Lowry, Graves, Anderson, Nicolson

Since my last post, I've read OK Magazine, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Globe, The New Scientist, and Hello Canada.

I've also read Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson, which struck me as exploitative. I have no doubt at some point he needed a best seller to save his publishing house, Weidenfeld Nicolson. But to outline the travails of two gay people married to each other, his own parents too, I don't know, it seems a bit much like an invasion of privacy, despite the fact that all the principals were dead by the time it came out. He sold the TV rights, too, I saw the mini-series years ago. Anyway, the famous story of Vita Sackville-West and her same-sex lovers, although the affair here is not with Virginia Woolf, but with Violet Trefusis. And Sir Harold Nicolson, a British diplomat and biographer of George V, famous for his bon mot: "All he did for forty years is kill animals and stick in stamps." Golly, what an epitaph.

I read a biography of Robert Graves, and of Malcolm Lowry, and let me tell you, my life seems a pinnacle of good judgment and stability compared to these two, Graves with his attempts at menage `a trois that publicly and painfully don't work out, and Malcolm Lowry with his alcoholism and his Walter Mitty complex. And then I read a biography of Sherwood Anderson, who died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick. How can you not know you are swallowing a toothpick, and stop yourself? Oh well.

McEwen, Wodehouse, Jewett, Graves

Since my last post, I've read an issue of Eclectic Reading, one of OK Magazine, and one of The Economist.

I also read a biography of Gwendolyn McEwen, which was very thin, and consisted of a list of her husbands and lovers. I also read a biography of P.G. Wodehouse. His hapless decision to broadcast from his Nazi imprisonment to the then neutral US was spectacularly dumb. I also read a biography, written by a relative, of the 19th century novelist Sarah Orne Jewett, now largely forgotten except for House Among the Pointed Firs. I'm now powering through a biography of Robert Graves, author and poet, best known for writing I, Claudius.

Thomson, Taylor, Heilbrunn, Pembroke

I've read Caroline Heilbrunn's The Garnetts, about a literary family: one was head of the British Library, the next was a great editor in London, the third was a translator of Russian literature, and the fourth was a novelist. Sort of like the Polanyi intellectual family: a philosopher, an economist, a chemist. I have also read a great book by the AUTHOR Elizabeth Taylor, called Angel. It's about an eccentric young writer, and the protagonist she created is charming. I also read David Thomson's memoir of the love of his youth in Woodbrook -- I knew when he got to kiss his girl after a decade of puppy love it wasn't going to end well. She does die at the end, before they have a chance to be together. Finally I wrote a fairly thin biography of the Countess of Pembroke, who was a patron of literature and a writer herself. Hard to reconstruct what happens at such a distance. It's called Philip's Phoenix.

Joyce, de Quincey

Since my last post, I've read an issue each of OK Magazine, The New Scientist, The Globe, the Examiner, the National Enquirer, and Eclectic Reading.

I've also read a biography of Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which made for very sad reading, and am now reading a biography of Norah Joyce, wife of James Joyce, by Brenda Maddox. It's excellent of course. But both of these books are endless tallies of debt and despair. The Joyce story, as you might expect, is leavened with sex. Golly. James Joyce fell in love because Norah gave him a hand job on their first date: not exactly what mothers taught their daughters when I was growing up. Now, it is clear that Norah gave James much of his material -- she wrote him letters full of sexual content, she talked about sex, she enjoyed sex, she had sex with him, and her surviving letters show a great debt he owed her for her stream-of-consciousness style. I had no idea, despite reading a biography of James Joyce. Puts much of Joyce in a new light, it seems to me.

Nesbit, O'Brien, Moore

Since my last post, I've biographies of Evelyn Nesbit, the children's author, and Frances Moore, the first Canadian novelist, and Flann O'Brien, the Irish writer. Julia Briggs does a good job of Woman of Passion: for a children's writer, it's kind of wild to find out the author got married two months before her son was born in the 1890s. Reading this book also informed me on the life of Philip Marston, who went blind, lost his fiancee, mother, two sisters, two best friends, all his nieces and nephews, went dumb and died of tuberculosis by the time he was 36. Flann O'Brien was an alcoholic -- it was interesting to read about Ireland in the 1950s, when it was normal for men to be celibate. Frances Moore was a clergyman's daughter, then wife, and spent a few years in Canada and set one of her novels here. Biography by Lorraine McMullen.

Amis, Porter, Valles, Ouellette, Cazotte

Today was a day of much reading, like my heyday earlier this year. I read Kingsley Amis's memoirs and a biography by Eric Jacobs of him. He impressed me little as a human being. The same, mind you, was true of his son Martin Amis. I also read Fernand Ouellette's Journal denoue. I found that he had listened to and read much of what I have listened to or read. He's a poet from Quebec, about 30 years older than myself. Maybe this means I'm a throwback. I also read Zimmerman's biography of Jules Valles, a French 19th century writer of whom I had never heard. His life was not that interesting -- the usual poverty and early death of a writer.In contrast,t he aristocratic Cazotte wrote one of the jewels of ancien regime France, and being an aristocrat, died on the scaffold. He had a Champagne vineyard, and his biography was written by, wait for it, Claude Taittinger.