Culture

As a young girl in Athens, Maria Callas would watch the films of the extraordinary Hollywood actress Deanna Durbin, and, entranced by that child-star’s utterly perfect voice, vowed to become an opera singer. A couple of decades later la diva divina went backstage at a New York theatre to congratulate another former child star with an equally perfect voice on her performance in her major Broadway triumph. The triumph was My Fair Lady, and the star was Julie Andrews. As a young girl in Athens, Maria Callas would watch the films of the extraordinary Hollywood actress Deanna Durbin, and, entranced by that child-star’s utterly perfect voice, vowed to become an opera singer.

‘Have you your next book in mind?’ ‘Not yet, I can’t fix on a subject,’ my friend replied. ‘What about Ouida?’ I said. Actually this exchange has taken place a couple of times, and on each occasion my suggestion was received without enthusiasm. Perhaps it was thought patronising: Victorian romantic novelist, suitable subject for a clever young modern woman. But it was not intended as such, for Ouida was a remarkable woman and a remarkable writer, and I would dearly love to read a good new biography of her. She is, I suppose, largely forgotten, and I doubt if anything she wrote is in print, though you can pick well-worn copies of her books up cheaply in second-hand bookshops. She was born in Suffolk in 1839 to an English mother and French father.

God forgive me, but I do enjoy tales of woe from the Manhattan dating scene. The latest dispatch from the front lines comes courtesy of Rachel Donadio in today's New York Times and happily it doesn't disappoint. At the outset the experienced reader knows this is going to be a corker: Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!” We've all been there. Oh dear. The horror! Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men.

Courtesy of Charles Moore in this week's Spectator: Reviewing Stephen Robinson’s new biography of Bill Deedes in these pages last week, Peregrine Worsthorne was fierce against his old colleague. Worsthorne said that Deedes lacked the ‘willingness to tell the truth to power’ which is ‘indispensable’ to journalism. Bill did indeed hate confrontation, to a fault, but there is something arrogant about the assumption, always made by journalists about ourselves, that we know so clearly what the truth is. Besides, if we do know it, surely our first duty is to tell the truth not to power — that is our second duty, flowing from the first — but to the readers.

Sam Leith reviews Toby Faber's history of Fabergé eggs What a great idea for a book, this is — and how well-executed. Toby Faber has produced, at just the length to suit it, a hugely enjoyable and informative account of the making and afterlife of the best-known examples of the jeweller’s art. Here is a series of love stories; a historical panorama; a tale of grotesque imperial frivolity, of barbarous totalitarian wrecking and of all-American hucksterism; a parable about the nature of value; and, above all, a portrait of the endless and winning absurdity of economic man in pursuit of shiny gewgaws. The first Fabergé egg was given as an Easter present in 1885 by Tsar Alexander III to his wife Marie Federovna.

Why do we write? Dr Johnson had no doubts, or pretended to have none: ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. This is manifestly false, unless you make writing for some other reason one of your definitions of the word ‘blockhead’. In any case it’s not true of Johnson himself. Despite the indolence for which he reproached himself, he was an assiduous correspondent, writing long thoughtful letters to his friends. Likewise, there are those who — obsessively — keep journals or diaries without, until recently anyway, expecting ever to profit from them. The American novelist Jay McInerney has suggested that writing comes ‘out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some gap.

In 1958, Daphne du Maurier published a collection of short stories, The Breaking Point. Justine Picardie’s novel Daphne begins the year of the stories’ composition, 1957. Du Maurier, then Britain’s best-selling novelist, struggles with her own breaking point. Newly acquainted with the infidelity of her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, known as Tommy, she oscillates between anger and despair. Tommy succumbs to a nervous breakdown. Daphne’s mood is not lightened by her current literary preoccupation, a biography of Branwell Brontë. In Picardie’s hands, Daphne dreams of rescuing Branwell from critical obscurity by proving him the author, at least in part, of his sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

Some roles in domestic service truly capture the imagination and have supplied English literature with several of its most enduring figures. There are the manservants from Sam Weller to Jeeves. There are butlers, including the terrifying one who receives the news of Merdle’s death in Little Dorrit with such equanimity, Henry Green’s Raunce, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s infinitive-splitting Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Surely, however, no domestic role has provided so many poignant inventions as that of the governess. From the moment the threat of the ‘governess-trade’ is made to hang over the head of Jane Fairfax in Emma, the 19th-century novel can hardly do without it.