Book Beasts

Daily Dose

From The Little Foxes, by Lillian Hellman

THERE ARE

"There are people who eat earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it"

A Quick Review

Horace Walpole A Biographical Study by Lewis Melville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Before even addressing the very good biography he wrote, it is worth making note of the biographer, Lewis Melville (1874 - 1932.)  I don't know much about him, but the little I do is, I think, interesting.  A perfectly respectable Englishman, meaning educated, middle-class and by date at least Victorian, Lewis Melville nonetheless made his first career on the stage.  Not, I hasten to point out, an entirely respectable choice, even so late as the glory days of Sir Henry Irving, when Melville went "on the boards."  Melville must have been pretty good, as he made his living in the theatre -- no easy task to this day -- for a number of years and, despite what I've just read online, would seem to have maintained his connection to the theatre world for the rest of his life (an assumption I feel safe in making from various references made in more than one of his books, though none that I know of is actually set in the theatrical world, other than a novel called, In the World of Mimes: A Theatrical Novel, (1902) which I admit I've never seen.)  My interest in this aspect of the writer's life has less to do with his autobiographical experience, or any attempt at seeing into his mind or personality, than a confidence that his time in the nearer Bohemia of the London playhouses gave him greater sympathy with the less buttoned-up 18th Century, about which he wrote frequently and without all the more usual, and boring reserve of his own time.  I can't know that, but it seems a fair guess.  Also, he has the actor's eye for staging and character, as well as an appreciation for gossip and the revealing anecdote whispered, as it were, backstage.  That Melville made himself, or as we would say nowadays, remade himself into a proper Man of Letters indicates his very real devotion to literature, and biography in particular.  He writes easily and well -- not always the same thing, obviously.  I've now read three of his books; this, his Life & Letters of Sterne, and his book on Thackeray.  All were charming, well organized and seemed perfectly competent as to research and veracity.  (What none of them has been is scholarly in the modern sense, thankfully.  There's no cumbersome academic apparatus beyond a serviceable index and such notes as might be necessary for sense, and no overweening theoretical agenda to be met.  Lewis Melville represents an earlier, more elegant and straightforwardly entertaining school of narrative biography.)

In Horace Walpole, biographer and subject seem well matched.  The great problem with books about Walpole generally is in how the question of "Which Walpole?" is answered. There's Walpole the parliamentarian, and son of the Prime Minister.  There's Walpole the maker of Strawberry Hill, collector, antiquarian,and champion of architectural and publishing innovation.  And there is, of course, Horace Walpole the great letter writer, perhaps the greatest of the greatest age of English letters.  I've tried to read, in whole or in parts, more than one stultifying book on one or more of these.  Melville's is the first book I've read other than Walpole's Letters that brought the little gentleman himself to life.  While touching on seemingly every aspect of Walpole's career and hobbies, Melville's life focuses on what it was that made this rather minor historical figure into one of the best remembered and most representative personalities of his age.

Melville's Walpole; curious, generous, self-deprecating, vain, and above all amusing, is the soul of wit. "The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think," as Walpole himself perhaps most famously said.  While perfectly respectful of Walpole's rather stunted emotional life, Melville quite rightly indulges his own enthusiasm for what might best be encapsulated in the two words, Walpole's Brain.  There wasn't much to Horace as a specimen of either spirit or flesh, but what a fascinating Mind!  And what's more, what an almost perfect record of it he quite consciously left, primarily in his letters!  (Melville himself argues gently and convincingly that nearly every aspect of Walpole, from his house, to his press, to his enormous correspondence was both an expression of his joie de vivre and paradoxically, his loneliness.)

As both an appreciation of and a spur to reading Walpole, I can think of few books better suited to introduce the common reader to this most uncommon and fascinating figure.

A Quick Review

On Rereading by Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Here we have the professor, as it were, se déshabiller; retired, at her ease, reading. or in this case rereading now just for pleasure.  From her grandmotherly first chapter forward, she seems a lovely person; patient, affectionate, happy at the chance to share her enthusiasms and her experience, which is not inconsiderable as she's taught literature at a number of respectable institutions for 50 years.  This however is not a memoir of her classroom experience.  These aren't rewritten lectures or even scholarly essays per say.  The book is a personal examination of what might be the books on her nightstand, not a critical review of even her favorites.  Still, it seems, you can take the professor out of the classroom, but...  In sharing her childhood identification with Carroll's Alice, for example, she goes on to mention having also taught the book in the 1960s, in a Wellesly College seminar "called The Independent Woman," so that her rereading of it again as she writes this book is informed by both of those earlier experiences of Wonderland.  It shows.

And there then is the problem, at least for me.  While I applaud her ambition in undertaking this project of rereading, and particularly admire her willingness to give another go to some of the important books she'd never quite liked the first time, or the first few times around, I can't quite like the reading she makes of any of these, favourites of mine or otherwise.  It's not for want of a refreshing honesty.  She's very forthright in describing what she may have misjudged, as well as what she may have missed.  And with the exception of an unfortunate affection for using the ridiculously Biblical term "text" when all she means is book, neither her language nor her style suffers much from the usual pseudo-scientific pretensions and wilful obfuscations of academic criticism. And yet, it can't be helped.  She is the reader, and the writer her time before the chalkboards made her.  It's unfortunate.

She's quite good at explaining how and why we reread and why more often we ought.  She's even better at putting herself into that premise in quite a winning way.  The reader quickly comes to be nearly as curious as the author herself as to which book will be the better for rereading, and which won't.  The professor's is a refreshingly open mind.

What she can't do is tell a joke.  But that's not right.  What she can't do is resist explaining a joke.  I've never read anyone who managed to explain every hint of pleasure out of Pickwick, for instance, even as she explains how she finally came to appreciate the comedy of Pickwick!  it's painful to read.  (It's like watching a life-long student of dance, without a hint of rhythm demonstrating the intricacies of the Lindy Hop.)  It's not a want of warmth or of enthusiasm for her subject that undoes her here as a personal essayist, presumably it's the company she's kept all these years.  She can't seem to keep the chalk off everything she touches. 

It's regrettable.  There's someone here I rather like, doing something I like doing myself, and with exactly the books I like best, and yet I can't like this book, much as I might want to.



View all my reviews

A Quick Review

The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin by Philip Larkin

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Ever looked forward to something, something familiar, something toothsome and juicy, a steak sandwich say, only to be disappointed when it's served?  Well, here's the problem: too much bun.  Larkin's a lean poet; there's not much of him, but as Spencer Tracy famously said of Hepburn in "Pat & Mike," what there is is  "cherce."  Not lean in his person certainly, where he ran to sedentary fat, or his politics and prejudices which, as it turned out, were unappetizing, but in his poems there is no one in the last century of a cleaner cut or more savoury pleasure.  I'll drop the awkward metaphor in a moment, but first back to the bun.

The idea of a "Complete Poems" was terribly exciting for me as a regular reader of Philip Larkin.  If ever there was a poet of whom I've wanted more, this would be the one.  I've treasured the Collected Poems for years.  Imagine my disappointment then when confronted by this... object.  Other than a truly paltry smattering of unpublished stuff, mostly variants, what we have here is the Collected Poems served up on roughly four hundred additional pages of bun: notes, notes, notes, mostly abbreviations and reference to the shoe-boxes from which the drafts were plucked, and what the wretched academic editor rather grandly labels, "Commentary."  Bun.

Witness this starchy morsel on "There is snow in the sky", pulled all but at random from the mass:

"7 - 8 Cf.  Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, 10: 'A tattered coat upon a stick'.  8 Crossed bones (with a skull) constitute the emblem on the flag (the 'Jolly Roger') flown by a pirate ship." 

Choke that down and see if you're not the better for it.

Pages and pages and yet more pages of just such helpful, glutenous blandness.  (I know I promised to drop the metaphor some time back, but it seems I can't.)

 Worse yet, there's no useable table of contents listing titles in the front, just the original book titles. The Index of Titles and First Lines, on page 707 (!) is a painful experience in and of itself -- witness the 32 lines listed most unhelpfully for The North Ship. So even in simple matters of accessibility and ease, this is entirely inferior to the earlier book.

Enough.  While I understand the potential need of such an edition for scholars, publishing this thing with all the fanfare of a new, "Complete" and final edition to presumably replace the Collected Poems was, frankly, a dodge.  This is not new anything, but an adulteration.



View all my reviews

A Quick Review

The Invisibe Man by H.G. Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It can be hard to remember just how extraordinarily good something this familiar can actually be!  I love the 1933 movie.  Watched it again just this past year.  I hadn't actually read the book since I was at most a teenager.  Then I found this hardcover copy on a display of discounted books and thought the design nice, so why not?  It evidently was reissued as part of a series of classic short novels.  (I bought copies of the lot.)   I don't know that I ever intended to reread it.  Here it was now, top of the stack, so... in for a penny, in for a pound.

What a truly masterful piece of fiction; brilliant invention, perfect logic, great suspense, comedy and even pathos.  It was the comedy of it that surprised me most.  It shouldn't have, of course.  Wells was a brilliant comic novelist.  We forget that, remembering him now primarily as the father of modern science fiction, but both aspects of his genius were perhaps never better represented than here, in this one slim book.   In the classic film, the great Claude Rains manages -- almost exclusively with his voice, mind -- to invest the character with both menace and a kind of comic mania.  The film's director, James Whale proved himself perfectly suited to reproduce the novel's thrilling mix of horror and delight in devilry, as in the unforgettable scene of the trousers dancing down the lane with no one in them.  In it's own way, Whales' film is every bit as much an exercise of invention, and likewise a masterpiece of dark comedy.  Still, there is so much the film simply could not do, so much they couldn't show that was there in the book.   (How I should miss the mob from "The Jolly Cricketer" now, for example.)  Just the specific thrill and painful vulnerability of being actually naked in the wilderness; of surviving the cold, and of peeping in on the conventional from well and truly outside, but also the depressing embarrassment of going without so much as shoes in the wide world.  It's Wells, not Whales who must have the bays for thinking through every implication of his nightmare's perfect premise.

And that is the greatest gift of rereading Wells now, of having the experience and appreciation of the novel's artful simplicity, and yes, whimsy, but also the chance to marvel at Wells' inexorable comic materialism, his entirely reasonable, even cruel working out of all the logical consequences of the universal wish fulfilled and inescapable.  

One thing the movie gets quite intentionally wrong, it seems to me now, is in suggesting, as Wells certainly never does, and as the philosophic socialist certainly never would, that the moral if any to this tale has anything to do with science presuming too much on either God or nature.  Silly business, and I suspect no fault of James Whale.  Just a convenient and reassuring bit of religious doggerel meant to sooth the credulous.  Instead, Wells dispassionately describes the likely, if sadly unforeseen consequences of an almost unimaginably brilliant insight, and dangerous discovery, but this is no inditement of scientific curiosity.  The horror here is in the loss of identity, of community, of recovery, and of ignorance and superstition and violence begetting violence.

It's a really superb satirical fantasy.  I can't think of another near as good but Twain's mechanic in Camelot, or any better in English save Swift.  And I can't think of another book, or of another novelist of 1897 likely to be so remarkably, permanently modern as this.


View all my reviews

A Quick Review

My Memoirs by Alexandre Dumas

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The only version in English that I've been able to locate.  One of a treasured series of Dumas' nonfiction published in English the early Sixties, it took me ages to find it.  I was disappointed to discover that this translation was  a heavily edited text of what was, after all, an unfinished work, admittedly running to multiple volumes in the original.  As with any such selection, there is always the nagging knowledge that for all there is here, there's roughly three times as much of the original that isn't.  (The only alternative to this edition is English would seem to be an arbitrary selection of stray volumes from 1907 available for reprint from Google books.  Very frustrating.)

That said, what is here is still Dumas.  What's more, ironically, this is Dumas at his most voluble; nothing like the straight-forward autobiography his American editors have tried to make of him here.  He tells stories, remembers friends, laments his father's untimely death, his mother's poverty, his own.  This is Dumas over a cognac.  This is Dumas in his slippers.  The fear I suppose was that he might bore; describing unfamiliar events, reminiscing about forgotten names, now mystifying feuds, lost triumphs.  All true, even here.  What the editor seems to have missed was the point.  That may all be true, but what of it?  There was no one in the history of fine lettres better suited to such digressions, better with a pointless anecdote, with a better memory for the arcane nonsense of publishing squabbles, backstage gossip, lazy conversations, jokes, youthful bravado, gaucheries, adventure.  Yes, even here he talks too much, but such talk!

Even here, we get the exquisite comedy of the young playwright selecting an appropriate hunting costume and sidearm in which to join the Revolution of 1830.  After a skirmish or two, and a delightful afternoon spent leading a small band of fair-weather warriors down the wrong streets, the author retires for a nap.  Think of what opera Hugo might have made of the same memories!  Think of how Balzac might have slowly recoiled in dignified horror from the chaos, the crowds, the dirt, page after page after page!  Only Dumas would think to report his desire that day for a proper dinner.

The only reason the common reader could have for even picking up such a book is for the chance at spending as much time as might be had in the company of this great and ridiculous man, this supreme and forgiving artist of the the noble and foolhardy gesture!  (How does one remember Dumas but in exclamations?!) 

Take then what there is to be had.  Dumas himself left the book unfinished.  The stories end well before he's even written the first of his great romances.  Such a pity!  Still, I'm glad of even the life he, and his American editor -- blast and damn man -- left us. 

And there's always Monte Cristo to come back to.  There will always be that, bless him.



View all my reviews

A Quick Review

Oliver Cromwell by John Buchan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


John Buchan was a gentleman.  Yes, yes, he was an MP, and eventually Governor General of Canada, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir PC GCMG GCVO CH, etc., etc.  Very respectable, all that, if not specially meaningful to the common American reader, such as me.  Be that as it may, as something of an anglophile and a devoted reader of English history, I can certainly appreciate a gent.  I say again, John Buchan was a gent.

The breed, so far as I know, is all but extinct -- and most ways that's probably just as well: colonialism, The British class system, fox-hunting; a mixed bag at best.  It could likewise be pretty convincingly argued that gentility, for want of a better term, did nearly as much harm as good to English literature.  (Think of Anthony Trollope on sexual "incontinence" or Kipling or Churchill on "fakirs.")  At his best though, the English gentleman of letters, or even as here the Scot, tended rather charmingly to judge mankind not as monsieur might, by the crease in his pants, but rather by his "bottom"; here suggesting gravitas, the way he sat a horse, spoke to subordinates, behaved in the company of ladies.  So it seems, the Lord Protector was a gentleman.

I might have foreseen this from reading Buchan's Julius Caesar, who even more surprisingly proved to be -- yup -- a gentleman, much otherwise misunderstood.  Say what you will about the historical accuracy of this perspective, it does make for a not unpleasant atmosphere of good humoured fair play.  Not quite the same thing as objectivity, obviously, or even even-handedness, so much as an even-tempered, even genial style, tempered by a very genuine sympathy for both subject and history. 

Here then is Cromwell as the leader of men, yes, but awfully good about horses too, you know.  Cromwell, it must be admitted, was a rather bloody conqueror of Ireland -- bad form -- but never really so bloody-minded as has been made out elsewhere.  Not really, no.  Just the one ruthless massacre, just at the start, and we have his letters home to tell us he did come to feel very bad about the slip.  And domestically, it's well worth saying, he kept more heads on shoulders than he took off, or jolly well might have done.

I'm not really being fair.  Buchan was, first and foremost, a thoroughly accomplished writer, a novelist of very real gifts.  His prose is always smooth, his curiosity and care both obvious and satisfying.  I can't fault his scholarship, which seems certainly to have well met the standard of his day and profession.  His is an eminently readable and well-made history, very much in the tradition of Macaulay and the great Victorians who so clearly influenced both his style and his outlook on life.  He's neither stuffy nor stiff, and I can't remember a book about Oliver -- as he sometimes endearingly calls this least endearing of men -- I've enjoyed reading more.

Reading this book set me to at least browsing in Carlyle's impossibly heavy edition of Cromwell's letters, and that was well worth doing too -- if abandoned immediately after concluding Buchan's history.  (If I was never quite convinced of Cromwell's basic goodness and simplicity of heart by either author, it certainly wasn't for want of effort on the part of all involved.)

How then does Buchan's Cromwell read compared to those before and since?  I'd have to say that even the serious student of the period could certainly do worse.  Here at least is a model of narrative efficiency, good humour and sympathy.  When was the last time a contemporary historian exhibited that sort of restraint and emotion, ladies and gentlemen?



View all my reviews

A Quick Review

The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This would be the volume of Caro's masterful, and massive biography in which I anticipated taking the least interest.  I was not altogether wrong.  The 1960 election, every dull, equivocating hour of it, seemingly from breakfast to bed for the whole of a year, the feud with the Kennedy brothers, the unhappy compromise of that near non-thing, the Vice Presidency, the assassination... better than half the book felt, for the first time with Caro, like an unhappy rehash of just so much crow.  I put the book down for months.  Always in the earlier volumes of this biography, there was enough of the unfamiliar, the unsuspected, the scandalous and the triumphant to hold my interest through even the longest lecture in civics or history.  Always before there was some unfamiliar peak toward which I as the reader was being led.  Here at last, for me at least, the territory was not only all too familiar but of such an overcast and deadly airlessness as to feel suffocating.  I need never read another word about rural electrification, Joe Kennedy Sr., the electoral politics of West Virgina, etc., etc., -- due in no small part to Caro himself.  This time, I simply hadn't the strength, or the interest to continue the climb.

Caro's last, and to my mind best book, by some miracles of research and writing, managed to make the story of Johnson's Leadership in the US Senate not only a monumental tribute to the political genius of the man, but also what must be the slowest moving but nonetheless thrilling narrative of legislative compromise I'd ever read.  If the victory at the end of that one felt a bit hollow, after, this volume promised a greater good.  Strange then that it should feel such a slog.

Finally picking up the load again, at the point of Kennedy's fall, I was pleased and no little amazed to find Caro, and myself all the better for his second wind.  The rush of events explains this, but not completely.  Yes, from the day in Dallas, there is an urgency to everything to come after, but perhaps the key to Caro's special gift as a biographer is his relentless focus, much like Johnson's, perhaps here because of Johnson's, on the main chance.  As Caro's LBJ is almost entirely a creature of politics, an all but perfect practitioner of power, so both subject and biographer are at their very best when exercised.  Even in defeat, if still active, Johnson is a fascinating monster.  But power here begets power.  Out of it, and Johnson all but disappears as a personality.  Caro, wandering with him in the wilderness, does not so much lose his way as the point.  With LBJ, for good and ill, the doing is all.  Likewise, I've come to suspect with this book.  Neither the politician nor his biographer seems much suited to the contemplative, or even the equivocal.

From the hour that Johnson is called on to take up the real power of the presidency, both he and the book spring to an unexpectedly thrilling new life.  His handling of both the tragedy and the transition, culminating in his first address to the Congress and the country, show LBJ as Caro has taught the reader to admire him most; decisive, effective, even ruthless in his determination to move forward; move the country, his progressive agenda and himself further, faster, better, higher.  (Making my anticipation now of his fall all the greater, frankly, and already more understandable, and possibly forgivable than I'd ever have thought possible otherwise. We'll see.)

My advice then to any not already committed to reading the whole magnificent, sometimes ponderous, sometimes maddening project of Robert Caro's biography might be, at least for those most familiar with this period, to make up as much time as possible through the first third or better of this book and maybe, just wait for the next and then read just the last two hundred of this one's six hundred pages by way of preface to Caro's (hopefully) final volume, and Johnson's last, glorious and horrible exercise in hubris and destiny.



View all my reviews

A Quick Review

The Victorians an Anthology Chosen by Geoffrey Grigson by Geoffrey Grigson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Exactly the kind of anthology I might more usually take again': highly personal, comprised of poems and prose excerpts, attributed by author, but without the works cited in the text, arranged in a rough chronology, more by period, or even month than by any obvious theme.  And yet, here it all works brilliantly, thanks entirely to the discriminating and happy arrangement made by the poet, Geoffrey Grigson.

There's an almost devilish delight in the way he's bumped and jostled major and minor, the popular and the forgotten all together in a compact three hundred pages or so, exclusive of a charming introduction and a very few eccentric notes.  Novels, travel, poems, letters, journals and diaries and what-all, so that a popular penny ballad may follow a judicious bit of Dickens, and that lead to Tennyson, or Clough or a bit Leslie Stephen.  It works so well as it does because Grigson isn't in the business of surveying the age, or dusting the monuments.  What he's done instead is to catch something of the sound of seemingly the whole company of the Victorians as they bustle and talk and truck their very busy hour on the stage.  This, more than any like object I've ever encountered has, if not the whole, then just enough of the times to both satisfy and sharpen the appetite for that most Victorian of pleasures, abundance!

To list even just the authors represented, or suggest the many topics, styles or points of view would produce nothing like the thing itself, but just confusion.  That that was not the result of reading the book says more for it than anything I might add here.  Indeed, this book can be read as I've just read it, front to back -- a rare temptation as anthologies go -- or opened where and when fancy takes the reader and it will provide all the pleasures of familiarity and discovery either way.  It is a masterful piece of selection and conducting throughout.

It makes me want more: more of the writers herein that I know, and those I don't, and more of Grigson too.  What better recommendation for such thing than that?


View all my reviews

A Quick Review

Herbert: Poems by George Herbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is but a little book -- part of an excellent, attractive and affordable series of Pocket Poets -- and as with the best of such small things, while satisfying of itself, it made me want more.  I've read dozens of the books in this edition; familiar poets and not, anthologies on themes and by period, and selections, as here of just one writer, in this instance a writer I had otherwise avoided.  Here is George Herbert, just as I vaguely remembered him; pious, inventive, shrewd.  I do not share either his faith or his interests.  His times to mine could not frankly feel more remote.  Yet unlike his contemporary and fellow clergy, John Donne, by some strange alchemy of novelty and sincerity, Herbert won me over completely, not to his Christianity or his God, but to him.  I like and admire him now more than I might ever have imagined possible.

As a poet his is an almost artless seeming innovation; making new forms, fresh visions and the brightest and warmest of readings from all too familiar materials.  He seems, the poet himself, as seen in these poems, the gentlest and kindest man, even when his theology, to me, is repugnant; full of as much Hell as Heaven, sin and sincerity, and yet what a great and generous heart!

I cannot let him alone.  I've read and reread poem after poem in just this slim book, marveling at how good both the poetry and the author seem to me now.

As an introduction then, this little book seems to me a fine thing, well made.  Now I want more, bless him.


View all my reviews

Quick Review

Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

How I wanted to prove the bastards wrong.  Unfortunately, how right they were.  I recently picked up not one, but two big, handsome volumes from the collected works, thinking I should give the old boy a proper chance again.  Cost me nearly nothing, but the time sadly wasted.  Here's the novel that named the bad-writing-contest: "It was a dark and stormy night..."  What's bad about it turns out to be that that was the last sensible thing he wrote in it.

Bulwer-Lytton hadn't a style so much as a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for the inexact, the exaggerated and the swank.  Evidently the man could not write so much as a declarative sentence without decking at least the verb in fancy-dress.  Maddening.  No one ever says what they can "expostulate."  No one ever walks but they "perambulate."  No one does anything much, for that matter, that they mightn't better have done in half the words in which he insists they do it.  Worse, there's no point to any of it.  It's Dickens without a thought, a point, the slightest discernment or deviation from type.   What makes the whole business unreadably bad is that the man clearly had nearly every other requirement of a first-rate novelist; character, invention, sympathy, intelligence and tact.   What he lacked was taste, any real sense of humor or confidence in the English language.

What a lot of ponderous hooey.


View all my reviews

Quick Review

Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Sometimes someone who by her own admission doesn't read books, will write a good one.  The inerudite Ms. Coddington admits to having read just two books in her lifetime, and yet has lived so long, done so much -- and so many -- and lived such an interesting life that it matters hardly at all that she would seem to have done it all without reading much beyond menus and cheques.  This then is a life told in charming doodles.  There are surprisingly naïf and charming little sketches made with magic-markers throughout, all drawn by Coddington with roughly the same forgiving spirit with which she describes lovers, husbands, photographers, editors and stylists, etc.  Intentionally or no, having been transformed from the girl next door of her modelling days into the Elizabethan fury of the 2009 documentary, The September Issue, there would seem to be still a rather sweet person under all that skull and red fright-wig.  Who'd have guessed?

And she has been everywhere, and she has met nearly everyone, and she does make some very sensible points about art and fashion, and she is responsible for producing some genuinely beautiful photographs, though not a model anymore nor herself a photographer.  Don't ask how, 'cause she can't quite explain it either.  No matter.

I'm sure there must have been a whole team of people who helped to produce this book and Coddington would seem to have always been a generous collaborator, so I'm quite sure they've all been adequately thanked, one way and another.  A book like this does however make the point that if such a collaboration can't quite make art out of Grace this time, they certainly have helped to preserve some of the fun it must have been making Grace.

It's true, it took longer to look at all the pictures than to zip through the text, but what fun it all was!  I doubt I'll remember any of it by the time I've finished my drink.



View all my reviews

Quick Review

Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings by Craig Brown

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


No one other than the occasional modernist poet ever seems to have had the slightest problem with the obvious contrivance of poetic form.  What's a sestina or a villanelle after all but an artificial, indeed, arbitrary set of rules?  Indeed, some of the greatest poetry ever written, most of it I should think, conforms to one form or another, and while I've heard of and even read some explanation of what makes a sonnet a sonnet, and even why make a sonnet, I can't recall what if any explanation's been offered as to why a sonnet in the first place or where that first place was.  I can't say I'd care one way or another.  Like most people, I should think, I enjoy a sonnet much as I enjoy a superior cocktail; with only a passing curiosity as to the finer points of it's making.  (The poet as bartender.  Not so bad, that.)  Here the author has not only devised an ingenious premise: A meets B who met C who meets D, etc., and then, presumably just to complicate matters for himself, each of the 101 meetings is described in exactly 1001 words.  None of this matters in the least to the reader, or to this reader at least, other than to add a little to the fun of the thing for all concerned.

I've seen some terribly serious reviews of this book that seem to either disapprove of this sort of wilful nonsense or to have made entirely too much of it, considering the fundamentally frivolous nature of the whole enterprise.  Why?  Perfectly good nonfiction has been made by equally talented writers by painting themselves into equally tight corners before -- telling history in a day, for example, or in rhyme, or reviewing existence in considering just the thumb -- so I'm not sure why these harmless, and entirely self-invented restrictions need mean anything at all.

For me, the great fun here is just the dizzying parade of personalities, in one interesting, unlikely and or awkward encounter after another.  Some, like Groucho Marx & T. S. Eliot may be familiar to fans of either gentleman, while others, Madonna and Martha Graham for instance, I would never otherwise have imagined.  It helps, I should think, to know something of the celebrities involved, but Brown is expert enough in just one thousand and one words a go to tell the reader what he or she needs to know to enjoy each encounter.

This is actually one of those rare books of anecdotal biography I've actually kept open longer than it could possibly have taken me to read the whole thing at a go, just for the fun of having more to read.  All good things come, alas, to their ends at last, so all I can hope for now would be... a sequel?  Why not?  The rules of the game clearly allow for almost endless play.  Here's hoping Craig Brown agrees.



View all my reviews

Quick Review

Tales of a Wayside Inn by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Yet another handsome little book I read for no better reason than that.  My copy is actually a hardcover edition published and sold by what's now called "Longfellow's Wayside Inn."  I've read some Longfellow of course, and more in the past few years as I've started exploring the great Victorian poets, English and American.  This past summer was all about Tennyson for me, and Longfellow figured briefly in Tennyson's biography, so perhaps that's why this book caught my eye.  Whatever the reason I picked it up, I didn't put it down again until I'd read it through.  Pleasant enough at a go, so why not?  There was a hook.  After the brief introductory poem, what was the first of the Tales?  "The Landlord's Tale," aka "Paul Revere's Ride."  I don't think, even today, that there is an American child who has not, at some point heard or read that one -- if only to dispute the historical particulars or mock the quaint sincerity of an old fashioned patriot.  Turns out, it's a better poem than I remember.  (That's been my experience of Longfellow generally.)

I was a little disappointed by what followed, simply because most of the subsequent stories were, frankly, so self-consciously exotic, or simply "foreign." They weren't unhappy reading, for the most part, but they did smell more of the library than the salt sea air, or the perfumed sands of Arabia, or what have you.  Still, if some of these Tales seemed but so much watered beer, there were a few of enough interest to keep me reading, the surprisingly pitch-black story, "The Falcon of Ser Federigo", for example.

And then came Olaf.  I'd actually read one these in a Christmas anthology recently, and one or two of them here held my attention for the length of a poem, but I am not a saga-man.  Nothing bores me more the exploits of Big Strong Men.  From the Iliad to the Ramayana to all these stomping, bellowing blonds, I simply could not care less who smote who.  Actually, I only thought I could not care less.  Turns out, I could.  Take your Norseman, and make him, as Longfellow does here, a rampaging Christian, "converting" Vikings by the sword, and, yup, even less do I care for such doings and hymns. And there is, sadly, an awful lot of Olaf here.

It was a fashionable excursion at the time, I suppose, off to the Sagas, just as the Romantics dearly loved a seraglio.  (Here, I stand with the Romantics; give me a trip to the harem before a night in the mead hall any day.)  Not really Longfellow's fault I don't care for beer.  But then, my dislike of subject also could only point  Longfellow's virtues: ease, aptness, simplicity, and faults: placidity, obviousness, simpleness.  There are stretches of the Olaf stories as bad as anything I've read by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which is saying somethin'.

But then, to close out this pale, New England Boccaccio, comes a truly remarkable poem, another American story -- though it might be a myth as old as man -- "The Poet's Tale," or "The Birds of Killingworth," to remind me of the rare power in Longfellow's simple line and sternest voice.  As an indictment of man's hubris in the face of nature's perfect balance and a perfect metaphor for the poet himself, the poem is a remarkable performance, and deserving of a wider, modern readership.

These grey-bearded, respectable Victorian gents can still surprise.



View all my reviews

Quick Review

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Christie herself said, more than once, that she enjoyed most writing books without her major characters.  Perfectly understandable, as the precedent was already there with Conan Doyle; no one wants to do the same trick with every hand.  Here, unencumbered by any of the little Belgian's baggage, or the need for a spinster's extended stay, the novelist wastes little time on the placement of the narrator, as it were, in the soup. The son of the police inspector, affianced to the granddaughter of the murdered old gentleman, you see?  And, we're in.  Simplicity itself.  Works a dream, too. Inoffensive fellow, not stupid, but not too many "little grey cells" smugly ratiocinating away ahead of us.  The point made so well here is how unimportant such a one actually is to Christie's business.

She's made a devilish good puzzle here -- and who would expect less?  -- but even that is less source of her real delight than just the comedy of an ill-assorted, if largely loving family, suffering the very English embarrassment of, how to put it?  A spot of murder?  Seems someone's done in the old man.  Horrible, nasty sort of crime, poisoning. The twist being everyone, or nearly so, genuinely loved the old darling, honest.  Her murder and her premise established, Christie parades the suspects to and fro, their faults and foolishness most acidly and amusingly described; from silly women to their sillier husbands, a noble old spinster, a noble old nanny, etc.  Best of all, and a particular favourite of Christie's, a truly funny, truly awful little girl.  It's all good, bloody fun.

The final twist and the inevitable reveal all satisfy mightily, as does the comfortingly just conclusion.  (I do wonder now but what left to her own devices and not answerable to her public and her publishers, Christie would not have been happier, and more respectable as a modern artist, had her confinement to genre not insisted on something like justice.  Often the only false note for me now, reading her again in middle age.  I suspect she knew enough not only of life but of actual crime to disbelieve in such finality, but I suppose I may be wrong, or in any case we're not to know.  Perfectly respectable, damn her, was dear, old Dame Agatha.)

This one will certainly set me off in search of other holidays from her detectives.



View all my reviews

Quick Review

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Omar Khayyám

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Let me share the Pork Bun Theory of academic editions.  I love me some cha siu bao -- aka BBQ pork buns -- specially the shiny brown baked kind.  (There's a little bubble-tea joint that sells them, right across the road from the bookstore where I work.  Yum.)  What I like best about the good ones would be the good BBQ, and the right ratio of pig to bun, or Zhū ròu to Bao, if I've got that right -- no idea if I do, but that's the thrill of the Internet, ain't it?  I've had some bad Bao in my time; inferior filling, sometimes, but mostly, too much bun.  Get the idea? 

FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, with his preface and notes, in this edition, runs to fifty-three pages.  Throw in some variants, and the whole thing, unillustrated could maybe be made to total, what?  Seventy-five?  This edition from Oxford?  What with sixty-nine pages of front matter, end-notes and the rest, I put the total at 236. Too much bun, right?

Normally, I would say yes.  Anyone can pick up any used copy of the Rubáiyát for cheap from nearly any used books stall and read it, with variant versions, and maybe illustrations by Edmund Joseph Sullivan, or Willy Pogány, or most famously Edmund Dulac.  I've come to love Edward Fitzgerald mostly for his letters -- among the best and most entertaining in English -- but this means I also own already at least three editions of his Rubáiyát.  Well, now I own a fourth. 

The lengthy introduction by editor Daniel Karlin was actually one of the better things I've ever read on Fitzgerald, let alone his poem.  Dry, incisive and surprisingly enthusiastic about a work the popularity of which peaked well before the professor was born, I can't remember the last time I enjoyed such a brief so much.  That wouldn't have been enough to make me buy yet another copy, even with the best notes on the poem I've ever read, including even FitzGerald's own -- which can make as many mysteries as they solve, by the way.  What sold me finally were all the really interesting supplemental materials: the few, fascinating, contemporary reviews, under "Critical Responses," and Alfred Tennyson's lovely poem, "To E. FitzGerald." Makes for a pretty handy object, all that.  Sold.

The poem itself, admitting it was widely held, even in it's own day to be as much or more Edward FitzGerald's rather than Omar's, has actually come to matter more to me than I ever imagined it might.  Frankly, I couldn't much care for anyone's Omar but this, faithful or false.  Getting to know Fitz through all those letters, and a biography, and some more obscure reprints, I've come to very much to appreciate not just the rather weary attitude and philosophy of the piece but even more, the fine and delicate balance of FitzGerald's great Victorian verse.  A wonder, that, considering this is a poem I was warned against in my youth.  Older folks, of my parents generation roughly, had long since dismissed the Rubáiyát as the very worst sort of Kiwanis Club recitation; bouncy orientalism, no longer suitable to any purpose but mocking theatrics, in imitation of those dusty saps, the Homo Sapiens Victoriana.  Maybe that disdain for all things mid-nineteenth had to pass before the Rubáiyát became readable again.  Maybe I just had to get over myself.  At any road, I now own four editions so clearly I like it fine.

This Oxford edition of 2009, I would recommend to any with a curiosity about Fitz, or for whom the poem may otherwise not mean as much as it might with some good end-notes.

Turns out?  Good Hum Bao. 



View all my reviews

Quick Review

One Hundred Portraits: Artists, Architects, Writers, Composers, and Friends by Barry Moser

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Easily our greatest living illustrator, it's easy to forget just what a dark and curious art it is that Barry Moser practices.  Really, it's not until one has the opportunity to see his work out of other people's books, picture after picture, all the shadows stacked, as it were, one atop the other, that one may appreciate just how thick the gathering dim.  It's a technique, of course, and to do with the tools employed, but is just as clearly the artist's somewhat unforgiving vision.  "Warts and all" in the phrase supposedly from Cromwell to his portrait painter, does not begin to describe Moser's brutally lined, deflated James Joyce here, or his all but coal-black profile of Twain.  And neither is Moser's black meant to invariably suggest some dark night of the soul for each of his subjects.  One of the beautiful and striking pictures in this book, for instance, is of Chopin -- reproduced here, one suspects at an enhanced size from the original, though perhaps not.  Chopin hardly qualifies as a specially tortured soul.  Here, barely rising from the surrounding black, Moser's famous lines thicker and and more obviously artful, the composer's face seems to just drift briefly into focus, like a message in a magic eightball.  It's a remarkably beautiful if far from pretty picture.

More typically, Moser's mastery of his form seems best suited to the care-worn, the weathered, battered and blown, so that the faces most familiar from photography, and in at least middle-age, seem the most authentic likenesses.  Dreiser, Borges, Cocteau in old age, and more cheerfully, if that's an applicable word, Jim Harrison and Eric Carle are all celebrated in the full dishevelment and decay.  Perhaps the single most horrifying image might be Jonathan Swift, imagined in his toothless dotage, in a gargoyle's profile, not so much as a thought suggested in his head. 

Which is not to say that Moser hasn't a lighter hand when called for.  His Washington Irving, for example, reproduced as well as part of the dustjacket, conveys a wry amusement, as does Moser's Whistler.  The picture of the Rev. Martin Luther king Jr, is notable for its optimism as well; no shadow of tragedy, but rather a bright and curving light that seems to run through the round and healthy face.

Special note might be made of all Moser's portraits of African American subjects here.  From Sojourner Truth to Richard Wright, there's a restrained and respectful fidelity, and no hint of caricature. 

Perhaps the single most faithful and affectionate portrait in the book, at least of the famous faces, may well be Hemingway.  I don't know anything of Moser's literary preferences beyond his obvious interest in illustrating books by Melville and Lewis Carol, etc.  It seems obvious to me at least that his Hemingway is not just beautifully detailed, but well nigh heroic.  I don't mean any disrespect in suggesting that it's the kind of head that deserves a stamp.

Perhaps Moser's least successful portraits are those faces we know not from photographs but only from one or two paintings or a bust; Keats for example, or Dr. Johnson, neither of which really registered for me as recognizable likenesses of either writer (though a case can be made for having nothing but unalike pictures of Keats to which we might compare this one.) 

My own favorite pictures here would tend to correspond to my own preferences among the writers depicted, but honestly, the drawings I've found myself studying most closely have actually all been of the least familiar faces: Moser's own, mostly, but also his family and friends.  If my absolute favorite, more typically, is his drawing taken from Blake's remarkable death-mask, every bit as fine, in their way, are Moser's affectionate portraits of his parents on facing pages.  There's enormous vitality in all three drawing, ironically only in the case of Blake.

With a rambling, quite charming introduction by novelist Ann Patchett and excellent production values throughout the book, this is a treasury well worth keeping, hard-by.  I should think I will want Barry Moser's perspective whenever I might set to thinking about any of the writers included here.  Nearly as easy to get lost in these drawings as in the minds of the artists depicted.

What an extraordinary record of a remarkable talent!



View all my reviews

Quick Review

The Event of Literature by Terry Eagleton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I don't do the crossword puzzle.  I'm not much for games, generally.  I enjoy a hand or two of rummy once in a long while, but the friend who tried to teach me bridge eventually gave up in tears.  In junior high, the basketball coach taught me chess during practices.  I was the team manager.  We were bored.  I was never very good at it, but at least it was more interesting than boys running drills -- for the coach, anyway.  I had my own interests there. 

Reading Terry Eagleton is sudoku for me.  Just as sudoku uses numbers but doesn't actually involve arithmetic, so with Eagleton and literature.  Oh, the name of a novelist may pop up now and then, but it doesn't signify.  One no more has to have read Melville to enjoy Eagleton than one has to remember algebra to play sudoku.  (If you want to know who actually matters in Eagleton, who the writers are he's reading, other than Marx who always comes out on top for citations, check the index. More importantly, who are the writers with whom Terry Eagleton is arguing?  Just check the index for critics, familiar and otherwise.  Pretty safe bet that if the name's unfamiliar, Terry's got his number.  Ultimately, you're more likely to find Stanley Fish served up than Moby Dick.) The game Eagleton plays happens to use literature, but I don't doubt he could play it just as well, and every bit as divertingly with The Old Farmers Almanac, or reports from the Department of Agriculture.  Books are the clues, but substitute "crop yields" for "semiotics," and what might be lost in meaning wouldn't be so very much, and the result would be just as much fun.

Really what this particular puzzle book is meant to be I suppose is something of an elegy for the faded charms of theory in general, which Eagleton seems to feel have lost their rosy glow.  Hadn't noticed.  Still, he would know, wouldn't he?  Now, the Professor never really approved of all that stuff anyway, it seems.  There's a right way and a wrong way.  Every game has its rules, and so on. Seems all those theorists were atheists or something.  Who remembers?  Doesn't matter.  The game, and great fun it is too, is all to do with the logical progression of Eagleton's argument, not with whom he's having it, what it might be about or whether it matters to anyone else.  Trying to guess Eagleton's next move is always fun, but frankly I'm no better at this game than I was a bridge.  Doesn't matter.  Terry Eagleton's a grand master of this nonsense.  Every performance is about equally dazzling.

In fact, Terry Eagleton is the Will Shortz of this kind of puzzle-making.

It doesn't really pay to study this kind of book with the idea of understanding how Moby Dick -- just for consistency's sake -- works or doesn't works, why one ought to read it in preference, for instance, to any other novel, or why one ought to read novels at all, for that matter. (I don't know that Professor Eagleton thinks we should. Don't know what Professor Fish would say.)

Meanwhile, at least between novels, for the exercise if to no other or better purpose, I will now and again find myself sucked in by the goofy magnetism of Eagleton's witty, giddy gamesmanship.  I can't recommend it highly enough for those long winter afternoons, by the space-heater.  If there's no one around for backgammon and you're not ready for your nap, give the old boy a try. 

Perfectly harmless fun.



View all my reviews

Quick Review

The Great Charles Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Slater is perhaps the greatest living Dickens scholar.  That isn't to say he's Dickens' best biographer -- a title I would still give to the late Edgar Johnson, if anyone -- or even that I much liked his magisterial life of Dickens from a few years back.  It was a factual wonder: summarizing and condensing all the best Dickens research of the past fifty years, indisputably accurate in every detail, no doubt, and as true a record of the great man's life as we are likely to ever see, two centuries out from his birth.  If it was not a very diverting or stimulating book, and if critically it lacked the sharp edges and enthusiasm of earlier lives, such as Johnson's, Pope-Hennessy, Steven Leacock or the more recent and readable biography by Claire Tomalin, Slater's book was also free of many, even most of the critical eccentricities and or speculative inventions of the rest.  The best biographies, particularly critical biographies of great artists, at least for the common reader, are not quite so dryly reportorial, so determinedly objective as was Slater's.  Specially when reading the life of a man of such profound and influential emotions as Dickens, one wants some clear sympathy, some humor, some joy.  Even John Forster's classic biography, for all Forster's supposed Victorian reserve, was suffused with what can only be described as love for biographer's great subject and friend.  Likewise, later, Chesterton's brilliant little book, and even to a lesser extent, Leacock's life, or the recent short life by the actor, author and Dickens reader, Simon Callow.  For a man who has devoted a good span of his professional life to reading and writing about Dickens, Professor Slater would seem to allow himself precious few pleasures in the task, at least precious few he's felt fit to share.  (There were many familiar and not a few fresh and wonderfully new anecdotes of Dickens' fun in the biography, quoted presumably with Slater's full intent to amuse, but rather as an unfunny man might relay the story of a party at which he abstained from the punch.)

Curiously, the very deficits in Slater's full-length biography; the cool, not to say cold detachment, the dry reliance on accumulated evidence, no matter the reader's willingness to accept such authority as might have been already sited, the over-fastideous refusal to comment directly on anything but in deadpan, can prove real virtues when, as here, the literary historian's task is to sort, sift and present rather than revivify the past.  Slater hasn't any interest in reviving past controversies, or in disputing the dead or the living.  What he does do, and do extremely well in a brief span, is tell a somewhat sorry story straight.

I could not imagine why he should want to tell this story at all until I'd read his book.  Claire Tomalin, in her biography of Ellen "Nelly" Ternan, The Invisible Woman, and again, if with less emphasis in her biography of Dickens, rather conclusively and quite brilliantly made the case not just for Dickens' last "scandalous" love for a much younger actress, but also definitively restored Ternan to her full dignity as an interesting and sympathetic person and personality in her own right.  So why then should the great scholar, Michael Slater choose to follow up his weighty biography with this considerably more sleight review of the whole history of the scandal?  Why rake over yet again Dickens' disastrous end to his long and fruitful marriage, his not so secret fascination with Ternan and their life together and apart to the time of his untimely death?

What Slater does here, and does so well, is painstakingly trace the evolution and detection of that well known and yet little recorded story.  His interest is strictly and quite cleverly confined, again, to the facts, and most interestingly, how they were concealed, revealed, suppressed and finally brought most fully to light.  The book is more the story of the many Dickensians -- amateur detectives and enthusiasts mostly, with a few professional hacks and hatchet-men among them --who down the years made it their business to winkle out the many small details; an address here, the name on a lease there, a letter, a confession, an otherwise lost conversation and or half-forgotten encounter, from which one of the few truly private episodes in Charles Dickens' very public life might be reconstructed.   Slater's command of not only the facts but the personalities involved is masterful.   Even with the end now a forgone conclusion for most readers, the good professor manages to make this teapot tempest genuinely exciting, even suspenseful in part because of the scholar's dry, distance survey.  Slater looks into it all from a very great height and surprisingly, with very little disdain for any but the very worst characters involved, nay, with even what I feel safe in characterizing as amusement and affection.

Imagine.  Such a surprise for the reader of his earlier biography.  (Though that's not altogether fair.  Slater's entry for Dickens in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, later reproduced as a very short book, was a wise and almost witty thing, smart as paint, and his even earlier critical volume, Dickens and Women was a very clever analysis, free from all the more usual psychological and political cant to be expected from an academic on such a subject, replete as it would seem to be with opportunities for scoring points for and against current theories of sexual and literary politics.)

This book then would seem to have been exactly the sort of exercise the great scholar was meant to take, so late in his labors; an almost brutally clear-eyed review of some the last messy materials left over from more than a century of gossip, rumor and pedestal-rocking.  The reader would be hard-pressed to think how anyone coming after might still make much more of the business.

(This also answers some of the more naggingly lazy references to the scandal, and the rather shabby uses to which it is still put in even quite recent books, like Robert Gottlieb's otherwise entertaining and informative book, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, where that author too easily reproduces one or two of the least attractive opinions of Dickens' behavior to both Nelly Ternan, his wife and daughters without properly tracing the origins, as Slater does so definitively here, of those judgements against Dickens' character and affections.)

If finally my own interest in both the relationship between Dickens and Nelly Ternan and the resulting scandal remains next to nothing, even after this book and the rest, That, I happily confess is because my awe of and delight in Dickens achievement as a writer, and my admiration of him as a man, remains all but undimmed by the unhappy end of his marriage and or his personal failings as either a husband or father.  I am myself then a Dickensian, I suppose, and proud to so say.  Perhaps it is just my own thoroughly modern disinterest in saints, sin and personal scandal as a determining factor in appreciating great literature.  Perhaps it is my ever deepening appreciation in this, Dickens' bicentennial year, of his unparalleled artistry as the greatest comic novelist in English that makes me, if always curious as to the details of his life, unwilling to judge him by any other standard.  Perhaps it is as simple as saying that I love him, as best as I am able to say, as he was, that makes this book of such keen if passing interest.  Whatever I think of this book then, and I think it quite good, it is still Dickens I believe to have been great.

Of that, I am more sure with every word by, rather than about him that I read.


View all my reviews