Lead book review

Novelists’ careers take different paths, and sometimes don’t look much like careers at all. It’s true that some start publishing between 25 and 35, and write a novel respectably every two or three years until they die, like Kingsley Amis. Others don’t start until they are 60, like Penelope Fitzgerald, or stop abruptly without warning, like Henry Green, or write one novel and no more, like Harper Lee. Inspiration, or interest, comes and goes, and both the audience and the industry will have their wilful way with creativity. The ultimate aim of a novel, to be read with pleasure decades after its creator’s death, is reached in tortuous ways.

Clinton Heylin is the eminence grise of Bob Dylan scholars: co-founder of Wanted Man (the magazine dedicated to studying Dylan’s life and work), long-time editor of its quarterly magazine the Telegraph, compiler of Stolen Moments: The Ultimate Dylan Reference Book and also the author of Behind the Shades, which, when first published in 1991, was rightly praised as the most reliable account of Dylan’s life and career up to that point. Dylan has accomplished a great deal since then, including becoming a Nobel Laureate, so it’s not surprising that Heylin should want to bring his account up to date, especially since a large new collection of Dylan material has recently been deposited in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.

On page 532 of my preview copy of this biography of Philip Roth there is a footnote. In it, Blake Bailey quotes from Roth’s novel Deception, where the character of Philip Roth asks his mistress what she would do if she was approached after his death by a biographer. Would she talk to him? She replies she might, if he was intelligent and serious. Bailey then adds, with self-deprecating wit: ‘Emma Smallwood did not respond to my request for an interview.’ Emma Smallwood is the name of one of Roth’s many lovers. It is not her real name. OK, so: a fictionalised version of the subject of the biography I’m reviewing is quoted in words written by the subject of that biography, speaking about an imaginary biography to a fictionalised version of an unnamed woman.

In June, Commonwealth heads of government will meet in the Rwandan capital Kigali, a city advertised by their Tutsi host, the 63-year-old Paul Kagame, as ‘the Davos of Africa’. Kagame, Rwanda’s de facto leader since 1994 — and boasting more honorary degrees than Barack Obama, although he never finished high school — has become the ‘donor darling’ of the international community. He is why the World Bank has donated in excess of $4 billion, and why, until recently, the biggest bilateral donor has been the UK. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ says the Tory MP Andrew Mitchell, ‘he is a hero for ending the violence.’ Michela Wrong is a British authority on Africa who begs to differ.

Like most novelists, I am a firm adherent to the W.H. Davies principle of finding time to stand and stare. I was once sauntering down Regent Street when a gentleman hared out of a department store, closely followed by two rather healthier specimens. They flung him to the ground, upon which large quantities of merchandise started falling from his pockets. I was fascinated, both by the level of violence the shop’s security was using and by what a captured thief actually says when he’s being subdued. (Clue: not ‘You got me bang to rights.’) After a moment or two another bloke came over to me and a couple of others gawping on the public pavement. ‘Move along there,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for you to see here.

It had been billed as a clash of the Titans. Boston, 22 November 1986: two giants of their field slugging it out in the circus, a shootout at the scholars’ corral. The atmosphere was electric. Here was the long-awaited confrontation between Edward Said, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and Bernard Lewis, emeritus professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. It didn’t disappoint. Ten minutes into the debate on ‘The Scholars, the Media and the Middle East’, Said took the microphone and let rip, unleashing his blistering attack on American scholars, journalists and ‘the Zionist lobby’.

Most of the grander 20th-century diarists had a sniffy air about them, looking down their noses at everyone, particularly each other. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, so snippety in his own diaries, was sniped at in others’. James Lees-Milne thought him ‘a flibbertigibbet’; to Nancy Mitford, he was ‘vain and spiteful and silly’. Kenneth Rose confided to his diary that Channon was ‘a rather stupid man’. When the bowdlerised Channon diaries were first published in 1967, edited by Robert Rhodes James, Rose could not disguise his thrill at how badly they had gone down in his own smart set. At a ‘luncheon party given by Raine Dartmouth at her pretty house in Hill Street...

In the summer of 2014, David Hargreaves was invited by Robert Cottrell, the editor of The Browser, to write a series of articles shadowing, week by week, the course of the first world war. Over the next four years Hargreaves and his researcher and co-author, Margaret-Louise O’Keeffe, brought these out online, and they have now been published, originally by subscription, in a set of four volumes that runs in all to a monumental 2,200 pages. It is one thing to have dreamed up the project, it’s another to have carried it off with the collaborative skill and commitment on show here.

‘Why, Elizabeth, did you not tell me when we first slept together that you were a virgin?’ This is one of the most peculiar letters in English literary history, written in 1934 by the writer Humphry House to Elizabeth Bowen, now widely recognised as one of the major novelists of the 20th century. Bowen was 34 and had been married for ten years when she first went to bed with House in 1933. It’s not surprising that he shouldn’t have expected her to be a virgin, though his rendition of their encounter is bafflingly obtuse: ‘I thought you had some malformation... had I known... how much less gloom would have sat across that breakfast tray!’ The story of Bowen’s affair with House was under wraps for years.

In August 1961, two middle-aged Jewish New Yorkers, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, launched a new superhero comic book for the company that would become Marvel Comics and called it The Fantastic Four. In less than two years, working with either Kirby or Steve Ditko, Lee also co-created Hulk, Thor, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Wasp, Doctor Strange, Nick Fury, the X-Men and the Avengers. Over the past 20 years, movies based on those characters alone have grossed more than $30 billion (three times more than the Star Wars franchise) and Lee made jovial cameo appearances in all of them. When he died in 2018, millions of children born in the 21st century mourned a man born during the Harding administration.

Keats long ago became the meaningless emblem of poetic genius. When the poet Amanda Gorman appeared at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, both detractors and admirers wanted to set her against the highest possible comparison. They didn’t reach for the US’s new Nobel laureate, Louise Glück. They went for Keats: either ‘Amanda Gorman is Keats-level brilliant’ or ‘Well, it’s not exactly Keats’. But what is Keats, exactly? It seems to me that there is a difference between the 5ft English poet who worked for a very few years before dying at 25 in 1821, and the idea of ‘Keats’.

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’ asks the speaker in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Memorabilia’ — a line which recognises how easy it is to misread a writer once they’ve passed into a hazy afterlife of fame, neglect or simple misunderstanding. Yet few of Browning’s contemporaries are as hard to see plain as his own wife: the poet who was known to her family as Ba, signed herself EBB, and published a number of popular works under her married name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During her lifetime she was one of the most admired poets of the age; a framed portrait of her hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, and when Wordsworth died in 1850 there was serious talk of her becoming the first female poet laureate.

This is such a superb idea that it’s a wonder a book like this has not cropped up before. Here we have a critically acclaimed, best-selling novelist, who also happens to be a highly sought-after creative writing teacher, setting out the curriculum of his over-subscribed ‘How to Write’ class in a way that is accessible to anyone... and the book reproduces the texts under discussion. Wow. This has to be the best York Notes ever, flawlessly designed for the exam we all sit without realising: life.

After the storming of Congress last week, numerous American commentators looked at the Proud Boys, the QAnon Shaman and Trump himself and said, in so many words: ‘This is not who we are.’ Undoubtedly true. It raises, however, an interesting supplementary question: who, in fact, are you? Looking through the ranks of those who might represent the best values of America, we arrive quite quickly at Dolly Parton. She came from a family in rural Tennessee of both grinding poverty and honest, decent aspiration. Sacrifices on their part, and a 30-hour bus journey to Louisiana, let her make her first recording in 1959, at 13.

What did Mary Wollstonecraft like and love? This is the question Sylvana Tomaselli, a lecturer at Cambridge University, asks herself at the start of her new book about the writer and philosopher who is often described as ‘the mother of feminism’. After the unveiling of Maggi Hambling’s controversial statue in honour of Wollstonecraft on Newington Green last November, and the vitriolic spats between its detractors and supporters that ensued, a book that refocuses attention on the person at the centre of the storm is a welcome relief. Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, was determined to live independently by her pen.

For some years I chaired the international alliance of centre right and conservative parties, the International Democrat Union. It is an organisation that illustrates the difficulty of defining and categorising right-wing political movements: it is called ‘democrat’, but includes the American Republicans, boasts the Australian Liberals among its avowedly conservative members and includes Christian Democrats, Independence parties, National parties, People’s parties and even one United Workers Party. This variety is more than a matter of nomenclature. What these parties have in common is that they are the main rivals in each of their countries to a party of the left. They are defined more by a shared enemy than having similar programmes of their own.

The Rosetta Stone is the icon of decipherment. As one of the most popular objects in the British Museum, its irregular shape and the once white-on-black of its three scripts — hieroglyphic, demotic, Greek — are distinctive enough to sell countless socks, keyrings and nail files in the museum shop. The stone’s marketable popularity testifies both to the allure of hieroglyphs, including a persistent orientalising idea of their ‘mystery’, and the seemingly miraculous achievement of code-breaking. The latter is most associated with the two men of The Riddle of the Rosetta’s subtitle: the ‘English polymath’ Thomas Young (1773-1829) and the ‘French polyglot’ Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832).

There is nothing wrong with being self-invented. The most interesting people in the world designed themselves. And in this matter Roy Strong, once upon a time the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery, can offer a master class. He has discovered the mines of self-invention to be very deep and richly seamed with treasure. This is no less than his third bulky volume of diaries, and readers have been generously treated to autobiographies as well. While convinced that a scheming Alan Yentob conspired to keep him off the telly for more than 30 years, Roy, with his singular voice, is a national asset, recognisable from innumerable radio broadcasts.

Well, it’s quite the title, isn’t it? It tends to invite comparisons. The first one that occurred to me, though, was that the original Promised Land guy managed to get all the important stuff down on two stone tablets. His would-be successor doesn’t have quite that gift for compression. As he semi-apologises in the opening pages (he feels bad about it, but not bad enough to do a ruthless edit), this memoir was originally envisioned as a 500-pager. A Promised Land is just north of 700 pages, and there’s another volume to come. That speaks of a certain self-regard. Then again, Barack Obama has a good bit to be self-regarding about.

Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’ has gone everywhere in the world since 1830. A professional scholar in Uruguay, Papua New Guinea or New Haven, Connecticut, reading the lines ‘Weeded and worn the ancient thatch/Upon the lonely moated grange’ might want to ask a few questions. Do English houses ever have moats? (Yes — Ightham Mote and Madresfield Court are famous examples.) Can we find houses with a humble thatch and also a moat? (A harder question – Tennyson’s poem set a vogue in landscape design as well as poetry.) Or, taking a different tack, where does the use of the word ‘moat’ as a verb come from? (Easy — ‘moated grange’ is from the poem’s subject, Measure for Measure.) What sort of word was it by 1830?