Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford — Leslie Brody
Irrepressible, Leslie Brody’s new biography of Jessica Mitford, is a fascinating study in divergent attitudes about class, politics, and what it might mean to dissent from one’s own family. Jessica Mitford — “Decca” to her friends — was born into English aristocracy, which she promptly tried to escape. Brody offers a succinct outline in the opening pages (“Little D.” is young Decca, of course)—
What was Little D. running away from? The usual: parental rules and regulations, hothouse sibling rivalries, boredom; the more arcane: country estates, nannies, governesses, secret cupboards, and secret languages: conservatism and elitism in her relations; and fascism, in the body politic. Where was she running to? At first, she longed to go to school and, later, to the East End of London to live in a bedsit and be a Communist. To readers of the British press, the Mitfords were the subject of gossip and scrutiny for the fashions they wore and the odd things they did. Anyone not related to her seemed infinitely more fascinating to Decca.
For Decca, experiences with “Anyone not related to her” became her form of school, which her mother forbade her to attend (although, to be fair, brother Tom did hip her to a crash course of Western canonical lit). As the passage above suggests, the trajectory of Decca’s life would be defined and drawn against the conservative values of her family. In an especially instructive scene near the end of her teen years, Decca and her sister “Unity etched symbols of their political affiliations into the window of the room they shared at the top of the house—Unity drew a swastika; Decca a hammer and sickle.” What did these kids use to draw their sigils? A diamond ring.
Brody (thankfully) doesn’t dwell on the psychological motivations that might have led Decca to a life and ideology so dramatically diametrically opposed to her aristocratic, fascist-leaning family, perhaps in part because Decca’s progressive convictions seem, in retrospect, so clearly to have come down on the “right side of history.” As Brody’s biography reveals, however, Decca was not simply some rich kid slumming for a few years; indeed, we find in Jessica Mitford a soul clearly committed to the ideals of equality and democracy throughout her entire life.
And what a strange, wonderful, and often tragic life it was. In a sharp, reportorial style (one that frequently employs primary sources), Brody relates Decca’s tumultuous life, beginning with her early, scandalous marriage with a cousin, Esmond Romilly, their involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and his death in WWII. Soon after Esmond’s death, Decca married Bob Treuhaft, an American civil rights lawyer. The pair moved to Oakland and had children, although Decca doesn’t seem to have been much of a mother (her heavy drinking might have gotten in the way when political obligations like testifying before HUAC didn’t). The bulk of Brody’s narrative covers Decca’s intense involvement in the Civil Rights movement, from its earliest inception right through the Vietnam era and beyond. Decca wrote articles, facilitated meetings, and generally served as a nexus point for creative and political energies devoted to free, progressive thought. Decca went on to author books investigating the funeral home practices, the Vietnam War draft, and the American prison system, but it is likely that her memoirs will be of the greatest interest to readers today.
Brody’s biography seems more relevant than ever as the Occupy movement (particularly in Decca’s adopted Oakland) sheds greater light on the disparity between the rich and poor in America and calls into question the very ground that pioneers like Jessica Mitford fought for. At the same time, Brody’s book is never didactic, nor is it overtly and unnecessarily juicy (which surely must have been a great temptation, considering that Decca’s entire life was something of a scandal). Instead, Brody offers us a tightly drawn, well-researched portrait that is sure to fascinate.
Irrepressible is available in hardback from Counterpoint Press.
Book Acquired, 9.12.11 — Nathanael West Biography
This one’s new from OR Books—Joe Woodward’s Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West. (Sorry for the extraordinarily amateurish photograph—the glossy cover spit back much light). I read the first three chapters this afternoon, and Woodward has a punchy, even terse style that I greatly appreciate in a literary biographer. It’s rare that the literary critic, “showing a little plumage,” to borrow a phrase from James Wood, knows when to remove himself from the text under discussion. Woodward’s writing here dispenses with any airy rhetoric, cutting sharply to bone in telegraphic sentences and short chapters.It’s the kind of beginning that makes me want to keep reading. Here’s the publisher’s description—
From his name to his college transcript to his literary style, Nathanael West was self-invented. Born Nathan Weinstein, the author of the classics Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of theLocust (1939) was an uncompromising artist obsessed with writing the perfect novel. He pursued his passion from New York to California, flirting dangerously with the bleak, faux-glamour of Hollywood as the country suffered through the grim realities of the Great Depression. At the center of a circle of vigorous young literary writers that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, S. J. Perelman, and Dashiell Hammett, West rose to become one of the most original literary talents of the twentieth century—an accomplished yet regrettably underappreciated master of the short lyric novel.
In December of 1940, West — a notoriously bad driver — was racing back from a vacation in Mexico with his young bride of eight months when he crashed at full speed into another car. He was dead at 37. Just as he was finally starting to enjoy financial stability as a Hollywood screenwriter, he died in the California desert.
For this book, the first biography on West alone in over 40 years, Joe Woodward combed the archives at The Huntington Library and the John Hay Library at Brown University. He had access to personal letters, photographs, unpublished manuscripts and corrected typescripts as well as seldom-heard taped interviews with S. J. Perelman, Dalton Trumbo, Matthew Josephson and others.
Alive Inside the Wreck comes alive as it explores West’s struggle to survive both the writer’s life and the 1930s.
New in Paperback: Ali Shaw Does Creepy Fables, Cathleen Schine Channels Jane Austen, and Joan Schenkar Plumbs Patricia Highsmith
The Girl with Glass Feet is the début novel from British author Ali Shaw. Set in the remote archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land and steeped in the traditions of English folklore, Shaw’s novel works in the idiom of magical realism. His titular girl Ida Maclaird suffers from a strange affliction: she’s slowly turning into glass. She returns to St. Hauda’s land in the winter (after a previous summer holiday there) in the hopes of finding a cure. There she meets Midas Crook (whose symbolically overdetermined name seems part and parcel of Shaw’s program), a photographer fascinated by his father’s ghost stories about the isolated archipelago who is trying to capture something of its haunted spirit in his pictures. Together (and with the help of some strange locals) the pair tries to find answers against a melancholy and magical backdrop of tiny winged cows, albino crows, and other grotesques. A sample ghost story, one of many in Glass Feet–
His father had once told him a legend: lone travelers on overgrown paths would glimpse a humanoid glow that ghosted between trees or swam in a still lake. And something, some impulse from the guts, would make the traveler lurch off the path in pursuit, into the mazy trees or deep water. When they pinned it down it would take shape. Sometimes it would form a flower of phosphorescent petals. Sometimes it drew a bird of sparks whose tail feathers fizzled embers. Sometimes it became like a person and they’d think they saw, under a nimbus like a veil, the features of a loved one long lost. Always the light grew steadily brighter until–in a flash–they’d be blinded. Midas’s father hadn’t needed to elaborate on what happened to them after that. Lost and alone in the cold of the woods.
In The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Cathleen Schine transposes the Dashwoods of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to a dilapidated beach cottage in Westport, Connecticut. When 78 year old Joseph divorces his 75 year old wife Betty, and his mistress essentially forces her from their high-end NYC apartment, Betty rallies by moving to the beach cottage with her daughters, impulsive Miranda, a literary agent, and practical Annie, a library director. The premise may sound like the domain of that most maligned of genres, “chick lit,” a fact that many reviewers tackled when it debuted in hardback last year. Here’s Dominique Browning in The New York Times–
Schine sets her novel squarely in the most appealing part of chick-lit territory — its light-hearted readability — and then thumbs her nose as she starts kicking up the dust. The strange thing about the Jane brigade is that most of its practitioners have raided only her plots, apparently not quite up to the task of honoring the essence of Austen. But Schine’s homage has it all: stinging social satire, mordant wit, delicate charm, lilting language and cosseting materialistic detail.
Before looking over Joan Schenkar’s exhaustive biography of Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, I have to admit that I thought of the writer primarily as a practitioner of pulp fiction, the kind of lurid crime tales at home in airport bookshops. In recent years, I’ve come to reevaluate my stance on crime noir in particular (which I wrote about here), a genre whose conventions I find increasingly more apparent in the “literary fiction” that I enjoy. Anyway, Schenkar’s book places much stress on the Serious Art section of Highsmith’s biography. I knew Highsmith mainly from her Ripley novels, which I’ve never read, but gather to be smart and psychologically complex. I didn’t know that Highsmith wrote Strangers on a Train, adapted by Hitchcock into a noir classic. I didn’t know that she wrote comic books for years — the weird crime ones that stirred up so much commotion in the fifties. I didn’t know that she worked homoerotic themes into her novels, and wrote one very openly lesbian novel that was published during her lifetime (albeit under a pseudonym), The Price of Salt. Schenkar makes a case for a Highsmith as an underappreciated novelist, a contemporary of Mailer and Capote who never got her due (even if her novels were bestsellers), a writer in the tradition of Kafka and Freud. Rounding out the biography is a complex investigation of Highsmith’s strange relationship with her mother, a look at her long list of lovers, and plenty of charts, diagrams, and photos (Schenkar even sneaks a topless pic in, if that piques your interest).
All three titles are new in trade paperback from Picador.
Hiding Man — Tracy Daugherty
Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s excellent and insightful biography of Donald Barthelme begins with a fascinating anecdote. Daugherty, a student of Bartheleme’s, is told to “Find a copy of John Ashbery’s Three Poems, read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, don’t sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.” We’re not sure if that sounds like fun homework or not, but it does signal both Barthelme’s imaginative trajectory as well as Daugherty’s intimacy with his subject. Elsewhere in his introduction, he notes that “it’s wrong to think of Don as a victim of neglect. He was, rather, a connoisseur of it.” In short, Daugherty argues that Barthelme was a “Hiding Man,” an artist of structured subtlety who remains under-appreciated and misunderstood.
Daugherty’s book is at once a well-researched biography, a work of cultural and literary criticism, and a writerly affair–that is, its written with a novelist’s fine ear. He weaves Barthelme’s personal life with the man’s stories against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society, weighing Barthelme’s themes and methods along with a shift in literature, art, film, and culture. The book is most interesting when Daugherty situates Barthelme’s writing along/against other writers, particularly the other authors at the forefront of the so-called post-modernist movement. In one late episode, Barthelme organized what has come to be known as “The Postmodern Dinner,” inviting literary giants like William Gaddis, William Gass, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and Susan Sontag to a fancy SoHo restaurant (Thomas Pynchon politely declined the invite). By 1983, postmodernism had fallen out of favor in lieu of minimalism; Barthelme wasn’t the only writer at the dinner who we might–even now–see as a “victim of neglect.” Many of these writers were attacked (and continue to be attacked) as verbal tricksters, hacks playing at a literary shell game. But, as Daugherty makes very clear in Hiding Man, Barthelme was deeply concerned with matters of meaning and art and philosophy and life and love. He was, like most postmodernists (and Modernists, and post-postmodernists), simply willing to remove some of the strictures that bound distinctions of high and low culture, all as a means of getting closer to a core of truth and perception–not as a means of displacing or denying it. He was an artist.
Hiding Man both begins and ends with an assignment. Daugherty invites Barthelme to read at Oregon State University in early 1989, six months before his death. After the reading, in a moment of utter poignancy, Barthelme asks his former pupil, “Did I do okay for you?” As Barthelme gets in a taxi to leave he gives Daugherty one final assignment: “Write a story about a genius.” Daugherty gets more than a passing grade on this one. Recommended.
Hiding Man is new this month in trade paperback from Picador.
Said