I finished up the biography of J.C. Powys -- did I really need to know about his struggle with constipation after giving up his bi-weekly enemas, and that when he resorted to using his fingers, that he wished he had clipped his nails? This is right up there with the discussions of anal fistulas that I read in a life of Samuel Becket. Although I will say this, I'm now really curious to read his Wolf Solent, all 900 pages of it, to see how this odd man who proclaimed his inability to have 'normal' sexual relations portrays the life force in his novel.
Anyway, what a sorry lot these writers are, Wyndham Lewis sabotaging his relations with his patrons, and Dostoevsky with his compulsive gambling and his epilepsy and his exile to Siberia, and Powys with his disclosed sexual peculiarities and the 'surgically deflowered' wife...And of course, I had to follow up all this with the life of Poe, whose dying wife could not relieve her tubercular chills with even a blanket, let alone a fire, because they were too poor. Mind you, Poe's nurse used to tranquilize him with bread soaked in gin, no one has a fighting chance with that. Antonin Artaud also died young of substance abuse, it's been a really happy little day.
C.S. Lewis' life, with his mother hang-up, seems comparatively tame compared to this. I must say I disliked the way in which Joy Gresham, Lewis' wife, is lambasted for her abrasiveness -- it's not just Wyndham Lewis who is a misogynist.
In this panoply, reading Levi-Strauss was a relief -- I really only liked his book about the cultural structures in both pre-industrial western and central American societies. His is justly famous for that.
Also, the life of I.A. Richards (by Russo), the promoter of Basic English, was also welcome relief.
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