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.