With a new feature, The Yale Review has become an even more wonderful place to go. Here, the announcement by Meghan O’Rourke of a weekly column called Annotating the Archives; archives that really are a treasure trove of 20th century literature and ideas, and which deserve to be brought to the fore and presented with perhaps a differentiated slant or emphasis – and by fine contemporary writers.
An abiding regret for the space left in my literary life with Hilary Mantel’s death; all those bodies and ghosts – royal and heavenly, and not – silenced. Now, just over a year later, today is published in the UK a collection of her essays, exquisitely – albeit misleadingly – titled A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (pub. John Murray). Pulled together by her former editor (at Fourth Estate and now at John Murray), Nicholas Pearson, are pieces from Mantel’s long writing career – on many subjects and from the many stations of her personal and professional life. It is not, then, a memoir in the usual sense, rather I read somewhere it described as a ‘memoir of the mind’ – and what a singularly brilliant mind it was. Perhaps this book will go a little way to fill that space that I still feel.
As her unpublished work and diaries are being deposited with her other papers at The Huntington Library in California and sealed until her husband’s death, for some, this collection is perhaps the last opportunity to wonder at Mantel’s gifts.
In April, a memorial service was held at Southwark Cathedral, around about which time it was revealed that, at the time of her death, Hilary Mantel had been working on an adaption – mash-up of sorts – of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the over-looked Bennett sister, Mary (the ‘plain Jane’ middle one), and tentatively or maybe definitely titled: ‘Provocation’. Lordy! Pride, prejudice AND ‘provocation’! Jane and Hilary in conversation (and now in heavenly union)! Regency England given the Tudor treatment – what a treat that would have been.
Here is The Guardian magazine piece that ends with the extract provided by Mantel’s widower, Gerald McEwen, and which was read at the memorial service. (What a divine thought: Darcy is not the brightest!) There are interesting reflections from McEwen and others, and I was reminded of Mantel’s Reith Lecture in which she said: “the dead are invisible, they are not absent”. I didn’t remember that to be a quote from Saint Augustine (looking back, those were indeed the first words of her first lecture), but it does then seem appropriate that her memorial service was held in Southwark with its ancient Augustinian tradition.
Essays are a favorite ‘filler’ if you will – ideal reading material when time is limited, on train or plane, when sleep escapes. And, there can’t be much better than those from Joan Didion who so magnificently chronicled the America of the sixties through to the new millennium. And (courtesy Amazon Prime), that is to whom I have flown of late. And, as coincidence would have it, in the form of her legendary collection, “The White Album”, from which this NYT piece last week springs, and in which the writer and academic, Timothy Denevi, is inspired by the release by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum of the Jean Stein Personal Papers that includes an audio recording of an interview Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, gave to Jean Stein in 1971.
The first and title essay of the collection has almost legendary status; in the first instance for its opening sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” (An oft quoted statement that has come to profoundly mean anything – or nothing at all!) But, more generally, for its sweeping panorama of the social and cultural landscape of the sixties and seventies told through diverse narratives – I mean, the whole kit and caboodle are touched upon: Vietnam, Black Panthers, Manson, The Doors, Joplin, and so forth, and including of course dead Kennedys. And it is on this latter, specifically the circumstances behind why we find Didion watching Robert Kennedy’s funeral on television at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968, and that seemingly corresponding to an appalling mental health diagnosis revealed in this opening section of her essay, that has evidently been speculated upon by a faction out there in literary nirvana that could be labelled (Denevi does so) as Didionologists. Now, I haven’t ever given too much thought to the whys and wherefores of her brief mention of being in Hawaii at this time, but presumably for the über Didion fan there must be more to the story.
And they were not wrong it seems. For, in considering the interview with Stein, it is clear from Denevi’s article that it was there in the glaring light of Hawaii in that first week of June 1968 that Joan Didion became overwhelmed by the darkness engulfing her country, became acutely aware of its cemented inequalities and lack of cohesion and, as observed by her in Hawaii, the delusional state of her fellow country men and women – their obsessions; their consumerism; their opportunism and an extreme self-possession: JFK, MLK, RFK – well, WTF, not my problem.
A whole nation was in the midst of a breakdown and belonged on the couch. Hardly to be wondered that it was there that Didion soon landed on her return to Los Angeles. Nor that, upon reflection and with or without a clinical diagnosis, she would have found her symptoms unsurprising.
[…] By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.
Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (p. 15). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
Dunne and Didion revealed in the Jean Stein interview the profound affect Bobby Kennedy’s murder had upon them, and how they saw it as the culmination of years of societal disturbance, what Dunne called “the final unraveling of a very dark tapestry”.
Unfortunately, Stein’s audio tapes are not available on-line so I can only give credence to Tim Denevi’s version, but a very thoughtful, well-informed one it appears to be. He may not be one of those above mentioned -ologists, but he is obviously an admirer of Didion and well-versed in the cultural time that she has come to personify. A really interesting read, to which I would only add two further vignettes from the essay.
Firstly, towards the end of that horror year, one cold rainy morning, Didion was driving between Sacramento and San Francisco on her way to report on the latest campus “revolution” when a line from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”: Petals on a wet black bough began pulsating in her head. At the end of the day she considers whether “[the petals] represented the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie…”. An interesting interpretation. A very famous line for sure, but she doesn’t say whether it may had been planted there by a particular episode, the state of society in general or at least as she saw it or her state of mind – these last two being the sort of same thing anyway. This perhaps something else for the Didionologists!
And, then, in August 9 1969, Didion is in a swimming pool in Beverley Hills when she hears about the murders at the Tate Polanski house on Cielo Drive. Contradictory, seemingly bizarre, reports and rumours spread like wild-fire. Everyone is appalled, but …
I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.
Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (p. 42). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
Towards the end of the essay, Joan Didion writes that many in Los Angeles believed this day to be the abrupt end of the sixties. She says: The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
From Juneteenth to the Fourth of July; it is but a couple of weeks, but for many Americans it could symbolize a life time of experience and expectation – ways shared and often not.
This Fourth of July 2021 being the very first that follows the very first official national Juneteenth, I let speak historian and law professor, Annette Gordon-Reed in today’s guest essay for The New York Times.
Pub. Liveright, 2021
No, I haven’t read her recent book which is an essay collection called On Juneteenth (I did read the excellent The Hemingses of Monticello several years ago) that reaches into her Texan childhood, but will certainly do so. Given her heritage, and after reading the NYT piece and this interview at The Harvard Gazette, Professor Gordon-Reed is definitely the person to go to as June turns to July and no star should stand alone.
Should an outsider dare to offer her opinion; I would suggest Fourth of July celebrations aren’t going anywhere fast, but Juneteenth as a new national holiday, with a narrative that is peculiarly fitting for these times and with appeal to a new generation of Americans, may gain in traction and attraction. It is to be hoped, as Professor Gordon-Reed pleads for, that these days do not fall into competition rather are seen as complementary facets in an ever evolving national identity.
There are names in journalism that everyone knows – Janet Malcolm, who died on June 16 in New York City at 86 years of age, is one such. During her almost sixty years at The New Yorker, she wrote a multitude of pieces over an extraordinary range; some I have read but most I of course I have not – being (funnily enough!) once too young, and later, before the digital revolution, while the said esteemed publication came my way only sporadically.
Interesting, are the controversies commented on in The New York Times obituary – serving to remind of just how radically the print media and journalism has changed in the last decades – how trite Malcolm’s transgressions now appear and how prescient her ideas about what good journalism is and what it could and could not do.
Also, in the NYT obit, and as one forever on the watch for lurking wolves – hunting in pack for easy prey, with family in tow or home in the den – I note with delight the link to her great 1995 essay in The New Yorker; entitled “A House of One’s Own” and inspired by the Stephen/Woolf/Bell family house-hopping, correspondence and biographical works, including Quentin Bell’s famous Woolf biography, and culminating with conversations with Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell during a visit of her own to Vanessa’s Charleston home. Malcolm brilliantly explores the Stephen sisters’ coming of age and complicated relationship; with others and with each other and brings Vanessa out of the shadow of her more famous sister. She surprises with details of the familial animosities and inconsistencies that the protagonists left in their wake for the next generation to grapple with. But, in considering Angelica Bell’s bitter recriminations, what Malcolm also does in this essay is articulate her own personal theory of biography; one in which choices have to be made, circumstances rarely prevail and moral certitude anything but.
In what I have written, […]I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous. Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, […]and if we pause to remember that [they] were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves, we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely, that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology—all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa. […] Another biographer might have made—as a subsequent biographer may well make—a different choice. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their actions and characters assume in the books written about them.
Finally, The New York Review of Books, to whom Janet Malcolm also often contributed over very many years, kindly provide a peep into their archives (probably for a limited time) to celebrate a great journalist’s life. From their mail of June 17, 2021:
Free from the Archives:
Janet Malcolm, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, died yesterday at the age of eighty-six. Between 1981 and 2020, Malcolm published thirty-eight pieces in our pages, including the essay below, part of her career-long meditation on the hazards of writing about other people. “Almost from the start,” she writes, “I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism.”
The Morality of Journalism
There is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art.
25 June 2021: There have been numerous tributes to Janet Malcolm in the last days, but I would just like to mention one last one; an antipodean perspective that unites her with another that I have long, long, admired. Should one have read any of Helen Garner’s non-fiction works, it would surely not surprise that she would have been influenced by Malcolm, in style, in sensibility and in methodology. (It also should be said, both writers shared a talent for attracting controversy, and not shying from it, and that Malcolm was not uncritical of Garner on a book and its repercussions that received intense scrutiny in the Australian literary scene and beyond, and that this appears not to have affected Garner’s admiration.) Here in a Guardian tribute adapted from her introduction to the Australian publication of an essay collection entitled “Forty-One False Starts“, Garner says:
To open any one of her books at random is to find myself drawn back into that unmistakable sensibility, that unique tissue of mind, and to grasp how deeply I am indebted to her. […]
[…]I saw manifest [in her Plath biography,The Silent Woman] what I was at the time painfully trying to learn: the fact that beneath the thick layers of a writer’s self-censorship, of her fear of being boring or wrong, lies a whole humming, seething world waiting to be released. I learned from watching Malcolm in full flight that I could go much further than timidly nibbling at the edges of people’s peculiar behaviour. I saw that I could get a grip on it and dare to interpret it, to coax meaning from it. The tools were already in my possession. […] that in journalism, as well as in fiction, I could call upon the imagery, the spontaneous associations and the emblematic objects that I had learned to trust when I myself was groaning on the therapist’s couch.
Another one, most favoured by many, and by me; so elegant her prose, so singular her voice. And, here is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie now, with three quite different pieces of writing, but all seeped with ideas about belonging – to family, to nation; about losing – those we love, freedoms taken for granted; and about fickle power – as a tool to control or to set one free. All are recent, very recent, very contemporaneous in style and subject and intent.
Firstly, Zikora. As modest a work as it is in terms of length, so wide its sociological and psychological scope; and all displayed in the compact first person narrative of a successful professional Nigerian woman, Zikora, about to give birth surrounded by the cool accoutrements of western medicine. At her side, the mother who she does not know how to please, and in the conspicuous absence of a partner, Kwame, deemed “perfect” and then to do “a runner”, and from whom she struggles to let go, and all the while reflecting upon her complicated Nigerian family and their complicated relationships, the awkwardness of her place as an African woman in the United States where her Blackness is always writ large. And, in the end, wondering herself why she persisted in forgiving the men who did her wrong – Kwame was not the first, and then there is the father who had deserted her mother (and her) and started another family, but whose attention she still craved. And when it is over, a new life brought into the world, a realisation is in the dawning that just as her thoughts flew to Lagos and her impossible family, it is alone her mother who has flown to her; her difficult, impossible to please mother who never left her and was with her now.
Interesting, in another respect, is that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has chosen to publish this through Amazon. I dare say this will not impress some, but it does actually make sense for a “small” work at a small price that she would have wanted to make available to as many people as possible.
This links to Amazon.de in Germany (because that’s where I am) but it is of course at every other Amazon out there in the big wide world.continue reading…
Recently, I enjoyed very much picking my way through this 2016 selection edited by Jesmyn Ward; someone I have been truly thrilled to discover in recent years. Presumptuous of me perhaps, but I think I have read enough of Ward’s work and garnered enough information about some of the known aspects of her life, to understand her concerns as a writer and how her identity as a Black Southern woman is the beating heart of her creative output.
A project that came out of Jesmyn Ward’s anger and frustration, not just at the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin (to whom amongst many she dedicates the book) but long simmering within from the violent deaths of young black men close, very close, to her. Collected are some of the voices of a generation of Black writers, in the middle of life like herself, who articulate in their own personal and creative way their anger, their fear, their grief, but never without hope. Her introduction expands upon her motivation and intentions, and is a valuable piece in and of itself.
Ward makes a further contribution of her own in an essay called “Cracking the Code”, which is a very interesting appraisal of her personal genealogy and is, in itself, exemplary of the intricacies of race and how it manifests over generations; not just biologically but in the stories told and assumptions made. Now, given her roots in the Mississippi delta, Ward knew enough from family lore to surmise a broad mix – African, Native American, Creole, European – but the results of a 23andMe test gave her pause for thought. Strongly identifying as Black all her life, and that it surely followed that her ancestry must lay predominately on the African continent, Ward was momentarily taken aback when the analysis in fact concluded her to be of thirty odd percent sub-Saharan African ancestry and in fact forty odd percent European. The discrepancy is relatively small, but it bothered her. Who am I?
But it was only a momentary distraction, for Ward then rationalises genetic information to be that which it is, one piece only of the puzzle – just as relevant, or more so, is the familial, societal, cultural history that formed her and which she embraces (and which embraces her back). Nor does she throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak – Heaney, Larkin, Harry Potter amongst others are more than welcome still in Jesmyn’s world. (And, Doctor Who! The Doctor? I ain’t ever met a Doctor fan that I didn’t like – even if my original Doctor is of an earlier regeneration.)
Also, and she doesn’t mention this, but any DNA databank is dependent on input, and is always expanding, and as time goes on that affects the analysis parameters. Should Jesmyn have another test now, some years on, she would almost certainly find that again she is not exactly that whom she thought she was. In some ways, the reading of the code, if not the code itself, is as fluid as the greater identity of any person through a lifetime.
such and such, …” – how often I have started a sentence so; inconsistently placing a hyphen, as in ‘re-reading’, or sometimes not – how then delighted I am by reading this essay written by Larry McMurtry in The New York Review of Books in 2005. (The NYRB is showing a great kindness of late by heavily digging into their archives, but available for only a limited period I would suggest.)
Referring to Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, McMurtry says:
[…Woolf…] records that his widowed mother, Marie Woolf, got herself a copy of Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, kept it by her bedside, and reread it “dozens of times.” …As one who has so far failed to make it through Rasselas even once, I consider Marie Woolf’s devotion to the book a matter worth pondering. […Should what WooIf said be true …]—Marie Woolf was probably the world’s biggest fan of Rasselas, […as I…] might claim to be the world’s biggest fan of Slowly Down the Ganges, a wonderful travel book by Eric Newby, which I have been rereading more or less continuously since 1965.
And does then go on to ponder whether rereaders generally have the “one book fetish” he shares with Marie Woolf, or are more inclined to reread over a greater range. Anthony Powell and Shakespeare, but a thing for The Sun also Rises (humanising him, says McMurtry). Kenneth Clark and Ruskin, but Clark takes a shortcut and edits a collection (presumably including his favourites), always to keep near. And Edmund Wilson and Cyril Connolly ? Rereading was par the course inherent to their work, but one must think also an abiding pleasure. Did they have a “talisman”? McMurtry seems not to know. One could though go asearchin’ in the University of Tulsa repositories for clues. (By the way, okay Wilson is a renowned American literary figure, but I always wonder why the papers of others – like the aforesaid, and very British, Connolly – end up in universities in the middle of the US! Yes I know the answer I suppose – $$$!)
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