved into nonfiction about politics, world peace, the way to create a socialist utopia, that kind of thing, and he became what was called a social commentator and is now called an Influencer. People loved it! He would have been a top youtuber. Even though he had an unattractive high whiny voice! Then at age 54 he thought ok enough fooling around, let’s write a history of the entire world since the first single celled creature, so he took a year off and read everything and synthesized it all with his brain machine and wrote An Outline of History which was issued in monthly parts and then as a book and it made a fortune. After that he decided to become a journalist, visiting anywhere he thought was interesting and knocking off a quick 150 page book about it. HG WELLS : PLAYER All his life he was a short tubby guy with a whiny voice who danced around the world in search of literary ladies who were in search of him, and there were plenty of them. He was a player. He always had a nice doormat wife at home bringing up the kiddies** and a girlfriend often in France or Russia who might have a kid too (say, Rebecca West) and another one lined up when girlfriend number one burned out. And he had some casual flings on the side too. Our biographer says, at one point : he embarked on a series of outrageous love affairs that almost amounted to a kind of performance art ONE OF HIS GIRLFRIENDS FINALLY DITCHES HIM Curse and blast and shit the day on which we decided to live together, you swine, and the house you built, and what you did and what you are. Can’t that diabetes of yours carry you off at last! The time and nervous energy you make me waste! God damn you everlastingly! And a little later : I send you in parting my pious hope that your neuritis, your diabetes, your sclerosed lung and your one kidney will soon combine to put a definitive stop to the diarrhetic deluge of drivelling works with which you persist in swamping a long-suffering public – and so I end our mortally boring association. HG WELLS : BEEN THERE, DONE THAT He knew everybody – JM Barrie, DH Lawrence, Gissing, Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Henry James (a particularly big mate) – but not just writers, he met Lenin, Stalin, Roosevelt (Theodore and FDR) , Chaplin, Booker T Washington, Huey P Long… Joseph Conrad and I used to shoot at breakable floating targets, bottles chiefly, at Sandgate, and as I have got a steady finger on a trigger while he was a jumping bundle of nerves I got most of the bottles. As he had a great pride in being a wild, wild man while I was a meek stay-at-home, this annoyed him. A FEW OTHER THINGS THAT CAUGHT MY EYE He has a jauntiness about him that is still hard to resist. He wrote a book called Anticipations which he described in a letter as being designed to undermine and destroy the monarchy, monogamy, faith in God and respectability – and the British Empire, all under the guise of a speculation about motor cars and electrical heating. He could be weird – when his mother died he photographed her body “from several angles in close-up”. He was controversial – one bigwig said about his novel Tono-Bungay “I would rather send a daughter of mine to a house infected with diphtheria or typhoid fever as put that book into her hands”. He had some good ideas ! In 1924 he wrote a book in which he advocates compulsory schooling up to at least the age of sixteen, nursery provision for four year olds and global conservation policies to protect whales, gorillas and elephants. He had a great feud with Winston Churchill – in 1920 he visited the USSR and wrote a book about it – Churchill castigated him for “giving comfort to fanatics and murderers”. He responded by saying that Churchill was a menace to world peace and that he should remove himself from public office so that he could put his talents to better use as a painter. PROLIFIC IN EVERY POSSIBLE SENSE 50 novels, umpty-ump nonfiction books, short stories, the unstoppable flood of Wellsiana until finally that tap got turned off in 1946 at the age of 79. I got to like him a lot. It was a great life. ***** *After The History of Mr Polly in 1910 Michael Sherborne pretty much trashes every one of HG’s novels – this is him on page 266 as “The Dream” progresses the narrative voice diminishes into nagging and the plot into melodrama HG wrote so many novels the world has been kind enough to forget completely! **but she had her limits. He complained to his current girlfriend that his wife had the temerity to object when he tried to put a photograph of her on the wall. ...more |
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1
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Mar 30, 2025
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Apr 16, 2025
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Dec 09, 2024
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Hardcover
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0786716231
| 9780786716234
| 0786716231
| 4.11
| 1,450
| 1989
| 2005
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liked it
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SOME FACTS Five wives, 3 children 49 novels, umpteen short stories One major encounter with God (alleged) lasting several weeks One 8000 page journal desc SOME FACTS Five wives, 3 children 49 novels, umpteen short stories One major encounter with God (alleged) lasting several weeks One 8000 page journal describing and theorising about the encounter with God Several spells in psychiatric facilities Truckloads, no, container-loads of drugs, mainly amphetamines, which may possibly have something to do with the spells in psychiatric facilities and the early death from stroke and heart failure at age 53. SOME QUOTES When he was born in 1928 he was a twin but because of ineptitude on the part of his parents his sister Jane died aged 6 weeks, and all his life PKD felt his twin’s death very keenly, with great sorrow, and blamed his mother for it. Our biographer says if that seems strange – how could what happened at his birth affect him so? – it can be corroborated by the testimony of anyone who has lost a twin. It is a bond that causes nontwins to be skeptical because it is, in truth, a bond beyond the telling. Some years later : Phil read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake several times in his early twenties. Hey, really? Have you seen how long that thing is ? 800 pages! Several times? Come on, pull the other one. He was a very paranoid person. Example : He would speculate that somehow, by accident, he had depicted a vital, classified secret in his sf – and had aroused the government’s suspicion. Sometimes he realised he was a giant needy egomaniacal pain : Gradually everybody is beginning to realize that despite my fame and my great books I am a distinct liability to know or have anything to do with. [image] Photos do not do him justice. He was large, physically imposing, and hairy. He was wearing slacks and an open shirt, as if his hairy barrel chest and barrel belly couldn’t stand being confined. Here’s Phil in 1972 aged 44 writing about a new girl he’s met : Tess is a little black-haired chick, exactly like I’m not supposed to get involved with, eighteen…it’s cool. The thing that’s so great about Tess is that she doesn’t lay any trips on me that aren’t my own. Yes he was kind of a blissed-out hippy throughout his thirties and forties. But wait, not that blissed-out…on the very next page, a friend Linda Levy is quoted : Tessa showed up at my apartment one day, covered with bruises, crying and very upset. She described a situation which, she said, Phil locked the front door, turned up the stereo, turned up the air conditioning, and beat her. I probably shouldn’t quote that part, but it’s there. Anyway, back to God. [image] (one of over 1500 "stock God photos" you can license) So....what sort of revelations did Phil receive from God? (This was all he wanted to talk about after a certain point in his mid life.) Well it was this kind of thing : It was as if linear time was illusion and true time was layered : simultaneous realities stacked one upon the other, the interpenetration visible to the opened mind. And I began to go outdoors at night to watch the stars, with the strong impression that information was coming from them. In fact he didn’t call it God. He called it VALIS which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Actually, Lawrence Sutin doesn’t think it was God or VALIS, he thinks it was temporal lobe epilepsy (“a reasonable diagnosis”). FLOW MY TEARS, THE REVERED DEAD SCIENCE FICTION WRITER SAID A messy, pretty unpleasant, drug-addled guy who couldn’t stand not being married and then after a few years of one marriage got sick of it and married somebody else. An author who would type like Glenn Gould plays the Bach Variations – pyrotechnically composing his novels as he typed, with no idea what will happen next until he sees it being typed by his breakneck fingers rattling away at 180 words per minute, a short story in two all night sessions, a novel in two or three nearly sleepless weeks. When he’s writing don’t talk to him. Bring him coffee and his amphetamines and shut up and go away. When he’s not writing give him your maximum full 100% attention, don’t go to your best friend’s wedding, stay in, he hates going out. And like George Gissing and George Orwell, his books had just started to make serious money when he keeled over and died. VALIS always has the last laugh. ...more |
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1
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Dec 13, 2024
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Dec 27, 2024
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Dec 02, 2024
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0826464971
| 9780826464972
| 0826464971
| 3.76
| 2,614
| 1918
| Mar 27, 2003
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it was ok
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It’s not too hard to see that when this book exploded into the drawing rooms of 1918 it left its readers reeling from shock – four of the high and mig
It’s not too hard to see that when this book exploded into the drawing rooms of 1918 it left its readers reeling from shock – four of the high and mighty big shot revered names of the Victorian period which had just ended were given a subtle but thorough debunking – the Lady with the Lamp turns out to be a nasty harridan, General Gordon, the hero of Khartoum, is a drunken deluded idiot, Cardinal Manning’s religion was a perfect screen for his enormous ambition, etc. These days these names are distant blurs but back then they were huge, and Lytton Strachey was ready to pull them off their pedestals. But here’s a curious thing. In this Definitive Edition they hired four experts to add essays commenting on Strachey’s account, and in each case they debunk the debunker! The first three experts say things like Strachey, unfortunately, was inclined to ignore evidence that did not fit his preconceived plan. He represents an early example of a journalistic trend that assumes that no great person can be what they appear to be, there must be flaws below the surface The fourth really puts the boot in though. Strachey’s account of General Gordon Must now be buried except as a superb piece of writing… he misunderstood and distorted the character as well as making errors of fact… misinterpretations and factual errors abound… Strachey cannot be relied upon… any reader wanting a reliable account must turn elsewhere Does this book work on any level anymore? The sardonic tone gets a little wearing, true; but the style is as smooth as silk, surely. The main problem is that the targets are no longer interesting. That an ambitious cleric switched from the Protestant to the Catholic faith and had a great career is yawn inducing ( – whoever in the 21st century didn’t assume that the serene princes of the Holy Roman Catholic Church did not conduct their affairs more or less along the lines of a slightly less murderous Tony Soprano?); that the great master of Rugby School was a religious egomaniac does not startle us; and his exposure of Florence Nightingale as an inflexible cantankerous monster falls completely flat since everything she applied her willpower and energy to was of enormous benefit to the poor soldiers and later to hospitals in general. This is a historically important book but I think it will have very few readers now. ...more |
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Oct 12, 2024
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Oct 17, 2024
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Oct 12, 2024
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Paperback
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1582433410
| 9781582433417
| 1582433410
| 4.07
| 113
| 2005
| 2005
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liked it
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His home town is 30 minutes away from here and I often pass the house where he met his wife, it’s a ten minute walk away. His father was a miner, mine
His home town is 30 minutes away from here and I often pass the house where he met his wife, it’s a ten minute walk away. His father was a miner, mine was a pit-top engineer. His mother came from Sneinton in Nottingham, so did I. After all that, the similarities are not so striking… Lawrence’s reputation has been a roller coaster ride. He was an obscure novelist writing for a tiny elite all the way until Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written two years before he died. That one made a bundle. He knew it wouldn’t get published by a normal company, not with all those rude words in it, so he self published and the word of mouth made him a nice tidy sum, for the first time ever. Thirty years later : [image] After he died some critics decided he was a genius after all and his reputation grew & grew and he was regularly considered to be one of the greats of English literature until 1970 when Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics put the boot into DHL so comprehensively that by 2005 John Worthen is writing : “Something of a national joke” was how one leading British journal recently referred to him, and many university departments of English literature in Britain and the USA have stopped teaching him….The reasons are simple. A contemporary American writer has declared : “He was a sexist and a racist, is there any argument?” And to that we can add the regularly repeated charges that he was a misogynist, a fascist and a colonialist. [image] And I don’t think his reputation has really recovered. I was hoping that this biography would talk about all of that, and exactly what DHL’s philosophy was that enraged people, but Professor Worthen gets overwhelmed by the sheer raging energy of Lawrence, all that writing writing writing and travelling travelling travelling - Lawrence just didn’t stop until TB put a stop to him aged 44. As Jimmie Rodgers sang one year after DHL died I've been fightin' like a lion, looks like I'm going to lose Cause there ain't nobody ever whipped the TB blues And it was true, Jimmie died two years after that. (My father’s first wife died of TB too.) DHL wouldn’t have bought Jimmie’s record though, he insisted he just had a bit of bronchitis. Lawrence is famous for 4 novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbore, Women in Love and the said Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He wrote a fistful more but he didn’t stop there, no, no, he wrote every day of his life, plays, short stories, novellas, essays, letters, poems, travel books, books about psychoanalysis and ancient sculpture, just give us all a break DH. We can’t keep up. Frieda von Richtofen (yes, those von Richtofens), the German wife of a professor, left her marriage within weeks of meeting Lawrence. At that point she had three children, aged 12, 10 and 8. She missed them every day, she frantically and pathetically tried to see them, but her husband totally cut her off in a you-are-dead-to-us kind of way, the divorce settlement actually forbade any contact, and Lawrence himself would go into a rage if she ever mentioned them. Ah, the good old days. DH and Frieda had the kind of marriage where they constantly argued and fought and insulted each other in front of friends and embarrassed everybody. They lived beyond all notions of embarrassment. After they skedaddled from England, they travelled to Germany, Italy, France, Sardinia, Sicily, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, Mexico and back to France. He couldn’t keep still. The most unattractive aspect of DH Lawrence was his tiresome and constant hatred of anything and everything with the sole exception of nature which he loved. Mostly he is like an early version of a Youtube or Instagram ranter who tells you that England Is Finished. Or he is a version of those amusing guys from the 20th century who walked around wearing sandwich boards which said THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH. He sounds like a pain in the neck, but on the other hand, many people really liked him. He did have a sense of fun, always willing to caper about and act the giddy goat. He once asked me if I had heard the night noises of a tropical jungle, and then instantly emitted a frightening series of yells, squawks, trills, howls and animal “help-murder” shrieks Then again, many people loathed him. He didn’t care. He was like a coelacanth with an urgent message for the world. He was one of a kind. [image] ...more |
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Sep 11, 2024
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Sep 21, 2024
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Sep 11, 2024
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Hardcover
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0393866769
| 9780393866766
| 0393866769
| 4.02
| 185
| 2024
| Aug 13, 2024
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really liked it
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This short very welcome sprightly biography has to move really fast to keep up with the crazy energy of Agnes Varda who finally died in 2019 aged 90 a
This short very welcome sprightly biography has to move really fast to keep up with the crazy energy of Agnes Varda who finally died in 2019 aged 90 and still working. She had three careers, at least. The main one was film making - 44 movies including 21 features. [image] She made movies about the Black Panthers, hippies, Cuba, feminism, architecture, fishermen, homeless people, dumpster divers, her cat, herself. She was the last word in do it yourself indie film making. Occasionally she took a couple of years off and would then go and photograph some distant country. She was happily married to Jacques Demy who was also a director. Whilst she was making all these little movies about odd subjects with zero budgets he was making big box office hits like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, but they lived together in perfect harmony for decades until in his 50s he realised he was gay and went off to live with a man. But they didn’t fall out about it. When she made her first film she had only seen around ten movies. It seems she just thought well, I’m a photographer, movies are just photographs that move, so I can do that. Along with the masterpieces like Cleo from 5 to 7 and Le Bonheur she made a few clunkers and Carrie Rickey is not afraid to say so : The Creatures opened in September 1966 and was generally greeted by the sound of audiences scratching their heads. Although tiny she was kind of forceful and mostly she made exactly the movies she wanted to. A NOTE ON WHY A DIRECTOR NEEDS A PRODUCER IN CASE YOU EVER WONDERED If you ever see the credit “Produced and Directed by” here’s what it means – it’s comparable to a fashion designer raising the sheep, shearing it, carding and spinning the wool, then weaving her own fabric before designing and making a dress MY RECOMMENDATIONS THREE EARLY ONES [image] [image] [image] THREE LATE ONES [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
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0297852124
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| 0297852124
| 3.90
| 29
| Feb 2008
| Feb 21, 2008
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it was amazing
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GEORGE GISSING : KING MIDAS IN REVERSE THE FIRST DISASTER He was the son of a pharmacist and a clever lad, a complete whiz at exams, top of the class, w GEORGE GISSING : KING MIDAS IN REVERSE THE FIRST DISASTER He was the son of a pharmacist and a clever lad, a complete whiz at exams, top of the class, won every prize. Aged 19 and studying in Manchester, he was going to go on to Oxford University and a glittering career. Instead of that he fell in love (or something) with a 17 year old prostitute named Nell, caught VD from her and started stealing from his fellow students (picking coat pockets in the cloakroom) in order to shower her with presents. He was easily found out and was charged and found guilty and sent to prison for one month’s hard labour. That was the end of his good name. Now he had no money and no future. So he went to America (Boston and Chicago) and wrote romantic letters to Nell because he was still obsessed. Didn’t like America, came back, found Nell in London. No surprise, it was a disaster. Partly that was because she was an alcoholic teenage prostitute and partly because he was desperately trying to turn her into Audrey Hepburn triumphantly realising that the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. But she never did. Instead she led him a merry dance which wasn’t all that merry. Never mind, he was dogged. After four years of kind of being together they got married. 1879. Meanwhile he got a job as a tutor for a rich guy’s sons and spent every other hour of the day furiously writing novels. He also was tutor to three daughters of a neighbouring rich family and one of these daughters grew up to be the very woman that the as yet unborn Virginia Woolf used as a model for Mrs Dalloway. Nice! As the years rolled by he found he couldn’t bear to live with Nell any more and they reached an agreement whereby he would pay her to stay away from him. Finally in 1893 she died aged 34 of syphilis. Later he wrote My first wife was a hopeless drunkard, and died miserably in 1881 or 1882, I forget the year. EARLY NOVELS [image] He bashed them out at the rate of one a year, didn’t get an awful lot of sleep. The early ones are all about the poor and the downtrodden, leading me to think he was a progressive socialist type guy, but he wasn’t. Paul Delany says that early reviews labelled Gissing as A gifted novelist who had something wrong with him Morbid was a word they used, pessimistic was another one. He never got out from under these ideas about him, mainly because he kept writing morbid pessimistic novels. He had a ridiculously high notion of his own worth. He made friends with Thomas Hardy (17 years older). He “grudgingly respected” Hardy’s novels but, says PD Did not see Hardy as a writer at his own level PD adds Gissing had fallen into the trap of despising other people’s opinions of his work, then being shattered when those opinions were less than totally approving. He wasn’t a socialist but he wasn’t a monarchist either. I can’t refrain from quoting his reaction to the crowds celebrating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (50 years on the throne, 1887) : It degrades humanity to yell in this way about a rather ill-tempered, very narrow-minded, and exceedingly ugly farmer’s daughter, just because she cannot help having occupied a nominal throne for half a century. But the vulgarity of the mass of mankind passes all utterance. [image] THE LONELY LONDONER I have lived in London ten years, and now, on a day like this when I am very lonely and depressed, there is not one single house in which I should be welcome if I presented myself, not one family – nay, not one person – who would certainly receive me with good will. I wonder whether any other man would make such a statement as this with absolute truth. Partly this is explained by his total failure to write anything like a popular book. His publishers were a rapacious crew who paid lowest possible rates and he never tried to get a better deal. So he was living on the tiny proceeds of the last novel as he immediately began the next novel. Look at my position, with a novel succeeding as New Grib Street has done, I cannot buy books, I cannot subscribe to a library; I can only just afford the necessary food from day to day; and I have to toil in fear of finishing my money before another book is ready. This is monstrously unjust. Who of the public would believe I am in such poverty? So he concluded that even though he was now rid of Nell he couldn’t expect a middleclass woman to put up with him. And this led to THE SECOND DISASTER I have fifty times been on the point of frenzy from sheer loneliness. When I had my flat near Regent’s Park I used sometimes to walk about the room really crying with misery because I had no one to speak to for days and days. So, eventually : The 24th September was a day of “extreme misery”, when Gissing could write nothing. At last he rushed out of his flat and spoke to the first young woman he came across, in the Marylebone Road around the corner from his flat; she agreed to walk down Baker Street with him to the Oxford Music Hall. Her name was Edith Underwood And yes, he married her too, and to cut a long story short, it was another horrible relationship, during which Edith’s mental health declined rapidly. There came a day in January 1902 when Edith’s landlady in Brixton reported her to the police for beating Alfred (her son). The police took Edith and the boy to Lambeth Workhouse Infirmary – the only place that would treat poor people without charge. At the Infirmary Edith was diagnosed as insane and removed to a private asylum. And 15 years later she died there. There is a strong case to be made that GG’s controlling OCD type behaviour contributed to this awful state of affairs, but who can say. Edith could not appreciate a writer’s needs, and knew only that her husband was making her live the life of a prisoner. A great example of the total mismatch this marriage was: When he went to work at the British Museum, Edith accused him of getting up to some other mischief; how could he need to go to a library when he had so many books at home? [image] (Lambeth Workhouse) A STRANGE KIND OF FEMINIST My demand for female “equality” simply means that I am convinced there will be no social peace until women are intellectually trained very much as men are. More than half the misery of life is due to the ignorance and childishness of women. The average woman pretty closely resembles, in all intellectual considerations, the average male idiot – I speak medically LIGHTBULB MOMENT Finally he realised that short stories paid so much better than novels, and he started cranking them out too. But they were distractions, he thought his business was to write Great Long Novels. PD says Now that he was earning twice as much money as ever before, he just saved half of it and wrote faster. He was saving like crazy because he thought he wouldn’t live long (he was right about that) and because his two sons needed a public school education to get them a good start in life. Ah yes, his sons. Because of the fractious cat-and-dog quality of the Gissing home life the poor little boys were separately bounced around to various guardians and sisters, and Gissing mostly didn’t live with them, and didn’t see much of them. One of them, Walter, grew up to study architecture and became a church restorer. What a lovely profession! He joined the army in 1914 at the age of 25 and was killed almost immediately in the Battle of the Somme. [image] The other one, Alfred, also in the army, sailed through the war without a scratch, and became a headmaster at a school in Switzerland. He died in 1975. THAT CLINKING CLANKING SOUND PD is so great on the sometimes avoided subject of money. For instance, in later years GG hired a housekeeper : Her wages were £18 a year – about the price of a short story. And one of the reasons GG had to keep grinding out three or four pages every day was because of the people who were “on the payroll”, to quote a Raymond Carver story about this phenomenon : Gissing had fifteen people who depended on him to some extent : Edith, Walter and Alfred; Gabrielle and Maman; his two sisters and his mother; and Algernon with his wife and five children. Algernon was his younger useless brother. As for Gabrielle and Maman, this review is already too long for me to explain who they were. A GREAT BIOGRAPHY OF A REAL PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE STUDY Perfect gift for the psychoanalyst in your life. On Christmas morning pass them a gaily wrapped copy of this book and say “Analyse THAT!” [image] ...more |
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Jul 02, 2024
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1400043948
| 9781400043941
| 1400043948
| 4.17
| 730
| 2009
| Mar 10, 2009
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did not like it
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Since I’m a biography fan and I have something of an obsession with very long books, and I love short stories, a 750 page biography of John Cheever se
Since I’m a biography fan and I have something of an obsession with very long books, and I love short stories, a 750 page biography of John Cheever seems guarandamnteed to please, especially one that comes garlanded with such blurby burbling as Quite simply, the best example of literary biography I’ve ever read (Entertainment Weekly) and The most exquisite, compelling and heartbreaking life I’ve yet encountered (T C Boyle) And plus, I already knew that John Cheever had a tortured unhappy life, as all great artists should have…. so, in the words of one of our greatest contemporary philosophers, what could possibly go wrong? (Note : I’m leaving aside the not small matter of the author and the swirl of accusations made against him. This is not about him, this is about his book.) You can see inside this book there is an excellent one trying to get out, but suffocating vines and creepers and clinging ivy wholly entangles it, it can hardly be seen, it’s lost, and there’s one single reason for this sclerotic tangle. John Cheever kept a journal all his life – it ran to 4000 typed single spaced pages – and Blake Bailey was one of only allegedly ten people who read it all. What is the result? Enraptured by this ultimate source of pure Cheever anguished selfreflective gold, he extracts every last possible detail from every one of the 4000 pages and submerges his book in a billion boring tedious details, usually about (not particularly) quirky friends of the Cheevers, or about the many fab get-togethers at somebody’s mansion, or about enraptured months at a writers’ retreat, or about drinking, drinking and more drinking. I stopped reading three biographies before this one because I hated the person so much (William Burroughs and Patricia Highsmith; and because I just got tired of Anais Nin). This time I liked what I could see of Cheever but I hated the biography. The fans of this book have way more tolerance than me for an ocean of headachy banal detail about John Cheever’s many interchangeable friends and acquaintances and their many apartments in New York and the many many parties they had and the un-naughty things that may have gone on. I’ll stick to the stories. Real life sucks. I always knew it did. ...more |
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Feb 29, 2024
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Jun 24, 2024
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074326245X
| 9780743262453
| 074326245X
| 4.24
| 693
| Sep 08, 2009
| Nov 24, 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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Apr 14, 2024
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Apr 26, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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0060545844
| 9780060545840
| 0060545844
| 4.28
| 558
| 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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1
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Mar 06, 2024
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Mar 09, 2024
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Mar 02, 2024
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0300163886
| 9780300163889
| 0300163886
| 4.15
| 1,692
| 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 |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 13, 2024
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Feb 23, 2024
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Feb 12, 2024
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Hardcover
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1400069513
| 9781400069514
| 1400069513
| 3.79
| 1,505
| 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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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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it was amazing
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THREE DEGREES OF SEPARATION BETWEEN ME AND SYLVIA PLATH When I was very young there was a family who lived three doors up the road from our house, the THREE DEGREES OF SEPARATION BETWEEN ME AND SYLVIA PLATH When I was very young there was a family who lived three doors up the road from our house, the Sillitoes. Turned out that he was the brother of the famous Alan Sillitoe, who was, for a time, one of Sylvia Plath’s good friends… cool! BEE DADDY In the famous poem Daddy Sylvia Plath totally trashes her father (“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”) but it turns out he wasn’t a bad guy at all, just a bit distant and frosty. He was a professor of biology at Boston University and he wrote a book on his all time most favourite subject which was bees [image] It was a hit! But when he was 50 he started feeling really ill. He decided that he didn’t need to see any doctors because he knew he’d got terminal lung cancer. This was ridiculous! But his dear wife just accepted it! Well he was correct in one way – he was ill, but actually he had diabetes. And if it had been diagnosed he would have lived. But he struggled on until he absolutely had to see a doctor because his foot became gangrenous. A doctor said “How could such a brilliant man be so stupid?” So he died aged 55. After dinner the children came downstairs to perform for their father. This half hour, Aurelia recalled, was “the one time we were together as a family for the last four years of my husband’s life”. What did she mean by perform ? “She would play the piano, draw, and recite poems”. SYLVIA HAD IMMENSE AMOUNTS OF BRAINS She grew up at expresstrain speed, top of the class in almost everything, joined every society, won all the prizes: top award in the Atlantic Writing Contest, three Gold Key awards in Regional Scholastic Art Contests, the Sons of the American Revolution History Prize, membership of the national Honor Society, and three writing awards from The Boston Globe. This was by age 17. The Plaths would have been expecting a letter from the Pulitzer prize committee any day in 1950. Hopping forward four years to September 1954 – on top of the usual academic pressures, she was applying for a Fullbright Fellowship to England, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and admission to Oxford, Cambridge, Radcliffe, Yale and Columbia. At university it was said not merely the most gifted student in the class… I have even heard it said that she is the most gifted student Smith has seen for many years. In May 1955 Plath won the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, the Marjorie Hope Nicolson Prize for her senior thesis, and the Clara French Prize, awarded to the top senior in English. She was accepted to Radcliffe and won the Academy of American Poets Prize (Total prize money $465 = $5100 in today’s money. ) CIRCULATE! DATING IN THE 1950s Academic brilliance is all well and good, but if you’re a girl in the 1950s don’t forget what you’re here for – finding a husband from a superior socioeconomic class! Get your gladrags on, fix your makeup! If you were between 16 and 20 in the USA you were supposed to go on as many dates as possible with many different boys. There was no relaxing. There was frantic upward mobility jockeying, there was sexual skirmishing constantly. While fending off the energetic groping of some of these usually tall handsome boys at the back of Sylvia’s mind there would always be a crushing reading list and five crucial essays to be completed by Friday! A date wasn’t a boyfriend, a boyfriend wasn’t a steady. A steady would be the person you thought you might marry. But when you located that dream guy you still had to maintain your social profile which in those days meant putting your gladrags on fix your makeup get out of the house and CIRCULATE and be popular. Gotta be popular! But don’t get a reputation! She wrote to Ellie that she had had dates with three young men in a single day. So you might say that she had fun fun fun till her daddy took the t-bird away. Except there never was a t-bird. They weren’t poor but they were never well-off and Sylvia noticed a difference; I remember Sylvia telling me with great resentment that the biggest problem these people had was which fur coat to wear on a date. Average age for women getting married in the 50s : 19. Current average age : 29 In June 1953 she won another prize! It was to be one of 20 other young women chosen to be “guest editors” of a prominent fashion magazine called Mademoiselle. It was one month of the high life in New York City, a very big deal. This photo comes from that month [image] Three weeks after the photo appeared in Mademoiselle Plath tried to kill herself. CRAWL SPACE Was this a real suicide attempt? Yes, it was real. She took 40 sleeping pills, went down to the basement, at the back wall there was a stack of chopped wood, behind that was the crawl space, she pulled some of the wood away, crawled into the crawl space, literally, and wedged the wood back into place, and lay down. It was like she had vanished. The cops were called, more than a hundred newspapers reported the disappearance. Two days later she was found. After that she ended up in the McLean Hospital for four months and was given shock treatment. The Mademoiselle experience, the suicide attempt and the ECT are all brilliantly described in her novel The Bell Jar GETTING BACK INTO THE SWING OF THINGS She told her mother she was “getting back in to circulation”… She went out with eight different boys during her first month back at Smith She decided to go to Cambridge University in England. SYLVIA IN ENGLAND “genius-person comes to subdued England and is four times more vivid than the culture” or to put it another way An attractive, clever, confident American woman did not suffer from lack of male attention at Cambridge in 1955. Many contemporaries remembered that Sylvia cut a dramatic figure on the quads with her perfectly coiffed hair, infectious laughter, and fashionable clothes. Now, not everyone was bowled over. AS Byatt, later to write many novels including (Booker-winning) Possession, remembered Sylvia wearing bobby socks and totally artificial bright red lips and totally artificial bright blonde hair… a made-up creature with no central reality to her at all, always uttering advice like a woman’s magazine column. She was always going out with two kind-of sort-of serious guys at the same time. If she ditched one of them she got another one in tow soon enough. Yes, she was popular. Then, along came Ted. I AM SURE IT IS JUST WHAT I WANT A note about gigantic biographies. This one is 940 pages on a life that lasted only 30 years. Is it too detailed? Probably. She wrote hundreds of letters to her mother & psychiatrist and a stack of detailed journals, and all of that seems to have been decanted into this huge book. The word is immersive! But that’s what vast biographies are. I have previously regretted the length of two biographies, Ron Chernow’s Washington (900 pages) – man, he was a great president but a very boring human being – and Dostoyevsky : A Writer in his Time by Joseph Frank (980 pages) – that was just TOO MUCH. So you have to approach with caution. MY THUMB INSTEAD OF AN ONION For those who are curious but not likely to dive into Heather Clark’s epic, here are a few flavoursome quotes : Sylvia’s friend remembered being impressed by Ted’s willingness to look after Frieda in the mornings while Sylvia wrote, which was highly unusual for husbands in those days. (Though he likely wasn’t ironing and floor scrubbing.) Sylvia wanted lots of children and yet she didn’t want to give up her writing…she wanted to do everything herself, you see…she wanted to ride. And she wanted a cow so she could learn to milk. She wanted bees so she could keep bees. And she wanted her roses-round-the-door Devon cottage…and she wanted her man who would be her man and nobody else’s. I honestly do believe I am wedded to Ted till death. Other men seem ants compared to him….My marriage is at the centre of my being, I have given everything to it without reserve (Ted to his sister :) …the real thing, which is to go and live where I like alone, working uninterruptedly, choosing my friends as I please and seeing them as often as I like, and generally changing myself without the terrible censorship of somebody like Sylvia confining my every impulse and inclination…I came awake, and find myself in the old folks’ home. (Sylvia is told of Ted’s affair with Assia Wevill). She lamented to me that his need to sin in such luxurious settings – The Ritz, the shores of the Mediterranean – so depleted their joint bank account. I am damned if I want to sit here like a cow milked by babies. I love my children but I want my own life…what I don’t want to be is an unfucked wife…and I don’t just mean the token American what is it twice a week front to front thank you darling either. (Ted will not turn her) into a doggy sobby stereotype…I think when I am free of him my own sweet life will come back to me, bare and sad in a lot of places, but my own, and sweet enough. Both Plath and Hughes wanted the other to “grow up”. …The marriage that had begun as a bold creative experiment ended in the most predictable of cliches. The foulness I have lived…saying he was bored and stifled by me, a hag in a world of beautiful women just waiting for him He told me openly he wished me dead, it would be convenient, he could sell the house, take all the money…told me I was brainless, hideous, had all sorts of flaws in making love - why in God’s name should the killing of me be so elaborate?....he was furious I didn’t commit suicide, he said he was sure I would! (dated 21 October 1962) Without the patronage of Hughes Plath’s social capital dissolved. Friends remembered her during this time as gratingly effusive, desperately lonely, a subject of gossip, a burden. THE DAY OF THE SUICIDE Across Regent’s Park, The Beatles were getting ready to arrive at Abbey Road Studios at ten a.m. where they would record their first album Please Please me. The morning of February 11, 1963 was the dawn of the 1960s. I had not realised this. Surely one of the more ghastly coincidences. YOUTUBE VIDEOS This book mentioned a few BBC radio programmes Sylvia appeared on, and I wondered if they were available on Youtube, and they are! Check out : Two of a Kind : Poets in Partnership – you can hear Sylvia and Ted talking casually, it’s so charming What Made you Stay? – six minutes of Sylvia explaining why she decided to stay in England. CUT TO THE CHASE We can be so happy that this gigantic biography replaces all the others (I count 10 and many memoirs). These previous attempts were always either pro-Plath (the feminist martyr, the genius crushed by the evil Ted Hughes) or pro-Ted (because he controlled all her literary estate no one could quote one word written by her unless he okayed it, but he passed that job over to his sister olwyn who was fantastically protective of Ted and hated all the feminists, so she got some biographers to soft-pedal the bad Ted stuff). Finally we have a careful and dispassionate and God knows detailed account of the life that Sylvia Plath was able to live and then die from. One of the saddest deaths in all of literature. Only 30. ...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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Oct 09, 2023
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Oct 09, 2023
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0871404672
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| 0871404672
| 3.89
| 820
| Mar 11, 2013
| Mar 11, 2013
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liked it
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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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Sep 30, 2023
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Sep 01, 2023
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0312221266
| 9780312221263
| 0312221266
| 3.95
| 38
| 1998
| Jan 01, 1999
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liked it
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Nobody will be interested in this one, the overlong biography of a (really when you get down to it unlovable) guy who wrote plays and series for Briti
Nobody will be interested in this one, the overlong biography of a (really when you get down to it unlovable) guy who wrote plays and series for British television. His masterpiece is a six part drama called Pennies from Heaven. It’s brilliant! [image] But dismally most people will remember that in the form of its Hollywood remake, with Steve Martin, which is awful. [image] Ah well, so it goes. ...more |
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Nov 07, 2024
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Nov 15, 2024
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Aug 29, 2023
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1585679178
| 9781585679171
| 1585679178
| 4.00
| 32
| Sep 06, 2007
| Sep 06, 2007
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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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4.15
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3.79
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it was amazing
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3.88
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it was amazing
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it was amazing
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Nov 09, 2023
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3.87
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Nov 03, 2023
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Oct 09, 2023
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3.89
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3.95
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Nov 15, 2024
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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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