George Orwell and me

Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three weeks old, he was adopted. Nine months later, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died at 39, after an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic she was given for a hysterectomy. Family and friends expected Blair’s father, Eric, to un-adopt him. Fortunately, Eric, better known as George Orwell, was an unusually hands-on dad for the 1940s.

Orwell and Eileen had wanted children for years, but he was sterile and it is likely that she was infertile as a result of uterine cancer. Having finally agreed to adopt after their struggle, Orwell was not going to give up on his son. “The thing he wanted most in life was to have children,” says Blair. “And now I was his family.” Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian

il figlio adottivo di George Orwell parla del suo avventuroso e fragile padre

The Grammar of Angels

Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. [...] An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels. [...]

Once he had mastered the orthodox disciplines, Pico found himself hungry for more. He sought out Jewish scholars to teach him Hebrew and Arabic, and became convinced that there were secrets in the ancient texts of the east, accessible only only to those who knew how to interpret them. Writing excitedly to a friend, he declared that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible contained “the entire knowledge of all arts and wisdom both divine and human”. Unfortunately there was a catch: “This knowledge is hidden and concealed.” Dennis Duncan, The Guardian

recensione alla nuova biografia di Pico della Mirandola di Edward Wilson-Lee dal titolo affascinante, The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language (William Collins).

Sonny Boy

Al Pacino, whose nickname “Sonny Boy” comes from the Al Jolson song of that title, begins this fine memoir in 1943 when he is three and his mother, Rose, a pretty, sensitive factory worker, starts smuggling him into the local picture house. Together they drink in the stories unspooling from the silver screen, doubly delicious since their own lives are so bleak. Rose’s impossibly handsome boy-husband has already skedaddled to another marriage and Rose has taken little Alfredo back to the South Bronx to live with her parents. Sonny delights in the role of provider and protector, buying his mother Kotex from the drugstore and shouting at the construction workers who dare to leer. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino is published by Century

The Uptown Local

One night in July 2013, Leadbeater, then 24, was drinking and smoking with his older brother and friends outside his parents’ house in Kearny, N.J., when he opened an email from the poet James Fenton, his mentor at the time in the MFA program at Columbia University. Earlier in the day, Fenton had sent a cryptic email about an unnamed “well-known writer” searching for an assistant, and Leadbeater had immediately expressed interest; now, Fenton revealed that Leadbeater would be interviewed by Joan Didion. “Whatever criminal gamble my father had made — desperately poor, abused horrifically, thirty years of manual labor, a few years of wire fraud — had paid off,” Leadbeater writes. “In one generation, we’d gone from the basement of the gas station next to the junkyard in New Jersey to the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, Joan.” Kristen Martin, The Washington Post

What Orwell Really Feared

The Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to get away. From what? Stephen Metcalf, The Atlantic

John le Carré's serial philandering

“My infidelities,” he wrote to me at a time when, for better or worse, the issue had come to dominate our discussions, “produced in my life a duality & a tension that became almost a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind … They are not therefore a ‘dark part’ of my life, separate from the ‘high literary calling,’ so to speak, but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.” Dan Fesperman, WP

citazione dalla nuova biografia di le Carré di Adam Sisman, The Secret Life of John le Carré (Harper), che promette di rivelare molti pettegolezzi, tralasciati nella precedente bio.

Flirting With Danger

In April 1920 a Baltimore heiress was arrested in Russia, accused of being a secret agent. Marguerite Harrison (1879-1967), whose wedding trousseau had numbered 40 outfits, now wore lice-infested clothes and a pair of men’s shoes. Imprisoned without trial, she would spend 10 months in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka jail, including time in solitary confinement. [...]

In “Flirting With Danger: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy,” Janet Wallach presents a compelling story that pulsates with the energy of a thriller.  Moira Hodgson, WSJ

Flirting With Danger è pubblicato da Doubleday.

Capote’s Women

The biggest tragedy of Truman Capote’s altogether tragic life was that he never got to write Answered Prayers, the novel of high society shenanigans that he and the rest of the world knew would be his masterpiece.[...]

The main characters in Answered Prayers would be a group of high-society women whom Capote referred to in real life as his “swans”. They included Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith and CZ Guest, as well as Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli and Pamela Harriman. They were immensely rich, clever if not intellectual, better with horses than children and never off the best-dressed list. They all also adored Truman Capote, the tiny, camp southern journalist who loved nothing better than a bibulous lunch at Elaine’s or La Côte Basque larded with some vicious gossip, typically concerning whichever swan had just left the table to powder her nose. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

nella foto: Truman Capote con Lee Radziwill nel 1966. Il libro di cui si parla è: Laurence Leamer, Capote’s Women (Hodder & Stoughton).

John le Carré visto da John Banville

David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, was tall, muscular, and physically forceful, even into old age, and possessed of what used to be called film-star good looks. He seemed, on the face of it, wholly at ease with the world and with himself. But what the camera so often revealed, behind the confidently winning smile, was the wounded man whose mother, when he was five, abandoned him without even saying good-bye, and who after he had become the successful novelist John le Carré was asked by his father to reimburse him for the cost of his education. The New York Review of Books

e anche, sempre sulla New York Review of Books, un interessante articolo sul nuovo libro di Adam Kirsch, The Revolt Against Humanity (Columbia Global Reports)

If humanity were to disappear from the Earth, what would be lost? On the human scale, the answer is everything; but on a planetary scale, it’s tempting to concede that such a loss might amount to a net gain. It is probably not necessary to enumerate the various ways that humanity has been unambiguously bad for the planet and pretty much every other living creature on it. But we tend not to think of our species, and the prospect of its extinction, in such bluntly utilitarian terms. We’d rather we weren’t so terrible, but we’d also like to think, even if it means fooling ourselves, that we might in time become less terrible—and either way, an enthusiastic embrace of our extinction would surely be taking things a bit far.

Or would it? This is the question that animates The Revolt Against Humanity, a brisk and bracing new book by the poet and critic Adam Kirsch. NYRB

 

Jean Rhys

There isn’t an adjective more appropriate than “haunted” to describe the deeply troubled, self-lacerating, and finally (to a degree) triumphant life of the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys. As presented by Miranda Seymour in I Used to Live Here Once [Norton], her richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic new biography, Rhys appears to have been haunted by memories of her girlhood on the small, largely impoverished island of Dominica, then a British colony. Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review

Emmanuel Carrère e TS Eliot

 ... non hanno nulla in comune, ma sono il soggetto di due articoli interessanti, che mettono in luce i lati inquietanti dei due scrittori. Di Emmanuele Carrère parla Ian Parker sul New Yorker. Ecco l'incipit dell'articolo:

Emmanuel Carrère, who writes with the clear-eyed judgment of someone who has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people, was eating lunch one day last fall in a restaurant in north-central Paris. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, a film director and Carrère’s partner, had joined him; they live nearby, in an apartment as spare and as sunny as one in a yogurt commercial. 

di TS Eliot parla Erica Wagner su The New Statesmen:

Withdrawn and prejudiced, the poet is hard to warm to – but Robert Crawford’s new biography shows how Eliot’s second marriage transformed his life.

si allude alla nuova biografia di Eliot, Robert Crawford, Eliot: After The Waste Land (Jonathan Cape).

Bernard Malamud's Mistress

Dusty Sklar intervista Arlene Heyman, psicanalista newyorkese che, negli anni '60 fu l'amante di Malamud:

Dusty Sklar: When did you attend Bernard Malamud’s class? Why did you choose his particular class?

Arlene Heyman: In 1961 I was a sophomore at Bennington College, 19 years old, when I first heard that Bernard Malamud would be coming to Vermont to teach creative writing. He had already won the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel so he was known and respected in the literary world—which was the only world that mattered to many of us. Tablet Magazine

Smells

If all our genius lies in our nostrils, as Nietzsche remarked, the nose is an untrained genius, brilliant but erratic. The human nose can detect a dizzying array of smells, with a theoretical upper limit of one trillion smells—yet many of us are incapable of describing these smells in words more precise than smelly and fragrant. Jude Stewart, The Believer

Un bell'articolo sugli odori, un altro su come si legge un libro (sono sempre stata incuriosita da come si legge!). 

The 20-page rule: Novelist Mark Billingham advises readers to angrily launch a book across the room after 20 non-gripping pages – but almost 40% of people will keep going right to the end, The Guardian

infine Hannah Arendt, sempre affascinante:

As her friend Mary McCarthy once said, Arendt was “a magnificent stage diva”.  Christopher Bray, The Critic

What we got wrong

Il Guardian festeggia i suoi 200 anni raccontando i suoi peggiori errori. "But the most noticeable missteps stem not from the news pages but from the editorial column. For it is here that readers find out what the paper thinks about the great issues of the day. And it is here that mistakes are inked most indelibly into history, whether they relate to suffrage, reform or, most notably in recent years, the debate over Brexit." Randeep Ramesh, Guardian

New York

I walked to Central Park. It had suddenly become warm and I was so jet lagged I thought I might faint. I found a place near the entrance to the park under a tree and collapsed on to the grass. Lying on my back, looking up at the big American sky between the leaves, I saw something hanging from the branches. It was a key. A key on a red ribbon that someone had hung on a branch and forgotten to take with them. I wondered if they had deliberately left it behind because they were never going to return to wherever the key belonged. Or perhaps they wanted to close a door on a chapter of their life and leaving the key behind was a gesture of this desire. There is always something secret and mysterious about keys. They are the instrument to enter and exit, open and close, lock and unlock various desirable and undesirable domains. Deborah Levy sulle case che ha sognato e sogna, sempre sul Guardian

Come parlare di cose difficili, tipo la morte, i soldi e il sesso: ce lo spiega Anna Sale in questo podcast del New York Times

 

Pretend It's a City

 

Is there anything more delightful than watching Martin Scorsese enjoy someone? One of the best things about his new documentary series, “Pretend It’s a City,” is getting to see the filmmaker react to his subject, the author and humorist Fran Lebowitz, who is also his good friend. Ten years ago, Scorsese made “Public Speaking,” his first documentary about Lebowitz, which was an ode to a vanishing breed of New York celebrity, as well as a portrait of the city itself. Sitting in a booth at the Waverly Inn, Lebowitz expounded on her various hobbyhorses, including her rejection of technology, her love of talking, and her addiction to smoking. (“The clerk said, ‘Oh, you know, Marlboro Lights, they’re on sale.’ And I thought, Really? Why? . . . They could be a million dollars, I don’t care.”) Now Scorsese and Lebowitz have made a kind of sequel, which comes, in the manner of the hour, as a streaming Netflix series rather than a feature-length film. Naomi Fry, The New Yorker

Nabokov in Utah

The slender Russian man is on vacation. He has an arrogantly beautiful face and is accompanied by an oddly tall little boy, as he stalks up and down a trout stream in the Wasatch Range, a few miles east of Sandy, Utah. They deploy butterfly nets. “I walk from 12 to 18 miles a day,” he writes in a letter mailed in July of 1943, “wearing only shorts and tennis shoes … always a cold wind blowing in this particular cañon.” Da Robert Roper, Nabokov in America (Bloomsbury USA), theamericanscholar.

Tutto su Hitchcock

Even the biographers, watching the life ‘start at zero’, have struggled to establish where the motivation for the inventiveness came from. The most popular hypothesis, not least because Hitchcock himself promoted it so vigorously, concerns timidity. ‘The man who excels at filming fear is himself a very fearful person,’ Truffaut observed, ‘and I suspect that this trait of his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear ... David Trotter, lrb.

Ecco le nuove biografie su Hitchcock:

• Peter Ackroyd, Alfred Hitchcock (Chatto)
• Michael Wood, Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest)
• Jan Olsson, Hitchcock à la carte (Duke)
• Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Vol. II, a cura di Sidney Gottlieb
  (California)

Una nuova biografia di Saul Bellow

This spring, on the centennial of his birth and the tenth anniversary of his death, Bellow will burst from posthumous detention. ... But the main event will be Zachary Leader’s biography The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune [Knopf], coming out in May, which portrays Bellow up to 1964. Orchestrated by Bellow’s literary executor, literary superagent Andrew Wylie (who replaced Wasserman), this massive life by Leader, also Wylie’s client, is transparently meant as a corrective to the authorized biography published by Atlas in 2000, which presented Bellow as a racist and a woman-hater, among other things, and accelerated Bellow’s fall from literary grace. Lee Siegel, volture.

Bob Hope

Ora dimenticato, Bob Hope sembra fosse un grande comedian. "When Bob Hope died in 2003 at the age of one hundred, attention was not widely paid. The “entertainer of the century,” as his biographer Richard Zoglin calls him, had long been regarded by many Americans (if they regarded him at all) “as a cue-card-reading antique, cracking dated jokes about buxom beauty queens and Gerald Ford’s golf game.” A year before his death, The Onion had published the fake headline “World’s Last Bob Hope Fan Dies of Old Age.” Though Hope still had champions among comedy luminaries who had grown up idolizing him—Woody Allen and Dick Cavett, most prominently—Christopher Hitchens was in sync with the new century’s consensus when he memorialized him as “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny". Frank Rich, nybooks.

Hope: Entertainer of the Century, Richard Zoglin (Simon and Schuster).

Le traduttrici di Isaac Bashevis Singer

Pare che Isaac Bashevis Singer avesse molte traduttrici (48) che fungevano anche da muse e probabilmente da amanti. The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer è un documentario girato dai registi israeliani Asaf Galay e Shaul Betser che ne racconta la storia anche raccogliendo le testimonianze di chi tra loro è ancora in vita. "Isaac Bashevis Singer, the famous Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner wrote with a 'harem' of dozens of translators behind him. Beyond simple translation, these women were a vital source of his creativity. The inspiration he drew from them came in many forms, often mixing romance with professional aspirations. Today nine remain to tell his story". mosaicmagazine.