Category: Literary Biography

A WRITER'S WIT: BLAKE BAILEY

7/1/2025

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that’s very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
Blake Bailey
Author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
Born July 1, 1963

B. Bailey

Up Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Donald Windham
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Charlotte Perkins Gilman
FRI: My Book World | Julie Sedivy, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love

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GUNN MAKES QUEER COOL

2/21/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct—it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.
W. H. Auden
Author of The Age of Anxiety
Born February 21, 1907

W. H. Auden

MY BOOK WORLD

Nott, Michael. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life. New York: Farrar, 2024.

As an American, I had never heard of British-born poet, Thom Gunn, but I was intrigued by the cover (dig those shades reflecting the half-naked photographer) and so bought the book. Almost expecting to lose interest, I, instead, read right to the end (not including Notes, egad) about this transplant to San Francisco. I am now looking forward to locating and reading Gunn’s published works with a certain understanding.

The key to getting at the core of Gunn’s life may be that his mother committed suicide when he was a child, and he never really recovered from it. He continued to ruminate over her death, and the topic dominated, at times, his poetry. But as one comes to understand, writing fine poetry (to him, not necessarily editors) helped him to understand all the important elements of his life, including this loss.

In one sense, Gunn was successful from the start, the Cambridge graduate placing poems in small journals in London as a young man. Though critical success was important to him, he seemed to be one of those rare artists who could analyze his own work and see what was needed—hardly ever following all the invited advice his (critical) readers would bestow upon him. From the beginning there was tension between how much he would reveal about being gay (many times his only subject matter) and being more veiled about it. Until, that is, he moved to the United States. At any rate, Gunn came to define (with the help of W. H. Auden and John Garrett) poetry as “memorable speech” (42). He never lost sight of that goal—leaving and returning to individual poems, sometimes for years, until they seemed memorable.

Gunn lived a lively and unconventional life, even for an out gay man in the 1950s and beyond. He met Mike Kitay when they were both in their early twenties, and they remained together—in one way or another—for the rest of Thom’s life (dying at age 74). Through teaching and lecturing events, as well as grants, Gunn cobbled together a decent living and bought a house in San Francisco. There he and Mike established a commune of sorts, calling the gathered people their family. It was a good and healthful atmosphere, in the main, because none of them had strong relations with or support from their families.

Nott’s book goes into great detail about Gunn’s drug use. For many years Gunn perhaps kept it under control, mixing but also rotating his heavy use of alcohol, speed, and sometimes heroin. And he managed to keep, until the end, his body in good physical shape—trying to maintain his attractive looks for tricks. But as he retired, giving up both writing and teaching (and purpose), his drug use became much heavier, and an overdose ultimately occurred, ending his life in 2004. As literary biography goes (and it can get a bit into the weeds), this one is very fine, I think. Nott fully researches all aspects of Gunn’s life with great detail and understanding, bringing to light the most important elements of a poet’s life. And yet one also understands the poet as a human being, a very generous and kind man at that.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Benedetto Croce
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth George
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Steinbeck
FRI: My Book World | William S. Burroughs, Queer

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A WRITER'S WIT: HESKETH PEARSON

2/20/2025

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A man’s character never changes radically from youth to old age. What happens is that circumstances bring out characteristics which have not been obvious to the superficial observer.
Hesketh Pearson
Author of The Life of Oscar Wilde
Born February 20, 1887

H. Pearson

Up Next:
FRI: My Book World | Michael Nott, Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Benedetto Croce
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth George
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Steinbeck

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ACTRESS EXTRAORDINAIRE

12/20/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
Sandra Cisneros
Author of The House on Mango Street
Born December 20, 1954

S. Cisneros

MY BOOK WORLD

Rutherford, Margaret. Margaret Rutherford: An Autobiography as Told to Gwen Robyns. London: Wyndham, 1972.

Recently I caught a couple of Rutherford’s Murder films on Turner Classic Movies, in which she plays Agatha Christie’s detective, Ms. Marple. And I became fascinated with the actor, how intricately and honestly she played the part, though the stories are relatively simple. Like a lot of actors/artists she suffered in her personal life early on. At age three her mother died, and an Aunt Besse raised her. It is easy to imagine her life as she was born in 1892, just a few months before my maternal grandmother was born. I usually don’t care for “as told to” books because the prose does sound as if it has been dictated onto a recording and transcribed word for word. But Rutherford’s spoken prose apparently is so eloquent, it doesn’t seem to affect the quality of the written result. Besides, her accounts are terribly interesting.

Rutherford celebrated nearly fifty years in the acting business before, because of physical difficulties, she quit, just before her death in 1972—at age eighty. She seemed to make the most of her life no matter what. She went after and earned the career she desired. She traveled for both work and pleasure. She “adopted” adult children after she was married because she had none of her own. At age fifty-four she married fellow actor, Stringer Davis. He died a few months following her death. Perhaps some of her tips to actors are dated, but for the most part probably not. Kindness, consideration of fellow workers, and generosity never seem to go out of style. I paid entirely too much for this used copy, but I do think it has been worth it! If only it were signed!
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY 2025!
Up Next:
TUES JAN 7, 2025 : A Writer's Wit | Zora Neale Hurston
WEDS JAN 8, 2025: A Writer's Wit | Robert Littell
THURS JAN 9, 2025: A Writer's Wit | Simone de Beauvoir
FRI JAN 10, 2025: My Book World | Nic Stone, Dear Martin

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ISHERWOOD COMPLEAT

12/13/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
Healing is a constant state. You don’t have to be “fully healed” to give or receive love, to chase after that dream, or to get yourself to that next level.
Lucía González
Author of The Bossy Gallito
Born December 13, 1957

L. González

MY BOOK WORLD

Bucknell, Katherine. Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. New York: Farrar, 2024.

In 2016, I Christopher Isherwood’s entire oeuvre. Why? I admired his work at every level: sophisticated and lyrical vocabulary; his sometimes quirky but lyrical syntax, the variety of genres he tackled, from fiction to nonfiction (history, biography), and play/screenplay writing. My reading included about 4,500 published pages of Isherwood’s journals, all edited by Bucknell. Now she has created an exquisite biography of the author.

Isherwood worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. He kept diaries most of his adult life and drew on them for his published writing, creating narratives more vivid, more revealing, more entertaining than what he documented. He altered the truth in order to make the truth more compelling, and his subtle and mysterious reworking accounts, more than anything else, for the lasting appeal of his writing (5).

At first, I thought I would run into a lot of repetition, but I soon discovered that Bucknell’s scholarly work had thoroughly investigated Isherwood’s life from beginning to end—as a biographer should. From Isherwood’s point of view, for example, he only knew his father until the man was killed in WWI, when Isherwood was little more than eleven. Bucknell fills in those blanks for readers: lets us know what a sensitive man the father was and how, as long as he could, he nurtured Christopher’s artistic personality. The hole left in Isherwood’s life was one that would never be filled.

Christopher Isherwood was as openly gay as a man could be in his era (b. 1904). By his own accounting he went to bed with over 400 men (from Germany to the UK to the USA). He loved his sexual life. Even when he had a lover/partner, he often had trysts with other men. Yet “[h]e saw from the outset of his career that he must make homosexuality attractive to mainstream audiences if he was to change their view of it, and he worked to do this in all his writing in different ways” (9). I believe he succeeded. Within the glory of the Gay Liberation days of the 1970s, the man was in his sixties, yet he still continued to grow, and he was admired far and wide by younger gay men (my generation) for his pioneering life and work. He was in constant demand for teaching and speaking gigs, which he labored to keep, not only for the remuneration but for the communication it afforded him with others.

This tome is one of the most eloquent pieces of literary biography I’ve ever read. If readers wish to learn about one of the finest twentieth-century writers working in English prose, this book is a fine place to begin.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ford Madox Ford
WEDS: A Writer's Wit |Lucy Worsley
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Ronan Farrow
FRI: My Book World | Margaret Rutherford: An Autobiography as told to Gwen Robyns

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THE TGIF CLUB

9/13/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.
Sherwood Anderson
Author of Death in the Woods
Born September 13, 1876

S. Anderson

MY BOOK WORLD

Dunne, Griffin. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir. New York: Random, 2024.

There may be several big takeaways from this celebrity memoir. One, rich (celebrities) and poor (ordinary citizens) alike can suffer from alcohol and drug problems. Two, rich and poor alike may lose a family member to murder and lose, as well, the court case against the accused murderer. Three, rich or poor, family support can mean everything to an individual who’s attempting to suffer through or recover from life’s insurmountable problems. Dunne—actor, producer, director, and writer—writes with humor (usually on the sardonic side) and understanding about his alcoholic father (also in the Biz and later a best-selling novelist), a difficult but caring mother with MS; his long friendship with the late Carrie Fisher (who hails from a similar background); the murder of his beloved sister, Dominique. At the same time the author portrays his mostly solid and loving relationships with relatives close and distant (his father’s brother is married to author Joan Didion, yet the two brothers do not speak for years). All in all, an enjoyable memoir. I know I kept turning the pages.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ken Kesey
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anna Deavere Smith
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Tanith Lee
FRI: My Book World | Adam Moss, The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing

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LINCOLN REVISITED

8/9/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
Lie on the bridge and watch the water flowing past. Or run, or wade through the swamp in your red boots. Or roll yourself up and listen to the rain falling on the roof. It's very easy to enjoy yourself.
Tove Janssan
Author of The Summer Book
Born August 9, 1914

T. Janssan

MY BOOK WORLD

Freedman, Russell. Lincoln: A Photobiography. New York: Clarion, 1987.

A 1987 Newbery Award winner, this book informs all readers (not just children for whom it is meant) about things they might not have known concerning Abraham Lincoln. I am glad I finally read it and marveled in its unique photographs and illustrations.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Kate Walbert
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Steve Martin
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Robert Bolt
FRI: My Book World | Robert Fiske, The Dictionary of Disagreeable English

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A SUNNY AND WILDER ADVENTURE

7/5/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
Women have more to prove than men when it comes to politics.
Julie Nixon Eisenhower
Author of Special People
1948

J. Nixon Eisenhower

MY BOOK WORLD

Dahlstrom, S. J. Wilder and Sunny. Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2015.

Dahlstrom writes so nicely for children. He doesn’t talk down to them. In fact, he strives to expand their vocabularies, I believe. In this simple adventure in which a friend of the family, a man of seventy-two, takes twelve-year-old Wilder and his female friend Sunny on a fishing trip. The author goes into great detail about trout fishing in Colorado, incorporating words like tippet, hopper-dropper, bead head, and two-fly rig. You either get meaning by context or author explanation or looking them up. Either way you learn. The climax of the book may be when, during this camping trip, the three campers are confronted by a mother bear and two cubs. It is a realistic and dynamic depiction, rather graphic at times, but it does give Wilder and Sunny a chance to grow up in certain ways before Sunny’s father locates them and saves them from further adventures. Wilder and Sunny form a bond that may last well into the future. Only time will tell.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Dorothy Thompson
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Alice Munro
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Frederick Beuchner
FRI: My Book World | Charles Kenney, John F. Kennedy: The Presidential Portfolio. History as Told through the Collection of the JFK Library

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HIGH ON HIGHSMITH?

1/19/2024

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Possible basis for my weltanschauung. That the childishness is never lost, but adulthood put like a veneer over it. We think inside like children, react, and have their desires. The outside manners are an absurd puff of conceit.
[Diaries and Notebooks 5/19/41]
Patricia Highsmith
Author of Edith's Diary
Born January 19, 1921

P. Highsmith

my book world

Highsmith, Patricia. Edith’s Diary. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1989 (1977).

An interesting interior novel. A middle-aged woman’s life is plagued with any number of problems, least of which is that her husband divorces her. At the same time, she keeps a diary that reflects a much happier version of her life—so much so that by the end, her behavior seems bizarre (at least to her ex-husband and others who think she should see a shrink). As a reader I never see the deterioration, however. I believe she’s merely frustrated with all that life has thrown at her.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Karen Abbott
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Edith Wharton
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Joe Conason
FRI: My Book World | Barbra Streisand, My Name Is Barbra

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'Shy' She Is Not

1/27/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
Curtsy while you’re thinking what to say. It saves time.
Lewis Carroll
Author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Born January 27, 1832

L. Carroll

My Book World

Rodgers, Mary and Jesse Green. Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers. New York: Farrar, 2022.

I’ve been a huge fan of comic Carol Burnett my entire life. I remember her belting out a song called “Shy,” when she appeared in a TV version of the play, Once Upon a Mattress. By today’s standards, it was a simple production and recorded on kinescope for us now to cherish by way of YouTube. The one highlight is Burnett as the princess singing “Shy” with some irony, her mouth open wide, her lungs full of air, no microphone needed. The thing I don’t know or realize at the time is that the music is written by the author of this book, Mary Rodgers—the younger daughter of composer Richard Rodgers.

Mary Rodgers’s book is co-written with Jesse Green, a lifelong friend. Rodgers at one point attempts to pen the book herself, yet always gets bogged down. But you’re a storyteller, Jesse tells her, a talker! So Mary tells her stories to Jesse, and Jesse does more than write them down. He creates a great book, handing over each draft to Mary for approval, until they arrive at what is this tome.

The title may not be quite so ironic when applied to Mary. Although she in many ways is bold, she is always reigned in, first of all, by her parents. Her mother, probably jealous of her daughter’s talent (this learned from Mary’s many hours on analysts’ sofas), belittles her and her work. Richard Rodgers, her famous father, is also begrudging with regard to how much time he spends with his daughter. Mary Rodgers (b. 1931) is an early feminist without the crusading. She must fight her way into every project she obtains until she reaches a certain point (probably when Mattress becomes a huge hit). Even after that, she doesn’t always get the big projects. Her fame comes more or less from writing projects for children.

In fact, she must love children a great deal, giving birth to six of her own (three each by two different husbands), one dying quite young. Her legacy, as she tells it, may to be a better parent than composer. She tries, in vain sometimes, to be a better mother than her own mother was. Ultimately she realizes she may not be able to have it all, as more recent feminists realize. At least not without a lot of help, women can’t have it all. (We’re talking the hiring of tutors, governesses, child caregivers, not to mention lots of domestic help—something available only to the wealthy.) At any rate, this memoir is enjoyable to read on many levels. Not always the greatest prose (transcription of an oral work seems to miss out on the finishing touches that grammar and phrasing can give it), with perhaps far too many footnotes that could have been incorporated into the main text, this memoir is still a pleasant and entertaining read.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Laura Lippman
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Muriel Spark
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Havelock Ellis
FRI: My Book World | George Saunders: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

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Pat Conroy: No Exaggeration Needed

11/11/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
The only way to know what is possible is to venture past impossible.
Mary Gaitskill
Author of This Is Pleasure
Born November 11, 1954

M. Gaitskill

My Book World

Clark, Katherine. My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy. As Told to Katherine Clark. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2018.

I don’t usually care for “as told to” books, but this one is too intriguing to pass up. Clark spends a number of years communicating with author Pat Conroy either by direct interviews or by way of written communications. He declares early on that his spoken language is much different from the prose he uses in his fiction. And his fiction (for those who don’t know Conroy)? The Great Santini. The Lords of Discipline. Beach Music, to name only a few.

Each book that Conroy writes is his way of transforming the mess that is his autobiographical material. The Great Santini is essentially about his bully of an abusive father who cows Conroy’s mother and all his siblings. The Lords of Discipline is about his four years as a miserable cadet at the Citadel, in South Carolina. But his writing is also about his three marriages. His parents. His children. He writes, by the way, The Water Is Wide, the novel about a young man who teaches on an island with an all-Black classroom of children—made into a successful movie, Conrack, starring Jon Voight. In fact, Conroy makes a great deal of his income from selling the film rights to his works and getting a successful result—a rarity among novelists.

I am much more encouraged to read Conroy’s oeuvre, in part, because I can now sense how difficult it is for him to arrive at each finished product. He is one of those persons who must fight for every minute of happiness, every inch of success, and Clark’s book relates his story plainly and with great sensitivity.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Georgia O'Keeffe
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | George S. Kaufman
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lee Strasberg
FRI: My Book World | Elizabeth Strout's Oh, William!

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Lone Star Short Stories: Two Books

11/4/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
I'm not an artist. I tell inappropriate stories and jokes and I try to make people laugh.
Kathy Griffin
For Your Consideration (CD)
Born November 4, 1960

K. Griffin

My Book World

Byrd, Bobby, and Johnny Byrd, editors. Lone Star Noir. New York: Akashic, 2010.

These fourteen stories, though set in the singular locale of Texas, are about the same things that noir is about in the other forty-nine states: avarice, greed, murder. Thus, making the collection rather universal. Divided into three parts—rural Texas, urban Texas, and Gulf-Coast Texas—each story brings to life those three qualities. Noir allows readers to experience this thrilling but illicit word vicariously so that we never ever have to commit such crimes ourselves. Title is part of the Akashic Noir Series.

Peery, William, Editor. 21 Texas Short Stories. Austin: U of Texas P, 1954.

These twenty-one stories written by Texans (either by birth or by successful transplantation) were published between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s. But many of them chronicle earlier times, calling to mind rural-agrarian, nineteenth century Texas, calling to mind Texas’s involvement in the Civil War and slavery. Editor Peery features some famous names: O. Henry, Katherine Anne Porter, J. Frank Dobie, and Fred Gipson. But he also includes many fine writers who do not possess that kind of fame. Margaret Cousins, for example, may write the best, non-sentimental Christmas story I’ve ever read. “Uncle Edgar and the Reluctant Saint” tells the tale of a little girl who almost doesn’t get to celebrate Christmas with her family due to her train getting stuck in a freakish Texas snow storm. Her curmudgeon of an uncle happens to be on the train, a man who detests marriage, Christmas, and almost everything else that is part of civilization. He manages to come through for her and everyone else on the train without changing his character too much. All the stories reveal diction and dialog that are no longer used (probably), sort of Huck Finn meets the Texas State Fair. Worth the time, especially if you are interested in Texas folklore.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Marianne Wiggins
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Carroll Quigley
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John P. Marquand
FRI: My Book World | Elizabeth Clark's Biography: My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

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'Demon Inside' Is Old Story

10/14/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
Hannah Arendt
Author of
Born October 14, 1906

H. Arendt

My Book World

Wedgwood, Barbara. The Demon Inside. New York: Simon, 1993.

A sad but true story. Made sadder by the fact that I attended graduate school with the two principals: Walker Railey and Margaret “Peggy” Nicolai Railey. My young wife (at the time) and I entertained them in our efficiency apartment on the campus of Southern Methodist University. I was both a seminarian where I met Walker, as well as a student of graduate music, where I studied with the same organ professor as Peggy who was enrolled in the master of music program. The couple were about to be married, effervescent and fun to be with. After I left seminary, withdrawing before I graduated, I never saw them again. I only heard of them when their story hit the national news. I had left the church and divorced my wife, leaving the seminary life far behind. They were figures I no longer seemed to know.

I was aware of this book when it came out, but I was not interested in reading it at the time. Somewhat like learning about the Clutter family in the news (I grew up in Kansas), I had grown tired of hearing about whether Walker Railey had strangled his wife of ten years or not. In that she didn’t die as a result of the attempt but remained an invalid for more than twenty-five years, dying at the age of sixty-three, she remained frozen in time for me: a pretty, intelligent and gifted musician. Witty and with a mind of her own.

I read Wedgwood’s book with a wary eye when I noted in her foreword that she was a Dallasite who had grown up in the city’s First Methodist Church located downtown. Even though she’d left the area to pursue a more global career and life, I wondered how objective she might be. She also knew or seemed to know of many of the principals in the story: other Methodist ministers and spouses, Methodist bishops, and the like. But for the most part, I was impressed with her fanaticism for detail, almost too much at times (offering much more than a thumbnail sketch of minor characters, for example). All the dialogue, she claims, is lifted from “sworn testimony, quotations from newspapers and magazines or the recollections of two observers of a scene or one of the participants in a dialogue” (xi). She allows for the mistaken or distorted memories of people when recalling even such a traumatic event as this one.

But one element is missing. Facts. Walker Railey consistently refused to speak with law enforcement, except briefly, all the while claiming he was innocent. And, of course, Peggy Railey could no longer speak for herself—nothing more than a drooling ghoul the strangler had created the night of the attack. One time, early in her time at the Dallas hospital, she “woke” momentarily from her coma, ostensibly upon hearing the voice of her husband standing at the foot of her bed, and seemed startled. The older child, Ryan, five, had suffered some injury, the attacker apparently pushing him away from the scene, but he was too young ever to positively identify the violent intruder. Those events may be as close as the public ever gets to knowing the truth. A strange and lurid case made markedly so because it takes place within the context of one of the country’s largest churches of one Protestantism’s most established denominations. As the title suggests, the demon remains within, within the realm of its own story, perhaps never to be set free.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Wendy Wasserstein
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Dan Flores
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Dewey
FRI: My Book World | J. R. Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday

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Sylvia Plath's Life: A Red Comet

8/26/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
It’s sad, the time in your life when you can really wear clothes is also the time when you oughtn’t to be wearing any.
Christopher Isherwood
Author of The Berlin Stories
Born August 26, 1904

C. Isherwood

My Book World

Clark, Heather. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. New York: Knopf, 2020.

This impressive biography of the famed poet may be the most comprehensive literary biography I’ve ever read. Clark, who took more than ten years to write this book, utilizes a broad range of sources, including Sylvia Plath’s diaries, letters (some never before seen), journals, and poems. Clark also includes the story of Plath’s famous poet husband, Ted Hughes. It would be like telling the story of one conjoined twin without including the other; that is how inextricably woven their lives are, right up to Plath’s infamous suicide, in 1963. The acknowledgement page and Clark’s notes section are filled with other sources, she having visited England to conduct research as well as interviews, and having combed U.S. libraries from coast to coast.

The book reads more like a novel, achieving a fiction-like narrative arc. We learn of Plath’s early childhood, the loss of her father, her dominating but generous mother. We learn of Plath’s education, particularly her four years at the prestigious Smith College. We learn of her creepy attempt at suicide, almost succeeding, when her near-dead body is discovered in a crawl space beneath the family home, her electroshock therapy at a draconian institution in Massachusetts. We cross the Atlantic where Plath continues her education at Cambridge University, where she meets her match intellectually as well as future husband, Ted Hughes. This narrative continues to build as we learn of her struggle to cope with a male dominated literary life in London. She is alternately elated and deflated as some of her work is accepted with accolades and “her best work” rejected by the likes of the New Yorker as well as prestigious English journals. It would have been a mistake for her to eschew her British education because the Brits seem, at times, more open to her raw style than the Americans.

We live through the Plath-Hughes tempestuous marriage and become acquainted with their two children. Plath’s death comes with fifty pages to go. It is the climax, all right, but it is not the end of Plath’s story. All throughout the biography Clark intersperses lines from Plath’s and Hughes’s work to demonstrate not only biographical elements but fascinating literary observations, as well. But even Plath’s death is deconstructed in such a way that we may understand it differently from earlier biographies (Anne Stevenson’s “famously negative” one, for example). With twenty-twenty hindsight, we see that Plath’s suicide (as many are) is mere minutes away from being another failed attempt. Plath is always, in the damp English climate and because she runs herself ragged, having bouts of a cold or the flu. As a result she takes a number of OTC medications, as well as a merry-go-round of prescription drugs, including antidepressants, sedatives to sleep, other drugs to wake her up so she can work—all of these interacting horribly as a perfect storm to help end her life (some experts understand that those particular antidepressants may have intensified her depression before finally kicking in).

And it isn’t as if she doesn’t try to live. She consults doctors and psychiatrists galore. She corresponds with an American psychiatrist across the Atlantic. She fights like hell to stay out of British psychiatric wards because she is terrified she will be subject to shock therapy again, which she believes, has altered her brain and her life forever. For fans or nonfans alike this biography is a must-read. It generously takes all we knew about Plath before, all the research that has come earlier, and adds or even convincingly contradicts a great deal of the old. I can’t see any biographer attempting to top it for a long time to come. Indeed, the book may finally put her story to rest alongside her grave atop a lonely spot near where her husband grew up at Heptonstall—a simple granite marker worn down now by nearly sixty years of inclement weather.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Mary Shelley
WEDS: AWW | Eldridge Cleaver
THURS: AWW | Jesse Kellerman
FRI: My Book World | Colin Barrett's Homesickness: Stories

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Ms. Brodie Still Sharp As a Tack

8/19/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes, there'll be more war; and soon, I don't doubt. There always has been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them.
James Gould Cozzens
Author of By Love Possessed
Born August 19, 1903

J. G. Cozzens

My Book World

Sparks, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999 (1961).

If one has seen only the movie version of this book, a fine work in its own right that premiered in 1969 with the inimitable Maggie Smith starring in the main role, one might be lulled into thinking the book to be quite similar. One would be wrong. This short novel set in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland, impresses me as being an extended prose poem about an intelligent and nonconformist teacher who is yet rather naïve. Brodie eschews the prescribed school curriculum to lecture her female pupils concerning a wide variety of cultural and artistic topics, and yet when she also embraces the likes of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler, she reflects either a certain naivete or an intellectual dullness. The word “prime” or phrases containing that word appears more than thirty times throughout these brief pages; the phrase “crème de la crème” more than five. Both have a rather fatuous ring to them, “prime” referencing Miss Brodie’s heightened sense of her own refinement and knowledge, and “crème de la crème” indicating the girls she has rather commandeered to follow her—not just for the year they are in her class but for their entire lifetimes: they are the “Brodie set.”

Spark’s structure is an omnisciently meandering one in which she may speak of one child in her adult future, one dying prematurely, another becoming a nun. Very lightly Sparks inserts that the year is 1931 or 1937 or that Ms. Brodie is now forty-three. One knows where one is at all times as if the novel were a sort of hologram. Young Sandy is the only pupil who sees through Jean Brodie’s ways, and early on readers learn that she will bring Brodie down. In the last scene of the film, a wounded Brodie who has been released from her teaching position because of Sandy’s actions screams the word “Assassin!” after her beloved Sandy, but the book ends rather quietly when readers visit Sandy upon her adult position in a nunnery. When asked about her childhood influences, she simply says, “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (137).

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Erin Foster
WEDS: AWW | Howard Zinn
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair
FRI: My Book World | Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Career of Sylvia Plath

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Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks

5/13/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Take it from someone who fled the Iron Curtain: I know what happens when you give the Russians a green light.
Madeleine Albright
Author of Fascism: A Warning
Born May 13, 1937

M. Albright

My Book World

Von Planta, Anna, ed. Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks. With an introduction by Joan Schenkar. New York: Liveright, 2021.

This more than fifty-year compendium of Highsmith’s 8,000 pages of diary and notebook entries is a stunning read—particularly if you savor the voyeuristic practice of reading someone’s private thoughts. Her diary entries are brutally honest about everything from her current girlfriend(s) with whom she is madly in love to resentments toward her mother, estranged father, and stepfather. Though bright enough to graduate from Barnard, she never quite masters the art of achieving a meaningful love relationship; her tone seems the same for fifty years. I can’t understand why this relationship has failed. And yet, I believe she does know why: her profession requires much alone time, which is not compatible with a needy lover.

Her notebooks, on the other hand, are about her current and proposed works, sometimes a poem here and there. She also talks business. About her agent(s), once her sales go international. Her publishers. Friendships, lasting ones at that, with a broad range of writers. Strong female writers (mostly part of a lesbian group of professionals) mentor Highsmith on how to navigate the heady waters of being a single woman sometimes writing about being queer. Early on, when she is young, she has sex and “love” relationships with a few men, but none of them is every satisfying.

What may be most fascinating is to watch how her life and living influence particular books. The Ripley series of five novels has such an authentic, European backdrop because besides being multilingual, Highsmith lives in Europe much of her life. Still, having been born in Fort Worth, Texas, she does return there to visit once her parents move back from New York. Yet she harbors deep resentments against her abusive mother, who lives to be ninety-five (PH nearly perceives it as a punishment), and, because of her own health problems, fails to visit upon her mother’s own funeral. A sad but triumphant ending for a triumphant but oft-times sad and lonely life. If readers have time, it is well worth theirs to read these 1,000 pages, especially if they’re curious about the writer who authored Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series of five novels, a total of thirty-two books.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hermann Hesse's Rosshalde.

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Coppola: True to His Vision

3/25/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
If birds will abandon their young rather than miss the moment to begin a flight of thousands of miles, what migratory signals might our own cells still hold?
Gloria Steinem
Author of My Life on the Road
Born March 25, 1934

G. Steinem

My Book World

Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life. New York: Crown, 1999.

If readers are fans of both film and director Coppola, this book is an embarrassment of riches—at least as far as it takes us, through 1998 when the book comes out. One may not realize, for example, how easy the 1970s seem for Coppola, succeeding beyond his wildest dreams with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. The next twenty years are more arduous, and Coppola loses his credibility at times. He wishes to be more of an artiste, making films that appeal to him but perhaps not the public at large—or the studios. Even when he makes a big-budget, mass-appeal film, he is almost always at loggerheads with studio execs over scripts and, of course, money. He is a creative man, who also finances, for a time, his own studio, and even publishes a literary magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, which still exists today—not to mention a number of other enterprises including a winery. He ends the nineties having made enough money to dig himself out of debt and establish an independent life. Although he continues to make film, it is at his own pleasure. One has to admire that.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Herman Wouk's Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author

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Melville"s Biography

8/21/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How To Write A Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past page three of that book.
James Rollins
Author of Sandstorm
Born August 20, 1961

J. Rollins

Sorry! This post should have come out yesterday, but due to a scheduling error on my part it did not happen!

My Book World

This biography of the author of Moby Dick is all consuming and likable in most respects. Once the reader gets past Melville’s childhood and youth—the fact that his father is poor at handling money and dies in middle age, making it impossible for Herman to earn a formal education—the book becomes more enthralling. Keeping straight the large number of Melville’s siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins becomes tedious. And anyone looking for exacting truth may be disappointed for whenever author Parker can’t nail down the facts concerning Melville’s early life, he uses language such as “may have been” “could have walked,” “is rumored to have,” “may have borrowed,” “may, before this, have demonstrated,” “a reasonable guess is,” “may not have told,” “may have been referring,” or “31 August is safe enough” (450) to make conjecture. Might Parker have chosen to leave that information out if he wasn’t sure?

The chapters and passages concerning the works of Melville—how he researches, how he drafts (his sister is his official copyist), and how he approaches getting published—are entirely engrossing. As a young man of twenty or so, Melville spends more than a year in the South Pacific. From this expedition he mines much material for his first three books: Typee, Omoo, and Mardi. One thing that is difficult to believe is that the American press (with highly opinionated and not always qualified critics) question the veracity of his work. Does he really travel to those places, or does he use resource material to “pad” his work? The British press are kinder to him, but it seems that he is always struggling to pacify the whole lot of them. At the same time, he does attract enough positive attention to continue writing. One must realize that Melville, as well as his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, never made much money during their lifetimes. Melville was always begging or borrowing or dealing to keep his family with an income. Would that the poor man had lived to see his place in literary history or to reap the monetary rewards from his brilliant labors!

Though it sold barely 3,000 copies in his lifetime, Moby Dick is the novel for which Melville is most remembered. Here, Parker waxes romantic about his subject (and deservedly so): “The river of Melville’s reading had long flowed into his conscious mind (indeed, it had overflowed there in the more bookish parts of Mardi). Now his profounder reading not only flowed on the surface but was partly diverted into a subterranean river that flowed into the spring of original thought, a spring ready to burst out, under the pressure of the occasion and the time, into Moby-Dick, once the interminable voyage was over” (701).

Parker’s Volume I concludes with an extended scene in which Melville presents a copy of Moby Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne so that the man can see that Melville has dedicated the tome to his dear friend and mentor. “Take it all in all, this was the happiest day of Melville’s life” (883). I plan to read Volume II, but I may give it some time!

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Frank Lloyd Wright: An Artful Autobiography

7/23/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.
Lauren Groff
Author of Florida
Born July 23, 1978

L. Groff

My Book World

Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1998. First published, Duel, Sloan and Pearce 1943.

I missed out on all the instruction I needed to write my high school research paper because I was in the hospital with a bad case of pneumonia. When I finally did make up the paper, I wrote it on Frank Lloyd Wright. I did not keep the graded copy, and I can only guess that I perhaps did not narrow down my topic enough, but I do recall being very enthusiastic about my research. The great architect had only been gone about six years, and my childhood fascination with him fired up my ambition. I was happy finally to read his autobiography divided into five books, each one perhaps written at the end of a particular era.

Some people talented in one area seem to be good at virtually everything they attempt, and some talented people seem to be natural writers. Frank Lloyd Wright appears to be both. He is not only architect but artist, chef, sommelier, pianist, and humanitarian. Book One is titled “Family,” written in the third person, about his childhood and the family members who made it a magical one growing up in Wisconsin. One even gets a good feel for his Welsh ancestry. He begins a book-long examination of “sentiment” vs. “sentimentality.” In this passage he speaks of a summer night just after his father has read to him from Poe’s The Raven: “Sometimes, after all had gone to bed he would hear that nocturnal rehearsal and the walking—was it evermore?—would fill a tender boyish heart with sadness until a head would bury itself in the pillow to shut it out” (50). The passage is moving but contains no “sentimentality” (for Wright that may mean the vestiges of
Romanticism).

In Book Two, “Fellowship,” Wright begins to write in first person, a young adult looking for and finding work with one of the best architectural firms in Chicago. Either a latent or inherent anti-Semitism seems to influence his thinking at this time as he works alongside others in a crowded drafting room: “Next table to mine Jean Agnas, a clean-faced Norseman. To the right Eisendrath—apparently stupid. Jewish. Behind me to the left Ottenheimer—alert, apparently bright. Jew too. Turned around to survey the group. Isbell, Jew? Gaylord, no—not. Weydert, Jew undoubtedly. Directly behind, Weatherwax. Couldn’t make him out. In the corner Andresen—Swedish. Several more Jewish faces. Of course—I thought, because Mr. Adler [his boss] himself must be a Jew” (96). Why the preoccupation with this issue? It may be part of his upbringing, the fact that he was born in 1867. At any rate, he does begin to build a fellowship of young architects to whom he serves as mentor.

A long section, Book Three, covers his life with at least one spouse and a second one in the wings, the building (and burning) of Taliesin I and II in Wisconsin. Wright moves fairly smoothly back and forth through time, including stints in Tokyo, where he builds the Imperial Hotel, innovating construction that will withstand the many earthquakes the region is prone to having. Once again, even though Wright is fond of Asian art and culture, a certain racist language mars the portrayal of his otherwise humanitarian point of view, using terms like “slant and sloe eyes,” (197) even when he may believe he’s being complimentary: “Decorous black eyes slyly slant upon you from every direction as the little artful beings move noiselessly about, grace and refinement in every movement” (209).

By Book Four, FLW is building Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, once again working hard to fit his work into the landscape instead of forcing a structure upon it, always preferring “horizontal” to “vertical” buildings of his Usonian vision. One wonders if even the US wouldn’t run out of land if we built everything horizonal.

Book Five seems to be a potpourri of ideas from slamming youth who do not want to work as hard as he did in his youth, Beethoven as a metaphor, a recapitulation of his family ancestry, the introduction of his idea of “gravity heat,” in which, instead of steam registers, heated liquid is piped through concrete floors, and because heat rises, rooms are heated more efficiently. Finally, though, in spite of passages of pomposity and dense abstractions, FLW still remains an interesting figure. I’ve never had a bucket list, per se, but if I were to put one item on it, it would be to visit as many as Wright’s remaining structures as possible. They are that good, that interesting.

One sad note: this Barnes and Noble edition has (by my count) at least twenty typographical errors of varying kinds from misspelled words to words omitted, to subject-verb agreement, to using commas when periods were needed. Not cool, B&N.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | The Complete Stories of Truman Capote

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Cheever's Son Brings Father's Letters Alive

6/25/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
Books are something social—a writer speaking to a reader—so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
Yann Martel
Author of Life of Pi
Born June 25, 1963

Y. Martel

My Book World

Cheever, Benjamin, Ed. The Letters of John Cheever. New York: Simon, 1988.

This collection of letters from the 1930s to 1982 is as much about the editor, John Cheever’s eldest son, as it is about the senior writer. So many times in reading a compendium of letters, one is left alone to solve certain puzzles the letters may contain. For most letters Benjamin Cheever glosses events, dates, but most important, personalities, and by doing so he allows readers a deeper view into his father’s letters, his father’s life, the life of their family: John Cheever’s wife, Mary; daughter Susan, Benjamin, and a second son Fred (born Federico in Italy).

Having read Cheever’s journals some years ago, I again encountered his wicked wit, in which he slices humanity a new asshole but also a humane man who loves that very flawed humanity and is kind enough to portray his characters that way. For the wicked sense of humor: “About a month ago Mary took a job teaching English at Sarah Lawrence two days a week and so she journeys out to Bronxville on Tuesday and Fridays and comes home with a briefcase full of themes written by young ladies named Nooky and Pussy” (124).

Or this, with a scintilla of rage: “I got back to work on the book about a month ago, but was dealt some crushing financial blows three weeks later and now I’m back in the short story business. I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken” (125).

And a sweet cat story: “The cat, after your leaving him, seemed not certain of his character or his place and we changed his name to Delmore which immediately made him more vivid. The first sign of his vividness came when he dumped a load in a Kleenex box while I was suffering from a cold. During a paroxysm of sneezing I grabbed for some kleenex [sic]. I shall not overlook my own failures in this tale but when I got the cat shit off my face and the ceiling I took Delmore to the kitchen door and drop-kicked him into the clothesyard” (235).

But ultimately, as I said, Cheever loves humanity and declares as much by way of a Time magazine interview chronicling his career: “My sense of literature is a sense of giving not diminishment. I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next, and the we possess some power to make sense of what takes place” (240).

Now for the sex part of this profile: Editor Ben, eldest son to Cheever, discovers that his father is not bisexually bicurious in a furtive, shameful sort of way but has had sexual-emotional relationships with many different men over his lifetime. Cheever’s letters attest to having done the deed with (grad student of Cheever’s) Allan Gurganus (about his son’s age) and photographer Walker Evans about whom he tells this story: “When I was twenty-one Walker Evans invited me to spend the night at his apartment. I said yes. I dropped my clothes (Brooks). He hung his (also Brooks) neatly in a closet. When I asked him how to do it he seemed rather put off. He had an enormous cock that showed only the most fleeting signs of life. I was ravening. I came all over the sheets, the Le Corbusier chair, the Matisse Lithograph and hit him under the chin. I gave up at around three, dressed and spent the rest of the night on a park bench near the river” (304).

I must say that I admire John Cheever’s zest for life, an enthusiasm he did not relinquish until the day he died. And even then?

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

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President Obama: Promises Fulfilled

1/15/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Author of Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Born January 15, 1929

MLK

My Book World

Obama, Barack. A Promised Land. New York: Crown, 2020.

Having read President Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father a number of years ago, I pre-ordered this book and anxiously awaited its arrival from Amazon on November 17, 2020. Dreams had revealed to me a skilled and sensitive writer. The scene in which Mr. Obama kneels at his father’s grave in Kenya is deeply moving and serves as the striking climax. It remains fresh in my memory.

A Promised Land is a title that resonates in a global way. However, Mr. Obama transforms it a bit to reveal how the United States of America has functioned as a promised land for him, for his life. The book seems to possess a unique structure. The former president limns in this the first volume of his long-awaited memoir his political life. Yet he does not hesitate to return readers by way of carefully selected flashbacks to his humble beginnings: we learn things about his family that we perhaps did not know before, the boldly liberal nature of his Kansas-born grandparents who flee to Hawaii to live a freer life; their daughter who marries a Kenyan man and gives birth to Barack Hussein Obama.

At the same time, this memoir develops a strand of history focused as readers would expect to see through the eyes of the person to whom it happened, the one who witnessed first-hand his several political campaigns, his earthy language in dealing with staff who have displeased him or fallen short of their expected performance. In spite of the subjectivity of such a view, one senses that Mr. Obama is being fair, that not many can argue with his point of view, his memory, his own fact-checking.

But finally, this book is silver-lined with personal and moving vignettes the president experiences throughout his first term: campaign events, public and private; White House anecdotes (he gives an inviting description of the contemporary White House); the relationships he develops with everyday WH employees, the large majority of whom are African-American, one essentially declaring, “You’re one of us.” At the same time, though he avoids making too much of the issue, Mr. Obama sets the record straight on the political evils he must endure: Donald Trump’s birtherism campaign; the media’s daily tearing at his flesh even though he is far more transparent and open than the previous administration’s leader; obstructionist Republicans who wish to thwart the President’s agenda, not because they so much disagree with him ideologically (which they do) but because they object so blatantly to him. Mr. Obama very elegantly portrays their vitriol without saying what I have no problem stating: Republicans regularly respond with a latent but powerful sense of White person’s entitlement, racism, and bigotry that have laced our American life since before its formation. That the man continues to rule with great dignity is a tribute to his stature as an adult who wishes to build on our democracy, not destroy it.

Mr. Obama relates the night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which he takes stand-up potshots at a seated and furious Donald Trump. I think Mr. Obama must later realize how much this roasting inspires DT to run for president. Finally, skillfully building toward the narrative arc’s fine climax, Mr. Obama relates the fulsome scenario by which Osama bin Laden is assassinated and buried at sea. Though at times the reading is a slog, because the former prez wishes to be thorough and exact (a quality I appreciate), the book is well worth the time. And that infamous date, May 2, 2011, is where the first half of this memoir ends.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Steven Millhauser's The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

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The Tragedy of Richard Yates

10/9/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
I grew up in an affluent suburban world and never worried about money until I'd grown up and found wonderfully original ways to screw up my life.
K. A. Applegate
Author of The One and Only Ivan
Born October 9, 1956

K. A. Applegate

Bailey, Blake. A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. New York: Picador, 2003.

Tragedy is a horrendous thing for any human to endure, and yet we all do endure it to one extent or another: adverse childhood experiences, deaths, career failures, and more. The author of this exhaustive literary biography, Blake Bailey, does not employ the word lightly, neither in the title nor how he uses it throughout the book. Bailey’s subject, novelist Richard Yates, born in 1926, has about as tragic life as one can live, yet Yates uses it to formulate his fiction with a high degree of success, perhaps too well, to listen to some critics, many of whom are put off by his lack of “happy endings” or his “dim view” of humanity.

No matter what, Yates comes by his viewpoint honestly. In short, his parents’ divorce, not to mention he is raised by a mother who probably has a better opinion of herself than her real talents manifest themselves in her life. She believes herself to be an “artist,” and because of her opinion, her two children (Richard and sister Ruth) are always at the bottom of her priorities. On the other hand, she is a highly seductive person, among other things, encouraging her young son to sleep in her bed. On nights that she stays out late or all night, the boy child lies in bed, wondering where she is. And when she comes home and falls in next to him and vomits on his pillow, his rage is stoked in a way that remains with him his entire life.

Some nuggets:

“. . . he fixed on his round eyes and plump lips as physiognomic signs of weakness; more to the point, he thought they made him look feminine, ‘bubbly,’ and he had a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual” (39). Hm, I wonder why, with the mother thing he has going on.

Friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut writes about war: “People don’t recover from a war. There’s a fatalism that he [Yates] picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survival. Death doesn’t matter that much” (75).

Friend and former student DeWitt Henry notes: “Dick cultivated an anti-intellectual manner, but there was nothing phony or affected about it. In places like the army and tuberculosis wards he was put in contact with unlettered people, who were just as sensitive as anybody else” (78). Yates did his best to capture natural intelligence in characters, and, in life, in his teaching at the Iowa Workshop, he landed hard on any, any arrogant student who put another’s writing down.

Yates discovers what the term “objective correlative” means: “I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase ‘objective correlative’ until the scene in Gatsby where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explain that they are ‘the finest specimens of human molars.’ Get it? Got it. That’s what Eliot meant” (109). He now gets that Wolfsheim, true to his naturalistic name, traffics in human flesh and uses his understanding to find such tokens for his own characters.
“Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the ‘objective correlative’—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without laboring the point” (175)

“The only hope of escape was to write a successful novel—the raw material of which, he already sensed, would be the stuff of his own predicament. But he wanted to transcend the merely personal, to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment and self-pity” (175).

Bailey comments on claims of French critic, Jacques Cabau, that Yates is a master: “Not surprisingly the Frenchman was especially pleased by Yates’s insights into the hollowness of American life: ‘Eleven Kinds of Loneliness—a courageous theme in America, where loneliness is a sin, where success is obligatory and happiness is the first duty of every citizen’” (271).

Long-term friend and publisher, Sam Lawrence, says at Yates’s funeral (more of a come-as-you-are wake): “‘He drank too much, he smoked too much, he was accident-prone, he led an itinerant life, but as a writer he was all in place. He wrote the best dialogue since John O’Hara, who also lacked the so-called advantages of Harvard and Yale. And like O’Hara he was a master of realism, totally attuned to the nuances of American behavior and speech. You know what I think he would have said to all this? ‘C’mon, Sam, knock it off. Let’s have a drink’” (607).

Anyone wanting to get inside the head of one of the greatest American twentieth-century novelists must consider reading this book. It’s that great. My second-hand copy is marked with a “WITHDRAWN” stamp from the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library in Indiana. Guess it wasn’t much of a hit there.

NEXT FRIDAY: Michael Waldman's The Fight to Vote

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Cole Porter Letters Reveal a Vibrant Life

6/5/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink—and in drinking understand themselves.
Federico García Lorca, Spanish Poet
Born June 5, 1898

F. García Lorca

My Book World

Eisen, Cliff and The Letters of Cole Porter. New Haven: Yale, 2019.

If you are a fan of Cole Porter and his music, you will probably enjoy this collection of letters. Though some of them refer to his bisexuality, most of them pertain to his many professional and personal connections. Such communications illustrate many characteristics about Mr. Porter. One, he is a consummate professional, in spite of his propensity to play and play hard during vacations and between gigs on Broadway or Hollywood. He answers every bit of mail himself, except when he occasionally calls on his secretary to take care of something. He is a team player, important for anyone working in a collaborative arena like the theatre. Second, he is also fierce but polite about not doing anything musically that would (in his opinion) ruin a show. At the same time, when overpowered by those above him, he sometimes gives in, particularly, it seems, when the issue does not matter that much to him.

In a business that can be crass and cold at times, Porter is also very caring and thoughtful of everyone he comes in contact with. He sends thank you notes for the smallest favors, and, because he often runs short of money before he makes it big, he is generous with cash gifts and loans later in life. Third, his wit and sharp tongue are unmatched with regard to the social whirl of the 1930s through the 1950s. Though he wouldn’t dream of hurting anyone publicly, he does not mind getting off a zinger or two during a personal letter to a dear friend. Perhaps most interesting is how Porter shares some of his methods for songwriting:

In a related matter, of what compels him to accept a job or assignment, he says:

“My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer. If Feuer and Martin phoned me today and asked me to write a new song for a spot, I’d just begin thinking. First, I think of the idea and then I fit it to a title. Then I go to work on the melody, spotting the title at certain moments in the melody, and then I write the lyric—the end first—that way, it has a strong finish . . . I do the lyrics like I’d do a crossword puzzle. I try to give myself a meter which will make the lyric as easy as possible to write without being banal. On top of the meter, I try to pick for my rhyme words of which there is a long list with the same ending” (499).

A friend who travels with Porter in 1955 relates this story: “We were not stopped very long at the border. On the Spanish side, one of the soldiers came out with Cole’s passport in his hand, looked in the car, and said, ‘Cole Porter . . . Begin the Beguine!’ and kissed his fingers to the air, and began to sing the song. Cole’s music is known everywhere we go—even in the remote spots” (507).

I think that just about says it all about Cole Porter, his music, and how many fans he still has in the world!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

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An Intellectual Rendered Human

12/6/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
I keep an ongoing list of my fifty favorite books, which I recalibrate whenever I discover a new one that seems to demand a spot there.
Kevin Brockmeier
Born December 6, 1972

K. Brockmeier

My Book World

Moser, Benjamin. Sontag: Her Life and Work. New York: Ecco, 2019.

So many books I would not hear of if I did not watch C-SPAN’s Book-TV on the weekends—and so much cheaper than an expensive subscription to something like Publisher’s Weekly. In hearing Benjamin Moser speak of his years of research on this biography, I knew right away I wanted to read his book. He has undertaken an encyclopedic yet nuanced telling of Susan Sontag’s life, both the good and the bad, and her works both the lauded and the reviled. Moser divides his monumental book into four major parts of many chapters of short to moderate length, allowing the reader to absorb the material instead of being overwhelmed by it. In addition to many varied sources, Moser utilizes much evidence from Sontag’s own voluminous journals.

He begins with important early biography because Susan Sontag’s childhood gels her personality into one that haunts her until the day she dies. Her mother is hardly a nurturing person and helps to germinate Sontag’s many insecurities, including her body, which is eventually consumed by cancer. While though she is a brilliant intellectual and contributes much to a broad understanding of literature as well as world politics, she can be childishly petulant and hold a grudge longer than most. She tries the patience of all the people whom she purports to love. In spite of all her faults, however, Moser paints a sympathetic portrait of his subject because she does seem to be a victim of her own literary success, as well as a victim of her childhood. Moser is able to draw from many sources, including Sontag’s own words, and distill the facts in such a manner that one can understand the legend in terms that are both realistic and reverential—a must-read for fans or those (like me) who would like to know more about the subject.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

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We Are All Beneficiaries

8/30/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
Mary Shelley
Born August 30, 1797

M. Shelley

My Book World

Scott, Janny. The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father. New York: Riverhead, 2019.

Journalist Janny Scott limns a harrowing portrait of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott, yet his story does not begin that way. Between the dedication and epigraph pages of the book appears a family tree extending back three generations. From a vast variety of sources, Scott brings to light the larger-than-life characters who are her ancestors, one set of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. Most persons would not necessarily know that much about their people, but for generations this family live off the good fortune and largesse of Thomas A. Scott, a railroad baron of the nineteenth century. They live on one property, Ardrossan, larger than New York’s Central Park, west of Philadelphia. Scott’s grandmother, flamboyant Helen Hope Montgomery, is the real-life personage upon which Katherine Hepburn’s character is based in the 1940 film, The Philadelphia Story. There is so much spectacle in this family, people who can, and do, almost anything they wish to do, that we almost lose sight of the subject of the book, Janny Scott’s father.

At one point, when journalist Scott is young and becomes interested in writing, her father promises her possession of his journals one day. Through the years the promise is lost, both because she puts the idea on a back burner and because her father is apparently reluctant to hand them over. Following his death, from a long bout with alcoholism, Janny Scott unearths them in one of those hiding-in-plain-sight locations, where all she must do is recall the four-digit default household code to unlatch his trunk, and voila, there they are: decades of notebooks full of loose-leaf pages. Scott magically (it’s really arduous work, one must realize) gathers all of her sources, including this gold mine, and produces a portrait of her father, the beneficiary of generations of great fortune. Only, the portrayal of a human life is never that simple. The rich—we often don’t have much sympathy for them—have a uniquely difficult time in life. They often wield too much power for their own good, and Scott herself says it best:

“The diaries, I began to think, were an inheritance of sorts—unanticipated, undeserved, a stroke of fortune. But, like an inheritance, they came at a cost. Land, houses, money: Wealth had tumbled in my father’s family from one generation to the next. Each new descendant arrived as an unwitting conduit for its transmission. You had a right to enjoy it, an obligation to protect it, a duty to pass it on to your own unsuspecting children. It was a stroke of good fortune, of course. But what you could never know, starting out, was how those things would influence decisions you’d make over a lifetime” (220)

In the epilogue, Scott makes clear that the Scott money ran out. Descendants of the railroad baron now live as far away as Los Angeles or Paris and many points in between. “They work in education, medicine, technology, consulting, music, banking, business, finance, landscape gardening, the law. They don’t live in big houses. They work for a living. But they’re beneficiaries, in one way or another, now and forever, for better and worse” (260)

As any good journalist, Scott knows when to remove herself from the story, always maintaining that important distance. At the same time, she lets us in on one of life’s greatest secrets, yet also a platitude, that money alone cannot buy happiness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-47 North Dakota

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