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“The Gospel at Colonus” now available on DVD

The Gospel at Colonus DVD

I’m going to shift my spotlight away from neglected books for the first time to draw attention to the long, long-overdue release on DVD of the 1985 PBS “Great Performances” production of the Lee Breuer/Bob Telson landmark show, “The Gospel at Colonus”. Recently, I was talking to an acquaintance about memorable theater experiences. He and his wife had seen “The War Horse” at the National Theatre in London, and he said the first sight of the horse puppet, designed by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, sent a shiver up his spine.

I told him I had the same reaction to the opening moments of the theatre production of “The Lion King,” when the dancers, in Julie Taymor’s incredible costumes, begin to come onto the stage from the wings and through the aisles. “I think there have only been three or four times I’ve had that reaction something in theater,” I said, but my mind instantly went blank when I tried to think of the others. And then it hit me: “The Gospel at Colonus”, of course.

It was in 1990, when my wife and I went to see Breuer’s revival of his 1985 production for the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. About 10 minutes into the show, Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama enter from the left wing, dressed in shining silver tuxes. They are the collective, choral Oedipus. “Daughter, lead me on,” Fountain calls out, and Jevetta Steele, playing Ismene, begins to lead them in a classic sufferin’ gospel show trudge, toward center stage. From the right wing goes out a shout: “Stop!” The Soul Stirrers, as the defenders of Colonus, all dressed in deep burgundy suits, with Sam Butler, Jr. on guitar in the lead, begin moving out to stop them. “Stop, do not go on,” they sing. “This place is holy. You cannot walk this ground.” A vocal battle of sorts then erupts, as the Oedipi come on and the Soul Stirrers push back. With each step, the tension mounts. Behind, a large gospel choir sways back in forth to the rhythm of the march. Butler and Fountain come face to face, duking it out: “Can’t do it!” “I’ll do it!” “Can’t do it!” “I’ll do it!” Finally, in frustration, Fountain lets out with a wild, falsetto howl that slices right through to the heart. I had tears in my eyes, it was so thrilling.

I had first heard about “The Gospel at Colonus” in the Village Voice back in 1983, when it opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the academy’s Next Wave Festival. I was intrigued at the whole concept of the show: an interpretation of the ancient Greek tragedy, “Oedipus at Colonus” in the music of modern American black gospel. I was already a big fan of black gospel music. But the fact that Breuer had been able to enlist the participation of not just the Five Blind Boys but the Soul Stirrers left me dearly wishing I was living on the right, not the left coast.

Fortunately, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan fame was also a fan of the show and arranged to release an original cast recording on Warner Brothers Records in 1984, and I swooped my copy up the moment it hit the racks. I copied it to cassette (remember them?) and played it over and over in the car. Some critics have written that “Stop! Do Not Go On” is the only memorable song from the show, but having listened to the album at least a hundred times over the last 20+ years, I think this is unfair and seriously wrong.

Virtually even number is good enough to take its place alongside the best gospel tunes of the last fifty years. “How Shall I See You Through My Tears?”, Ismene’s plaintive cry for her long-lost father is matched Oedipus’ desparate wish that the Lord would “Life Me Up (Like a Dove)”, so that “I could look with the eyes of the angels/For the child that I love.” The joyous resolution of the choir’s answer to Oedipus’ plea to find a resting place: “Live where you can/Be happy where you can.” The stunning oratio of “Numberless Are the World’s Wonders”, in which the singer lists all the powers of man, spiralling up to a series of “From every wind/He has made himself secure”, only to end with the chorus reminding us, “From all but one/In the late wind of death he cannot stand.” And the stomping, rousing celebration of the peace Oedipus finally finds: “Lift Him Up.” These songs are among the most moving I know.

Although “The Gospel at Colonus” only ran for about two months when Breuer took it to Broadway in 1985, he’s managed to stage a number of revivals at fairly regular intervals, so that by now, the show has been performed over 1,000 times. A second recording of the songs from the show, with mostly the same cast members as the first, was released in 1985 and is now available on CD (although I personally prefer the Warner Brothers version).

PBS recorded a performance in Houston in 1985, when Morgan Freeman was still playing the speaking Oedipus, and showed it on their “Great Performances” series. This was briefly available on VHS tape, but it’s effectively been out of reach until a month or so ago, when NewVideo finally issued it on DVD. Given the show’s record, this release may disappear just as quickly as all the past revivals and recordings, so I urge everyone to buy or rent a copy and see while it’s still available. The video quality is not the best, being just a digitized version of the first release without any apparent touch-up. But the power of the music, the performances, and the visual impact of the staging easily overcomes this shortcoming. Until you have that once-in-a-lifetime chance to see it live, don’t stop and do go on to see it now on DVD. Your life will be richer for it.

“The Gospel at Colonus”

Book by Lee Breuer
Based on “Oedipus at Colonus,” “Oedipus Rex,” and “Antigone” by Sophocles; Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” and “Antigone” adapted by Robert Fitzgerald; Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and “Antigone” adapted by Dudley Fitts
Music by Bob Telson
Available from New Video (ISBN: 1-4229-1948-X)

Mine Enemy Grows Older, by Alexander King

The 'controversial' cover of 'Mine Enemy Grows Older'Every writer who’s ever been featured on Oprah’s Book Club follows in the footsteps of Alexander King. When he published his memoir, Mine Enemy Grows Older in 1958, he was, in the words of a Time magazine reviewer, “an ex-illustrator, ex-cartoonist, ex-adman, ex-editor, ex-playwright, ex-dope addict.” His book probably would have taken a quick trip to the remainder tables–had it not been for a lucky and path-setting break: on the second of January, 1959, King appeared on “The Tonight Show”, hosted by Jack Paar, to plug his book. As Russell Baker put it years later, “After charming millions on the Jack Paar show, Alexander King came up out of the basement and took off like a 900-page bodice ripper.”

Mine Enemy Grows Older is King’s rambling and very much tongue-in-cheek account of his first fifty-some years. Born in Vienna (as Alexander Koenig), King emigrated with his family to New York City in his teens. With a little bit of art training and a great deal of moxie, he worked his way through dozens of jobs, from decorating department store windows and painting murals a Greek restaurant to illustrating radical newspapers.

Cover of Alexander King's 'Is There Life After Birth?'It was as an illustrator that King’s career finally took off. Throughout the 1920s, he was caught up in the convention-flounting wave of Mencken, The Smart Set, and the Jazz Age and became a much-in-demand illustrator for new, unbowdlerized editions by such scandalous authors as Flaubert, Rabelais, and Ovid. He then worked as an art editor, first for Vanity Fair and then for Henry Luce’s transformed Life magazine. Unfortunately for King, he developed a serious kidney problem that led to a doctor’s prescribing morphine as a pain killer.

At the time, morphine was controlled but legally available in pill form from most pharmacies. And like any addictive drug, it also encouraged a thriving black market, with shady MDs writing scrips on demand for junkies like King who could scrape up enough cash. Eventually, King’s addiction led to his being arrested and convicted on federal drug charges and sent to a narcotics rehabilitation hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. He was able to clean up, get back into painting, and reestablish some of his connections with the publishing world in New York, which led to a contract from Simon and Schuster for Mine Enemy Grows Older.

It probably would have ended there had not King’s wry and outrageous banter on Paar’s show. He was just the sort of taboo-breaker Paar’s audience was looking for: funny, opinionated, unconventional, urbane. Frank and April Wheeler of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road would have loved him. Take this account of King’s reaction to being stuck in a room in Lexington with nothing to read by an issue of the Saturday Evening Post:

It was a waking nightmare of the most sinister dimension and variety. My whole past life was insidiously evoked, ruefully demonstrated, and mercilessly indicted. It suddenly came to me that the reason my three marriages had smashed up was, simply, that they had been frivolously ratified on the wrong kind of mattresses; I realized with unshakable conviction that my social and financial calamaties had been caused by my improperly sanitized apertures; and, as I went on reading, it became brutally clear that all through my life I had washed only with soap substitutes, had worn unmasculine underwear, and had never decently neutralized my offensive bodily effluvia.

For seventy-two hours I wallowed in accusations and self-reproaches, and when the nurse finally let me out of my isolation cubicle I was a psychic tatterdemalion.

I remember saying to the doctor who interviewed me that rather than have another such weekend, I would prefer to spend three days on an army cot, lashed to a belching, gonorrheal Eskimo prostitute, who had just finished eating walrus blintzes.

Funny stuff, for sure. Practically every page of Mine Enemy Grows Older is filled with this sort of caustic, ribald bird-flipping humor. For fifteen to twenty minutes on a talk show it must have seemed like revolutionary stuff. By the end of the book’s 374 pages, however, it has grown monotonous and tiresome.

That didn’t stop Simon and Schuster from releasing four more books by King between 1960 and his death in 1965: May This House be Safe from Tigers (1960); I Should Have Kissed Her More (1961); Is There A Life After Birth? (1963); and Rich Man, Poor Man, Freud, and Fruit (1965). All sold well, though each time in diminishing numbers. There was something about King that really appealed to readers and viewers at the time. My grandparents, life-long Republicans and firm upholders of middle-class values, had two of his books on their shelves, and kept them with the small number they moved to their retirement apartment. Nor did it keep Paar and then Johnny Carson from bringing him back for dozens of appearances.

The 'safe' cover of 'Mine Enemy Grows Older'My theory is that King’s was a safe form of revolt. He mocked convention, but he didn’t exactly offer an alternative–nor did he suggest that people grab torches and set fire to police stations. He was like a Brother Theodore who could write. He introduced America to the term, “raconteur” and opened a door for other talk show guests–including Truman Capote. After a long day at the office and an evening of westerns and sitcoms, a bit of King’s “acid appraisals of modern art (‘a putrescent coma’), advertising (‘an overripe fungus’) and people in general (‘adenoidal baboons’)” (to quote Time’s obit of King) was a refreshing bit of outrage before turning in for the night.

Simon and Schuster were happy to exploit this sense of dabbling in forbidden fruit. After “The Tonight Show” appearance, the publisher released subsequent printings with two covers–a “shocking” one (above) featuring one King’s Dali-esque paintings and, to prevent any awkward glances, a conventional one (right) with a safe grey cover.

King still has a few fans, as you can see from the reviews posted on Amazon. For me, his books, like his art, is colorful, vivid, but ultimately superficial.

Other Opinions

• Gerald Frank, New York Herald Tribune, 7 December 1958

This is a scandalous, wonderful, and strangely moving book. The publishers, for want of a better word, describe it as an autobiography. Actually it is less autobiography than memoirs, less memoirs than a series of immpressionistic self-portraits and wildly hilarious anecdotes done so vividly that the book all but leaps in your hands.

• Bernard Levin, The Spectator, 4 December 1959

Alas, funny though the anecdotes, or some of them, are, this is the emptiest book to appear for many a year, and even if it were not written almost entirely in the same breathless, sweaty prose, it would still be a waste.

• Raymond Holden, New York Times, 4 January 1959

The reader who has a strong stomach and is not irritated by the author’s verbal juggling and sometimes painful name-calling will be made either happy or morbidly excited…. [T]here are sandwiched in between its horrors some anecdotes and personal narratives of rare subtlety and humor. Whether one regards this as autobiography or fiction (the two are not really so far apart), it is at once a story of degradation and depravity and a sensitive and often kindly commentary on human life.

Locate a Copy

Mine Enemy Grows Older, by Alexander King
New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1958

Robert Chandler recommends the works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Robert Chandler, translator of Andrey Platonov’s Happy Moscow, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate write to recommend “[A]nother great, and still more recently discovered, writer from the 1920s and 30s: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky”:

I included one of his stories, ‘Quadraturin’, in my Penguin Classics anthology Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics). There is also a small anthology of his work published by GLAS: Seven Stories.

And NYRB Classics are bringing out another volume [Memories of the Future] in the next few months.

His work is translated by Joanne Turnbull, and her translations are very, very good indeed. [Turnbull won the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize for Seven Stories.–Ed.]

There is a bit about him at the Complete Review.

You can read his short story, “Quadraturin” online at the Glas website (http://www.glas.msk.su/krzhizhanovsky.html) and another, “Yellow Coal”, at OpenDemocracy.net. You can also read about Krzhizhanovsky on Wikipedia and Ellis Sharp’s blog.

Cook’s Ingredients, from Reader’s Digest Home Handbooks

Cover of 'Cook's Ingredients'
I love to cook, and I’ve always tried to apply in the kitchen the advice of the composer Charles Ives, who once said to a listener who was booing a piece of modernist music, “Stop being such a God-damned sissy! Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?” Well, when it comes to food, I believe in standing up and using my tastebuds like a man.

There are plenty of opportunities to do that here in Belgium. Even our small local grocery and the corner store often have things on display that send me home to research what they are and how to cook them. Since 1990, one of my most useful references has been this book, published by Reader’s Digest, of all companies. Produced by Dorling Kindersley, Cook’s Ingredients is a model of DK’s image-intense approach to information.

Although it comes with the diminutive label of “pocket encyclopedia,” it packs into 230-some pages an invaluable wealth of information. Starting with vegetables, ending with meat, and covering fruit, herbs, spices, grains, dairy products, fish and fowl in between, the book covers just about every ingredient you’re likely to find in any good grocery store and plenty of those you’re not. Over 60 different types are shown in the seven pages on pasta. For each item, there is a pristine studio photo and a sentence or two about its origin, taste, production, or use.

Lungo Vermicelli - Riccini - Gramigna

If nothing else, it’s been terrific to have on hand when we have to send one of the kids to the store for scallions or a bag of orzo. Open it up, point to the picture, and say, “This is what you need to get.” We learned this lesson after one of the boys came back with a green cabbage instead of head of iceberg lettuce.

I do keep a couple of other guides: The New Food Lover’s Companion is more comprehensive but lacks illustrations; Waverly Root’s Food: An Authoritative and Visual History and Dictionary of the Foods of the World is more entertaining to read, if not the most efficient reference; and the CIA’s 7.8 pound behemoth, The Professional Chef, looms over them all. But for every one time I look at any of these, there are ten times I’ll thumb through Cook’s Ingredients.

I see that there are used copies available for as little as 35 cents plus postage on Amazon. C’mon now, folks: surely you can fork out that for the sake of a book that can hold its place in the kitchen for a lifetime–something few books beside Joy of Cooking can do.

Cook’s Ingredients, Adrian Bailey Contributing Editor
Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest Books, 1990

D. G. Myers recommends Perry Miller’s “The Raven and the Whale”

Regular visitor Texas A&M professor D. G. Myers recently posted a thoughtful and appreciative review of Perry Miller’s 1956 book, The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene. He compares it to Louis Menand’s Puliter Prize-winning 2002 book on James, Holmes, and Pierce, The Metaphysical Club, writing that, “The result is a human comedy, a collection of lively anecdote and a war-memorial to men who cared passionately about raising up from scratch what Miller calls “an independent, a completely native and unique, literature” in America.”

Myers also rightly notes that not all neglected books are ones that fade from the spotlight, like Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Some are, in his words, “books that are even more likely to be neglected, because they were not widely bought and read to begin with.” Such books have certainly become more and more my focus as this site matures.

Neglected No More: Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road

Although it was a National Book Award finalist when first published in 1961, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road has been a perennial on lists of neglected books, starting with David Madden’s first Rediscoveries compilation in 1971.

As the old joke goes, death was a good career move for Yates. Slowly but steadily, his star has been rising since his passing in 1992, despite the fact that as late as 1999, Stewart O’Nan was writing in the Boston Review of “The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print.” However, it’s safe to say that it’s now reaching its apogee with the impending release of the Revolutionary Road, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio.

In anticipation, two of America’s biggest literary magazines, the Atlantic and the New Yorker published feature reviews of the book by two “first call” critics–Christopher Hitchens for the Atlanticand James Wood for the New Yorker. Of the two, Wood’s is the must read, as his often are–respecting, insightful, but cutting when necessary, as in this comment:

That first novel was Revolutionary Road (1961)—the basis of a new movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet— and it could be said to have dissolved its creator’s career even as it founded it, because Yates never published a novel half as good again. To put it brutally, he had about ten good years. His later fiction was compulsive but not compelling, necessary to him but not to his readers, who would always chase the fire of his first novel in the embers of its successors.

Having read all of his novels short of Cold Spring Harbor and most of his short stories, my experience of reading Yates was very much one of chasing the fire.

Thirty years after first reading Revolutionary Road, I can still remember the amazing scene in the hospital, where Yates subtly shifts the point of view to that of Shep Campbell so that he can land the narrative punch with maximum impact. After locking us into April Wheeler’s perspective, we wander off with Shep to grab a cup of coffee only to come back and find that April is dead. It remains one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced in reading.

After that, I went on to read most of Yates’ work over the next year, and although he often succeeds in drawing the reader into the world of failure, disappointment, and desparate dreams, The Easter Parade aside, he never quite manages to bring the pieces together as well.

In further recognition of Yates’ ascendancy, Everyman’s Library is releasing in January 2009 a one-volume edition collecting his three best books: Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade , and his first short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

Reading Hitchens’ and Wood’s reviews reminded me of one aspect of Revolutionary Road‘s story of the disillusioned young couple, Frank and April Wheeler. Their dream for escaping the conventional suburban Connecticut life they believe they should abhor is to run off to Paris, where April will get a job working at NATO Headquarters (then still in Paris) and Frank will work in his writing. Ironically, this is very nearly what Fred Holland and Sally White do in George Goodman’s A Time for Paris, recently reviewed on this site. And after Fred and Sally have their European adventure and lived Frank and April’s dream, what do they end up doing?

Getting married and settling down in the suburbs outside New York City.

Mary Astor, Author


Film and theater director Lindsay Anderson once said, “… when two or three who love the cinema are gathered together, the name of Mary Astor always comes up.” “She was an actress of special attraction”, he went on, “whose qualities of depth and reality always seemed to illuminate the parts she played.” Between 1921 and 1965, she appeared in over 100 films, dozens of plays, and plenty of television dramas, but looking through her list of credits, what strikes us today is that we remember Mary Astor despite the fact that most of her films, aside from The Maltese Falcon and a few others, are pretty forgettable.

What almost no one remembers today, however, is that Mary Astor also had a respectable career as a writer. In her 1971 memoir, A Life on Film, Astor implies that it started “as a sort of assignment to help me during a short period of psychotherapy,” but the version that appears in the book that resulted from this assignment, Mary Astor: My Story, is a little more vivid.

Astor repeats an old joke in A Life on Film about the five stages of an actor’s career:

  1. “Who is Mary Astor?”
  2. “Get me Mary Astor.”
  3. “Get me a Mary Astor type.”
  4. “Get me a younger Mary Astor.”
  5. “Who is Mary Astor?”

Somewhere between stages 4 and 5, Astor became depressed over her declining career and ever less-interesting roles, developed a fondness for the bottle, and may have attempted suicide. During her recovery, she was in the care of a Catholic priest and practicing psychologist, Father Peter Ciklic, who encouraged her to write about her life and experiences. According to Astor, the result “was not meant for public eyes, but someone convinced me it should be a book.” She lucked into the support of a fine editor, Lee Barker, at Doubleday, who helped her shape the raw material into finished shape–remarkably, for a celebrity memoir, without the aid of a ghost writer.

Published in 1959, Mary Astor: My Story was one of the first confessional autobiographies to come out of Hollywood. Astor was candid, within the limits of her generation’s standards of discretion, about her affairs, emotional turmoils, and alcoholism. At the time when Donna Reed was still a leading role model, it was a real scorcher and became a best-seller.

For most celebrities, this would have been the end of the story, but Barker then suggested Astor try her hand at fiction, “…and I’ve been hooked ever since.” A year later, Doubleday released her first novel, The Incredible Charlie Carewe.

Cover of Dell paperback reissue of 'The Incredible Charlie Carewe'
Although it suffers some of the typical construction problems of a first novel, The Incredible Charlie Carewe is a remarkable work that demonstrates “qualities of depth and reality” equal to those Anderson noted in Astor’s acting. Charlie Carewe is the handsome, charming, charismatic son of a wealthy East Coast Establishment family with impeccable bloodlines. On the surface, it seems as if the sky is the limit–no doors are closed to Charlie Carewe.

Unfortunately, something is a bit, well, odd, about Charlie. At first, there is just a sense that his behavior is a bit hard to explain, but given his class and status, his parents, his sister, the help–everyone writes it off to quirks in his character. But then his sister comes across Charlie in the rocks along the shore of their country estate–bashing a playmate’s head into the rocks:

There was absolutely no savagery in the action, no passion or hatred, no viciousness, He looked up briefly as he saw Virginia and Jeff and called out a smiling “Hi!” and then went back to his task. Firmly, purposefully, as though he were occupied in cracking a coconut. In the seconds before movement came back to the paralyzed observers another wave whispered up to the two boys and receded with pink in its foam.

Charlie’s victim is rushed off to the hospital with permanent brain damage and the Carewe’s social finesse is put to the test as they graciously usher out their guests as if nothing more than an unfortunate accident had taken place. The next morning, as he tucks into his breakfast, he asks chattily, “What’s the news on Roger? Did he die?”

The Carewes can recognize that they have something of a ticking time bomb on their hands, but their upbringing and lack of psychological awareness (the incident above takes place in the early 1920s) leaves them helpless when it comes to dealing with it. They shuttle Charlie through a series of elite prep schools, smoothing over matters when he’s quietly asked to leave due to thefts, attacks on other students, or other indiscretions. For a long time, the only person who seems remotely able to accept that Charlie’s actions are more than a little abnormal is his sister Virginia, and even she is at a loss to explain it:

As usual, she thought, she was making a fuss, putting too much importance on Charlie’s behavior. She should be used to it now. Wearily she thought, at least there was one consistency; in any given situation, Charlie could be counted on to do the wrong thing, the inappropriate thing. Nobody, but nobody, could be more charming when he wanted to be. He had, it seemed, a full command of the social graces, and in any gathering, especially of people who were strangers to him, could attract attention with no effort. People would gravitate toward him, toward the sound of his pleasant voice, his contagious laugh; but always he seemed to want to destroy it….

Schools could expel him, friends were quickly made and quickly lost, his contact with any kind of social life was brief, and none of it seemed to matter to him. Nor did it matter that the cumulative effect was destroying a family.

Astor displays a clinical objectivity in leading us through every step along the way as Charlie spreads havoc into the lives of almost everyone he meets. In each situation, the pattern is the same: glittering, showy success followed by abrupt failure due to some or other act of willful brutality. His forms a company, makes a great splash, achieves fame as a tycoon and philanthropist, and within a couple of years is being escorted out by his nearly bankrupted partners. He makes a show of joining the Navy after Pearl Harbor, then weasels his way out by pretending to be a bed-wetter. He drives his wife to divorce and alcoholism, borrows and loses money from friends, seduces wives and ruins friendships.

Not even the incredibly strong defenses of family fortune and status, though, can withstand the destructive force of Charlie’s will, however, and only an unlucky trip on a staircase keeps Charlie from standing alone in a wasteland of his own fallout. What Charlie is, we can now see in a glance with the benefit of much greater awareness, is, of course, a psychopath. The psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley recognized this, citing Astor’s book in the 1964 edition of his classic work on psychopathology, The Mask of Sanity:

In many respects the most realistic and successful of all portrayals of the psychopath is that presented by Mary Astor in The Incredible Charlie Carewe. The rendition is so effective that even those unfamiliar with the psychopath in actual experience are likely to sense the reality of what is disclosed. The subject is superbly dealt with, and the book constitutes a faithful and arresting study of a puzzling and infinitely complex subject. Charlie Carewe emerges as an exquisite example of the psychopath – the best, I believe, to be found in any work of fiction.

The Incredible Charlie Carewe should be read not only by every psychiatrist but also by every physician. It will hold the attention of all intelligent readers, and I believe it will be of great value in helping the families of psychopaths to gain insight into the nature of the tragic problem with which they are dealing, usually in blindness and confusion.

By this point, anyone reading this review who’s been in a bookstore in the last decade can’t help but think of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. If asked to sum up the book in a single catchphrase, I would have to say, “Imagine American Psycho written by Louis Auchincloss (or Edith Wharton).” Where Ellis writes to shock, Astor writes to show how people of refinement and elaborate rules of conduct respond when faced with pure irrational violence.

The Incredible Charlie Carewe is a remarkable novel not just in the detail and accuracy of its portrayal of a psychopath but in the “depth and reality” of its portrayal of the society in which this particular psychopath operates. Astor is very much in the territory of Wharton and Auchincloss, and she’s clearly deeply familiar with it. This is a novel that has more than a few parallels with the story of the 20th century as a whole, which is one reason it’s a genuine shame that it vanished after a single Dell paperback release in 1963.

Astor went on to write four more novels: The O’Conners (1964); Goodbye Darling, Be Happy (1965); The Image of Kate (1966); and A Place Called Saturday (1968). The last opens with a rape and goes on to tell about the victim’s decision to bear and raise the child that results. Clearly, Astor’s imagination ranged beyond the walls of the senior citizen apartment of which a visitor commented, “My, isn’t this nice! You can sit here and watch the cars go by!”

In her last book, A Life on Film, Astor revisited her life, but this time dealing almost exclusively with her experiences as a working actor, starting with a 1921 two-reeler, “The Beggar Maid”. Astor didn’t come to film: she was shoved into with both hands by her parents, particularly her father, Otto Langhanke, who was summed up by the great director D. W. Griffith as “a walking cash register.” Her first agent changed Lucile Langhanke into Mary Astor. Lucile was too young to understand much of the insidious nature of her father’s actions at the time, and by the time she was able to take some control of her life, she was in her early twenties and a veteran of over thirty films. So she writes:

As well as I know the actress, Mary Astor–every movement, every shade of voice, and I learned to manipulate her into many different kinds of women–she is still not “me.” A year or so ago I flipped on the TV set and then went into another room for a moment. I heard some familiar words and said, “Hey, that’s Mary Astor!” not “Hey, that’s me.”

Astor survived the transition from silents to sound. She recounts in the book all the troubles associated with the early sound recording techniques, which forced actors into behaviors more stilted and artificial than anything seen in the silents. By the start of the 1930s, she was a legitimate star, if not one of the first magnitude. Her life was regularly covered in Photoplay and a dozen other fan magazines, but as likely to be cast in a B-picture like “Red Hot Tires” as in a A-film like “Dodsworth”.

Then, in 1936, her private life became headline news as her husband’s attorneys attempted to introduce her diary as evidence. Although the studio execs managed to get it suppressed, gossip held that its contents were full of lurid sexual details of her affair with the playwright George S. Kauffman and dozens of male film stars. Astor consistently maintained that this was all hogwash, but forever after she was considered as dangerous material: a solid, consistent, and reliable performer but not safe to make a first-rate star of.

Although she gained some of her best parts in the years after the scandal, including her Oscar-winning supporting role in “The Great Lie” (1941), by 1944 she was, at 38, playing the mother of 22 year old Judy Garland in “Meet Me in St. Louis”. She began to think, she writes,

“What’s so damned important about being an actress?” I saw my little world, insulated, self-absorbed, limited. And all the twenty years of hard work seemed sour and futile. It was a partial acceptance of reality, but it was still a bit like a child saying, “You mean there isn’t any Santa Claus?” I wasn’t aware of, nor ready to accept, the fact that the mere doing, the achieving, was the point. Not what I had achieved. For what I had achieved would in due time be forgotten. The doing was important, it was part of my being–of what and who I am.

Ironically, as Mary Astor got less and less to work with in her roles, she made more and more of them. In his forward to A Life on Film, writer Sumner Locke Elliott recalls working with her on a ridiculous 1950s television play intended to showcase the talents of the latest Miss America. She spoke, he writes, in “the voice of the actress who has been through it all; this is the calm of the veteran who can get you through even if the set falls down.” By her last film, “Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), her reputation as a professional had reached the point where Bette Davis could turn to director Robert Aldrich and say, “Turn her loose, Robert, you might learn something!”

A Life on Film is a terrific book and it’s entirely due to Mary Astor’s intelligent, ruthlessly honest, and ever ironic voice. This may be the least ego-filled book ever to come out of Hollywood. Astor makes no bones about the creature comforts that one can enjoy as the perks of stardom, but she never confuses film-making as a business of making money by creating distractions. This is a book about craft, about learning to build a character out of two-minute takes and hours and hours and hour of sitting around and waiting, written by a woman who was among the best craftspersons of her era.

If I had to pick just one of Mary Astor’s books for reissue, it would definitely be A Life on Film. As much as I admire and marvel at her accomplishment in The Incredible Charlie Carewe, I have to say I preferred her final memoir. I not only admired it–but I thoroughly enjoyed it and regretted at the end that I was closing the cover on Mary Astor’s last words as a writer.

Tributes to Two Neglected Gay Writers: George Baxt and Irving Rosenthal

• George Baxt

Brooks Peters, who writes some of the most interesting and thoughtful pieces on literary, celebrity, and cultural figures of the past, recently posted a long review of the diverse career and works of George Baxt. Although Baxt worked in theater, film, television, magazines, and just about every other medium requiring written words, he will probably be best remembered as the creator of a pioneering series of mysteries featuring the first openly gay detective, Pharoah Love, starting with A Queer Kind of Death in 1966. Baxt also wrote a popular series of mysteries based on celebrities from the 1930s, including The Dorothy Parker Murder Case and The Mae West Murder Case, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Brooks quotes from Wendy Werris’ memoir, An Alphabetical Life, who recalls Baxt as,

If you can imagine a swish, fey and girlish Phil Silvers, you’ll have a picture of George Baxt. He was hilarious and irreverent. He batted his eyelashes to make a point when telling a dirty joke. His Brooklyn accent was delicious, and he had stories to tell about every great star from the Golden Age of Hollywood and beyond. You never heard dirt dished until you heard it from the mouth of George Baxt.

• Irving Rosenthal

Earlier this year, Dennis Cooper reposted an article from a previous blog on Irving Rosenthal, whose 1967 novel/memoir/cut-up assemblage, Sheeper, was one of the most outrageous and unashamed celebrations of gay life to emerge from the Sixties’ wave of sexual liberation. Although Sheeper is currently out of print, its name often pops up in discussions of favorite forgotten books.

Two Recommendations from Kevin Michael Derby

Kevin Michael Derby, about the only person, it seems to have noticed my post about the works of historian Kenneth S. Davis, wrote with two recommendations for books worthy of rediscovery:

• The Age of the French Revolution, by Claude Manceron, consisting of the following five volumes:

        • Volume 1: Twilight of the Old Order, 1774-1778

        • Volume 2: The Wind from America, 1778-1781

        • Volume 3: Their Gracious Pleasure, 1782-1785

        • Volume 4: Toward the Brink, 1785-1787

        • Volume 5: Blood of the Bastille, 1787-1789

“Manceron was a unique historian who decided to chart the French Revolution through a hundred lives of key individuals. This leads to a vivid and often over the top narrative which offers little in the way of analysis and often proved incoherent in the way of descriptions. Manceron is all over the place and his narrative reminds me of Eliot’s “heap of shattered images.” Now he takes us to Rome for a papal election. Next stop is outside Philadelphia where General Washington retreats from Howe’s redcoats. Now to Versailles where Marie Antoinette is dancing. Meanwhile in the country, Robespierre studies law. Manceron makes no secret of his biases. He is a fan of the revolution and even dedicates volumes to modern day leftists like Allende and Mitterrand. Manceron also felt the need to jump out from behind the curtains and interrupt his narration with odd asides and comments, often shaking his fist at the leaders of the Church and other reactionaries. Still other times, he smugly asserts that the lead players of the Revolution were more heroic and had more dynamic adventurers than nomads and explorers. Manceron promised there would be at least ten volumes. He died after writing five, just as the Bastille was captured. While I can not claim to know more about why the Revolution occurred, I know the lead characters and their various motivations better having read the five volumes. These books really deserved better than to be forgotten despite the flaws. They make the French Revolution accessible.”

• Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne: Misadventures of an English General in the Revolution, by Francis J. Huddleston.

“Perhaps the strangest biography that I have ever read. While attempting to offer a life of the losing commander of the battle of Saratoga and a celebrated playwright of his times, Huddleston makes a number of asides including all of the following: there are too many scholars attempting to prove Shakespeare did not write his plays; whether or not actresses should take to the stage in skimpy night attire; what happened to French soldiers after the Great War; why they should not sell snacks on trains despite the declining quality of full meals served on trains; how horses from Spain are overrated by gamblers and equestrians alike; why the Prince of Wales both then and now-both George IV and the future Duke of Windsor-needed to find better mentors; why the British needed to adapt khaki uniforms sometime in the 1870s or 1880s; thoughts on what an Irish military museum should include; speculations on the exact nature of the Gulf stream; advice that if you are going to recite a limerick at the table with old friends and the first line is sexually suggestive, make sure the second line is too otherwise it will be a severe letdown for your companions; yelling “Are we downhearted?” is not a good way to convince your boss that your team does not have low morale; and many more comments, all of which have nothing to do with the life of General Burgoyne.”

Thanks for the recommendations, Kevin–I’ve already sent off for the first of Manceron’s volumes and am looking forward to reading it.

As always, readers are encouraged to provide their own recommendations–especially when they’re as interesting as these.

Khufu’s Wisdom, by Naguib Mahfouz

Cover of hardback edition of 'Khufu's Wisdom'I just got back from a visit to Egypt to see the see the Pyramids and the other major ancient sites, and while there, I was impressed to see in many of the hotel and airport bookstores and gift shops a respectable sample of works of Arab literature, virtually all of them part of a fine series from the American University in Cairo Press. The largest portion of these books, understandably, was the work of Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s 1988 Nobel Prize winner for literature. In the spirit of all the tombs and temples we were visiting, I decided to give Khufu’s Wisdom, one of Mahfouz’s few books set in ancient Egypt, a try.

First published as a special supplement to a small Cairo literary journal, al-Majalla al-jadida in 1939, Khufu’s Wisdom is, in fact, Mahfouz’s first novel. Although it received several positive reviews, it quickly vanished until his Nobel win inspired a rediscovery of his complete oeuvre. In truth, completeness is probably the single best reason for bringing Khufu’s Wisdom back to print and for its able translation into English by Raymond Stock in 2003.

The story in Khufu’s Wisdom is like something out of an opera: a switch of infants, mistaken identities, a stalwart young man rising to shining excellence against all odds, and love overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The writing, on the other hand, is a long way from the realism that characterizes Mahfouz’s works in more modern settings. Take this passage, in which cadets at the Pharaoh’s military academy compete in games of skill:

Suddenly there raced out from among them a rider who sped past them all with preternatural power, who moved so quickly that they seemed to be standing still. He was headed for victory right until the end, when the trainer again announced the name of the winner–“Djedef son of Bisharu.” Again, the cheers rose for him, and this time the clapping was even stronger.

Next the crier proclaimed that it was time for the steeplechase. Once more the officers mounted their horses, as wooden benches, whose height gradually increased one after another, were set up in the midst of the long field. With the blast of the horn, the horses bounded forward abruptly, flying over the first obstacle like attacking eagles. They leapt over the second like the waves of a ferocious waterfall, clear victory seeming to crown them as they progressed. But fortune betrayed most of them. … Only one horseman cleared all the hurdles as though he were an inexorable Fate, the embodiment of conquest. The crier called out his name, “Djedef son of Bisharu,” to the crowd’s huge praise and applause.

Our hero, Djedef, goes on to win all the contests and is appointed by the Pharaoh’s crown prince to a trusted post in the palace guards. Soon after, Djedef, Algy, and Ginger fend off a Nazi plot to bomb the … sorry, I got my one-dimensional heroes a little mixed up there.

Mahfouz was 28 when he published Khufu’s Wisdom, so we can’t consider it as juvenilia, but I personally find it hard to consider it literature, either. The narrative, it’s true, has plenty of momentum: it took me about two hours to finish this book, and I’m usually a slow reader. Mahfouz did have to sacrifice characterization and atmosphere for speed, though. Rambo is positively nuanced compared to anyone in this novel. What Khufu’s Wisdom most reminded me of was the Stalinist epic, “The Fall of Berlin”, in which the stalwart Stakhanovite worker, Alexei, beats all steel production records, wins the “All-Soviet Worker” award from gentle, wise Comrade Stalin, then single-handedly defeats the Nazis and wins the hand of his beloved Natasha. Only in Khufu’s Wisdom, our hero winds up Pharaoh in the end. I don’t think Stalin would have let ol’Alexei take over as Party Chairman.

Despite these shortcomings, Khufu’s Wisdom is now readily available in three different editions: in hardback from the American University in Cairo Press; in paperback from Anchor Books; and in a fine compilation with Mahfouz’s two other early novels set in ancient Egypt, Rhadopis of Nubia and Thebes at War, from Everyman’s Library.

Khufu’s Wisdom, by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Raymond Stock
Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003.

A Time for Paris, by George Goodman

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'A Time for Paris'Marshmallows have more substance than this book. Stalwart Yale-grad and Korean War vet Fred Holland sails off to serve in the American Embassy in London. He and his chum spot pretty Sally White, also of good WASP stock, boarding their ocean liner. Fred chats up Sally, who turns out to be an old but distant acquaintance from summers on the island in Maine.

They flirt during the voyage and Fred accompanies Sally for a few days’ idyll in Paris before joining his post in London. Thanks to cheap flights and trains, they see each other occasionally over the next few months. Sally amuses herself with an avant-garde lover and then one of Fred’s old Army buddies. Fred establishes himself as a sturdy right-hand man to one of the Foreign Service’s rising stars. Fred and Sally wonder to themselves: is this love? Is this friendship? Is this a mistake?

Despite detours into romances with an English earl (Sally) and a worldly older woman (Fred), true love reigns in the end, with stalwart Fred flying an ailing Sally to a hospital, saving her life and winning her heart.

So why read this book? Isn’t this just a fancy variation on a Harlequin novel?

For me, the attractions of A Time for Paris are nostalgia and good, if ultralight, writing. Author George Goodman would later become much better known as Adam Smith, author of the best-selling The Money Game and host of a long-running PBS show. Goodman spent a year as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and he brings many of his impressions of England and France from that time into A Time for Paris.

In some ways, the world of A Time for Paris is as mannered and archaic as anything in Henry James: the schools one went to, the cut of one’s suit, the slant of one’s politics all still matter and are used like litmus tests by many of the characters. This is world where parties are still for drinking cocktails and smoking is obligatory. On the other hand, this is not quite your grandmother’s world. Both Fred and Sally have sex with several other people before finding their way to bed together.

Sexual liberation aside, though, the line between male and female is drawn in big, bold strokes. Though Sally runs to Europe to escape marriage to a conventional suburb-residing, daily-commuting, WASP male, by the end of the book she is destined to marry Fred, settle down to raise 2.5 children, and drive a station wagon, as we all know is only right and just.

Yes, it’s all out-dated, two-dimensional, and ridiculous. But fun. After all, even marshmallows deserve their spot on our kitchen shelves.

A Time for Paris, by George Goodman
Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1957

The Age of Reason, by Harold Nicolson

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Review
· Find Out More
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt

In the early years of his reign the King lived mainly at the Tuilleries in Paris, but in 1722 he moved to Versailles. Officially he occupied the gorgeous rooms which his great-grandfather had tenanted and slept in the monumental bed in which the Great King had died. But in fact these majestic apartments were too grand and cold for a man who, however promiscuous may have been his love-affairs, was essentially of a domestic temperament. He thus, with the help of ingenious architects, constructed a suite of private rooms communicating by a secret staircase with the state apartments. There were in the first place what were called les cabinets, namely, bedroom, bathroom, dining room, library, and study looking out into an interior courtyard. Above them was an even more private suite, known as les petits appartements, situated as a penthouse under the leads and surmounted by a private roof garden containing macaws, parrots, canaries, monkeys, and pleached trees of box, or myrtle or bay in blue and white tubs. It was here that the King would play with his children or exercise his fat angora cat.

The rigor and symbolism of court etiquette can be assessed by the strange fact that, although it was in his private flate that the King flirted and pretended to work, the state apartments below retained their old hierographical significance. Louis XV, like his great-grandfather, would undergo the slow, elaborate, and unbearably pompous parade of going to bed. Still would the dukes and marquises compete with each other to be accorded the honor of holding the candle or helping the King to get out of his shirt. When the last rites had been accomplished, when the carved and gilded barrier that separated the bed from the rest of the room had been ceremoniously closed, when the last courtier, bowing profoundly, had backed out of the bedroom into the adjoining oeil-de-boeuf, then Louis XV would leap out of bed again, put on his dressing gown, and, accompanied by a personal page carrying a light, would skip up the secret staircase and slip into his own comfortable bed in his own comfortable room. Then in the morning the ceremony had again to be performed in reverse. It never seems to have occurred, to either Louis XV, his family, or his courtiers that these cumbrous parades were absurdly unreal. The monarch was King by divine right, and his accustomed actions must be distinguished from those of ordinary mortals, as it were liturgically.

Editor’s Comments

The Age of Reason was the first of a half-dozen or so books in a series published by Doubleday in the early 1960s. Edited by the veteran reporter John Gunther, author of the popular “Inside” books of the 1940s and 1950s, the series had the impressive title of “The Mainstream of the Modern World.” Although works of history, the books were all written by authors better known for fiction (Alec Waugh), reportage (Edmond Taylor), or miscellany (Nicolson), and all focused more on personalities than movements, politics, and larger issues.

Although Nicolson declares his subtitle to be, “A study of the mutability of ideas and the variety of human temperament,” his emphasis is on the latter. As with his classic, The Congress of Vienna, Nicolson is an unapologetic popular historian, in the vein of Andre Maurois, Stefan Zweig, and others of his generation, writers who never felt their amateur status disqualified them from using history as a canvas of characters every bit as intriguing as any they might make up.

Of the twenty-one chapters in the book, nineteen are miniatures of a representative figure from the 18th century. Most are very well known: Peter the Great, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau. Making no claims to scholarship, Nicolson is unlikely to have uncovered any remarkable new material about them, so one could ask what makes such a book worth a bother forty-plus years after it was written.

The answer is simple: because it’s superbly entertaining. Nicolson gives us the basic facts of each life, but these are just a frame within which he weaves a tapestry of observations and anecdotes. Most of his material comes from the letters and memoirs of contemporaries: other historians are absent from the text. What doesn’t come first-hand sources comes instead from Nicolson’s keen eye for character and decades of experience in politics and diplomacy.

“Reason,” he quotes Herbert Read in his introduction, “is a very difficult word to use without confusion.” Nicolson acknowledges his skeptical view of the aspirations held out for reasoned discourse and rational thinking during the 18th century. We learn relatively little about the philosophical ideas any figure held or propounded, except as theory reveals something of the man who has it.

Instead, we learn of the merits and faults of each man and woman, of their eccentric habits and money problems, of their vanities and miseries. And we find out things more sober history books leave out. Take the opening of the chapter on Peter the Great, for example:

Walking in the royal park at Brussels, the inquiring traveler, if he diverge but a few yards from the graveled alleys of pleached lime, will come across a hollow among the shrubberies which is now used as a midden in which the gathered leaves are rotted down for leaf mold. In this declivity there is a small stone bearing a Latin inscription. It tells the traveler that on this spot the Duke of Muscovy, having drunk heavily, was violently sick. What is interesting about this memorial is that the Belgians at that date should have regarded the public vomiting of a reigning, even if barbarous, prince as so odd as to merit being recorded for posterity.

Considering how exhaustively documented the lives of most of his characters have been, it’s striking how often Nicolson introduces something like this–odd, trivial perhaps, but telling. As another example, take the ending of his chapter on Tom Paine:

William Cobbett … was shocked by the fact that the godfather of the United States should be shunned by all decent Americans. He therefore exhumed Paine’s body from the graveyard at New Rochelle and brought it back with him to Liverpool. For many years Cobbett preserved Paine’s skeleton in his house at Botley in Hampshire and on his death he bequeathed it to his son. The son, shortly afterward, went bankrupt and his possessions were sold by auction. Nobody has discovered who bought the bones of Paine. They have disappeared. And his works, which at the time created so prodigious an effect, are today unread.

This anecdote manages to be bizarre, tragic, and symbolic at the same time, which illustrates how, for all the novelty of the facts that Nicolson digs up, he never chooses them for novelty alone.


His lack of scholarly ambitions also allows Nicolson to inject his opinions where he feels the judgment is deserved. Thus, of Grand Duke Peter, husband of Catherine the Great, he writes, “He possessed a childish character, an incurable taste for low company, marked aversion from any form of study, and a violent temper. If not a certifiable lunatic, he was certainly a clinical specimen of arrested development.” After crediting Joseph Addison with “spreading to many dull and unenlightened homes the blessed habit of reading,” he passes a harsh sentence: “Addison’s complacency and optimism are as insipid as a vanilla puff.”

Such subjectivity is refreshing when dealing with historical figures. In too many works of history, maintaining the illusion of objectivity becomes an excuse for suppressing all sense of the writer’s own character. In Harold Nicolson, the Age of Reason had a chronicler with the erudition to deal with a broad and diverse span of time, ideas, and people with ease and skill, the political experience to make shrewd judgments of men, and the confidence to speak his opinions bluntly. The result is a tremendously enjoyable and satisfying work of history.

Review

· Time magazine, 5 May 1961

The age was often out of character but never out of characters. That is what fascinates Harold Nicolson, who scants history for personality, and arranges his book as a gallery of portraits bathed in the warm glow of idiosyncrasy rather than the cold light of 100% accuracy. The result is an “entertainment” written in the witty and amusing fashion of a male Nancy Mitford.

Find Out More

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In Print?

Search for it at Amazon.com:  The Age of Reason

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Search for it via AddAll.com:  The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason: The Eighteenth Century, by Harold Nicolson
Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1961

Jane White

Cover of UK paperback edition of 'Quarry'Brooks Peters wrote with a recommendation of Quarry, a 1967 novel by Jane White. As Brooks describes Quarry,

It’s a British novel from 1960s about three adolescent boys who kidnap a boy and keep him in a cave in a quarry. It’s been compared to Lord of the Flies. It got great reviews when it came out. I’ve just finished it and thought it was extremely well done. But a real enigma. I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society.

Richard Freeman, in the Saturday Review, wrote that Quarry,

… is an allegory with a variety of more or less cosmic overtones. The action takes place not in a normal, pastoral English summer, but in an arid wasteland during a fierce heat wave. Images of darkness and light are strewn about and the cave is philosophically associated with the one in Plato’s Republic. The victim, especially, is given much symbolic weight to bear as a universal scapegoat…. [U]ltimately, the book is about the complex symbiosis between prosecutor and prey. If Quarry is less richly imagined than Lord of the Flies and lacks its verbal distinction, it is nevertheless an extraordinarily assured first novel, and is even superior to Golding’s in its control of allegory, the bare bones of which are less frequently allowed to obtrude.

Other reviewers compared White favorably with Iris Murdoch. Her second novel, Proxy, received mostly positive reviews in the U.K. but was uniformly panned in the U.S.. From what I can determine, White went on to publish six more novels:

She also published a memoir, Norfolk Child, in 1973. Despite the fact that reviewers of her later works offered such praise as “Miss Young writes well of marriages and the forces that mold them”; “a haunting, macabre quality reminiscent of Iris Murdoch”; and “an abundant mixture of lyrical and symbolic”, White seems to have disappeared from the publishing scene entirely after 1976. I haven’t had a chance to sample White’s work, but on the surface at least, she appears to be a worthy candidate for reconsideration.

————————-
Added 22 November 2009

Jane White, autho of QuarryBrooks Peters added the following biographical information, along with a photo of Jane White, from the dust jacket of Quarry:

“Jane White was born in Cambridge in 1934, and her family moved soon afterwards to a remote farmhouse in Norfolk. Her father is an historian and University Lecturer at Downing College, Cambridge. Jane White was educated at home by a governess until the age of nine, then at a Convent boarding school. At eighteen she won a State Scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge. She read for an honours Degree in English and graduated with an upper second Degree. She worked as an assistant in a large public library for nine months prior to Cambridge and took various vacation jobs as a waitress — also as general help in a Maternity Hospital.

She was employed for five years with the B.B.C. World Service as a News Clerk in the News Information Department. In 1961 she married a lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, London University. She has one small son, and lives at Godalming Surrey.

Jane White has written plays, poetry, verse dramas for as long as she can remember. Her first novel was completed at the age of nine. She is much interested in acting, and took part in various amateur productions at Cambridge, once venturing as far as the Edinburgh ‘Fringe’.

Her interests include theatre-going, films, both good and bad, music of all kinds, and reading.”

Thanks, Brooks!

UW Press to Reissue “Two Kinds of Time”–Forgotten Classic China Travel Book

Cover of UW Press reissue of 'Two Kinds of Time'On the rare occasions when I’m back in the U.S., I always try to take time to stop by a public library and do some browsing through back issues of Book Review Digest. This evening, flipping through the 1950 volume, my eye was caught by the entry for Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time. Here is what Robert Payne had to say about it in the Saturday Review:

The present work, jam-packed with anecdotes, incidents, observations, theories, portraits, drawings, obscene jokes, quiet jokes, terrifying jokes, even ordinary jokes, has everything to commend it. It bursts at the seams, but so does Gargantua and Pantagruel. He has not written the modern Chinese Gargantua and Pantagruel, but he has done the nearest thing to it.

I took down the title, of course, and when I got back to the hotel, quickly googled it. To my surprise and pleasure, I found that this book, cited by numerous writers as one of the best books ever written about China by a Westerner, is about to be reissued in full, unabridged form for the first time in nearly sixty years–and from my alma mater, the University of Washington Press.

Peck, a Yale graduate, artist, and heir to a small hairpin fortune, first arrived in China in January 1936 while on a round-the-world trip. He ended up spending the better part of a year there before returning to Derby, Connecticut, where he then spent two years writing up his notes and collecting dozens of drawings into his first book, Through China’s Wall, which was published by Houghton in 1940. The book’s critical reception was superlative: “… the most important, the most fascinating travel book on China”; “remarkably unadulterated travel writing, transmitting observation and experiences close to the sensations of the moments when they occurred to a man of unusually balanced and sensitive intelligence”; “a better characterization in a paragraph than most venerable sinologists could achieve in a volume.” And, as Time‘s reviewer put it, “It is part exquisite travel book, part exciting history, part exotic philosophy.”

Peck returned to China in 1939 and remained there for the next six and a half years, surviving Japanese air raids, accompanying Mao’s Communist forces, and working for the U.S. Office of Information. He then left China for good and returned to his family home in Derby, Connecticut. Although he wrote several children’s books and collaborated with the veteran “China hand” John K. Fairbanks on China: The Remembered Life, it appears that Peck spent most of the rest of his life after 1946 looking backward, not forward. He died in 1968 at the age of 54.

Two Kinds of Time will be published on 30 October 2008 by the University of Washington Press.

Nobel Committee Salutes Neglected Books

In an indirect tribute to neglected books, the selection committee awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature to the French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, who has managed to be successfully ignored by most of the English-speaking reading public for the last forty-some years. But this neglect is understandable, at least in the eyes of Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, who told an Associated Press reporter, “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature …That ignorance is restraining.”

For a quick and admittedly crude assessment of where the US and UK stand with respect to other countries in the recognition of Monsieur Le Clézio’s work, I checked a variety of online bookstores to see how many of his books were currently in print and available for sale. Here are the results:

Overall, this rough survey suggests that U.S. publishers are not doing too bad in keeping up with Le Clézio’s work, at least compared to other countries. And though his novels have never rated very high with any but a small circle of academics and fans of the avant-garde, the fact is that the Atheneum Press was a faithful supporter, issuing fine hardback editions of most of his major novels until the mid-1970s. With the celebrity of a Nobel on his side, Le Clézio is certainly back in demand, and there is a good chance that at least some of these now out-of-print English translations will be coming back. So, in spite of Mr. Engdahl’s assessment, the American publishing industry and reading public tends to be pretty responsive to the Nobel Committee’s championing of a neglected writer–certainly more than they are to this site’s!

Atlantic Crossing, by G. Wilson Knight

G. Wilson Knight, 1936, Photography by Howard CosterG. Wilson Knight subtitled this 1936 book “An Autobiographical Design,” and had he stuck to the autobiography and left the design out, I might have been less resentful about the several hours I devoted to assaulting its slopes. Perhaps I lack the mountaineering skills to attempt such a tower of intellect. But Atlantic Crossing struck me as one of the most grandiose failures I’ve tried to read in a long time.

Knight made his name as a critic and director of Shakespeare and other English dramatists. His lifelong immersion in Renaissance poetry and prose left him with a weakness for an intricacy at times beyond his own dexterity:

It was then I watched in twilight where up-piled clouds in rugged Alpine ranges towered and caught the morning and glowed with it, black rocks and giant crags fire-fringed, stained with a gilden glory. Shafts of burning mist, spear-points of the assaulting dawn, slanted angular upward splendours. Watch those breaking palisades, that rock-pinnacle flaming to its ruin, those tufts of red smoke, that heaving, billowing, crumbling, conglomerated mass–was ever such chaos so musically blended?–while the artillery of advancing day fumes the air with its cordite, rolling attar of roses in wave on wave.

Phew! Imagine 300-plus pages of this hyperventilating.

In Atlantic Crossing, Knight hangs on the slender frame of six days’ voyage on a 1930s ocean liner from Montreal to Southhampton enough ornaments and appendages to sink even the most sea-worthy narrative.

There are some promising bits. A fleeting, glancing romance with a lively American ingenue. Some fine purely autobiographical passages in which Knight recalls his experiences as a dispatch rider with British forces in Iraq and Persia during World War One. And enough tastes of luxury liner travel to leave us envious of the past:

Now what to do after breakfast? A pipe in the lounge; a walk on the promenade deck; watch the people; perhaps get to know some of them; shuffleboard and deck-tennis. This is to be unadulterated leisured aristocracy, free from beggars, telephones, letters, money, and all complex interrelations of modern civilization, yet with its best luxury at hand; in a world beyond richness and poverty, for one week.

Unfortunately for the reader, however, Knight can’t wait to hurl in great shovel-fulls of aduleration and complex interrelations:

It is often hard to day whether man’s passionate unrest is a matter of volcanic flame or turbulent ocean. The opposition of Thales and Heraclitus is profound. Fire must be liquid in us, coursing like quicksilver in our veins: that is, man’s fiery ascent drags ocean up mountains through fields of air. I suppose fire is ultimately the Alpha and Omega, earth-centre and empyrean.

OK, folks–a show of hands. Man’s passionate unrest: volcanic flame or turbulent ocean? I know my mind is often torn between these two choices. On the other hand, I have no second thoughts about what category Atlantic Crossing belong in.

Atlantic Crossing, by G. Wilson Knight
London: J. W. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1936

William Blake in This World, by Harold Bruce

William Blake, a portrait sketch by John Flaxman“In 1757 William Blake was born in London; in 1827 he died there; where he has been since 1827 I do not know.” This wonderful line opens Harold Bruce’s William Blake in This World, and that spirit of cheerful skepticism permeates the whole book.

“I doubt if a soul is to be understood, or a ghost to be saved by whitewashing,” Bruce writes in response to a century’s worth of attempts to fit Blake’s wildly original imagination into a more conventional and Victorian form. Instead of following tradition, laying out the story of Blake’s life in chronological order and drawing lessons from its successes and failures, Bruce takes what was, at the time, a very novel, Modernist approach:

To try to sift fact from romance, to try to erase the details of Blake’s life not backed by competent, material, and relevant evidence, will be to blur a smooth and highly-finished portrait, and to substitute a flawed and imperfect one, with lines sometimes dim, wavering, or blotted out. But this portrait, traced by Blake’s own words and by the memories of those who knew him, however flawed and imperfect it turns out to be, has certain sharply clear lines, and is at least a partial likeness of him as he was.

William Blake in This World is a collage, a view of Blake’s life and work from a variety of perspective, studded with quotations from his poems, letters, and the recollections of his contemporaries. He looks at Blake in terms of his view of religion and revolution, of the early signs of the Industrial Age and the mundane demands on his energy of politics and commerce. Bruce addresses the question of Blake’s mental health: was he locked up in Bedlam as a madman at one point?

Today, the book would probably be classed as criticism, but Bruce’s interest is strictly biographical. If Bruce has any particular message, it is that, however ethereal and visionary Blake’s spirit was, it resided in the breast of a man very much of his own time and place. Although I found the author’s own prose at times too elliptical and tangential to follow, there is no doubt that in William Blake in This World, Harold Bruce is a vigorous defender of his subject’s right to be himself.

William Blake in This World, by Harold Bruce
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925

If Everybody Did, by Jo Ann Stover

I vividly remember a few of the first books I encountered as a child. Though I never knew the names of their authors until I had kids of my own and started taking them to the library, I know I was fascinated by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire’s George Washington and Norse Myths. I don’t know if it was Wotan or Odin, but one of those Norse gods set in my mind as the father in “Our Father, who art in heaven,” and I never could quite accept what they taught us in Sunday School about God being Love. I thought Jesus was the nice, gentle guy who protected the little children from getting smote by God, all wrathful over something we did wrong.

Fortunately, the image that stuck with me the most was something a lot funnier:
Squeezed Cat
My family had one or more cats pretty much the whole time I was growing up, and a few of them endured hours of being picked up by the middle and lugged around by one of us adoring little boys–the way it seems all little kids carry cats:
Squeeze the Cat
After having this book read to me and looking through it over and over, I started to consider if maybe there were gentler ways to pick up the cat. See, the message of the book, as I understood it at least, was that if everybody did something like pick the cat up by the stomach and carry them all around the house, well, then, kitties would end up all pinched up in the middle. Which does look pretty uncomfortable, though funny.

Every once in a while in recent years, the image of that pinched kitty would come to me again and I would rack my brain to try to remember what the name of that book was. But I always drew a blank. I know I never came across it in trips to the library with my own kids, so it struck me recently that whatever it was, it might be a candidate for a mention on this site.

Out of the blue, it occurred to me to do a search on “What If Everybody Did?” It came up blank. So I tried, “If Everybody Did”, and lo and behold, there it was on Amazon:
Squeeze the Cat
And it was in print.

If Everybody Did is nothing more than a collection of illustrations of what might happen if everybody did what kids often tend to do: track in mud, leave toys on the staircase, leave water running in the sink, or wipe dirty hands on the wall or window. Some of the extreme results are pretty comical, but in my view, nothing tops the pinched kitty.

Jo Ann Stover wrote and illustrated a few other children’s books, including They Didn’t Use Their Heads, which, like If Everybody Did, has been brought back in print by Bob Jones University Press. Yes, the fundamentalist Christian college that seems from the outside, at least, a little Stepford Wives-like. Apparently these two books are popular with home schoolers.

Still, I’d highly recommend If Everybody Did for any parent trying to foster some manners in a two-to-five year old. At least one of their bad habits is in here, and I can offer personal testimony that seeing the exaggerated consequences is a good way to turn it around. I know there are a few kitties lounging around Cat Heaven now who owe Jo Ann Stover a bit of gratitude for not having to walk around our house looking like an hourglass.

If Everybody Did, by Jo Ann Stover
New York City: David McKay, 1960
Greenville, South Carolina: Journey Forth Press, 1989

Harper Perennial reissue of “The Moonflower Vine” by Jetta Carleton Confirmed

Cover of new Harper Perennial reissue of 'The Moonflower Vine'Easily the most popular neglected book on this site, Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine is now firmly planted in Harper Perennial’s release schedule for the first quarter of 2009. In fact, you can pre-order it on Amazon today–if you’re willing to wait about six months to get the book, that is. A sneak peak at the cover is shown to the left. Jane Smiley, who wrote about the novel in her 2005 book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, will provide the foreword for this new edition.

The Problem of Kenneth S. Davis

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Experience of War'A very long time ago, I checked a book titled The Experience of War out of my high school library. It didn’t look too inviting–the cover is a photo of small black figures–soldiers–walking across a dark gray field, silhouetted against a light gray sky. The pages were filled with long, dense paragraphs of small print. But it was two inches thick, and at the time, I thought size mattered–at least when it came to impressing my classmates with my seriousness.

I only got about 200 pages into the book before I had to return it, and for whatever reason, I didn’t check it out again. But I can remember being profoundly impressed by how … well, I guess I would say, cinematic the book was. It wasn’t like other history books I’d read–setting aside things like The Great Escape as adventure rather than history, that is. It wasn’t a sequence of “this happened and then this happened” facts, with an occasional bit of analysis. It was a series of scenes. Wendell Willkie in the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan, listening to the returns from the 1940 Presidential election. General Jonathan Wainwright waiting for the end in a tunnel on Corregidor. Navy pilots spotting and attacking the Japanese carrier Kaga just as they reach the very limit of their range, opening the battle of Midway. Harry Hopkins, already suffering from stomach cancer, flying from Washington to London and then on to Moscow to meet with Stalin in the early days after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union–and then back to Scotland to meet up with Churchill and travel to the first Atlantic conference:

For twenty-four hours he is in troubled air, his sick body tossed and buffeted. He has barely strength enough to jump from the plane to the slippery deck of an admiral’s launch, at Scapa Flow, when at last the flying boat comes down. A sailor with a boat hook hauls him sprawling across the deck to the safety of the cabin. But he laughs! He laughs at this undignified arrival of the President’s personal envoy upon a British boat. He laughs at his sickness, his weakness. He waves a cheery farewell to the crew of the PBY, whose captain will later speak in awestruck tones of his passenger’s “unbelievable courage,” his “splendid devotion to duty.”

Almost twenty years later, I pulled down a copy of The Experience of War from a bookstore shelf and began thumbing through it. My first reaction was much the same as before: “Hmm … looks very thick, slow, and dry.” But then I hit that passage about Hopkins again, and I suddenly remembered, and decided right there to buy the book and immediately begin reading it again. At the time, I was flying regularly from Washington to Denver and back, usually in the same day, and a good, thick book I could sink into was something I really needed.

But then, around 300 pages into it, I ran into the following at the start of chapter ten: “Let George do it, the saying goes. So call him George.” George is a Marine, and Davis leads us through his enlistment, his basic training, his transport to Hawaii, his transport to a ship off an island in the Southwest Pacific, to George’s part in the island’s assault and bitter conquest.

George is a fictional character.

I found this quite disconcerting. Was this whole thing just a crock, I wondered? Was Davis just toying with the reader?

But eight pages later, we were back in real history, travelling around the world with Wendell Willkie on his 1942 propaganda tour at FDR’s request, and for the rest of the book, we stayed in what I considered safe territory. Edmund Morris’ Dutch was still ten years in the future and I thought mixing fact and fiction was like adding even and odd numbers–in the end, the result would always be fiction.

In his prefatory note to The Experience of War, Davis wrote,

This is a book about the American experience of World War II. It is not designed to be a formal academic history, though every effort has been made to assure its factual accuracy. Rather, its essential purpose is literary in that it attempts to rescue from the erosions and abstractions of Time something of what Webster’s Dictionary, in the definition of “experience,” calls the “actual living through an event or events; actual enjoyment or suffering.”

Looking through the reviews that greeted the publication of The Experience of War, you can see that the majority of reviewers stumbled over exactly the same point I did. Most praise the work’s overall breadth and richness of detail, but caution the buyer to beware that the whole package could be considered tainted by the one detour into creative writing. Almost three decades later, the fine historian David Hackett Fisher could still sniff that the book “promiscuously mixes fiction and fact.” Eric Goldman, writing in the New York Times was one of the very to express unqualified praise, calling it, “…[H]istory in the grand manner, broad and powerful in its themes, eloquent in style …,” and noting its “sharply etched vignettes of people and scenes.”

Soon after publishing The Experience of War, Davis began work on the project that consumed the rest of his life–over thirty years–and ultimately end unfinished: his massive five-volume, nearly 4,000-page biography of Franklin Roosevelt. His first volume, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928 published in 1972, was a critical and commercial success, earning him the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians.

From there on, however, it was a long downhill slide. Walter Goodman’s Times review of the second volume, FDR: The New York Years 1928-1933 (1985), ended with this litany of faint praises: “He is an assiduous researcher, a creditable psychologist, a fair-minded analyst and, when he isn’t trying too hard, an inviting chronicler of the most fascinating political personality of our age.” Irving Howe was much more enthusiastic about the third volume, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (1986), calling it an “admirably rich book – rich in historical substance, political thought and character portraiture.”

He did note, however, that, “Sentence by sentence, Mr. Davis is not a bewitching writer: he has a curious weakness for stiff syntax and cumbersome phrasing.” And it must be said that the significant obstacle for Davis’ readers is less an occasional dalliance with fiction but his almost nineteenth century prose style.

At times, it can be completely over the top, as in this passage from The Experience of War:

High hopes. Bright hopes …

But then, abruptly, deep disappointments. Dark disappointments, and even despairs …

The bright and the dark ran side by side in a rush of contrasting events through the weeks after Yalta; they thrust against one another and tumbled over one another as if struggling for the minds of men …

I can only imagine what Professor Sale would have written if I’d turned in a paper with that tempestuous bit of prose. It’s Bulwer-Lytton grade stuff.

Throughout Davis’ long career, which began with a wartime biography of Eisenhower in 1944 and continued through over a dozen works of biography and history and three novels for over fifty years, reviewers took exception to his stylistic foibles: thousand-word paragraphs composed from sixty-word sentences, topped off with telegraphic exclamation points for dramatic effect: “It made a great stir. Of course it would.” And, yes, those bits of poetic excess no self-respecting dispassionate historian would attempt today:

With decision came liberation. A heavy weight was lifted from Roosevelt’s mind: his long-oppressed spirits could again rise.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'FDR: Into the Storm 1937-1940'Despite the fact that Random House gave the fourth volume, FDR: Into the Storm 1937-1940 (1993), the biggest publicity push of the whole series, Davis’ reputation continued to decline. Although Robert Dallek acknowledged that the work would “take its place in the Roosevelt literature,” he found the most distinctive aspect of the book “the mass of detail on all the major and many minor events of Roosevelt’s second term.” Boy, ain’t that the kind of acclaim that sells a book: “‘A Mass of Details’ says the New York Times!”

Davis died in 1999, leaving the fifth and final volume unfinished. Mary Ellen, Ralph Titus, and Robert Loomis collaborated to shape the completed portion of the book and Davis’ notes into FDR: The War President, 1940-1943, which was published in 2000. Even so, the book ends in the middle of the war, with Roosevelt screening Casablanca at the White House.

Davis was spared the indignity of the book’s reception, which reminds one of the old joke, “The food here’s terrible–and the portions are so small.” Here is Michael Lind, again from the Times:

FDR: The War President, 1940-1943 is not history. It is sensationalistic historical fiction of the kind associated with Oliver Stone and the Edmund Morris of Dutch. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reputation as a historical figure will survive this book. Kenneth S. Davis’s reputation as a historian will not.

One pictures Lind spiking his copy of the book into Davis’ grave and dancing a little touchdown jig.

Kenneth S. Davis in 1993So is that the fate of Kenneth S. Davis? To have steadily and diligently written himself into oblivion? At the moment, all but his history of Kansas are out of print. While his FDR books have been referenced by dozens of historians since their publication, as a quick Google Book search reveals, most of the time it’s for their details of color and character than the historical insights. And for readers unprepared for the task, the prospect of lugging a few pounds of a Davis book or sticking with his long, dense paragraphs probably seems like that of reading Proust without the payoff of being able to brag about it at parties.

For a few persistent and diligent readers, though, there are considerable rewards. I said early on that I remembered The Experience of War as a cinematic book. Irving Howe, on the other hand, saw the parallel for Davis’ approach in an earlier century: “… [T]he total effect of his book is strongly dramatic, reminding one of those naturalistic novels that marshal lumbering sentences in behalf of narrative drive.” Yes, there are plenty of lumbering sentences. But there are also such vivid, memorable scenes: Eisenhower pacing up and down the runway in Gibraltar, anxiously wondering how successful (or costly) the American Army’s landing in North Africa would be. John Hersey encountering the realities of combat in Guadalcanal. Oppenheimer torn between hope and dread at the first atomic bomb test. David Lillienthal wresting control of the Tennessee Valley Authority from the powerful electric utilities. An ordinary visitor experiencing the marvels of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Or FDR’s first fireside chat:

There was nothing fake about the hearty, laughing good humor, the optimistic faith (he knew everything would come out right in the end!), the indomitable courage, the incessant, stupendous joie de vivre which he exuded and which others, needful of it, soaked up as parched earth does water.

If what Davis set out to do in his books was, as he wrote in his prefatory note to Experience, to “rescue from the erosions and abstractions of Time” experience–“the actual living through an event or events,” I think we can say he succeeded, even if it was counter to critical preferences.

For the past umpteen years, I’ve usually had one or another of Davis’ books in my nightstand. In between books, I’ll pick it up, open a page at random, and dip in. And almost always, I find myself carried away through the next dozen pages by the power of his story-telling. And for that, I am grateful.