August 26, 2012 |
Television is the devil. My strategy for avoiding its sinister stranglehold, not to mention its deadly inertia rays and mind-eraser beam, is to pick up a book. And then another one. And so on. And then, ironically, when you’re asked to be on TV, having watched it is of absolutely no use whatever, whereas reading will give you plenty of stuff to talk about.
Here is my summer reading list for remedial education and high-quality amusement. As this is primarily a women’s publication, my list is skewed somewhat toward literature by women about women for women and the men who appreciate them.
REVISIONIST CLASSICISM
Robert Graves is our greatest historical novelist, and you can’t go wrong with such extraordinarily accurate and tremendously entertaining books as I, Claudius and Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina, which together tell the story of the Roman emperor who managed to survive and succeed Caligula, and rule well before disaster returned in the person of Nero. There is much to be learned about feminine power here as we get a good look at Livia, the third wife of Augustus, mother of Tiberius, grandmother of Claudius (who deified her) and great-grandma of Caligula. One of the most astute politicians of her day, few figures of any age approach her skills as a persuader, a conspirator or poisoner. Messalina, the third wife of Claudius, is also in a league by herself in the fields of treachery and promiscuity.
On a lighter note, Graves’s novel Homer’s Daughter is a fascinating fleshing-out of the theory that not only was the Homer who authored the Odyssey a different person from the author of the Iliad, but also that author was a woman, and a Sicilian woman at that.
If Homer’s Daughter gets you revved up on literary revisionism, there’s no better read than Shakespeare by Another Name: The Biography of Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare by Mark Anderson. There are people who hate me for plugging this book. At the risk of being assassinated by an enraged Stratfordian traditionalist, I will admit that I became a fully fledged Oxfordian after seeing (a few times) the delightful film Anonymous, directed by Roland Emmerich. This film totally threw me, because Emmerich directed five of my least-favourite films (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012). I would like to think that people can suddenly mature artistically, but it didn’t hurt that John Orloff (Band of Brothers, A Mighty Heart) wrote an intelligent and compelling script. Actually, the film is richly entertaining, with star turns from Rhys Ifans as the Earl of Oxford (who wrote Shakespeare’s works, sez me), Vanessa Redgrave as the elder Elizabeth I, Joely Richardson as the young Elizabeth, Sebastian Armesto as Ben Jonson, and Rafe Spall, playing William Shakespeare the bit-part actor almost as if he were Ali G. It also makes a rather complete case for Oxford being the author, and whatever loose ends remained were tied up nicely by Anderson’s book. And while I have been treated as a lunatic for taking the Oxford side by many intelligent persons, including one of my publishers, I say if the theory was good enough for Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud and three US Supreme Court Justices, not to mention Sir John Gielgud, Jeremy Irons and Derek Jacobi (who also played the title role in the wonderful BBC miniseries I, Claudius), well, it’s good enough for me.
LADIES EGREGIOUSLY OMITTED FROM THE PANTHEON
Elaine Dundy lived a wild life in New York’s bohemia in the 1940s. Apparently she taught Piet Mondrian how to jitterbug. At the end of the Second World War she moved to Paris to get away from her rich daddy, and lived a wild bohemian life there. She eventually moved to London and wound up marrying the superstar critic Kenneth Tynan at the age of 29. Seven years later she published her first novel, The Dud Avocado, based on her adventures in Paris. It shot to the top of the bestseller list, to the dismay of her husband, winning such admirers as Groucho Marx and Gore Vidal. After her divorce from Tynan she continued to write successfully and wrote an extraordinarily interesting book on the subject of Elvis Presley’s relationship with his mother titled Elvis and Gladys. Every young woman must read The Dud Avocado. It’s a riotous, totally fresh and sassy assault of American Girlishness (with a twist of Jewish Princessness) on European Bohemian affectation. Every page is a gem. Elaine Dundy was the real Holly Golightly.
I was lucky enough to be friends with Iris Owens, one of the great under-known writers. Iris was well educated but she wasn’t rich and she had a tendency to take up with the wrong men. She lived with Alexander Trocchi, the beat junkie novelist legend, in Paris. And it was Trocchi who put her up to pornographic writing, for which she showed a remarkable aptitude, which is why her first novel was really her fifth. The first four were written under the nom de plume Harriet Daimler for the Olympia Press in Paris and, while they are not up to the standards of Iris Owens, they are about as literate at the genre gets (though not quite as arty as Guillaume Apollinaire’s). Her titles, which almost remarkably are now available for e-readers, include Darling, Innocence, The Pleasure Thieves and The Woman Thing. (What a gift for titling.) It is said that Iris was the only Olympia Press author that the publisher Maurice Girodias suggested should, “tone it down”.
While Miss Daimler was one of the most literate and amusing pornographers of all time, Iris Owens is even more fun to read. Her first novel as Iris, After Claude, has been called “the bitchiest novel ever written”. It starts out with, “I left Claude, the French rat.” The main character, by the way, is named Harriet. Iris was a very attractive woman, but as a conversationalist she could intimidate anyone, especially after a drink or two. Terry Southern wrote of her, “Aside from her Junoesque beauty, [she had] a rapier wit and devastating logic. She was a pre-Sontag Sontag.” I have never had writer’s block. Iris had it bad. But maybe that’s why she was so good.
SLIGHTLY GUILTY PLEASURES
It’s funny reading a book that really seems aimed at young girls. It’s kind of like eavesdropping on a teenage daughter, except more appropriately prurient. Emma Forrest is 34 and has recently published her memoir Your Voice in My Head. That fact makes me feel even older than looking in the magnifying side of a shaving mirror. It’s like when I’m asked what young artists I like and everybody turns out to be 40. I’ve known Emma for about 10 years. She says she was famous for being young. Now she’s just famous. But, for me, Emma is still a young writer, even having produced a memoir volume, and Namedropper and Thin Skin are still books that make me feel young and old at the same time. They are funny and tender, but not sappy and they read really well. They aren’t naïve – when the character is going wrong she usually knows it. These books are also universal – they explain the chick realm of the human condition – and it does people much good to read books by someone well outside their demographic. That’s what literature is all about.
DREDGING UP THE SHALLOWS
Rather than realising in despair that a life led with considerable attention paid to fashion and one’s appearance has left one not only devoid of ideas but bankrupt of life itself, why not attempt to formulate an amusing and fairly watertight apologetic philosophy retroactively that will prove, if necessary, that you have been doing the right thing all along, as you dimly suspected?
A good starting point is Honoré de Balzac’s 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living, a comprehensive though brief meditation on the meaning of style, including an inspiring yet triste visit with Beau Brummell, the original dandy, in his French exile, reminiscent of Dante’s visit with Virgil in hell. There is a fine little edition with an English translation by Napoleon Jeffries (Wakefield Press).
Here, as an advertisement, I offer a few aphorisms of Balzac:
“A man becomes rich; he is born elegant.”
“Though elegance is less an art than a feeling, it is also the result of instinct and habit.”
“The constituent principle of elegance is unity.”
“Unity is impossible without cleanliness, harmony and relative simplicity.”
“The man of taste must always know how to reduce need to a minimum.”
“Negligence of clothing is moral suicide.”
“The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.”
“A rip is a misfortune, a stain is a vice.”
Another wonderful modern volume on the philosophy of fashion is Quentin Bell’s On Human Finery, first published in London in 1947. Written in light of Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 masterpiece The Theory of the Leisure Class, this extends Veblen’s ideas on “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste” into the natural realm of fashion, discussing the enormously powerful social, economic and political role fashion has played in European culture. Along the way it illuminates the meaning and repercussions of such phenomena as the corset, the crinoline and bloomers, and the political realities of retro fashions.
A GENUINE INSPIRATRIX
If Patti Smith doesn’t do it for you, or even if she does, maybe you should give Mina Loy a shot. An important poet and playwright, and the last of the significant modernists to be recognised, she stands today as a prophetic figure and an extraordinary role model for women, artists and poets.
Born in London in 1882, she took up painting at 17 and studied in Munich and London. She moved to Paris, married at 22 and had the first of several children. There she fell in with Gertrude Stein’s salon, mixing with Picasso, Apollinaire and that heady crowd. A great beauty she was also admired for her bravery and wit. In 1907 she moved to Florence, where she became involved with the Italian futurists, having an affair with and taking up with their leader, the proudly misogynist Filippo Marinetti, who proclaimed in his manifesto, “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.” She also met John Reed and Carl Van Vechten, who became her first publisher and her agent.
In 1916 Loy moved to New York where she became friends with Man Ray, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, then she moved on to Provincetown, where she joined the now-legendary Provincetown Players and immediately acted a starring role. In 1918 she published the Feminist Manifesto, a visionary document that retains its power today.
She declared, “To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first and greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your ‘virtue’. The fictitious value of a woman as identified with her physical purity – is too easy to stand-by – rendering her lethargic in the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by which she could obtain a concrete value – therefore, the fist self-enforced law for the female sex, as a protection of the man made bogey of virtue – which is the principal instrument of her subjection, would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty.”
At around the same time Loy met Arthur Cravan, a bizarrely colourful show-off who travelled among the avant-garde. A Swiss boxer, poet and performance artist before there was such a thing, he was something of a hustler and seemed an odd choice for a feminist, but he was an outlandishly romantic figure. Loy obtained a divorce and married Cravan in 1918, the same year she published the Feminist Manifesto. He made money as a prizefighter in Mexico, but as part of his continuous bid to avoid the draft for the First World War, they planned a move to Argentina. A pregnant Loy sailed ahead on a hospital ship to Buenos Aires and Cravan followed, embarking alone on a sail boat, but he vanished at sea. In 1923 she published her poems in Lunar Baedeker. Her poetry was praised by TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes and Francis Picabia, among others.
The poems of Loy are now available in The Lost Lunar Baedeker. There is also a volume titled Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. And Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy by Carolyn Burke is an excellent biography, covering Loy’s extraordinarily rich, eventful and important life and work.
Image Courtesy: Steven Poetzer
by Glenn O’Brien
