Book review

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who died aged fifty in 1673, was a divisive character whose life spanned one of the most fraught periods of English history. To some contemporaries, she was one of the wonders of the age, while others considered her one of the silliest writers ever to have taken up a pen. In her last two decades, Cavendish published over a dozen works of drama, philosophy and poetry, including what some consider her masterpiece, The Blazing World. Posterity has seen her obscured and dismissed, the fame she admitted craving granted only in 1929, when Virginia Woolf described Cavendish in A Room of One’s Own as “a giant cucumber” who “frittered her time away, scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity.

Many magicians have passed through Las Vegas since its inception somewhere around the early 1940s: David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, Criss Angel. But possibly its most renowned, yet least acclaimed, trickster was a woman named Gloria Dea.   Dea performed traditional magic — the sleight of hand stuff — but she had a specialty in billiard ball manipulation, tossing the balls so that they seem to multiply and then disappear. A prodigy, you could say — and one of the first magicians, let alone a female one, to set foot on the Strip. In 1941, Dea, who was born Gloria Metzner in Oakland, California, appeared at the Round-Up Room at the El Rancho Vegas. She was not yet twenty years old. Dea lasted a year before Hollywood recruited her into D-movies.

Green-eyed Gertrude Bell belongs in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, that slab of velvety antique that enthralled the English (they were not yet British) in the love-affair phase of their relationship with the Arabs. County Durham-born to a wealthy industrialist father, Bell (1868-1926) was a key player when the Powers tried ineptly to mould the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. She is well covered in the literature and appears in a large hat alongside Churchill in conference photographs. But as Pat Yale announces in this new book: “Her time in Turkey has been largely overlooked.” Bell traveled extensively in that country before the first world war (starting in 1899) and in its aftermath.

It was too dark to see, and the painting was upside down. In 1877 John Ruskin, the leading art critic of Victorian England, attended an exhibition that included paintings by the American-born artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He hated them — and said so. In print. “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued. The following year the argument came to court, on a dark day in a gloomy and gaslit courtroom. The canvases that Ruskin had so disliked were propped up against a wall and barely visible; one was the wrong way up, and another was dropped unceremoniously onto an elderly gentleman’s balding head.

For much of the last century, a young woman’s concept of artistic vocation was forged by the ballet. The dream of being fêted for a body that was drilled, starved and exercised into a perfect instrument was preeminent — until Maria Callas came along. Daisy Goodwin’s fourth novel, Diva, is based on the life of Callas, whose affair with the other most famous Greek in the world, Aristotle Onassis, made her a worldwide celebrity. Her glamour and genius made her a superstar, but her life was crosshatched with tragedy. A singer’s voice, as her teacher told her, is like an amphora filled with golden coins: each time she sings, she is giving one gold coin away. Singing too much, too young, hastens destitution.

Great books make genres jump. It happened with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which looked like a travelogue, claimed to be a novel and felt like neither. Albert and the Whale by Philip Hoare, which recalls and converses with Sebald, is such a work. An antic and original creation, it is not exactly a biography of the revolutionary Renaissance printmaker, painter and theorist of geometry and perspective. For the fuller story of Albrecht Dürer, turn to Erwin Panofsky’s mighty monograph, as Hoare does frequently. Instead, Hoare has made a book as much for Dürer as it is about him. Dürer’s life and art are thrillingly encountered.

Biological differences exist between men and women. Hamas lacks a justifiable reason to kill Israelis. Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. Vaccines work. These are truths which, depending on the political class you’re speaking to, you can no longer say in public. Reading Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me, I thought, “We should add ‘the Free Britney Movement was wrong’ to the unspeakable truths list.” Two years into her freedom, Spears should celebrate her memoir as her umpteenth comeback. She should be sitting down with Oprah, confessing what really led to her 2007 breakdown, and releasing a new album pegged to The Woman in Me.

The first problem about decolonization is the word itself. Colonization is the process of establishing control over a foreign territory and its indigenous inhabitants, by settlement, conquest or political manipulation. But decolonization? It has come to mean much more than the reversal of that process. Today, it refers to an altogether wider agenda, whose central objective is to discredit or downgrade the cultural achievements of the West. Objective truth and empirical investigation are mere western constructs. They are optional ideas which need have no weight beyond the western societies which invented them. But the West has imposed them on the rest of the world by a process akin to the colonial conquests of the past four centuries.

The fellow biographer for whom I always felt the most sympathy was James Atlas. Mr. Atlas, who has left an extensive account of his tribulations in The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (2017), made the fatal mistake of writing a life of Saul Bellow while its subject was still alive. Bellow, you may not be surprised to learn, revealed himself to be a devious, shifty and manipulating old cuss. He interfered, blew hot and cold, disparaged his encomiast’s prose style, intelligence and research techniques and finally remarked, “I like you Atlas, but cut the crap.

When a new book by an author often characterized as a conservative polemicist earns a rave review in the staid Economist, independent thinkers take notice. Christopher Rufo’s articles on recent US radicalism for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal have long attracted wide attention, and now America’s Cultural Revolution has been praised as “meticulous” and “cerebral” as well as “persuasive and well-written.” All true, for Rufo’s book is impressively erudite, reflecting a breadth and depth of familiarity with influential leftist writings that will shame any number of “woke” academics.