Books

There is a famous (and, I fear, apocryphal) story about Bono at his most messianic at a U2 gig in the early part of this century. Pausing between songs, he clicked his fingers meaningfully. After doing this a few times, he said, with utmost gravity, “Every time I do this, a child in Africa dies of starvation.” Most of the audience nodded in sympathy, but one man in the front row had a better response. “Well stop fucking doing it then!” Bono’s response was not recorded, but the finger-clicking soon disappeared from his repertoire of stadium show gimmicks. It is reasonably easy to see why Bono — and, by extension, U2 — are so reviled.

Cockburn would like to issue a preemptive apology to those who thought being extraordinarily accomplished was enough to justify a lucrative book deal. Apparently an author's manuscript should be sent to the shredder if he or she holds an unorthodox opinion on hot-button political issues. That's the case made by the coffee-fetchers and typo-catchers in the publishing industry who signed an open letter denouncing Supreme Court Justice Amy Barrett's upcoming book with Penguin Random House. The group of "concerned publishing professionals" claim that paying Coney Barrett a $2 million advance to outline her judicial philosophy constitutes an international human rights violation. No, seriously.

In April 1930, the nineteen-year-old Edda Mussolini married Count Galeazzo Ciano, aged twenty-seven, after a brief courtship in which love appears to have played little part. Her father, Il Duce, wanted the magnificent occasion to be not merely the wedding of the century but a grand, almost royal, demonstration of fascist might and a celebration of fecundity. Edda, his beloved firstborn, was to stand for everything that was best about fascist womanhood, while the groom was to carve out the path of “the new Italian man.” These were the glory years, and thousands of schoolchildren sent poems and cards with angels in advance of the occasion, which the Papal Nuncio attended with a present from the Pope.

In a late September article for the Washington Post magazine, staff writer DeNeen L. Brown declared that she has “decided to eventually leave America.” Though when or where she will go she “can’t say for sure,” she is “finally ready.” “I want to engage in intellectual debates without having to explain the history of this country’s racism,” she writes. "I want to live in a country where racism is not a constant threat.” There are other things about America that frustrate Brown. It's a country that “seem[s] to be increasingly dangerous for Black people” — an observation that is, in fact, true, though, as data indisputably demonstrates, this stems far more from black-on-black crime than it does from a supposedly “white supremacist” regime.

All is not well at the literary journal Hobart Pulp, Cockburn has learned — and it's all down to one of our mischievous Spectator contributors. His words have caused violence, apparently, as nearly the entire staff of the journal have resigned in protest. Last month, Alex Perez sat down with Hobart Pulp's top editor, Elizabeth Ellen, to discuss the state of the literary and publishing scene — ranging from MFAs to woke writers to how he got his start in writing. Perez, a Latino writer who graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, had some choice words about the cowardice of writers and editors today. The interview, originally posted to the Hobart Pulp website last month, didn't make much of a stir until this week, when its editors and contributors began to take notice.

Perhaps the defining moment of the posthumous collection of diary excerpts from the late actor and director Alan Rickman comes around two thirds of the way in. Rickman has recently played the villainous role of Judge Turpin in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, an undertaking he describes with what readers will have come to recognize as his signature combination of angst and actorly obsession ("I can only sense the crumbs, dandruff, dirt under the nails.") At last, the film is finished, and is premiering in London. Rickman’s general mien of detachment ("there is a deep introspection during these days…a feeling of being marginalized by shallow minds") is temporarily interrupted by an impertinent journalist, who asks him at the premiere, "If you were a pie, which flavor would you be?

In an interview with Stern magazine at the end of July, Sir Salman Rushdie was asked about the current circumstances of his life. Given that this is a question that he has faced since 1989, Rushdie might have been expected to respond with boredom, even irritation — as, understandably, he has done in other public conversations, when the subject of the fatwa that he has been under for nearly three and a half decades has been raised by an inquisitive or prurient journalist — but he responded with reasonably good cheer. Describing his everyday existence as “very normal,” he even ventured a light-hearted remark, saying, “A fatwa is a serious thing. Luckily we didn’t have the internet back then. The Iranians had to send the fatwa to the mosques by fax.

“I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job. I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.” So wrote Anthony Bourdain in a text to his ex-wife and confidante, Ottavia Bussia-Bourdain, according to an unauthorized biography being released in October. Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, written by journalist Charles Leerhsen, isn’t a retread of Bourdain: The Official Oral Biography, nor is it another Roadrunner, the movie about Bourdain released earlier this year. In Leershen’s own words, his motivation for writing it was that “We never had that big story, that long piece that said what happened, how the guy with the best job in the world took his own life.

There are so many examples of narcissism-on-steroids that litter Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner’s memoir that it’s difficult to point out just one. But the following is typical: in 2001, Wenner was invited to a recording session for his friend Mick Jagger’s solo album Goddess in the Doorway. Wenner, long out of practice in writing for his magazine — clear prose was never his forte — submitted a review to his editor, who, knowing of the friendship, gave the album four stars. Wenner intervened, bumping it up to five stars, and reflected: “There was some snickering [in the office] about being on Mick’s leash, but so what, and what if I were?” Wenner’s torturously long memoir is a very bad book.

When the Queen died a fortnight ago, it was widely speculated that the perfect writer to describe both her death and its aftermath was Hilary Mantel, but now that will never be. Mantel died from a stroke yesterday at the age of 70, leaving behind a unique legacy in transatlantic literature not merely as someone whose weighty novels about royalty in the Tudor era have sold millions, but as an acute chronicler of our own time, too. Not for nothing is her most controversial short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, a subversive account of what might have happened if a woman she felt "boiling detestation" for had been killed in 1983.