Geraldine Brooks – The Secret Chord

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Bible, Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Geraldine Brooks, King David, The Secret Chord

The story of King David – warts and wonders

I was sent this as a digital copy for review from the publishers via NetGalley.

I have admired Pulitzer prizewinning author Geraldine Brooks’ writing since discovering her 2001 book The Year of Wonders. In The Secret Chord, she is up against a more challenging task in some ways, and yet perhaps an easier one in others.

This the story of King David, from Ancient – History? Allegorical Writing? The Bible, a Holy Book? Many interpretations might be possible.

My knowledge of David was scant – he became King, and Jesus came from ‘David’s Line’ so, clearly he is part of New Testament as well as Old Testament theology.

He was a psalmist, a musician, as well as a king, and many of the Psalms in the book of Psalms are his. He fathered Solomon, fount of wisdom, and one assumes the creator of another Biblical Book, The Song of Solomon, deeply poetic, and also erotic – the song can be read as physical or as spiritual in praise, and this tradition of praise to a divinity which also has elements which could be seen as erotic is one found in other poems of love to the divine. David was the young boy, of humble birth, who slayed Goliath, with a stone. David and the then king’s son, Jonathan, formed a deep friendship. David, who seems to be courageous, charismatic, devotional, and is perceived as a wise ruler, also coveted and raped Bathsheba, his general’s wife, and sent that general into dangerous battle, where he was killed.

David Cuts off the Head of Goliath by James Tissot, (1836-1902)

His almost seems to be an operatic, soap opera story. I found the Bible original, its 1st Book of Samuel Chapter 16 onwards, through the 2nd Book of Samuel and into the second chapter of the Book of Kings, because I was interested to see the source material she had worked from, and from whence a novelist’s imagination, or, even invention, might arise.

To be honest, it’s a fairly bleak and plain telling, and inevitably reads quite drily. (The Biblical telling)  The usual collection of intense smitings and smotings which litters the sometimes sorry history of our species. We do pretty well all of the smitings and the smotings ourselves, without the need of outside agencies, it seems, and utilise those agencies to justify ourselves.

As society becomes more secular (some societies, and I live in one) it perhaps becomes harder to write inside the mind-set of faith base, in a way which can allow readers outside faith to enter into characters and societies for whom it was central, without the reader judging the character as credulous or simple minded.

Brooks does flesh out this rather extraordinary life, and this rather extraordinary world, extremely well. The inevitable parallels to Mary Renault and what she did, particularly in her trilogy about Alexander the Great and the two Theseus books, are not misplaced, though Brooks doesn’t quite manage the hairs up on the back of the neck stuff, the bringing of that long ago time and its mixture of the familiar and the weird, so much into potent reality as Renault does.

David and Bathsheba Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1889

Brooks uses a couple of devices in the telling of her story, which a had a slight question mark about. She took the decision to use the original personal and place names ‘in their transliteration from the Hebrew of the Tanakh’ – so this means, instead of the versions bible readers – and more particularly non bible readers who have become familiar with the place and personal names which have passed into popular culture – are concerned. making the necessary connections may not be immediately obvious. For example, it was not until I found the source material that I realised that the Plishtim were the Philistines. I thought this decision, presumably to add a kind of historical authenticity was not helpful. It may be that a glossary will be included with the published, as opposed to the ARC copy. The combination of the archaic namings and the use of various period terms with the need at times, where she wants to show salty and foul language, such as used by soldiers, somehow grated. This is always a problem, people will always have used such language, how to marry the need for immediacy without losing a sense of place and time : the challenge of quaint and old fashioned versus something which wrests the reader out of period.

There are also decisions taken (which may or may not be accurate) but which leave the reader  (or did leave this reader) wondering how much a modern gloss, a modern viewpoint, is an accurate one, and how much we are unable to see, feel, think into other times. The most obvious, here is the relationship between Jonathan and David. We live in a world which is overtly sexualised; thus it becomes almost impossible for deep love by adults, between the same sex, or between the opposite sex, to be seen in any other way than actively sexual, or as a conscious or unconscious sexual repression. We may, or may not be far too knowing now to enter into a different time. So Brooks makes David a man of broad tastes. In which she may be right or she may not. There is no concrete knowing, either way. But this decision did also put me out of an inhabitation of the past, making me realise that, for example, a Victorian writing this story may very well have accepted a loving relationship between two men without sexualisation.

David and Jonathan Cima da Conegliano, 1507

She is not in any way salacious or gratuitous in her writing about sexual content – we never go into the bedroom, she does not need to do this, as she chooses the device of having the whole story told by the prophet Nathan :

I have had a great length of days and been many things. A reluctant warrior. A servant, a counselor. Sometimes, perhaps, his friend. And this, also, have I been: a hollow reed through which the breath of truth sounded its discordant notes.

Words. Words upon the wind. What will endure, perhaps, is what I have written. If so, it is enough.

Brooks is, as ever, a wonderful story teller, one who makes characters come alive, and one who writes wonderfully.

Going back to the source, she has given rich depth, life and colour to events which were set down and her David is complex, rounded, and as my title suggest, a man full of contradictions, as all humans are.

The Secret Chord Amazon UK
The Secret Chord Amazon USA

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Paula McLain – Circling the Sun

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Beryl Markham, Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Circling The Sun, Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen, Kenya, Paula McLain

Beryl Markham : The Splendid Outcast

Paula McLain’’s well- written second book, Circling The Sun, a biography-as-fiction of Beryl Markham, aviator, horse-trainer, free woman, adventurer, leaves me with the same kind of uneasy questions as did her first novel, The Paris Wife, another biography-as-fiction about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson. Those questions are about the ethics of biography-as-fiction, particularly with those who may have still living children.

Biography itself may of course be flawed, even ‘facts’ are subject to interpretation, but the general tenet of a good biography is not to assume the fictional mantle of identifying what the subject was thinking and feeling – unless of course they left evidence of this, or perhaps there was a third party who reported conversations and recollections (those these of course may be subjectively and selectively filtered by that third party)

The problem (and of course the beauty) of biography as fiction is that the fiction writer deals in what a character feels and thinks, not merely what they do, or have done to them by others. The adding of the fiction writer’s inventive, empathetic, imaginative skills to ‘real’ people, makes the fiction biography SEEM more real than the objectively researched biography, merely reporting verifiable facts. This is precisely because we are taken into the added dimension of understanding and thinking and feeling what a person is like, which the fiction writer has imagined, invented, supposed, and which has been filtered through their own sensibilities.

Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham was an unusually bold, free-spirited woman, even amongst the adventurous time and place which was the British ex-pat community of British East Africa between the wars. Born Beryl Clutterbuck, the daughter of a racehorse trainer, the family emigrated from England when she was 4. At a remarkably young age, barely out of her teens, she was forcing her way into the world of racehorse training under her own steam. This was a male-only commercial activity, and Beryl was the first woman in Kenya to gain a license to train horses – something she continued to do until her 80s. In 1936 she achieved another first, after discovering another passion – flying. She was the first woman to make the solo Atlantic flight from East to West – that is, against the prevailing winds. The first solo Atlantic crossing by a female, Amelia Earhart, from West to East, WITH the winds, had happened 4 years earlier. Earhart of course became a symbol and a figurehead. She mysteriously died young, when, on another flight, her plane disappeared. She was also a woman who undoubtedly did good works, and channelled her adventurous, free-spirit into activities which were of use to society at large – promoting both flying itself and training and championing other female aviators. Markham’s rackety personal life was probably in part responsible for her fall into obscurity

Beryl Markham, triumphant after completing her Transatlantic flight, complete with landing injury

My unease with McLain’s book is this : had this been a fiction about invented people ‘like’ Beryl Markham, Denys Finch-Hatton, Karen Blixen and the rest – using different names, with an explanation that it was closely modelled on known events of their lives, I would absolutely, unreservedly, have five starred this. But the presentation is that this is true, because the events are true – it is an ‘as if’ biography. I was really interested to find out more about Markham, and what I found seemed to make her an even more interesting and far more complicated – and – perhaps, a less admirable (according to our morality) character than McLain makes her. For example, she seems to have been a woman who bestowed her sexual favours much more widely than McLain suggests. There is a kind of noble sanitising going on. And in a strange way, this kind of dishonours the reality of who someone was, as if their reality is not acceptable.. Of course, it’s made more difficult by the fact that by all accounts neither Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) or Markham herself, in their own writings about Africa and their lives, are showers and tellers of the stuff we are always so fascinated by – what goes on beneath the sheets.

A biography of Markham was written, by Mary S. Lovell, who interviewed Markham in her 80s, and the biography was authorised by Markham. It also suggests that ‘the love of her life’ was not the one which is the central one in this book. So, again, I was left very uneasy that this woman’s ‘truth’ had been manipulated because it made a better story. I suspect this was because the Out of Africa film familiarised us with Blixen and Finch-Hatton, whereas some other real people are less well known, and have not been the subject of posthumous interest and speculation

By then we’d climbed above the coffee plants and thorn thickets and a narrow, twisting riverbed winking with quartz. The hill flattened out into a kind of plateau, and from there we could see straight down into the Rift Valley, its crags and ridges like pieces of a broken bowl. The rain had finally cleared, but a billowy ring of clouds rested over Kilimanjaro to the south, its flat top painted with snow and shadows.

As stated earlier, this fiction is a beautifully written, captivating one, but it is probably more of a fiction than a biography, and it is a shame that that is not made clear in the afterword

One of the real strengths of McLain’s writing is the evocation of place, the longing for, and meaning of place. I underlined many passages which rather stopped the breath, painting a vision of landscape which was both intensely itself and ‘more than’, both real and metaphor. She is excellent at describing that yearning for ‘more’ – not more goods, but more meaning. And a life as large, wayward and brave (not to mention, wilful) as Markham’s undoubtedly was, rather suggest a person whose drive was to be unconfined.

There are things we find only at our lowest depths. The idea of wings and then wings themselves. An ocean worth crossing one dark mile at a time. The whole of the sky. And whatever suffering has come is the necessary cost of such wonders….the beautiful thrashing we do when we live

I certainly recommend this as a piece of fiction, but not as a truthful biographical fiction.

I’m really pleased to have been offered this as an ARC, for review purposes, by the publishers, and am now hot on the trail to read Lovell’s biography, Straight on Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham , Markham’s own autobiographical book West With The Night, and Karen Blixen’s (Isak Dinesen’s) far better known account of the time and the place, Out of Africa. Not to mention finding and dusting off my CD of Sidney Pollacks’ 1985 film of this last book, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. Complete with John Barry’s marvellous soundtrack

I do love it when a book sends me so clearly off in a direction to various others!

The book is released in the States, but according to Amazon, will not be published in the UK as a hardback until the end of August, though it is available now on Kindle

Circling The Sun Amazon UK
Circling The Sun Amazon USA

William Nicholson – The Lovers of Amherst

Tags

Austin Dickinson, Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Emily Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd, The Lovers of Amherst, William Nicholson

A cool, restrained meditation on love, poetry and meaning

Although I haven’t read any of Nicholson’s novels before, I am aware of him as a writer of refinement in dealing with a certain kind of English emotional restraint , where `still waters run deep’ . This writerly strength, not to mention this strength in writing the lives of writers, was clearly shown in his stage play, Shadowlands, previously a TV play, later a film, exploring the life of C.S.Lewis, and particularly, his relationship with Joy Davidman/Joy Gresham.

I was therefore attracted to this book, which explores the life and work of another writer, the American poet Emily Dickinson, and also that of her brother, Austin Dickinson, and of Mabel Loomis Todd, who was the principal champion and driving force behind getting Dickinson’s poems published after her death.

Mabel, a young and vibrant woman, and the reclusive middle aged Emily never met, though Emily communicated with Mabel through sending her poems. Mabel, a married woman, and Austin, a married man (though not to each other) had a relationship which began its flowering in the dining room of Emily Dickinson’s house, the only place they could conceivably meet to consummate their affair. Austin was in his 50s at the time of his relationship with Mabel, who was in her 20s.

Mabel Loomis Todd

Austin Dickinson

Mabel was in a remarkably open marriage for 1880’s Amherst, Massachusetts society – her husband, David, had relationships with other women, which Mabel knew about, and sanctioned, and David too, sanctioned and approved of Mabel’s relationship with Austin. Indeed, the two became close friends, and eventually the Todds found land which they could build on, (they had been renting short leases before) and where Mabel could meet with her lover. She and David continued to have a physical relationship. Austin, meanwhile, was in an unhappy marriage with Sue, who had initially been great friends with the remarkable Mabel, until the close emotional, spiritual and intellectual friendship between Mabel and Austin became more than platonic. Sue disliked sex, and Austin and she had been husband and wife without any sexual connection for many years. Emily, meanwhile, wrote poetry of huge passion and spiritual content, which seethes with the possibility that the spiritual, soulful intensity of her writing about love and connection may have been sublimated sexuality – or, possibly that she had had some earlier romantic experience to draw on, in her poetry. Emily never married, and lived withdrawn completely from society, looked after by her sister Vinnie.

Emily Dickinson

I’ve none to tell me to but thee So, when Thou failest, nobody. It was a little tie – It held just Two, nor those it held Since somewhere thy sweet Face has spilled Beyond my Boundary –

What a hotbed mixture of both openness and secrecy, emotional expressiveness and emotional repression, co-existing within the strangle-hold of the morality of the place and the times.

Nicholson structures his book with a further twist – Alice, a British writer, who herself has a rather complex relationship with loneliness, connection and intimacy, is preparing a film script in which she will explore Emily, her poetry, and that complex relationship between Mabel, Austin, and herself. The theme of watching, watchfulness and a kind of distance which in inherent in the idea of Mabel and Austin’s initial use of Emily’s house in which to carry out their tryst – with Emily, perhaps, as voyeur – is echoed by sections in the book where scenes from the screenplay are written from the point of view of Emily, as the eye of the camera, the watcher. And of course, the audience/the reader becomes an even more distanced eye, and thinks of the voyeuristic nature of fiction and film, perhaps

That’s what we do with love. Create a story to overlay the passing events of our lives so that a pattern emerges. What was random develops meaning. Love as story-telling

The real letters between Austin and Mabel are full of philosophical questioning and discussion about the nature of love, its purpose, and the search for meaning. Alice herself is obsessed with these questions, and her two week stay in Amherst academia brings her into contact with a much older man, Nick Crocker, an academic, who is charismatic but also someone searching for meaning, and questioning the nature of love. So there are various prisms through which ideas can be examined.

So what about love? Is that just one of the little pleasures that fills our dwindling store of days?

The Emily, Mabel, Austin story (not to mention the Alice story) is further illuminated by Emily’s poems, which Alice is working into her script, and which she discusses with Crocker.

It also turns out that Nicholson in writing a loosely linked series of novels (this, I think, is title six, and there are various connections between the invented characters on the periphery of this novel, who have been more central in earlier novels, and also, there are characters and events in this which are, in Nicholson’s words, `more seeds which I’ve planted, waiting for their turn to flower’

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine, UK

The Lovers of Amherst Amazon UK
The Lovers of Amherst Amazon USA

Janis Cooke Newman – Mrs Lincoln

Tags

Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Feminist viewpoint, Janis Cooke Newman, Mary Todd Lincoln, Mrs Lincoln

The Unfortunate Insanity of Being Female

This is an absorbing read, based on the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, who was judged insane and incarcerated in a lunatic asylum by her eldest son.

Whilst Mary was clearly a person strongly ruled by her emotions, and someone who held passionate beliefs, inevitably the ‘under story’ has to be – ‘If this intensely emotional, passionately committed person had been male, at this time, would he have been judged insane and incarcerated by his son and the court system’. The answer would seem to be ‘unlikely’

Mrs Lincoln would I suspect not have been judged as insane today. The book’s sympathetic account of the central character reinforces a sense that it was the patriarchal straitjacket women were laced into that was insane, and that those women who were unable to be confined and laced within its cruel strictures were often victims of a rigid, blinkered and unemancipated society, terrified of its own ‘shadow’

2 other books which cover the territory of ‘woman confined by cruel patriarchy’ in a similar historical period are Margaret Attwood’s wonderful Alias Grace and also The Madness of a Seduced Woman , which was also based on a real life case. Marge Piercy’s fictional Woman on the Edge of Time (A Women’s Press classic) is yet another passionately written, deeply wise and compassionate account of how female desire and conviction has been (and still is) seen as threatening and dangerous.

If you enjoyed this book, these 3 should be worth a read, and if you haven’t yet read Mrs Lincoln, a treat awaits. Janis Cooke Newman has written a rich and moving account. It is also very much a love story – between Mr and Mrs Lincoln, and the love of parents and children for each other, and of the alienation within families.

Mrs Lincoln Amazon UK
Mrs Lincoln Amazon USA

 

J. R. Moehringer – Sutton

Tags

Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Crime Fiction, J.R. Moehringer, Novels about America, Sutton, Willie Sutton

Let us all give thanks for gifted storytellers

I enjoyed this enormously. It was a recommended read from another blog, a library collective  – so here is the review which made me buy the book Thanks, bfgb!

This really falls more into the Fictionalised Biography and Literary Fiction genre than it ever does into the Crime Fiction category, even though its subject is Willie Sutton, a notorious, audacious, bank robber who was highly successful (despite getting caught several times!) at bank heists and escaping from prison. Sutton spent more than half his adult life behind bars. He captured the public’s imagination, and became a somewhat romanticised folk hero, not least because he did not personally shoot anyone, and appeared (or so the legend said) to abjure violence against the person.

Moehringer is a stylish, well crafted writer, and the literary devices he uses in this novel work perfectly, giving added dimensions. This is not a whodunnit – we know it was Willie, and we know right at the start of the novel that our protagonist did not get away with it, as it starts with his release from prison, on health grounds, as an ailing, elderly man. Instead, we have a psychological picture of a society and an individual life in that society.

The novel is told in a series of snapshot flashbacks. Following Sutton’s last release from prison in 1969 in his very late 60s, he agrees a deal to tell his story to a paper, and the book follows the day of the interview with a reporter and photographer. So what we have is Wiilie’s life story as told to 2 other individuals, the developing relationship between Sutton and the Reporter and Photographer (this is how they are referred to).

There is Willie’s story, there are references to the research information which may be a little different from Willie’s accounts, which the Reporter has used, and of course, there is the shifting, unreliable fact of subjective interpretation and memory. This has the effect, for the reader, of a continual change of focus, where we think we know where we are going with this, and suddenly the focus is ever so slightly changed, so that the whole picture looks a little different.

American Union Bank Crash Wiki Commons

Sutton was born in 1901 and was active in his profession of bank robbing (with interruptions through incarceration), until his final arrest in 1952. What Moehringer is also giving us is a snapshot of America from the beginning of the nineteenth century, through the interwar and postwar years – but through the prism of 1969 – and beyond, as the book ends finally in 1980, after Sutton’s death

Soupkitchen queue Wiki Commons

Sutton became a great reader and philosopher, an auto-didact, so we are also being given surprising and thoughtful reflections, from, challenging one’s prejudicial thinking, an unlikely source. The reader, like the Reporter and the Photographer, thinks a bank robber must be a particular sort of person, whereas inevitably individuals are more complex than their categorisations A very sure, finely crafted story, beautifully constructed, with a fine, melancholy, romantic, mood.

Rhapsody in Blue!

Sutton Amazon UK
Sutton Amazon USA

Lynn Shepherd – A Treacherous Likeness

Tags

A Treacherous Likeness, Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Crime Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Lynn Shepherd, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley

The French Lieutenant’s Lying Skylark

Lynn Shepherd continues her sure, impeccably researched, stylish, dark, inventive journey into the historical, literary, murder mystery genre.

Lest this all sounds far too much of a hotch-potch, rest assured Shepherd is an author who can collect together bits and pieces of information, literary genres, literary tricks, and make something new so that you don’t even notice the joins

This is her third book with one of two detectives, both called Charles Maddox. Each book can be read as a stand-alone, but there is no doubt there is an especial enjoyment to be had if the reader has made the earlier journeys.

Her first book saw Charles Maddox senior, investigating an alternative world for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park had a much less satisfying, rather glumly good long suffering victim heroine, Fanny Price, rather than the usual spirited, intelligent woman Austen gives us. Using THAT book as a springboard, Shepherd gave the world a twist, and brought a darker world, though still witty, into play, with the investigation of a murder, Murder at Mansfield Park

With her second novel, she got even darker and seamier, in Tom-All-Alone’s (Charles Maddox 2), an amalgam of Dickens’ Bleak House, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman In White, and Henry Mayhew’s real investigation of the dark underbelly of Victorian capitalism, London Labour and the London Poor (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) So, she was still playing with plots from classic novels, and this time, her detective was Charles Maddox junior (great nephew of the Austen detective)

                       Shelley

  Mary Shelley

For this third book, she blurs the division between the real and the imagined still further, as young Charles Maddox (with the elder Maddox involved in the ensuing events forty years earlier) investigates the mysterious, messy lives of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his female circle – he of the tangled romantic liaisons with  very young women (something Shepherd rightly identifies a twenty first century reader might feel remarkably queasy about).

Espousing anarchism, free love, atheism at the early part of the eighteenth century was one thing – and no doubt Shelley and his poetry fed easily into libertarian sympathies (plus of course some soaring, elegiac poetry) However, as biographers have shown (and Shepherd utilises) the man did seem to bring an extraordinary collection of ruined young women, suicides, and the death of children along with him.

There seems at the time to have been a bit of an industry by his widow (Mary Shelley,the probable author of Frankenstein – though this has been more recently in question), surviving son, and son’s wife, to give Shelley’s life a severe whitewashing. Modern biographers have uncovered a lot of supposed very shady goings on, with the whole gang of Shelleys and Godwins of dubious moral scruples. A pretty stinking kettle of fish, all told.

Claire Claremont

It is this tangled web of whitewashed history, possibly very dirty linen and intrigue which Shepherd unleashes Charles Maddox into, turning a dark and shocking tale at times deliciously playful as she makes us, the reader, complicit as omniscient readers to her omniscient narrator.

However, much as I enjoyed this book, and the way Shepherd mangled my perceptions, and toyed with my understanding of what was going on and whom to believe, I am left with a couple of very uncomfortable questions about the ethics of `rewriting’ real people’s lives, particularly with some very murky allegations indeed. I discovered Shepherd `invented’ less than I thought she did, as she very correctly identifies which facts have been unearthed by recent, unwhitewashed biographies, and where she invented, but still, I have questions about `faction’.  It is one thing to imagine how a real person may have felt at the time of a real event, or what their motivations may have been for their real actions; it is quite another to invent dark events, which they are the protagonists of. I was left with a sense of moral ambiguity. What are the ethics of literary invention, in the lives of real people? Shepherd may well have transgressed such ethics. The dead cannot speak.

                                         Shelley and Godwin Tree

I received this as a pre-release ARC

Readers beware, for some obscure reason, exactly as with her second novel, there is a different title and publisher for the US and UK editions – BOTH of which are available on Amazon UK. This novel is called A Treacherous Likeness published by Corsair. In August, A Fatal Likeness (the same book!) will be published by Delacorte. Very confusing and annoying!

A Treacherous Likeness Amazon UK
A Fatal Likeness Amazon USA

Chris Greenhalgh – Seducing Ingrid Bergman

Tags

Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Chris Greenhalgh, Seducing Ingrid Bergman

Well written indeed – but left me feeling like a voyeur,

I enjoyed Greenhalgh’s earlier book, Coco and Igor He clearly has an interest in the lives of artistic stars, and the ability to create imaginative and interesting fiction out of the lives of those writ large in the public eye.

And on many levels, he has done the same, equally successfully, with the story of Ingrid Bergman and her affair with the war photographer Robert Capa.

However, my absorption with this beautifully written, sharply observed portrait of two real people, one of whom still has living children, kept getting a bit uncomfortable. A straight biography is one thing, whether authorised or not – information exists in the public domain and can be accessed – that this happened and that happened can be shown. And an authorised biography will allow the author access to a certain amount of private information, so more detail may be given.

But I found myself slightly queasy reading this fictional account of a real woman and a real man’s motivations, drives and private laundry, somehow laid bare by the author’s skill – in an extremely convincing way – but this still is FICTION, but somehow blurs into a possible/probable reality – that they did have an affair IS known, but the laying bare of the failing marriage Bergman and her Swedish husband had – what is the effect for the child of that marriage?

This book gave me MUCH to think about, aside from its own excellence. Is there a difference between the high quality turning into fiction of the lives of the Brontes which Jude Morgan did so successfully in The Taste of Sorrow and this book, which Greenhalgh seems to manage equally finely. It somehow feels as if there is, because it is fairly recent history, and the central character’s children are still living.

I wanted to easily award 5 stars for the quality of the writing, for the beautiful unfolding of psychology, place and time, but the ethics of the book, and my ensuing discomfort have left me with disquieting questions, which I can’t easily answer. If this book had been written another 50 years in the future, I would not be feeling this edge of unease

And unlike my usual habit of putting photos in wherever I can, it feels curiously wrong to upload photos of Bergman and Capa. The question is, does the quality of the writing (and it is fine, the managing of the voices of Bergman and Capa is done well) excuse the subject matter. Curiously, I found myself almost feeling that it was the good writing itself that was part of the problem, persuading the reader of an interior truth, whereas in fact, although the affair DID happen, there is no ‘interior truth’ – this is the author’s invention only. Less good writing would have left me feeling less ambivalent

Do I think this is worth reading. Definitely, in terms of the writing. And yet, those doubts remain

Jude Morgan – The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

Tags

Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Jude Morgan, Literary Fiction, Shakespeare, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

The writings illuminate the man; the man illuminates the writings

I got introduced to Jude Morgan through the very wonderful The Taste of Sorrow and was swept up by his ability to write what I suppose must be called ‘fictional biography’. In that earlier book, he clearly steeped himself intensely in the writings of the Brontë sisters, and in the known biography of their family, and he produced an astonishingly beautifully written, creative piece. This felt both true to their literature and what we know of their lives, but also expanded by a superb narrative and empathetic imagination. I felt my understanding of the books and the lives had been enriched.

In that earlier book, we were dealing with a more nearly modern world, where facts can be checked, less than 200 years ago. This time, Morgan has freer range with creative imagination, as the facts of Shakespeare’s life are far fewer, though the canon of work by which the man is also revealed, is much larger. And it seems to me that what Morgan has so clearly done is to say ‘by their works, you shall know them’, and has steeped himself in the work, to reveal an idea of Shakespeare the man. Which seems enormously right and proper.

For me, this was an utterly successful book. I spent some few days after reading the book and letting it settle,  wishing I could meet Shakespeare, but realised, with a wry smile, that of course I can, by re-reading the works. Morgan, a beautiful writer, does well with these fictional biographies of other beautiful writers. Phrases from the plays and poems are scattered, very naturally, within the text.

He has even made an acute and creative leap to make a virtue out of the fact that we know very little of the man. Other more defined historical characters trot through the pages, Jonson, Marlowe, Kyd, Dekker et al – but it is Jonson, musing about his friendship with Will, who is given this thought

”How if indeterminacy is Will’s essence? But it can’t be- because if he is nothing, how can he be what he so magnificently is?”

Shakespeare the actor; Shakespeare the writer. Both acts which if properly done, require a kind of negation of the self and the ego, so though invention must come from the actor or the writer’s sense of self, there must be a supreme and non-judgmental ability to get inside other – however virtuous or vicious that other – and inhabit them from within themselves, not from a sense of the actor or the writer commenting on their creation.

Magnificent book, Mr Morgan. Not least also for the literary criticism element – but from showing how Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe et al as people, give rise to who they are, as writers. Morgan illuminates the men by their writing, and it is the writing which illuminates the men. He (Morgan) has a brilliant, almost psychoanalytical understanding of human complexity, and how to allow each person to show their story.

And, not least, is the fleshing out of an even more shadowy figure, whom history has dealt with rather unkindly – Anne Hathaway. With no works to leave behind her, Morgan imagines just what might have made the creative luminary fall in love with the older woman, who was then left only his second best bed, in Shakespeare’s will. Or Will.

The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Amazon UK
The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Amazon USA

Jude Morgan – The Taste of Sorrow

Tags

Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Brontes, Jude Morgan, The Taste of Sorrow

Hewn out of rock, despair and suffering

The dust jacket of the hardback edition of The Taste of Sorrow is black – suggesting far more fittingly the depth and power of this wonderful book, and its sources, than the rather prettified 3 maidens in nighties which is the cover of the paperback. The motto is clearly rewritten thus “Don’t judge a book by the cover of its paperback!”

The lives of the Brontës have given rise to almost as many plays, books and films as the books themselves, particularly Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. The Brontës, by modern reckoning, had wretched, unfulfilled, bleak and narrow lives. Even within their own time they were seen to be socially inept and to be pitied.

It is extraordinary that from the events of those lives came the dark, obsidian revelations of The Professor, Jane Eyre, Villette, Shirley, Agnes Gray, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, – and that from a glittering, dark imagination, with few objectively understood personal biographical events to gestate it, Wuthering Heights was born.

The  Brontë sisters wrote dangerous, bleak revelations about life and human nature, exposing as much of the shadow as the great Russian writer Dostoievsky. No wonder they had to disguise their womanly identity and present the fiction of pen names which the world assumed were masculine.

In a neat twist, Jude Morgan is also an androgynous nom-de-plume – in this case we have a male writer beautifully entering into female sensibilities. Morgan writes elegantly, with discipline, poetry and passion, eloquently telling the story of this complex family. This book illuminates both the lives he is writing about, and the books which were the fruits of those lives. The Taste of Sorrow stands both as biography and fiction. It is a wonderful, wonderful book.

One of the many things Morgan does well is to illuminate the lives we know less about, and to take an imaginative, empathetic stance, understanding how those whom the modern student of biography might come to castigate, came into being who they were. In this case, I gained much more understanding of whom the Reverend Patrick Prunty (Brontë) might have been, and therefore, where genes as well as environment played their part in this otherwise sudden-seeming arising of artistic power.

Morgan does this again, brilliantly, in his later imaginative biographical fiction of Shakespeare,  The Secret Life of William Shakespeare,  where amongst a whole slew of defined characters, Anne Hathaway is given substance, swimming up from the cloudy veil of ‘the woman Shakespeare married’ into a possible flesh-and-blood reality of her own.

I had to search reasonably hard to discover who Jude Morgan is, and his picture, so in keeping with the privacy of the nom-de-plume hiding employed by the Bell siblings I have abandoned my normal insertion of author mug shots.

The Taste of Sorrow Amazon UK
The Taste of Sorrow Amazon USA

Therese Anne Fowler – Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Tags

Biography as Fiction, Book Review, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Literary Fiction, Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald

Golden lads and lasses must, Like chimney sweepers, come to dust

In this novel based on the lives of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and F. Scott Fitzgerald, using published materials by both, and biographical material, novelist Therese Anne Fowler recreates the roaring twenties, and the golden couple, who flew far too near the sun, and burned, whilst burning each other.

Fowler makes an interesting point in her Author’s Notes and acknowledgements:

“Where the Fitzgeralds are concerned, there is so much material with so many differing views and biaises that I often felt as if I’d been dropped into a raging argument between what I came to call Team Zelda and Team Scott.”

This struck a chord for me. During my late teens I was obsessed with F.Scott’s writing. And read everything, including biographies which must definitely have been written by Team Scott, as well as Zelda’s novel. In many ways, dying fairly young, burnt out through alcoholism, and with Zelda’s schizophrenia (which was probably misdiagnosed, more likely bipolar disorder) and also her wild drinking history, the charmed, excessive, damaged couple would probably have been particularly attractive figures to the dramatics of adolescence.

I suppose they were the literature obsessed adolescent’s equivalent strange adulated icons of wild death and destruction that the musically obsessed adolescent finds in Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain et al.

Huge talent, yes – but it is the self-destruct which blazes and attracts.

A glittering success in his early 20’s Fitzgerald used his own life, and the shallow mesmeric round of shocking the conventions, to fuel his fiction. The early books reflect this.

And then of course he wrote The Great Gatsby.

All the reading I did put me firmly in Scott’s camp. Reading Z, and reawakening my memory of all that earlier reading, I’m a little shocked how little I empathised with Zelda. She was brought up in a time and place where `the husband’ was worshipped and indulged and forgiven. Zelda had artistic talent herself, both as writer and artist. Some of her stories were published under Scott’s byline or as joint writings – purely because they could be sold for substantially more than if they were sold as Zelda’s. Sure, they were both outrageous spendthrifts, young and shallow in many ways – and times were changing. There were women who were beginning to make their own way, their own name, realise their own creativity. Several of them were lesbian – Stein, Djuna Barnes – but for the married woman of sensitivity and creativity and independent thought, past upbringing, coupled with masculine thinking that wives SHOULD have as their highest goal their husbands well-being – the world was a hard place

This is a magnificent read – its plunged me back into material I knew well, but slewed it round in a different direction. In another time, born 50 years later, maybe Zelda would have achieved something more for herself

You don’t HAVE to be familiar with F. Scott’s writing to enjoy this, but it certainly adds layer and depth if you do.

Just one warning – this is a book of 375 pages – clearly the publishers were chary of publishing a book of 500-600 pages – which is what this WOULD have been, given normal font size. The type is miniscule – 8 or less- it will probably be best read on an eReader, where it can be put into normal size!

I received this as a review copy from the Amazon Vine programme
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Amazon UK
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Amazon USA