“I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village.” (John Lennon)

October 16, 2023October 13, 2023 / madamebibilophile / 15 Comments

The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, starts today and is running all week which I am very excited about 😊 The Club weeks are always great and I’m really looking forward to seeing the posts. This is the first of what I hope will be three contributions, but as I never blog as much as I mean to, failure is almost inevitable!

The Golden Spur was Dawn Powell’s last novel, and it’s a humorous look at the bohemian arts scene of late 1950s New York, specifically Greenwich Village. This was a world Powell was very much a part of and my edition features an effusive introduction from Gore Vidal who was one of her close friends.

We are introduced to the artists and writers – both up and coming, and those very much faded and failing – their hangers-on and their varied associates through the outsider view of Jonathan Jaimison. He is in his late twenties and recently discovered that his father isn’t the domineering tyrant he grew up with, but someone from this scene, back when his mother was hanging out with Prohibition-era flappers.

So Jonathan leaves his Ohio home and soon makes his way to the titular bar, at the start of his quest to find his biological father:

“Through a gap in the plum velvet cafe curtains he could see the bar … He breathed deep of the heady New York air, that delirious narcotic of ancient sewer dust, gasoline fumes, roasting coffee beans, and the harsh smell of the sea that intoxicates inland nostrils. Then he pushed open the door.”

He’s quickly adopted by Lize and Darcy, two frenemies who sleep with the same male artists, although it’s not entirely clear why, as they seem to have no great fondness for men or for art:

“The girls never asked questions about a man’s private interests or listened when he tried to tell them. For them it was enough that he was a man and that he was there. Who needs a talking man?”

“That his newest canvas was gone should have told her something, but she wasn’t sure which was the new one because all his pictures looked alike to Lize. Great lozenges of red and white (‘I love blood,’ he always said), black and grey squares (‘I love chess,’ he’d say), long green spikes (‘I love asparagus’). All Lize had learned about art from her life with painters was that the big pictures were for museums and the little ones for art.”

As Jonathan makes his way in New York, he moves between two generations: the young artists and the fading interwar generation. There is a nostalgia for the Prohibition period and what New York was then which is beautifully evoked, alongside a recognition that New York is a city that continually makes itself and its inhabitants anew:

“Jonathan recognised New York as home. His whole appearance changed overnight, shoulders broadened, apologetic skulk became swagger; he looked strangers in the eye and found friendship wherever he turned. With the blight of Jaimison heritage removed, his future became marvellously incalculable, the city seemed born fresh for his delight. He took for granted that his mother’s little world, into which he had dropped, was the city’s very heart.”

Although The Golden Spur is described as a comic novel, I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny. Rather I’d describe it as affectionately satirical. It ribs the 1950s arts scene and the vacuous people drawn to it, but it never has a bitter or nasty tone:

“Anybody with a tube of paint and a board was an artist. But writers were not writers unless decently unpublished or forever muffled by a Foundation placebo.”

“‘I just want to be overestimated,’ Earl shouted, ‘like everybody else, goddammit.’”

Despite the overarching plot being Jonathan’s search, this really isn’t a plot-driven novel. Rather, the question of his paternity is a device to introduce the various characters and their world. It’s a novel to read for the evocation of the city, of a particular society found within it, and for the characterisation and the wit. In the way that Tales of the City was serialised in the San Franciso Chronicle, I felt The Golden Spur could have worked similarly in The Village Voice. It’s almost a series of sketches, albeit well realised ones.

I can’t say I loved this quite as much as Gore Vidal clearly did, but then he probably recognised a lot of the characters and situations within the novel. I still found a great deal to enjoy, and Powell certainly has a way with words:

“She was making more and more passes at the wrong men, then trying to recoup with stately cultural pronouncements in her refined Carolina accent, which she kept polished up like her grandfather’s shotgun, ready to bring recalcitrant suitors into line.”

To end, I was going to go with the song Little Lize because that’s the only other time I’ve come across the name. I thought it would be easy to get a good quality version as the massively successful Fisherman’s Friends have recorded it. But I couldn’t find a decent one so here they are instead singing about never leaving home. New York isn’t for everyone…

Novella a Day in May #6

May 6, 2018May 6, 2018 / madamebibilophile / 26 Comments

We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson (1962, 146 pages)

Well, this was a deeply creepy read. Shirley Jackson’s final novel tells the story of eighteen year-old Merricat, living with her older sister Constance and Uncle Julian in self-imposed isolation, ever since Constance was found not guilty of murdering the rest of the family with arsenic. The townspeople don’t trust the verdict, and the family are shunned. Merricat’s days are filled with ritual, both domestic and talismanic of her own devising, with a threat of violence never far away [skip the first sentence if cruelty to animals is a trigger]:

“I found a nest of baby snakes near the creek and killed them all; I dislike snakes and Constance had never asked me not to. I was on the way back to the house when I found a very bad omen, one of the worst. My book nailed to a tree in the pine woods had fallen down. I decided that the nail had rusted away and the book – it was a little notebook of our father’s, where he used to record the names of people who owed him money, and people who ought, he thought, to do favours for him – was useless now as protection. I had wrapped it very thoroughly in heavy brown paper before nailing it to the tree, but the nail had rusted and it had fallen, I thought I had better destroy it, in case it was now actively bad, and bring something else out to the tree, perhaps a scarf of our mothers, or a glove. It was really too late, although I did not know it then; he was already on his way to the house.”

‘He’ is Cousin Charles, whose arrival disturbs the fragile balance within the house. Constance and Merricat have a close relationship, but not a healthy one. They are both somewhat infantilised, and are co-dependent in complex ways. Charles is interested in getting Constance out and about, and his hands on the family money. Jackson superbly racks up the tension without ever resorting to clichés. There are also moments of levity, mainly around Uncle Julian’s eccentricities and non-sequiturs.

“ ‘Jonas is asleep in the lettuce,’ I said.

‘There is nothing I like more than cat fur in my salad,’ Constance said amiably.

‘It is time I had a box,’ Uncle Julian announced. He sat back and looked angrily at his papers. ‘They must all be put in a box this very minute. Constance?’

…

‘He is dishonest. His father was dishonest. Both my brothers were dishonest. If he tries to take my papers you must stop him; I cannot permit tampering with my papers and I will not tolerate intrusion. You must tell him this Constance. He is a bastard.’

‘Uncle Julian –‘

‘In a purely metaphorical sense, I assure you. Both my brothers married women of very strong will. That is merely a word used – among men my dear; I apologize for submitting you to such a word – to categorise an undesirable fellow.”

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a powerful read and an astonishing one. With its atmosphere of unspoken threat and insidious menace, all set within a ritualised domesticity, it is deeply disturbing. Undoubtedly a gothic masterpiece.

“Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.”(Dorothy Canfield Fisher)

November 22, 2016June 9, 2018 / madamebibilophile / 17 Comments

Last week I saw The Dresser with Ken Stott and Reece Shearsmith.

Image from here

Reece Shearsmith in particular gave a really moving performance. The cast were universally good and it was an interesting exploration of love in various guises amongst a group of people who are no longer young. For this reason, I thought I’d look at novels exploring love later in life.

Firstly, Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo (2013), which is a simple novel in some ways, the coming-out tale of 74 year-old Barrington Jedidiah Walker, and I loved it. Firstly there is the cover, which absolutely captures how I saw the main character:

“Still spruced up and sharp-suited with rather manly swagger. Still six foot something with no sign of shrinkage yet. Still working a certain je ne sais whatsit. I might have lost the hair on my head, but I still got a finely clipped moustache in the style of old Hollywood romancers. Folk used to tell me I looked like a young Sidney Poitier. Now they say I resemble a (slightly older) Denzel Washington. Who am I to argue? The facts is the facts. Some of us have it, some of us do not. Bring it on, Barry. Bring it on…”

Then there is the character of Barry himself: intelligent, witty, kind, selfish, self-centred, sexist. A mass of compelling and endearing contradictions. A sexist who uses the word “mentalate” rather than menstruate, yet who supports a lesbian he barely knows through a degree in Woman’s Studies. A flamboyant, confident, outgoing man who cannot come out through fear of judgement; unapologetic of his sexuality yet resistant to certain labels “I ain’t no homosexual, I am a ….Barrysexual!”, despite the love he feels for his partner of 60 years, Morris.

“He is my Morris and he always been my Morris. He’s a good-hearted man, a special man, a sexy man, a history-loving-man, a loyal man, a man who appreciates a good joke, a man of many moods, a drinking man and a man with whom I can be myself, completely.”

Barry has been married to Carmel for the majority of their lives, a woman with whom he has little in common:

“Carmel still don’t get arty-fartiness, and the only culture that interests her is the one she decimates with bleach.”

Yet Evaristo shows Carmel’s side of the story brilliantly, and cruelty of Barry’s lies and deception. The impact on Carmel, though she remains oblivious and thinks him a womaniser, is considerable and destructive. While we root for Barry, we are also aware of his disregard for other’s feelings, including his two daughters, especially the eldest with whom he has a strained relationship. And yet just at the points where I would be close to losing all sympathy for Barry, Evaristo would remind me of all he had to contend with:

“All of my life I’ve watched couples holding hands, kissing in the street, on the bus, in pubs. I’ve watched couples walking arm in arm, ruffling each other’s hair, sitting on each other’s laps, dancing closely…

And never, not once, have I ever felt able even to link arms with the man I love.

Me and Morris exchange sidelong glances, and flicker.

He grabs my hand and squeezes it for a few seconds.

It is our first public display of physical affection in sixty years.”

Mr Loverman is also a story of identity, colonialism, immigration first and second-generation, and prejudice in many forms.

“And so what if me and my people choose to mash up the h-english linguish whenever we feel like it, drop prepositions with our panties, piss in the pot of correct syntax and spelling, mangle our grammar at random? Is this not our post-modern, post-colonial prerogative?”

Barry is an intelligent, well-educated ( devoted to his various night school classes), well-read and funny guide through these issues, who provides plenty of food for thought whilst suggesting love always wins out, and there’s plenty to go round. A brilliant character study which engages with huge themes in a compelling but never didactic way, Mr Loverman, like Barry himself, is an absolute gem.

Now would be an opportunity for the song from which the novel takes its title, but I am less forgiving than Barry regarding Mr Shabba Ranks’ homophobia. So instead here is a pop video interested in addressing the issue:

Secondly, Our Souls at Night, the last novel by Kent Haruf (2015). Unlike Barry and Morris, Addie and Louis become lovers later in life, although they have known each other for years. The novel begins with Addie visiting Louis to make a proposition: that he visit her at night so they sleep together. It is not a request for sex, but for companionship, conversation, and comfort. They live in small town and know from the outset that their arrangement will not go unnoticed:

“It’s some kind of decision to be free. Even at our ages.

You’re acting like a teenager.

I never acted like this as a teenager. I never dared anything. I did what I was supposed to.”

The short novel (179 pages in my edition) follows the tender, tentative relationship that builds between Louis and Addie. Haruf’s writing is sparse and he hammers nothing home. Instead he presents moments in unadorned prose, leaving the reader to recognise the meaning.

“Addie turned off the light. Where’s your hand?

Right here beside you where it always is.”

The moments layer into a narrative which presents a touching, believable relationship between two strong, independent individuals who also recognise their need for intimate human contact. Haruf is interested in what human beings can give to each other in the simplest, most fundamental terms. This is further explored through their relationship with Addie’s grandson, a boy traumatised by his parents acrimonious split, who is healed through humble activities with Louis (ball games, camping) and adopting a rescue dog.

“The boy was asleep. The dog lifted her head from the pillow, looked up at Louis and lay back again.

In Addie’s bedroom Louis put his hand out the window and caught the rain dripping off the eaves and came to bed and touched his wet hand on Addie’s soft cheek.”

Haruf is a wonderful writer, presenting moments of extraordinary delicacy and complexity distilled to their essence. Beautiful.

To end, a picture of Ruth Gordon (I don’t know why I don’t do this every week). Because her face is amazing, and one of her most famous roles was in Harold and Maude, a controversial older person romance. In real life she was married to the same person for 43 years and he was with her when she died. Also, completely unconnected to theme but just because I think it’s awesome, when she died aged 88 she was planning the next play she was going to write.

3f1f4088e2230633f7c12b6bb903245b--gordon-aging