Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

Dreams From My Father is Barack Obama’s early autobiography, written before he went to law school. It details his early years and basically presents his pre-lawyer years in three phases, each of which he clearly considered formative, in its own different way.

The book is arranged chronologically, so we start with a birth and infancy. We learn something about his parents, his mother from up close but always from afar in relation to his father. ‘Old Man’ Obama, as we soon learned to call him, was clearly something of a character. We know details of President Obama’s life, so this review will not list unnecessary detail. From Hawaii to Indonesia and eventually to the United States we follow this young life, qt every page turn more mystified at how such a disparate set of experiences could have eventually formed such a rounded individual.

One thing the book does not stress which this review cannot overlook, is the use of the term ‘Old Man’ to label his father. Obama the elder was originally from Kenya and had studied for a doctorate in US colleges. He hailed from western Kenya, a Luo from the Lake Victoria region, where he had received an education that would still have been sympathetic to British traditions and cultures. He was still an African, however, and though not his own language, he would have learned Swahili and would have been fluent in the language. Mzee in Swahili means old man, but it signifies much more than age. It’s a label that would attach to anyone of status or deemed worthy of respect. It was the nickname, for instance, of President Jomo Kenyatta. Indeed, it was his title to such an extent that the use of Mzee with a capital letter would signify the president, himself, to anyone in the country. It is a title that in Kenya would carry no negative connotations whatsoever.

Reading Dreams From My Father I found myself regularly confronted with the title Old Man Obama without being reminded of how positive and respectful the label might be. Perhaps this was an oversight, an assumption that the young Barack Obama did not think necessary to restate. On the other hand, it might indicate an ambivalence towards the father who was not only a great man and a higher achiever, but also something of a chancer who could not be described as reliable. Other readers must make their own minds up, but for me personally the continued use of ‘Old

Man’ rather than ‘mzee’ provided an added layer of complication in this parentage that was already somewhat special. Perhaps the capital letters convey an ultimate respect.

 

Barack Obama Junior, often called Barry, describes much of his early life, especially his years in Indonesia, with affection. The absent father is, however, always absent. What was rather strange was the fact that Barry’s mother is always there, but we hardly get to know her via these pages. If anything, the grandparents figure more in the story, certainly, it seems, in the boy’s personal formation.

 

In the United States, we follow Barry into maturity and, by the time we reach Chicago, he is determined to play an active role in the society where he lives, choosing the route of community organizing to make his mark. It proves to be a hit and miss activity, as it always must be. We who are not generally involved in politics need reminding that it’s an activity where minuscule gains have to be savoured through a general mist of frustration. It’s a quality that clearly makes presidents.

 

Dreams From My Father really comes alive in the third section, when Barry visit Kenya for the first time. Potentially, this is a Roots-like odyssey, but for this particular young man it soon becomes impossible to romanticize about a past that has so many complicated loose ends. Though the family is clearly not poor, the country is, and the young visitor is confronted with many images that confuse or shock. I used to live in Kenya, so it may have been a personal familiarity that brought this section alive. I feel, however, that the young Barack Obama began to understand more about his father during that visit, enough at least to suggest a reality and that reality persuaded him to stay with the dreams.

El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero

El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero is beautiful, if at times frustrating book. It could all be said much more simply, succinctly and perhaps with greater immediate power. But if it were written that way, it would lose what becomes its special and elegant appeal as a repeated motifs, by simple virtue of their repetition, actually take on the flavour of what the writer clearly intended to communicate.

Ostensibly an autobiography, El balcón en invierno often feels like a novel, a surreal experience couched in a style that approaches magical realism. Long before we reach the end of the book, its characters have attained for the reader the near mythical status they hold for the book’s narrator, ostensibly a child of the extended family described.

We are pitched into a world of memories. This remembered world is that of a college educated, Madrid resident, mature man, who still wants to be a professional jazz guitarist. Every element of that sought after and pursued identity would have been beyond not only the experience or even capability of the family that raised him, it would be beyond the limits of their encultured imagination. Guitarists certainly existed in this reality, but jazz was recorded music, internationally marketed and reliant upon participation in an economic system that was unknown to this community. It would have been unimaginable for the grandparents, so vividly recalled from the experience of times shared. It’s a measure of how much change can be foisted from outside on a mere generation of human existence that the grandson viewed as normal that which was beyond the imagination of the parents.

The principal character of El balcón en invierno was raised in a rural community in western Spain, near Badajoz in Extremadura, not far from the Portuguese border. The families in that area shared a common approach to life. They were all different, but they were all dependent on a local economy rooted in the soil, in agriculture, in small holdings, in the processing of the products of that soil and the servicing of the needs of the community. Ambition extended only as far as the next village. And it is this all embracing, all encompassing, almost closed, repeated and repetitive way of life that forms the backbone of nostalgia the stiffens the entire book.

But not for this writer the repeated daily responsibilities of chicken coop, the tending of goats, the drawing of water, the pruning of vines, the tethering of cattle, the leading of donkeys. Not for him the preparation of gazpacho, the making of bread, the stirring of an olla bubbling with cocido over a wood fire, the kneading of dough or the grinding of flour. Not for him the cutting or pressing of grapes, the picking of oranges, the drying of tomatoes or figs, nor the harvesting of nisperos. For him, the enduring ambition was to become a jazz guitarist. And that would require visiting a city. A city! A what? And for what would you need all that schooling, all those lessons and exams and prices of paper they call qualifications, when not one of them shows you how to milk a goat, make cheese or butter or press an olive?

And it is this access to schooling, to an education that certainly existed in his grandparents’ time, that truly offered the means of transforming a life and, by accessing it, the process that would end a lifestyle. Schooling was probably a commodity not accessed by grandparents and parents alike, because it could contribute nothing to the necessities of a life that was all demanding in its essential tasks. But, as the schooling also demonstrated, it was also something of a self-reproducing prison, which retained relevance only within its own, shrinking walls. There was a life elsewhere and it was beginning to invade.

In less able hands, the reliving of rural life via nostalgic images could have become a mere romanticized fantasy, a lost imagined ideal world which, in reality, was hard, unforgiving, often short-lived and, when truth be admitted, far from ideal. The reader is often walked through the recalled reality of this existence, but the lists of objects, of foods, of daily tasks might just have been culled from someone else’s nostalgia. But in the hands of Luis Landero, the processing of lists becomes a cultural experience, a filled-out landscape, rather than an ego-trip down memory lane.

El balcón en invierno’s beauty is not in its sensitivity, its compassion. Its message, however, is that the lives become what time and circumstance conspire to arrange and that, in the end, we may idealize only the life we have not lived. The one we have lived, on the other hand, becomes the mundane, the challenging struggle that life has always been, even that ideal, remembered, reimagined rural existence for those who lived it. Read it in Spanish, but ignore the fact that there are many old, archaic words. Just go with the flow and appreciate the contrast that the author draws between nostalgic imagination and brutal reality.

The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt

John Galt published his Life of Lord Byron in 1830, just six years after the poet's death in Missolonghi, in what is now modern Greece and then was part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron had been legging it around the Mediterranean for a number of years, his entourage significantly greater than a backpack. Modern reads will need to readjust their ideas of travel when they read details of the veritable caravan that accompanied the Good Lord and will then immediately understand why it was that everywhere he went he was immediately able to access elite society. In modern day terms, this is like a dot-com-owning billionaire moving into the local estate that in feudal times used to own the locality. His presence, it seemed, demanded attention. Having said that, he was always short of money.

Apart from occasional vocabulary that we no longer recognise, John Galt's work reads easily, its tenor remarkably modern, except in matters of race and religion, where a modern interpretation might just confuse. It is important to understand the assumptions of these people in order to understand their work. Yes, Wagner was anti-Semitic, but wasn't everyone else at the time? Rejecting his work on that basis would lead to an equal rejection of other people and institutions that shared the same beliefs, which would automatically include anything to do with Christianity and most writers. Two centuries ago, people did not see the world in the same light and it is through their eyes, not ours, that their work must be seen.

Paradoxically, the Lord Byron was perceived as a Liberal which, at the time, must have placed him in sympathy with at least some of the aims of the French Revolution. This is interesting, given his title, but understandable given his relative penury. He supported the Luddites in Britain, but his domestic political life in the House of Lords was not easy and he was not chosen or perhaps suited for a life in public affairs. His identification with liberal politics is exemplified in this passage from Galt, though it must be noted that at the time liberalism did not extend far into the realm of gender relationships (a cicisbeo is a lover, by the way).

“but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men, and the venerable Count did not object to her availing herself of the privileges of her country in selecting a cicisbeo; an Italian would have made it quite agreeable: indeed, for some time he winked at our intimacy, but at length made an exception against me, as a foreigner, a heretic, an Englishman, and, what was worse than all, a Liberal.”

His liberalism did extend to the support of liberation movements, however, particularly those in Greece, where still today he is seen by some as a national hero. That is not to say that he was particularly fond of the people.

 “Do you know,” said he to the doctor, “I am nearly reconciled to St Paul; for he says there is no difference between the Jews and the Greeks, and I am exactly of the same opinion, for the character of both is equally vile.”

The significance of the above reference to Wagner's anti-Semitism now becomes clear. Perhaps we ought to reject much of Romantic poetry from the canon if we deny Wagner a place. What would be left? Answer – very little...

So what was it that Byron saw worthy of struggle and sacrifice in liberating people for whom he had little respect? The key, which becomes clearer as Galt's biography progresses, is that Byron, like other Romantics, possessed an internal motivation, a personal interpretation whose vivid emotion perhaps raised a screen that was capable of obscuring, even contradicting experience. His response to reality, it seems, is not directly born of the real, but of an idealised knowledge, perhaps pre-formed via education, birth-right and culture, that was more important, at least for the poet, than hard evidence, which could be dismissed or ignored. Galt sums up the process thus.

“that is another and a strong proof too, of what I have been endeavouring to show, that the power of the poet consisted in giving vent to his own feelings, and not, like his great brethren, or even his less, in the invention of situations or of appropriate sentiments”

The author describes how Byron was ambivalent towards the reality of Classical sites, not really showing much interest in the archaeology or the history. Perhaps, via his English public school education, he was au fait with the detail all along and so did not need to absorb direct experience. Perhaps the assumptions of his social class and culture did not admit contradiction of an already internalised ideal that was simply more important than any concrete reality.

Galt's account of Byron's life, however, seems to lack evidence of the hours that the poet devoted to writing. Given that he died in his mid-thirties, spent eight years on the road and did fifteen years in the House of Lords and several years in education, one would expect to find him at work with pen and paper much of the rest of the time. But Galt offers little evidence of this, preferring to concentrate on the travels, themselves, the people he met and the consequences of the complete breakdown in his family and marital relations. But Galt does quote extensively from the poems which, once we absorb the author's analysis that the work is rarely descriptive of anything but the poet's own emotional state, become distinct statements of personality. One feels that Lord Byron was not prone to great self-analysis or soul-searching. He had his opinions, and those were made from granite.

He did campaign for Greece's independence and he did much to achieve what the Greek people wanted at the time. But one feels that for Byron he was working towards the re-establishment of a Classical ideal, a quintessence of democracy that existed longer in school textbooks than it did in ancient Greece. Perhaps "liberal" is too strong a word for Byron... Perhaps "libertarian" would be closer to the modern equivalent. He was for individual freedom, what he saw as the natural order and more democracy, though this probably did not include either women or the lower orders.

How far we have progressed in the last two hundred years can be judged by the fact that Byron secured both personal fame and prestige of office in his own time with certain personal characteristics. He went to public school and Oxbridge, studied ancient Greek, achieved political status and public fame while being largely ignorant of the scientific advances of his day, was a libertarian and had distinct failures in both personal and familial relationships. Couldn't happen now, could it?

G. F. Watts by G. K. Chesterton

GK meets GF sounds like the title of one of those mid-twentieth century albums when a producer with an eye for a buck teamed up some ancient crooner with an equally aged instrumentalist to perform newly arranged standards. In this case it’s a book from early in the 20th century when the Christianity-inspired art-trained writer G. K. Chesterton put pen to paper to analyse the work of G. F.  Watts, the renowned Victorian painter. Chesterton´s style has been described as dealing in popular sayings, proverbs and allegories, and then turning them inside out. Basically, he follows this model in presenting the reputation of George Frederick Watts in this biography.

Watts was a grandee of English painting during the Victorian era. Chesterton starts by claiming Welsh roots for the painter, along with Celtic sentiments, but the theory is vague and frankly contradicted by the eventual location of the Watts museum, close to Guilford in the utterly English Home Counties.

In many ways, it is easier to describe Watts by starting with what he was not. He was not a Pre-Raphaelite, but probably sympathized with many of the group’s artistic aims. He was not an Impressionist, preferring always the classical, centrally placed, consistently-lit subject. He was not a modernist in any sense, but many of his images have a curiously modern feel. Perhaps he comes closest to being an English Symbolist, but that is not what Chesterton thinks.

Watts was a Romantic. He was an establishment figure who was also arguably anti-establishment. He took commissions from the state, often donated works to grand projects and painted the rich, famous and significant. But he also refused national honours and used the earnings from his celebrity portraits to fund projects to depict the social conditions of his age. He was not a member of the Arts and Crafts movement, but his wife was, and he was clearly a sympathizer. Next to the Watts museum is arguably Britain’s finest example of Arts and Crafts Celtic Revival architecture, the Watts Chapel at Compton, which essentially was his wife’s project. We may return to Chesterton´s opening at this point to record the fact that Watts, himself, did not claim this linked to his own heritage.

Watts’s work is highly individualistic within a framework that might appear at first sight to be conventional. Chesterton, in his characteristic obfuscation, defines three fundamental characteristics of this work. “…first, the sceptical idealism, the belief that abstract verities remained the chief affairs of men when theology left them; second, the didactic simplicity, the claim to teach other men and to assume one’s own value and rectitude; third, the cosmic utilitarianism, the consideration of any such thing as art or philosophy perpetually with reference to a general good." Apparently, such things as cosmic utilitarianism can be gleaned directly from the visual image, though a modern reader of this biography might find that rather difficult.

 

Chesterton, as ever, cannot resist moralizing about his own opinions. “So far the result would painfully appear to be that whereas men in the earlier times said unscientific things with the vagueness of gossip and legend, they now say unscientific things with the plainness and the certainty of science.” Perhaps, as a writer, GK should have read this quote before writing the analysis just quoted. The author, nevertheless, does occasionally deal with the visual content. Watts did have a tendency, perhaps a proclivity for the human back. “The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing of; like an outlying province forgotten by an emperor”

 

Chesterton does describe some of Watts´s memorable work. He concentrates on the portraiture and the poetic, dreamlike works, such as Hope. What is missing is any description of the social comment. But, after a hundred pages of embroidering the artist and his work with his own brand of prolixity, Chesterton concludes with “And this brings me to my last word. Now and again Watts has failed. I am afraid that it may possibly be inferred from the magniloquent language which I have frequently, and with a full consciousness of my act, applied to this great man, that I think the whole of his work technically triumphant. Clearly it is not. For I believe that often he has scarcely known what he was doing; I believe that he has been in the dark when the lines came wrong; that he has been still deeper in the dark and things came right. As I have already pointed out, the vague lines which his mere physical instinct would make him draw, have in them the curves of the Cosmos. His automatic manual action was, I think, certainly a revelation to others, certainly a revelation to himself. Standing before a dark canvas upon some quiet evening, he has made lines and something has happened. In such an hour the strange and splendid phrase of the Psalm he has literally fulfilled. He has gone on because of the word of meekness and truth and of righteousness. And his right hand has taught him terrible things.” Not really talented, GF, it seems, got lucky, at least according to GK. One hopes the meeting was cordial.

A Postillion Struck by Lightning by Dirk Bogarde

A Postillion Struck by Lightning is the first part of Dirk Bogarde’s seven volume autobiography. First published as long ago as 1977, it has stood the test of time, has been widely read throughout its existence and has been reviewed, probably, hundreds, if not thousands of times. This, therefore, is not a review of the book, but a reflection on a particular aspect of it.

The first volume covers years of childhood, schooling, and finally professional stumbling towards what became a highly successful career in films. It might be said that Dirk Bogarde had three different film carriers, a mass market, Mr. Clean in the Doctor films, the experimenting intellectual in his art house period and finally accomplished and internationally recognized character acting in his Death in Venice phase.

Here we have the idyllic childhood spent in the Sussex cottage or around Hampstead in North London. We have the failed school years where first nothing much interested him and then, during his time in a Glasgow technical school, when nothing at all interested him. He had to live with an aunt and uncle during those years in Scotland, and his only self-protection came by learning a Glaswegian accent.

He was born into a special family. His mother had been an actress, while his father was art critic at The Times. The surname originated in Belgium and his grandfather deliberately lost himself up-river in South America, only to return, old, aged, grumpy and cantankerous.

Dirk Bogarde’s prose is highly expressive and includes moments of vivid colour when events are magnified to significance. On country walks we share the vistas, smells, an occasional hug of an animal, always with something that amplifies the experience. We feel we personally get to know the tortoise. In later pages, he is already on stage, disdainful, he says, of any notion of stardom. He is happy to be doing what he does, and small venues in London, amateur to semiprofessional, will do. But we know what happened next.

But perhaps the most intriguing section in A Postillion Struck by Lightning happens in Glasgow, on a day when he is playing truant from school. In the 21st-century, the victim of sexual assault is granted whatever space is demanded to describe, relive, speculate, question, compensate, or indeed pursue -or indeed any verb that may be applicable – the recalled experience. In 1977 Dirk Bogarde relates his own experience from the 1930s in almost a bland, matter-of-fact way. It comes across almost as if it were a scene from one of his films. The detail of the assault can be experienced by reading the book, and it is essential that it is not described here because it has a theatrical character that itself is grounded in the cinema. It was, nevertheless, a real experience and a terrifying one as well. Now presumably, possibly, the perpetrator of this assault was still alive when this book was published, and yet there appears to be no record of the actor’s having pursued any action against his assailant.

One of the joys of reading is being presented with the surprising or the memorable. When I began A Postillion Struck by Lightning, I never for a moment thought I would be writing this kind of review.

Mary Swann by Carol Shields

I have just completed four years of thinking through a project. There were several false starts, many rejected, some reworked ideas. What I wanted to achieve was tangible, but I could not grasp it. When I thought I had it held, it would melt away or fly out like squeezed soap. Some six months ago things gelled and I began in earnest to write Eileen McHugh, a life remade. It’s the story of a sculptor who left no work, but who, by accident in this case, had become sufficiently recognized for a biographer to reconstruct her life and remake her lost work.

With the book complete and published, I decided it was time to relax and took up Mary Swann by Carol Shields. I found and bought it in a charity shop bag-full because I knew the author, not the book. I began to read and the experience was uncanny.

Mary Swann concerns of life and work of a poet from rural Canada. The town of Nadeau was both small and insignificant, until, that is, the world discovered a slim volume of a hundred or so poems by one Mary Swann, insignificant herself, until she was murdered - shot, bludgeoned, dismembered - by her husband in 1965.

Born in 1915, the exact date still debatable, she lived out her anonymous, almost hidden life, even from locals, on the farm. Elsewhere in the world this would be called a peasant holding and her life would be characterized as mired in poverty. Mary Swann had no domestic help, no appliances, none of the trappings of modern life. She never drove a car. Isolated, remote, poor, dilapidated are words that applied equally to the setting of the life and the person who lived it. Nothing much is known of her relationship with her husband, who killed himself after murdering his wife. The erasure was complete, except that they had a daughter who is alive, but is unwilling to discuss family matters.

But Mary Swan wrote. She wrote pithy, crunchy verse that inhabits the world this side of the garden gate but seems to dig deep into the infinite internal space of being. Academics, having discovered her work, likened her to Emily Dickinson. Mr. Crozzi who originally accepted her poems for publication and produced a couple of hundred copies of Swann’s Songs, the perhaps appropriately titled slim volume, was the last person to see her alive, apart from her husband. There are estimated to be about 20 extant copies of the collection. But the content has found its admirers and champions. There are even academics whose reputation is built on the critique of Mary Swann’s verse.

There is to be a symposium on the poet and her work and Carol Shields follows the lives, testimonies and experience of a group of interested parties. There are academic researchers, who cooperate by competing. There is Rose, the Nadeau town librarian, timid, self-effacing and suffering. There is Crozzi, perhaps a little crazy, the publisher and a long-standing journalist in the local press, though himself an immigrant. He is an eccentric, opinionated type who dearly misses his deceased wife. He also likes a drink or two. There are Sarah and Morton, academics with their own lives to live who have championed Mary Swann’s work.  And there are others. Via the experiences of these characters and others, we piece together something of the life and work of Mary Swann, though, like everyone else involved, we never know her and her work remains enigmatic.

What for me was utterly uncanny, was that this was the exact form I had chosen for Eileen McHugh. Exactly what makes an artist? Why do we try to express ourselves in these arcane, often esoteric forms? What is authorship? What constitutes recognition? Who controls that process? How does life influence art, or vice versa? How do we recall our interactions from the past with someone we never thought we would remember? At eighty per cent through Mary Swann, I felt like I was reading a different version of my own book and I concluded I was very glad I had not read Carol Shields’s book before inventing my own.

But eventually, things diverged. Carol Shields’ Mary Swann concludes with the symposium on the poet’s work, a meeting that brings together the characters we have been following and constructed in the form of a screenplay. A particular thread of the plot begins to dominate. Competition surfaces, insults are perceived, and offense is taken. Difficult to explain events coalesce to identify and conclude what really has been going on in the background throughout the book. By the end of this superbly crafted and constructed novel, we are intimately involved in considerable slices of the contemporary characters’ lives.  Mary Swann, however, lingers in a continued, enigmatic anonymity that remains entirely her own, just as, thankfully, does that of my own Eileen McHugh.

Giacomo Puccini by Wakeling Dry

 

Another Project Gutenberg book is a short biography and critical appraisal of Puccini, written around the time of Madame Butterfly's premiere. It's after Boheme, Manon Lescaut and Tosca, but before Turandot, of course. Puccini was certainly a man of his kind, and unapologetic to boot. Attitudes towards music and especially towards things people are unfamiliar with never fail to amaze.

The Journey of Anders Sparrman by Per Wästberg

To say that The Journey of Anders Sparrman, by Per Wästberg is a tale of two halves would transcend cliché. Rarely will one encounter such an apparently complete transformation of a character mid-way through a story, and even more rarely will one encounter such a thoroughly credible transformation.

This is a story about a scientist, a botanist explorer of the eighteenth century. Anders Sparrman was Swedish and was raised in a straight-laced society. He studied with Linnaeus at a time when a thoroughly new notion of biological species was emerging from beneath the stone laid by the creationism of Christian doctrine. A sense of discovering empiricism pervades this story of a real historical figure. The result is neither biography nor fiction, whilst simultaneously combining elements of both. Events are drawn directly from Sparrman’s life, as recorded in his own journals, but dialogue and encounters between characters are created to embroider the backcloth of fact. This may sound like conventional historical fiction, but the sense of biography in this work is always strong enough to dominate.

Anders Sparrman’s story is told chronologically, a device that only magnifies the eventual transformation of his life. We follow him to sea as a young man. We accompany him on board Captain James Cooke’s voyages of so-called discovery. One feels that Sparrman’s work in natural history is where the real discoveries are taking place, whilst Cooke’s more grandiose and historically more consequential claims might just be a tad overstated. Throughout, Anders Sparrman comes across as a dedicated, perhaps rather staid, sober and conventional documenter of experience. His quest for truth seems nothing less than single-minded, perhaps myopic, and his thirst for detail sometimes seems to exclude any view of a bigger picture.

Back at home in Sweden, he moves from one apparently well done but unappreciated job to another. He takes over the management of an institution and attempts reform, and thus makes enemies and friends, as might be expected. As the years pass, his memories of and achievements within his years of seafaring and travel begin to fade.

But then he discovers sex. She is not particularly young, beautiful or desirable, apparently. Lotta and Anders, we are told, choose one another not because of their merits, their appearance or anything else we might usually associate with breeding partners. Rather, in their case, it was a mutual sense of desperation that brought them together. It is as if both of them clutched at and grasped an opportunity life had resolved to deny them. And then, without qualification, they took a firm grip on their opportunity and went for it.

Anders Sparrman seems suddenly reincarnated. At least his relation to biology is redrawn, since he suddenly transformed from observer to participant, from the narrow end of the microscope onto the slide, so to speak. A bland and probably predictable life suddenly blossoms by virtue of involvement, and simultaneously the empiricism that discovered becomes personal experience that feels and creates.

The Journey of Anders Sparrman, by Per Wästberg thus becomes a difficult kind of reading experience. Lulled into a sense of predictable safety by the devotion and dedication to its subject, we spend most of the book taking risks at sea and in far-off lands without sensing danger. And then, in the comfort of our own home, we are suddenly propelled into a vivid universe of emotional and sexual fulfilment that is as threatening as a warm hearth, but literally takes the breath away. The Journey of Anders Sparrman, by Per Wästberg is a remarkable experience, both as a book and a life.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness by Amos Oz

In A Tale Of Love And Darkness Amos Oz writes an autobiography of his early years. Though written from a much later perspective, this memoir effectively lives entirely in the first years of the author’s life, covering birth to the age of twelve, when his mother died in 1952. There is also much in the book that is drawn from his adolescence and his work in a kibbutz after leaving home, but these remain like visions of an only partially real future when the narrative returns, often abruptly to those earlier years when his mother was still alive. There are detailed stories of schooling, discovery of literature and a little of his coming of age and his first experiences of an adult life of love and affection. There is much more about his father and his only partially successful life as a writer and academic, plus some other things for which he displayed equally unrecognized talent. There is also a good deal of Jewish history, especially that related to the post-World War II diaspora from Europe to British-controlled Palestine.

But at its core this book is essentially about the relationship between Amos Oz and his mother. It starts with her giving birth to him and ends with her death, just twelve years later, an event that left the author with deep feelings of guilt and loss, of course. But there is more, in that one also feels there has been a lasting psychological scar that has marked much of the author´s work.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness succeeds in many ways – too many for a cursory review as this to list, let alone describe. Its description of family life in the 1940s in Jerusalem must head the list. This was no rip-roaring, unpredictable household. The father was bookish, a man who yearned to be an academic, to feel the social respect that would be conferred with authorship and recognition. Much is made by Amos Oz of his father’s unrecognized talent and, one feels, the son was perhaps prouder than the father when the latter eventually gained his doctorate from the University of London. Both much had passed by before then.

Despite the book’s vivid portrayal of his own and his relatives’ families, Amos Oz seems almost to freeze in mid-sentence when he describes his mother. She was clearly an immense, if rather distant influence on him. She was domestically inclined, very attractive, perhaps aloof and certainly long suffering, as her husband pursued his private dreams in his even more private study amongst his books and papers. She was probably not alone in this situation, but perhaps more alone than she herself or especially others were willing to admit.

These families’ origins where in the Baltic states, Poland, Russia and other parts of Europe. They left for Palestine, pushed by the hardening fist of fascism and, elsewhere, mere intolerance. Most who stayed behind perished. They were greeted by a British administration in the Middle East that was never clear in its priorities and where policy was made on the roof. Nothing much changes, it seems. Calls for Jewish statehood were pursued alongside direct action and this era of tension and privation forms the backdrop for the early years of the author’s life. Aged eighteen, he would eventually meet Ben-Gurion, an encounter where the nervous tension, pride and awe jump from the page only to evaporate as quickly.

Amos Oz had relatives who were writers and academics, but they generally did not use their influence to foster his father’s ambitions, though this did not seem to generate tensions. His father’s stoicism would probably not have tolerated comment. Language was always at the core in the home, however, with his father‘s command of Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, Lithuanian and Russian allowing etymology to become breakfast talk.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness is especially memorable for its description of the author´s education. He attended all kinds of establishment, private and public, with both classroom and personal settings. He becomes infatuated with one teacher and certainly educated purposefully by another later on. It becomes an experience powerful enough to live on through a lifetime.

Eventually Amos Oz decided to adopt kibbutz life. This seems to come as a surprise, as much to Amos has his family, we feel. But he embraces the new challenges, appearing to relish the directness of physical work. Perhaps this was a psychological reaction to the face that his father’s rather withdrawn bookishness might have alienated his mother in the household. This is something that is alluded to in the book, but only via the opinions of the author’s relatives. It is certainly not stressed. But through kibbutz life, Amos Oz learns that the most effective way to become a writer is to live life and observe it. The writer then may interpret it.

But there is darkness here as well, a personal darkness that the author regularly alludes to and then quickly avoids. We feel it is surely the memory of his mother’s death which is resurfacing. If there is guilt involved, then its source is surely the perceived inability to influence events, to go back and change the circumstances that gave rise to tragedy. If only…

In the final pages, the author is again just twelve years old. He watches as his mother falls into the sleep that is the end of her life, a memory relived from the distance of middle age, but the memory remains as vivid as it was on the day it happened, illustrating that a silence of sleep, when eternal, is more powerful than any words can describe.

Gainsborough, A Portrait by James Hamilton

Gainsborough, A Portrait by James Hamilton is much, much more than a biography of a painter, though if it were only that it would still be a masterpiece of its genre. Thomas Gainsborough was born in Suffolk in 1727 and died in London in 1788. He spent his early years in Suffolk, was apprenticed in London as an engraver. He moved back to Suffolk and lived again in the family home. He was already painting. He seemed not perfectly suited to the messy, fiddly practices associated with engraving. He gradually amassed commissions, almost by increment from sitters of ever higher rank.

A lengthy stay in Bath was purely for professional reasons, but London and Suffolk were always a draw. By then he was a wealthy and successful painter of portraits, who dabbled in landscapes on the side. That last phrase, incidentally, is apposite since his wife, Margaret, used to pocket all of the fees he charged for portraits. What he received for landscapes he did not disclose to her, only to his own pocket.

If you have ever looked at Gainsborough’s portraits and saw that first, they were rather dark, or second, the forest looks altogether too round it to be true, or third, it seems rather that the feet emerging from the bottom of the dresses appear a tad too small, then you will find your explanations in James Hamilton‘s book. The light is problematic, perhaps, because these pictures were not painted en plein aire, but by candlelight in the studio. A sense of rounding in the trees might result from the fact that he often did not paint real trees, but miniature tabletop settings of coal, twigs and – yes – broccoli. Now that explains quite a lot. Observation number three results from his very businesslike procedures with his sitters. To minimize their discomfort, he concentrated on their faces and heads. After they had left his studio, he would then fill in the rest of the body, often using clothes he kept on dummies, the same dress sometimes appearing in portraits of different women. The mannequins obviously had no feet, so these were probably added with a little imagination, hence the sometimes awkward proportions.

But there is far more in Gainsborough, A Portrait than detail of the artist’s commissions, works and techniques. James Hamilton provide is nothing less than a rounded portrayal of English life in the mid-eighteenth century. In the artist’s letters we soon learn to recognize the euphemisms that are used to disguise the licentiousness that seems to occupy most of these men’s waking hours. In letters, d-mn is not a curse, and the word swords – or other obvious euphemisms - are often underlined, right up to the hilts. Not subtle, but socially acceptable according to the mores of the day, it seems.

The book has is a wonderful portrayal of small town life in Sudbury, Suffolk. We sense the nouveau riche pretensions of Bath and we can almost feel London expanding amid the stories of Gainsborough’s Pall Mall house and Richmond Hill getaway. But what is so wonderful about James Hamilton‘s book is that its erudition, which at times is breathtaking in its detail, is so beautifully embroidered into the narrative that all we received is a rounded, complete insight into the way Gainsborough lived, did business, and related to people, as well as seeing a detailed picture of what he painted and how he worked.

Of particular interest was his and his contemporaries’ touting of business from the rich and famous. Obviously, a commission from the Royals, especially the King, was what really put you on the map and, as ever in Britain, a social pecking order made the achievement of status easier for some than others. Gainsborough was from quite lowly origins and did not attend prestigious institutions to learn his trade, so he had to work for the elite status that eventually came his way. It is worth noting however that he was never knighted, unlike his rival Reynolds, being the journeyman of the trade in the celebrity likeness business. But he did make a good living, which he largely handed over to his wife, who stashed the money away, lest her husband blow it on wine, women or song, or even the expensive musical instruments he bought, but never learn to play.

Gainsborough rubbed shoulders with the elite. He was friends with other artists and with composers, such as Abel and J C Bach. But one feels his feet never really left the ground, even when parking his sword. And as such, he was not given to visionary statements in his art. He clearly liked to paint landscapes but found he could only sell them on the back of his portrait trade. Thus, he devoted his professional time to that which would be better his life, leaving intellectual challenge at least for later.

Interestingly, James Hamilton makes the point that Gainsborough the artist would have found work in any age. His approach would always have found a clientele and his style would have adapted, whilst more visionary artists, despite their massive achievements, could not have pursued their particular visions in a different age. Gainsborough thus becomes a kind of model modern artworld businessman, pragmatic, competent, in demand and commercially aware of the success he achieved. Well, at least his wife was.

The Life of Ezra Pound by Noel Stock

A review of The Life of Ezra Pound by Noel Stock must begin by acknowledging the phenomenal achievement of its author. It is comprehensive, detailed, forensic, appreciative, critical and illuminating, a massive achievement of analysis, research and insight. At around 200,000 words it is also a commitment, not for the fainthearted or for anyone with only a passing interest in either poetry or the history of the twentieth century. But it is also something else, something that, despite the magnificence of its scholarship, provokes this reader to focus on issues that are external to the text, itself. But more of that later: first, the book.

Ezra Pound was undeniably one of the greatest figures of twentieth century literature. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries and friends, however, Joyce, Eliot and Yeats among them, his name has seemed to slip from the mainstream since his death in 1972. I read his great achievement, the Cantos, when I was at college. I did not understand them. In some ways they feel less like a work of poetry than a lifetime achievement, a creatively conceived and sometimes over-presented commonplace book into which fell, in poetic form, a distillation, a reflection or sometimes mere mention of whatever disparate material that Pound obsessed over at the time. The Cantos were Pound’s creative life, but we must not forget the massive amount of other material, his journalism, music, prose and economics, for want of a more accurate word.

Pound was one of the founders and movers of literary and artistic movements: Imagism and the Vorticism among them. They were perhaps not the most enduring of directions. He was American but seemed more at home in England and then Italy, neither of which chooses to honour his achievements on their soil. But what is strongly felt about this man from the start is his conviction of, perhaps his obsession with his own genius. He was utterly sure he would contribute to the arts and perhaps even change their direction. He seemed to consider his legacy immortal, even before it had been created. He felt he was something new, original and enduring. And all this when apparently no-one even wanted to read his material, or formally give him time of day. And not only did he seem to deny his failures, he didn’t even seem to register them. The limitations were always somewhere else. In the early years, he thus seemed like a self-publicist, with is achievements acknowledged before they were achieved, like a modern self-published author who writes five-star, best-seller reviews of his own work. Nowadays, that surely would never do!

But eventually, perhaps by sheer dogged application alongside considerable talent, Pound received the recognition he thought he deserved, though perhaps never in our own contemporary, blunt instrument yardstick of success – sales. Certain academics loved him. Others did not. He himself had high hopes of a Nobel Prize.

Noel Stock includes copious quotations from Pound’s verse, always with critical assessment, sometimes with criticism. The Cantos were so far reaching in their intellectual coverage that it may appear from the outside that no-one without the full gamut of requisite skills would understand them. And given that these skills comprise, amongst other things, a knowledge of Dante and medieval Italian poetry, Confucius, Mencius and Lao-Tze in the original Chinese, troubadour songs in their original langue d’oc, Noh theatre texts in Japanese, Pound’s own experimental English, besides knowledge of the Classics and their metres, one might presume that there might be few modern readers of his work. This is probably accurate. But there is more to the modern shunning of Pound’s work than its overtly elitist intellectual demands. And it is here that this review needs to diverge from literature, poetry and indeed Ezra Pound, himself, to address the related concepts of fascism and racism.

The main reason why today Pound’s name remains passé is his espousal of fascist ideas and his overt antisemitism. He went to live in Italy. He regarded Mussolini as rather a good thing. In Italy at the time he was hardly alone in this belief.  He adopted Hitler’s aggressive antisemitism because he was fundamentally opposed to capitalism, if it meant what he saw as a banking and economic system dominated by Jews, the foundation of this belief being a bank owned by the Rothchild family. He also took to broadcasting pro-fascist propaganda (in Italian and English) on radio during World War II.

Normally, my reviews are consciously detached. I try to review the book, not myself. Likes and dislikes are, to me, wholly nebulous and indefinable and even passing whims that are always less significant than considerations of communication or achievement of ends. In the case of The Life of Ezra Pound, the subjective “I” must be included, since our appreciation or not of this poet’s writing now seems to depend wholly on our individual take on his politics, despite his being be neither analytical or pro-active in his views, as this biography clarifies.  In some ways, his politics were as transient as his current interests, as expressed in the meanderings of the Cantos. But what now can we make of Pound? Should we even try to understand him? Is dismissal the preferred option? I would say that he is worth the effort. Not the use of “I”! And this is not because I think Pound is a particular genius, overlooked or even readable. And I certainly do not see his actions as pardonable! And here I beg your pardon for making this book review become something personal, something about me and not about the book, but I assure you it is relevant. Please exit here if you are wary of the personal.

I remember in the recent past a well-known British television presenter saying on-air that the music of Wagner was not played in her household because of the composer´s antisemitism. I remember another celebrity saying that antisemitism was the flavour of Wager´s age, and that rejection of the composer´s work on those grounds alone ought to prompt a similar rejection of everything artistic or otherwise that came out of mid-nineteenth century German culture.

In the not too distant past I re-read Adam Smith´s Wealth of Nations. In my review I concentrated on those aspects of the analysis that might contradict the completely neo-liberal interpretation of the work. I was perhaps wrong to do so, but I wanted to challenge the idea that there is just one way to read Smith´s notion of free trade.  Embedded within Smith´s thesis, however, are assumptions about human progress and worthiness. The Hindoo, the Mussulman and even the Catholic have their place in history and civilisation, but the heathen is judged to be a primitive sub-human. I do not recall Smith referring to ´The Buddhist´, but that may be my own failure of memory. In today´s politics, how many of the neo-liberal, perhaps neo-conservative supporters of their own notions of Smith´s concepts of free trade also regard those not associated with an organised great religion as both uncivilised and sub-human? And, given that the assumption appears to run throughout the work, should that alone disqualify Smith´s views on other subjects or his contribution to economics? Another position that almost dominates sections of The Wealth of Nations is that there is no economic activity that is or could be greater than the total that describes the state. How many of these same free marketeers would share Smith´s oft-stated revulsion of the very idea of a transnational corporation, which he regarded as necessarily market-distorting and almost automatically corrupt? This is recognized in antitrust and anti-monopoly legislation, but how often is this side of Smith´s work quoted? My point here is that we can choose to be selective, and usually do.

I am tempted here to introduce the composer Anton Webern into the argument. A member of the second Viennese School, Webern espoused the atonalism of his associate, Schoenberg. Webern was perhaps the artistic opposite of Ezra Pound, being prone to destructive self-criticism and a desire for an extreme succinctness of expression. But Webern, like Pound, thought that fascism might be more sympathetic towards “high art” to which he aspired than the mechanisms of capitalism that concentrated on what it could sell. He thus initially espoused fascism, eventually to his own and his associates´ cost.

After this considerable diversion, there is eventually a moral, and that is to beware anyone touting answers, especially those based on interpretations of the past in anything other than its own terms. Which brings me to Brexit! It might seem quite a jump, but it does follow. Trust me!

I have recent personal experience, albeit apocryphal, that suggests the prime motivation among the British working class leave voters who surely swung the referendum result was “getting rid of all the foreigners.” I use quotes to emphasise that this was expressed to me personally and verbatim, with stress on the “all”. I had just finished The Life of Ezra Pound and I felt immediately a strange yet strong link with Pound´s antisemitism, which was founded on nothing less than trying to find someone to blame.

Perhaps we should not judge Wagner, Adam Smith or even Ezra Pound using the moral perspective of our own time. For if we did that, and rejected any espousal of either racism or religious bigotry, how much of our human past would we retain? And, given the above Brexit opinion, is the moral perspective of our time significantly different from that of the 1930s, or even the 1850s, or 1770s or indeed any other time in our conflict-ridden blame game of history?

The Life of Ezra Pound is a forensic biography of a poet. It describes a life lived in its historical and cultural context. Like all books committed to communicating its subject, it is a masterpiece that takes the reader way beyond the confines of its subject and thereby achieves a permanent relevance. Revisit this past. We must never deny it existed or forget its consequences. But it reminds us that as individuals, communities and societies, there is no rule that precludes the repetition of error. And neither is there any rule that insists that a current moral ground need be any higher than any other existing folly, contemporary or past.

Verdi: Man and musician by Frederick J Crowest

I began reading this on the bus coming back from Valencia, having consumed Byron’s Corsair on the way up, before a performance of Il Corsaro. Amazing to see what had happened to the English language in a few decades! OK, the Byron was supposed to be poetic…

Crowest’s short critical biography was written at the end of the nineteenth century. Verdi is still alive, but has completed all of his operas, including Falstaff. What is truly amazing about the book is the inclusion of quotes from reviewers throughout the century. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who might be put off expressing themselves because of a fear of what criticism might bring. In an apparent stream, critics of the nineteenth century queued up to lambast Verdi’s work as crass, unintellectual, in bad taste, loud, shallow… By the end of his life, most of the critics are kowtowing to greatness.

I have to find myself agreeing with quite a lot of the detailed points, however, as the above illustrates. Otello and Falstaff are different, however, in that they have stopped using the set pieces that he seemed to love in the earlier years.

An interesting if now irrelevant fact relates to the composer’s name. VERDI, Crowest assures us, came to stand for Victor Emmanuel Re d’Ilalia. Though Verdi, we are told here, shunned all aspects of politics, his identification with Italian nationalism cannot be denied.

Overall this seems to confirm what I am coming to believe more strongly by the day – that people don’t know what they like, they like what they know. Given enough airings, even Verdi became acceptable!

Perfect Hostage – A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi by Justin Wintle

Justin Wintle’s Perfect Hostage – A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi is not a book with a particularly perfect title. It sounds like it will be a simply a biography, and perhaps a rather fawning one, of a Nobel Peace Prize Winner, perhaps erring on the side of hero worship.

In fact Justin Wintle’s book presents much more than this. It does document the life, examine the politics and describe the actions of its dedicatee. But it also traces her background, both personal and public, and considers the status of her family in Burmese national consciousness. It describes in some detail the life of her legendary father, General Aung San. But Perfect Hostage is even more again. The book provides a wonderful account of Burma’s recent history, examining the politics, the role of the military and popular movements and then in more recent times the responses of the dictatorship in precise and informative detail. Passages that describe Burma’s participation in the Second World War are particularly illuminating, especially when juxtaposed with the course of later events.

From this account of her life, Aung San Suu Kyi emerges as a rather paradoxical figure. She is cast as both assertive in her commitment to do something for her country, and simultaneously ponderous in her apparent unwillingness to grasp opportunities when they arise. Again paradoxically we appreciate her determination to seek change, alongside her reluctance to destabilise. Her ultimate aim appears to be unification, but this may be in itself unachievable, since the diversity of interests at play may prove irreconcilable.

Throughout, via Justin Wintle’s admirably constructed work, we appreciate the contribution of Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, to his wife’s achievement. Together they shared personal, intellectual and political interests in Burma, interests that eventually led to action. This joint desire to act may have eventually have led to a separation, but that separation was merely corporal, since the couple’s joint motivation continued to thrive. And, via its consideration of Michael Aris’s role in events, Perfect Hostage eventually presents a wonderfully rounded and complete account of the personal, family and public life that Aung San Suu Kyi has led.

The book is surprising in its scope, its depth and its scholarship, but only because its title suggest something rather less than comprehensive. An example of the detail the book presents will illustrate. Justin Wintle relates some of the personal proclivities of Ne Win, Burma’s military ruler for many years. “If he travelled outside the capital, he did so in a flight of helicopters, his staff having made sure that all stray dogs in the vicinity – especially those with crooked tails – had been rounded up and slaughtered. For Ne Win was fearful of stray dogs – especially those with crooked tails...” Following on from this, we are told that when Ne Win was warned of an impending assassination attempt, he would trample in his bedroom on the entrails of a dog or in a bowl of pig’s blood and then “he would raise his revolver... and shoot himself in the mirror.” You just cannot make this up.

Human history, it seems, is full of such ridiculous detail. But it is also full of honesty, endeavour and idealism. Justin Wintle’s portrayal of Aung San Suu Kyi is replete with all of these qualities.

Doves Of War by Paul Preston

Writers of fiction are often accused of forcing their characters to jump through ever more fanciful hoops to satisfy a presumed need for engaging plot. The fact that reality often amplifies the unlikely to the near incredible regularly reminds any reader that considered fiction rarely overstates any issue that derives from our usually random human recklessness. Rarely, for instance, when dealing with war, does fiction place women in the front line. And equally uncommon is the recognition that women are also often in the front lines of politics, even when they might continue to be under-represented amongst the professional practitioners of the art.

And so we often need the kind of reality check that a balanced historical account can provide. Paul Preston’s Doves Of War is precisely the kind of book that can provide comment on all these themes and thus bring us back to earth with an eye-opening bump.

Doves Of War presents contrasting biographies of four women who were directly involved in the hostilities of the Spanish Civil War. Priscilla Scott-Ellis is born of the English upper crust and supports the Nationalists. Nan Green is also English, but motivated by a commitment to left-wing politics. She lines up with the Republic. Mercedes Sanz-Bachiller, a Spaniard, marries into the political life of Vallolid. Margarita Nelken, Spanish-speaking and Spanish-born, but Jewish and branded a foreigner by her enemies, becomes a significant actor on the political left. And so we follow the lives of four women, two on the left and two on the right, two outsiders and two insiders, two who celebrated victory and two berated in defeat. Their stories thus contrast.

It is much to the author’s credit that these lives are presented in a fair and unbiased way. Paul Preston’s personal take on the history of Spain’s war is well known. But in Doves Of War he consistently ducks opportunities to make points about the politics of the struggle, except when the politics are lived out in the lives of his subjects. Committed readers on either side of the argument might feel frustrated at this, but the overall result in that Doves Of War avoids polemic and lets the detail of these four women’s stories demand the reader’s uncomplicated attention. The first subject, for instance, was born into privilege and wealth, thus making political points easy to score. The second is very much the nineteen-thirties pro-Soviet apologist and activist, and caricature might thus beckon. The third is a long-suffering wife dragged into the limelight and the fourth is the driven polymath intellectual. In some way or other, all four could be presented as caricatures or used as vehicles to score other associated historical and political points. Aspects of all four lives could be stressed to demolish them as people or belittle their contribution and commitment. But the author always shies away from cheap shots, even consciously avoiding them, always preferring to analyse rather than judge.

What happens to these four women is the meat of Doves Of War, so this review will avoid reference to the detail of the individual stories. What the review can do, however, is note that each of these lives presents a series of events that is stranger, more heroic, more tragic, more convoluted, more complicated and much more profound than anything a writer of fiction might implausibly create to impose on a character. The twists and turns of these lives, each one pummelled by events and scarred by war leave the reader breathless just trying to keep up.

The style, however, is not easy. Paul Preston is an historian, not a sensationalist or indeed a sentimentalist, and these tales, as presented here, are more documentary than Hollywood. Their content may be stranger than fiction, but the material is considered, discussed, referenced, sourced and checked. Nothing is ever over-stated. Doves Of War displays immense scholarship and, whatever the author’s obvious sympathies, he offers tremendous respect for these four differing women who, in their different ways, gave their lives to the causes they supported.

Philip Spires website

Beyond the Schoolboy Fringe - Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett is something of a pot pourri. It starts with an autobiographical exploration of social and family origins, and then moves on to include occasional pieces on travel, architecture and art, copious diaries from 1996 to 2004, reflections on previous and current work and essays on contemporaries, educational experience and culture. The fact that it all hangs together beautifully is a result of its author’s consummate skills, both linguistic and perceptive.

Untold Stories takes its title from the autobiographical sketch that opens the book. Alan Bennett was the physically late-developing child of a family in the Armley district of Leeds, a northern English industrial city. His father was a butcher who owned two suits, both of which smelled of raw meat. His mother was the supporting pillar of the household, but was also prone to bouts of depression. As a child, Alan Bennett seemed to dream less than most. Perhaps he is still less than able to admit the breadth of his flights of fancy.

“With a writer the life you don’t have is as ample a country as the life you do and is sometimes easier to access.” This sounds remarkably like e e cummings, a character that would not usually be linked with someone as apparently domesticated as Alan Bennett. But reading all of Untold Stories, the reader is repeatedly struck by how much of the eventual content of Alan Bennett’s perceptive, witty and perspicacious writings has its origins within the four walls of the family home. Many of the values, assumptions, attitudes and standpoints, whose apparently unquestioning adoption by his fictional characters lead the listener to question them, arose from a wider family that feverishly tried to be mundane but, like all families, never achieved that goal. The family was, after all, made up of individuals, each of which had his or her own reality alongside unresolved and often shared misgivings. 

Thus, immediately, a writer has several lifetimes of real and imagined material. Alan Bennett, perhaps by virtue of having at least potentially crossed some of the chasms of social class that so profoundly divide British society, seems able to comment, often with no more than an occasional word or phrase, on those tentative but agreed assumptions that make us what we are. “Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and concerns more profound.”

But this, despite the authenticity of his flavours, is no minor writer. Not for a moment would anyone wish this writer’s passing, but there is no doubt that Alan Bennett’s work will live on, probably grow in stature as its ability to comment on the changing Britain of the twentieth century develops a sharper focus.

Essentially Alan Bennett comes across as a conservative type. He dresses and even looks like a 1950s schoolboy, visits churches to describe architectural details of selected tombs in Betjemanesque prose, probably doesn’t indulge in fusion cooking, shuns recognition, inhabits the inner city but is perhaps never quite at home there. But then there’s the anti-establishment side, the satirist, the overt homosexuality and general anti-bigwig mentality. 

And all of this from a First at Oxford. “But taste is no help to a writer. Taste is timorous, conservative and fearful. It is a handicap. Olivier was unhampered by taste and was often vulgar. Dickens similarly. Both could fail, and failure is a sort of vulgarity, but it’s better than a timorous toeing of the line.” Untold Stories is a long read, but one which offers a simple yet sophisticated joy from beginning to end. Alan Bennett revisits topics he has written about in the past. Miss Shepherd, The Lady In The Van is here, as are his early plays and Beyond The Fringe. So are Talking Heads and The History Boys. But throughout he selects and applies language with much wit and humour to offer apparently ephemeral perspectives on everyday life, perspectives that on reflection are anything but shallow. He is a man of taste, as revealed by his regular revulsion with Classic FM, but he is also an enigma because he keeps listening to it.

Wole Soyinka’s Aké

I expected to get a lot more from Wole Soyinka’s Aké than I did. It’s not every day that the childhood memoirs of a Nobel Laureate come to hand. Expectation demanded something special, something revelatory perhaps, from the formative years of a man who grew up to be one of the greatest writers of all time. What Aké presented was in fact exactly what it said on the tin. It’s a childhood memoir.

There are no great moments, no previously hidden insights on how to achieve greatness. But there is a life, and perhaps that is our clue. Born into a teaching family, Wole Soyinka lovingly recalls a headmaster father he calls Essay and a severe mother nicknamed Wild Christian, who certainly is the ruler of the household. But around this potentially unlocatable family, there exists an eclectic mixture of Yoruba tradition, imported educational values and imposed colonial rule.

The young writer’s concerns, however, are exactly what might be expected of a growing lad. He chases things, explores, is naughty – sometimes very naughty! He is punished and rewarded. Life goes on. 

There are local concerns, sometimes wider ones. He eats plenty of good food and, by no means uniquely, but certainly eloquently, describes the multicultural reality of colonial West Africa. Whether it was the reader or the writer is unclear, but when, about half way through the book, Wole Soyinka starts to relate his school experiences, Aké seems to change into a different, much more vivid book. Recollections become stronger, more deeply felt, more keenly described.

What had already been a joy now becomes thoroughly engaging as well. Wole Soyinka’s neighbours did become objects of great interest, and not merely because they figured in this book. Their name, Ransome Kuti, may be familiar. It’s a family that produced in successive generations two of Nigeria’s most famous musicians. Strangely, their family too lives its life just like the others, with no apparent inkling of the greatness to come.

As Aké progressed and this reader continued to search for what made the author such a great writer, it began to become clear that the only thing that made this man was experience, something we all share. Individually, any experience is unique; it does not need to be dramatic, violent, broken or ecstatic to be special. It is special because it was experienced. And this is what makes Aké, in the end, such a great statement. It’s life. Let’s get on with it.