More from Books

Saturday

Jane Gardam

People keep appearing

Susan Hill knows exactly how to please. This small, smart, elegantly printed little notepad of a book is a delicious Victorian ghost story, nostalgically and expertly comforting. It opens as smoothly as an M. R. James or Conan Doyle short story, over a good fire in a shadowy room on a winter’s night: The story was told me by my old friend, Theo Parmitter, as we sat in his college rooms one bitterly cold January night. There were still real fires in those days, the coals brought up by a servant in huge brass scuttles. . . . We know this room and we know the professor’s story, too. It is the fine old chestnut to roast upon the coals: the story of the haunted painting. Oscar Wilde examined it in The Picture of Dorian Gray and M. R.

Harriet Sergeant

No mean feat

Rows of black suits filled the China Airlines flight from Beijing to Paris in September 1984. The People’s Liberation Army had ordered its entire delegation of dancers and musicians to wear the same ill-fitting outfit. Only one 17-year-old dancer had disobeyed the order. For this, his first visit to Europe, Jin Xing had bought a dazzling, white three-piece suit. ‘Only I shone out,’ he declared proudly. It is this desire to shine against the bulwark of the Chinese state that defines Jin Xing’s autobiography, Shanghai Tango. It has been no easy feat. Jin Xing was born a boy and became a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army. A sex change saw her start a new career as an international ballerina, choreographer and, most improbably of all, Beijing bar owner.

David Caute

Joan of Arc with connections

This is a book long anticipated, as much in dread of dire news from Zimbabwe as in expectation of brilliant reporting spiced by mordant wit. It does not disappoint. Judith Todd’s chronicle of Mugabe’s crimes against his people appals, yet the ‘life’ of the subtitle has been a high-spirited crusade for justice, democracy and freedom of the press. Firmly attached to the progressive values of Grace and Garfield Todd, benevolent paternalists engaged in ranching, healing, teaching and politicking in south-west Zimbabwe since 1934, their daughter has proven to be cut from the same cloth. But now they are all gone. Through the Darkness displays the sly humour long ago apparent in The Right to Say No.

William Boyd

The artist as a middle-aged man

It’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves at the outset, as we reach the third volume of John Richardson’s stupendous biography of Picasso, exactly where we are. Picasso died in April 1973, aged 91, and it comes as something of a shock to realise that at the end of this volume, in 1932, he’s a middle-aged man entering his fifties: yet he had another 40 years to go. Is it this that daunts us when we try to weigh up the man and his work — his longevity, his century-straddling superhuman productivity? When we think of the kind of artist he was, or even the kind of genius he was, Archilochus’s old adage comes to mind — particularly useful when we come face to face with prodigious gifts: ‘The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The curse of riches

When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely an ill-defined area which included two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and a number of African principalities. The British had acquired the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars not quite in a fit of absence of mind, but with little enthusiasm, and although the Cape of Good Hope itself was of great strategic importance, commanding the passage to India and the Far East, James Stephen of the Colonial Office unpresciently called the lands of the interior ‘the most sterile and worthless in the whole Empire’.

Molly Guinness

Old wine in new skins

Canongate has commissioned various distinguished authors to retell the myths, and whether by choice or bad luck, Salley Vickers got landed with Oedipus. The problem with this story is that the details are so horribly memorable and its poet so good that there is nothing really to add. The Greek tragedians could play fast and loose with the myths and adapt even major details to suit their purposes, but when a story has become so enshrined, we are left with little to do but admire and analyse it. This is what Vickers has done: Tiresias goes to see Freud and tells him the tale. She has plundered the Greek play freely and, in terms of plot, furnished us only with an elongated version of Sophocles, adding a little about Tiresias’ childhood for good measure.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 November 2007

The Fixed Period is the most un-Trollopian thing Trollope ever wrote. It is a first-person futuristic narrative set in the state of Britannula, an island somewhere near New Zealand, in the year 1980. The President of Britannula, John Neverbend, decides to institute a fixed term of 67½ years for the life-span of his citizens, after which they will be dealt a painless and compulsory euthanasia. The Fixed Period is similar in style to a book published a few years earlier, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; in film perhaps its closest kinship is with Logan’s Run or Soylent Green. Let any man look among his friends,’ Neverbend says, ‘and see whether men of 65 are not in the way of those who are still aspiring to rise in the world.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Getting to the bottom of John

The first time I came across John Mortimer was while I was working as a gossip columnist. I had for some reason or another to telephone him in search of a quote, and did what dozens of my kind had done before, and dozens have done since. The telephone was answered by an elderly lady’s high, reedy voice. ‘Good afternoon, Lady Mortimer. I am sorry to trouble you. Is Sir John available?’ The voice, slightly peeved, fluted back: ‘This is John.’ Poor old John Mortimer —- this happens to him, as I understand it, all the time. I dare say it happens too, occasionally, to his second wife Penny, who speaks in a tobacco-seasoned growl.

Graham Stewart

Catch me if you can | 27 October 2007

It is a brave man who attempts to uncover the truth about George Galloway. One slip, one factual infelicity, one unguarded opinion and the biographer can expect to get his head bitten off. For, when it comes to receiving rather than dishing out abuse, the Respect MP and onetime Celebrity Big Brother contestant is no pussy cat. Perhaps therefore it is fortunate that David Morley is a seasoned documentary maker for radio and television who has no known links with the Republican party, New Labour, the security services, the Daily Telegraph or, indeed, any of the numerous entities that Galloway seems to believe are out to get him. Rather, Morley defines his objective early on, making clear that ‘this is not a critique of George Galloway’s political beliefs.

Cressida Connolly

Growing old disgracefully

It is a mark of how various are Jane Gardam’s interests that this collection of short stories does not read as a collection at all, but more as a very agreeable hotch-potch. Only place unites them, for several take place in leafy London suburbs, Hampstead, perhaps, or Wimbledon. The stories are unalike in subject, length and form: there are ghost stories, tales of quiet revenge; what might, in heavier hands, be called social commentary. Inevitably, some are better than others. Flights of fancy, jokes and telling moments spill across the pages. If there is a common thread, it might be described as growing old disgracefully.

Selina Hastings

The triumph of hope over experience

Derek Jackson was one of the most distinguished scientists of the previous century, whose work in atomic spectroscopy contributed significantly to British success in aerial warfare. Throughout his life Jackson remained absorbed in his highly specialised subject, regarded with profound respect by colleagues throughout the world, and yet there was almost nothing about him that conformed to the usual image of the boffin.

Vernon Bogdanor

Strong family ties

Kathleen Burk, Professor of History at University College, London, has written a magisterial overview of Anglo/American relations from 1497, when John and Sebastian Cabot, in Hakluyt’s words, ‘discovered that land which no men before that time had attempted’, until the modern age. Old World, New World is a remarkable achievement, based as it is upon massive and wide-ranging scholarship. It will undoubtedly become the first port of call for anyone seeking to understand this vast subject. But Professor Burk is, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, a fox who knows many things rather than a hedgehog who knows one big thing. Her survey lacks a conclusion, and, in a sense, lacks also an overarching theme. Unlike her former teacher, A. J. P.

Jonathan Cecil

From Cleopatra to Queen Elizabeth

In my childhood we used to make what were called ‘scrap screens’. We pasted magazine photographs, coloured and black-and-white postcards, reproductions, advertisements and flower friezes on to a folding screen, overlapping sometimes unevenly, to create a colourful collage; it was a pleasant, inexpensive pastime. Helen Mirren’s In the Frame is a scrap- screen autobiography. Her story is copiously illustrated with luminous studio portraits of herself, snap shots, stage pictures, film stills and all kinds of memorabilia from letters and telegrams to school books and even Mrs Mirren’s ration book from 1953, an austere post-war memento. Helen’s family was a remarkable one.

Simon Baker

A yarn about yarn-spinners

In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov described the perfect novel during a lecture in Paris which he delivered to an audience including, rather Nabokovianly, the Hungarian football team: What an exciting experience it would be to follow the adventures of an idea through the ages. With no wordplay intended, I daresay this would be the ideal novel: we would really see the abstract image, perfectly limpid and unencumbered by humanity’s dust. Miss Herbert, Adam Thirlwell tells us, is an attempt at Nabokov’s ideal novel — ‘which is not really a novel’. It is a book about novelists and their work, in which we are given themes, motifs and a fairly large caveat: ‘It just has no plot, no fiction, and no finale.’ So what is it, exactly?

Juliet Townsend

The view from the nursery

It was a perpetual source of regret to me at the age of ten that my parents were so boringly agreeable. My attempts to persuade my friends that my father, in reality the mildest of men, was a violent sadist, who regularly whipped me with his cane while uttering the sinister words, ‘I’ve got Tickler here!’ (cribbed by me from the children’s version of Great Expectations) met with a fascinated half belief, but what I really wanted was a Worldly Mother. Children in the Victorian stories to which I was much addicted often boasted one of these. They were generally only seen on their way out to a society dinner ‘in a soft satin dress and pearls, tall and stately but somewhat cold in expression’.

Jeremy Treglown

Stein and Toklas Limited

As in her brilliant study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm’s focus in Two Lives is on the writing of biography, especially the biography of a couple — here, the ebullient Gertrude Stein and her ugly, much exploited lover, Alice B. Toklas — and, behind that, the construction of identity itself. Like Stein’s own work, the book is vivid, elliptical and distrustful of artificial order. It’s un-Stein-like, though, in the lucidity of Malcolm’s underlying thesis: that life-writing often has a lot more in common with fiction than its practitioners have tended to admit. In the early 1930s, Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B.

Philip Hensher

This splendid, brave, mad imagination

The last letter in Ted Hughes’s collected letters is to his aunt Hilda, recounting the way in which the Queen awarded him, two weeks before his death, the Order of Merit. It reads like a dream of wish-fulfilment: Then I gave [the Queen] a copy of Birthday Letters — and she was fascinated. I told her how I had come to write it, & even more so how I had come to publish it. I felt to make contact with her as never before. She was extremely vivacious & happy-spirited — more so than ever before. I suppose, talking about those poems, I was able to open my heart more than ever before — and so she responded in kind. This is not a considered letter, as that repeated ‘more than ever before’ suggests, but a passionately felt one.

Allan Massie

Sympathy for the Old Devil

In his criticism of Sainte-Beuve’s biographical method, Proust observes that it ‘ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is a product of a very different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.’ I would not enter the argument stirred up by Professor Terry Eagleton’s attack on Kingsley Amis if it weren’t for the fact that those who have leapt — gallantly in the case of his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard — to Kingsley’s defence have spoken of the man, rather than the writer. This is understandable.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

A late and furious flowering

Sceptical readers will immediately wonder whether 14 years of any composer’s life really deserve over 1,000 pages of biographical examination. The second volume of John Tyrell’s Janacek certainly goes into events in extraordinary detail — I had a definite sense of foreboding of things to come when, on page 361, it is reported that in December 1919, ‘a button flew off [Janacek’s] fur coat so that he had to have another sewn on’. If we agree that the significance of the life dictates the substance of the biography, however, it seems perfectly reasonable. The last decade of Janacek’s life is truly one of the most astonishing and important periods in musical history. There is nothing that prepares us for it, and we are still coming to terms with it.

Bryan Forbes

King of the lurid spectacle

What a strange, gifted little martinet he was, this celluloid Nixon who demanded that his every word, no matter how trite or banal, was preserved exactly by his ‘field secretary’ while another acolyte, the ‘chair boy’, ensured that wherever he was he could sit down without looking. Surrounded by these perpetual attendants and telling his crews, ‘You are here to please me, nothing else on earth matters,’ he forged a career that began with the silents and went on to encompass 70 films. In the process he became a household word for a heady mixture of religion and sex. This proved a potent box-office martini which made him a multimillionaire who remained virulently anti-union and a much-quoted reactionary voice.