« Another American in Paris? | Main | THE ARCHIVES OF AUGIE MARCH »

July 14, 2006

MR. MANNERS

The London Review of Books looks at a new "energetic and enjoyable biography" of angry young man John Osborne.

Heilpern charts Osborne’s transformation from the Angry Young Man of the late 1950s via ‘the faux Coward sophisticate and surly teddy boy’ of the 1960s to the English country squire of the 1980s and 1990s. People who knew Osborne personally (which I didn’t) speak warmly of the quality of his company; however, most also acknowledge that his refusal to edit his life or his behaviour had its down side. The angry stalking out of rehearsals and previews (in later years), the vituperative correspondence, the jibes against lefties, gays and Jews (in the name of truth-telling and integrity) are all described, as is Osborne’s bitterness towards former collaborators and intimates alike. Given access to notebooks which reveal ‘a staggering self-loathing and guilt’, Heilpern acknowledges that he is dealing with a man who threw his 16-year-old daughter out of his house, fired his secretary for being pregnant, wrote letters to Jill Bennett addressed to ‘Mrs Adolf Hitler, Pouffs’ Palace, 30 Chelsea Square’, and, following her suicide, wrote of his desire to look down on her open coffin and ‘drop a good, large mess into her eye’.

Posted at 12:08 AM in Litlinks |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed