Books and Arts

There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists seem to have gone quiet, or at least unreported; but before then they were everywhere. In 1938, poltergeists kicked off in Thornton Heath, Surrey, and a Jewish Hungarian journalist and psychic investigator, Nandor Fodor, was alerted to strange happenings in the home of a 34-year-old housewife there. The list of happenings is familiar in all poltergeist stories. Furniture moves, light fittings shatter, crockery, money, knick-knacks, even small pictures are thrown through the air, sometimes seemingly aimed directly at individuals.

As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday, 1300. Dante Alighieri, a figure in his own work, has lost his way in middle age and is alone and frightened in the darkness. The ghost of the Roman poet Virgil is about to show him Hell: ‘Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost.’ Begun in the early 14th century, Dante’s poem is, for many, the greatest single work of western literature. With its dramatic chiaroscuro of hellish fuming mists and paradisal stellar regions, the poem is ‘awful’ in the archaic sense of the word (still valid in the Italian terribile), meaning to inspire awe.

Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the office world of Tokyo. The routine at first seems familiar, but intriguing disparities emerge: the present is also a foreign country. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job gives us the minutiae of everyday working life — but not as we know it. Think Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine, freed from lunchtime restrictions. A burnt-out young woman wants a job without responsibility — no stress, no demands. First up: a surveillance assignment observing a novelist suspected of receiving contraband goods.

Gilbert in Oscar Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ Not here. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. At its heart is a writer steely in his determination to entertain, an inexhaustible mine of mots, a nonstop genius of jokes, capable of winning the Nobel Prize for the interview as an art form. It comprehensively replaces Ira Nadel’s Double Act (2002), a biography which Stoppard hoped would be ‘as inaccurate as possible’. (Indian Ink and Arcadia are both explicitly hostile to biography and its hubris.

I first experienced Alison Lurie’s generosity remotely. In December 1989 my friend Janet Hobhouse was renting Alison’s tiny house on Stump Lane, Key West, and I visited. Janet was terrified after a break-in. Alison, away teaching at Cornell, Kindly arranged for a private security guard. I first sighted the celebrated novelist on her deck in February 1996, breakfasting on what looked like cereal and Marmite. Stump Lane was sold, and she had bought a house on Reynolds Street, near the Casa Marina Hotel — opened in1920 for travelers on the Flagler Railway from Miami to Key West. The poet Judith Kazantzis and her husband Irving Weinman had arranged for me to rent the second part of Alison’s house, across her deck. She invited us to dinner.

In 1975, I was commissioned to interview Sybille Bedford, by then a leading light in the literary world. She lived in a small house in Chelsea. As I got out my notebook, she said, ‘I hope you are not going to ask me about my life.’ She spoke freely about her work, though. A Legacy, the novel she published in 1956, had become an instant classic. Evelyn Waugh had reviewed it in The Spectator with all the authority at his disposal: ‘We gratefully salute a new artist.’ In a letter to Nancy Mitford he further praised the novel: ‘What a brilliant plot!’ A Legacy was high art at a time when the Angry Young Man and the kitchen-sink style were low art or no art at all. We found that we had friends in common.

His name was Igor Michael Peschkowsky. When he was five he lost his body hair after an allergic reaction to a whooping cough vaccination and wore a hairpiece and false eyebrows for the rest of his life. In 1939, aged eight, he escaped from Nazi Germany on an ocean liner bound for New York. He never mastered cursive handwriting. He was a cousin of Albert Einstein. Richard Avedon became his social mentor. He dated Gloria Steinem. He passed on directing The Exorcist. In the end he became an EGOT, having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a staggering 10 Tony Awards. In this exhaustive, emphatically chronological biography, Mark Harris recounts Mike Nichols’s rags-to-riches life and professional and personal highs from birth in 1931 to memorial service in 2014.

Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the Eliots ‘ate off solid silver plate, even shepherd’s pie’. In 1968, Freud was having an affair with Perry’s wife Jacquetta. According to her, it was an addiction: ‘Completely hooked, a dreadful drug.’ After two turbulent years, Jacquetta decided to have a baby by Lucian, ideally to be born on his birthday. Her husband agreed to bring up the child as his own, provided the matter was not mentioned again. The laissez aller attitude is partly accounted for (though not by William Feaver) by the 1960s, and the way the young aristocracy embraced the hippy-trippy counterculture. Jacquetta mentions smoking an opium spliff in Paris with Freud.