MY LIVES by Edmund White

In the mid-1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I told my mother I was homosexual: that was the word, back then, homosexual, in its full satanic majesty, cloaked in ether fumes, a combination of evil and sickness.  

Of course I’d learned the word from her.

Such is the very excellent beginning of this memoir of the life of author Edmund White.  I learnt something in this book about writing, and something about psychotherapy, but mostly I learnt that there was a period after the sexual revolution and before AIDS where a certain generation had a truly incredibly amount of sex.  And I mean, like really at lot.  Like, I can’t tell if I believe it, but then I guess there wasn’t that much on TV. 
As a side bar, let me just say how typical I think this is of this generation.  They basically lucked out: no war, no Depression, just rising house prices and access to birth control.  They took an absolute flame thrower to the environment, to the European Union, and to the notion that parents want a better life for their children.  If there is one thing we have learnt about this generation, it’s that they will vote for themselves absolutely no matter what, and god help those coming after them.  After Brexit, I don’t even like to give up my seat on the tube for an old person.  I am so ready for the revolution.
Revolution aside, back to Edmund White.  Unusually this book is organized not chronologically but by various themes ‘My Mother,’ ‘My Shrinks,’ ‘My Friends,’ and similar.  As so often in memoirs (regular readers will know I am on a memoir kick) the childhood is the most vivid part.  I wonder why this is? I have two hypothesis 1) Because you are just learning about life when you are young, it strikes you as more wonderful/memorable/unique; or 2) Because you are further away from it you have had more time to shape it into legend. 
I tend to think it is 2).  But in any case, White has a particularly interesting childhood, in the dubious position of ‘best friend’ to his divorced mother.  He spends a lot of time in therapy, trying to be cured of his homosexuality.  His therapist blames the parents (fully agreed; certainly nothing I’ve ever done has been my fault).  However, as Edmund points out:

They were as eccentric as he – impoverished rural Texans unprepared for the world they’d created for themselves by earning money and moving North . . . they were self-made crazy people, all too full of dangerous feelings.

This was not a bad thing in his view, as he observes:

Some children complain because their parents fight or are divorced, without realizing the most neglected people of all are the offspring of love marriages.  A husband and wife besotted with each other look at their children as annoying interlopers.

I’ve often thought this, but it’s the first time I’ve seen someone else mention it.  He gives his parents other weird free passes too.  Try this:

My father did try to seduce my sister, who many years later remembered that Daddy had come on to her when she was thirteen or fourteen.  He’d tried to kiss her and fondle her.  She’d said, ‘No Daddy, that’s not right.”  She’d been a bit proud that she appealed to him – after all, our mother had often spoken of the elaborate ruses she’d imagined to reawaken his sexual attachment to her.

  ?!?!?!

White is clearly a writer, and the book is full of interesting observations, such as  “. . . later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glen Miller – few people were avant-garde outside their own domain” and  “New York is a city of foreign accents in which no one ever asks someone where he is from except out of hostility or as a form of flirtation.”
But mostly this book is about sex.  He will describe someone by their height, and their eye colour, or whatever, so-far-so-standard, but this is the only book I’ve ever read where people are also routinely described by their GENITALS.  Sample: 

 I remember Jim had a long, thin cock and very warm balls.

I guess it makes sense.  It must be so super weird for boys that all their junk is on the outside, instead of where it should be, and is for girls, safely on the inside, nicely protected from things. 
The book gets bogged down in later pages in some serious name-dropping, in which he greatly overestimates how impressed we will be by how Foucault used to act at cocktail parties.  However I still enjoyed it, as a window into what it was like to get to be in the generation that has burned the house down.

GROWING UP by Russell Baker

The straightforward title of this memoir is a good clue to what’s inside.  Basically, he tells you all about how he grew up.  It gives you a different perspective on modern memoirs, where people feel that they have to have interior dramas and unique personal problems.  Baker tells us very little about his interior life, and focuses almost entirely on other people.  It was refreshing, and makes me wonder about our current modern mindset.  The idea that I might not be the centre of my own life is somehow sort of a relief.  Perhaps our focus on self-improvement and self-care is a symptom of an unhealthy modern self-absorption.

He grows up in a working class home during the Depression.  Times are tough, but family bonds are strong.  His mother is determined he makes something of himself and in many ways the book is her story more than his.  An example of what I mean by times are tough is his paper route.  Lots of ten year old kids have paper routes, but his happens at 2am in a bad part of Baltimore.  Apparently this is fine, because he gets two dollars. 

The book begins in fact with his mother, who is in hospital as an old woman:

Of my mother’s childhood and her people, of their time and place, I knew very little.  A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs.  . . . Sitting at her bedside, forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my own children, and their children, and children in general, and about the disconnections between children and parents that prevent them from knowing each other.  Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them. 

I suspect this book is written in part for his children.  I am not sure how much they will appreciate the extensive detail on how he hooked up with their mum.  Essentially when he meets her she works behind the make-up counter, and while he is quite crazy about her he doesn’t think she is ‘good enough’ to be his wife.  I am not sure why he is so sniffy, as he is the one with the background in dangerous child labour.  In any case, this lady breaks up with him after three years, because she realizes it isn’t going anywhere.  He manages to hold off calling her for a heroic three weeks or so.  Master stroke on her side, she then goes on a business trip with some men.  Then he really loses his mind.  Here is their romantic proposal when she returns.  It’s 7am at the train station café:

“I was going to say I’ve been thinking while you were away,” I said.

“I did some thinking too.” 

“Well, what I was thinking was, maybe it’s time I started thinking about getting married.” 

“Do you have somebody in mind?” 

“Are you still interested in getting married?” I asked 

“We’ve covered all this a hundred times.  I’m tired of it.” 

“Would you like to get married?” 

“To who?” 

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, say it,” she said. 

“Let’s get married.” 

“After the Sun raises you to eighty dollars a week?” 

“As soon as you want to. I’ve been figuring, and think we can get by on seventy dollars a week, if you promise to quit charging things in department stores.” 

“Would I have to live with your mother?” 

“That’s a hell of a question.” 

“I just want to know whether I’m going to have a husband or a mother’s boy.” 

“Do you want to fight or do you want to get married?” 

“Is March too soon?” she replied. 

I suppose I gasped.  March was only eight weeks away. It seemed terrifyingly immediate.  “March is fine with me,” I said. 

Mimi reached across the table and took my hand.“Kiss me,” she said.

Anyway they made it to their 65th wedding anniversary, so something went right. 

This book won the Pulitzer and sold 22 million copies.  Not all of those 22 million readers were happy.  I got this book used on Amazon, and I do love a yellowing dog-eared copy.  I especially love this one, as it was clearly owned by a teenage boy.  He adds after the various review quotes:

 This book sucks! Ken Johnson

He also reveals something I am sure would embarrass him today.  In a smart move he writes it in a foreign language:  

Ich liebe Sara Welch sehr viel

In a horrifying show of Google power, I was able to establish in about five minutes based on these names and where this book came from that Ken and Sara may be people who attended Clark High School in Las Vegas in the early 90s.  Truly, Big Brother is here and he is us. 

SPANDAU: THE SECRET DIARIES by Albert Speer

I found this in my father’s bookcase.  It is diaries written during Speer’s twenty years spent in jail after the second World War.  It’s one thing when you have just your regular crimes, but Speer was in for crimes against humanity.  I mean, how many people in high school ever think: I’m going to be famous for crimes against humanity?  It must come as a surprise, after the fact, because while you are busy being crazy you probably never think your behaviour rises to anything beyond but I-did-what-I had-to.
This is certainly Speer’s argument.  He was a highly ambitious, but not highly successful, architect when he met Hitler.  Hitler offered him the opportunity to build buildings for his thousand year Reich.  I’ve heard of the thousand year Reich, but always thought it was propaganda.  Apparently not – he genuinely thought this was what he was creating.  Eventually Speer became Minister of Armaments, and was thus crucial to the Nazi war effort. 
While other Nazis (I guess you could call them smart Nazis) ran away in the last days of the war, Speer stayed around, not thinking the Nuremberg trials would go bad for him.  After all, it was a war, and etc.  The judges didn’t look kindly on his use of forced labour (also called slavery) in the armaments factories, and he was sentenced to twenty years.  (Interesting side point: unlike the Allies, Germany refused to use women in its factories, preferring slaves.  Morality aside, how dumb is that?  Obviously slaves will sabotage you every chance they get, versus your wives who you would at least assume are on your side)
His twenty years he has to serve with seven other leading Nazis. You would think he would think he might find that comforting, but this turns out to be pretty much like it would be for anyone condemned to spend decades with their work colleagues, right after a business went bankrupt.  There is a lot of re-fighting the war, and trying to argue that more submarines would have made a difference, or more Aryan purity or whatever. 
Speer also wrestles a lot with how he got there.  Here he is on when he first saw Hitler:

Students had taken me along to a mass meeting on Berlin’s East Side.  Under leafless trees young people in cheap clothes poured towards one of the big beer halls in Berlin’s Hasenheide.  Three hours later I left that same beer garden a changed person.  I saw the same posters on the dirty advertising columns, but looked at them with different eyes.  A blown-up picture of Adolf Hitler in a martial pose that I had regarded with a touch of amusement on my way there  had suddenly lost all its ridiculousness. 

He spends a lot of time trying to explain the appeal.  He also tries to excuse himself, claiming he didn’t know the Holocaust was happening.  For example:

(Hilter) was capable of tossing off quite calmly, between the soup and the vegetable course, ‘I want to annihilate the Jews in Europe.  This war is the decisive confrontation between National Socialism and world Jewry.’ .. That was how he used to talk, in military conferences and at table.  And the entire circle . . . and I myself, all of us would sit there looking grave and gloomy.  . . . No one ever contributed a comment; at most someone would sedulously put in a word of agreement.

He claims that when Hitler said exterminate, he didn’t know he meant ‘exterminate.’  Just like you can say you will crush your enemies but don’t mean ‘crush’.  I wasn’t quite sure how to take all this, as he went on about this for quite some time (and let’s face it he had a lot of time to go on about things, like about twenty years).  Wikipedia tells me I shouldn’t trust a word of it and that there is evidence he knew very well what was going on, and indeed helped build the camps.  Though no one claims he was actively involved in what happened there.
It was interesting to read this book and try and understand how far it is a cynical effort at self-promotion and how far a genuine effort to explain how he got to where he was.  Also very interesting – probably more interesting – was seeing how someone deals with twenty years of nothing.  I don’t think I’ve ever quite understood how long twenty years is, or what prison truly means, before I read this book.  Death is obviously the end of life, but in so far as life is just a series of experiences, you can see how prison is the next best thing to death, because it really does deprive you of experiences. 
It reminded me of (strange bedfellows alert) Nelson Mandela’s LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, where you see how prisoners will create drama and event out of nothing.  For example, Speer starts doing long walks back and forth in the prison yard every day, and then gets an Atlas, so he can imagine that he is walking around the globe.  He writes about it as if he is really in India, or wherever, and in the end of his dairies focuses very much on how much he ‘hopes he can make it to Guadalajara’ before he is let out. He is eventually given a garden, and this transforms his life.  He is there so long that he plants tree seedlings knowing he will live to sit in their shade.  He’s probably a monster, but damn, it’s hard not to feel sorry for him. 

THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler

This is one of those books that was so original it now seems an imitative.  That is, fifty years ago it created a genre, and now looks like a rather stale example of that genre.  (A bit like this).  The genre: hard-boiled detective, ice-cold blonde, straight-up bourbon, etc.  Here’s the opening:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothillsI was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them.  I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. 

BOOM!  it’s a murder mystery, but the plot is not really here nor there, so let’s not bother with it.  Chandler didn’t: a chauffeur gets murdered at the beginning, and it’s not clear who did it; and when the movie came to be made, Chandler admitted he didn’t know himself who the culprit was. That’s not the point.  The point is drinking whiskey and being cool.  There’s lots of men facing off.  Here is what he says to one man pointing a gun at him:

“Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail”

Or here are some orchids:

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.

Chandler had an interesting life, and only got round to this, his first and most famous novel when he is 51.  This gives me hope for my own life.  Before that he did all sorts, military, corporate work.  From the latter “he was dismissed for a combination of factors, including heavy drinking, depression, missed work, and general womanizing.”   I mean, if you have to get fired, that is #goals way to get fired. 

GIVING UP THE GHOST by Hilary Mantel

I am on a memoir kick at the moment, all handpicked for me out of here.  This one is by a famous writer, Hilary Mantel (author of e.g., WOLF HALL).  It’s not much about her fame, or writing, but more about her rather mysterious inner life.  It has the gorgeous language I expect of her: my blog tells me I’ve read fully five (!) of her books.  She really is the master of transforming the ordinary into the marvellous. Here she is walking up to her back door in the dark:

 But just as feet know the path, fingers know the keys.  Fifty yards from the market place there is no light pollution, no urban backwash to pale the sky; no light path, no footfall.  There is starlight, frost on the path, and owls crying from three parishes

The book has three main focuses: her childhood, her illness, and bizarrely the process of buying her house.  She grew up in a working class family, and is one of that group of English writers whose whole life was changed by passing the 11+ exam.  It’s all very hard scrabble, especially the part where her mother leaves her husband for another man but they all continue to live together, but not in a cool menage-a-trois kind of way, more in an economic necessity kind of way. 

Then she goes to university and gets married, but this is largely summarized in a couple of lines.  The main focus is on her illness.  She has endometriosis, which is famously an under-diagnosed disease among women.  It’s still so today, but back then it was really bad: they sent her to a lunatic asylum rather than believe her symptoms. (I said it was better today, but not a lot better.  Ladies: if you have really bad period pain don’t let anyone tell you it’s not really bad).   

Now, all that said, let me clarify that I’m not saying she’s not crazy.   There are some pretty questionable parts.  She was very frightened once when she saw something creepy in the garden when she was eight.  It’s not clear what it was, possibly a ghost, possibly just a quality of the light, but she emphasizes repeatedly how frightening this was.  I would never tell people about such a thing.  I’m just not ready for the mockery.  Same with the last memoir, about the aunt who was just too charismatic.  I’m beginning to conclude that writing a good memoir means not worrying about mockery.

And now onto the third section, the most profoundly British section, which is all about house buying.  Weirdly, this is also about ghosts.  I enjoyed this view of your past homes:

You come to this place, mid-life.  You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face.  When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led.  All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been.  The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of your curtains, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer liners. 

She moves to a new housing estate, and I enjoyed her account of her young neighbours:

They were not . . . the sort for adulterous upsets, for drunken fumbles, for spring folie, for subterfuge and lies.  They were grounded infotec folk, hardware or software people. .  They were mobile in their habits till their children fixed them; keen, pragmatic, willing to defer gratification . . . Men and women met each other halfway, gentle fathers and defined, energetic mothers. . . They had parents, but they had them as weekend accessories, appearing on summer Saturdays like their barbecue forks 

 Her endometriosis, being treated very late, means she can’t have children, and these almost-children also haunt the book. 

Even adulterers have their ghost children. Illicit lovers say: what would our child be like?  Then, when they have parted or are forced apart, the child goes on growing up, a shadow, a half-shadow of possibility.  The country of the unborn is criss-crossed by the roads not taken, the paths we turned our back on.  In a sly state of half-becoming, they lurk in the shadowland of chances missed.

So GIVING UP THE GHOST is an unusual memoir, in not being just the story of her life, but the story of all the lives she didn’t get to lead.  It’s sad really, it seems unfair: how come we only get to live the one life.  Seems like we should get a second chance.

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA by Stendahl

I keep meaning to read Stendhal.  I got a good distance into this book before I googled myself (by means of this blog) and found out I have in fact already read Stendahl.  

And not just Stendahl, but THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA.  In my defense, last time I apparently gave up on p225.  This time I got to p265.  

Yes, I’m not into it.  It’s just sort of hard going with lots of silly swashbuckling.  This blog is now almost ten years old and I see it is such a long time period that I have forgotten entire books, but not such a long time that I have changed as a person.  Creepily, not just my verdict and quit point are about the same, but so too are the parts I enjoyed.  Both this time and last I noted this rather fun line, which shows cities don’t change so very much:

In front of each of these cafes, crowds of the inquisitive are installed on chairs in the middle of the street, eating ice-cream and criticizing the passers-by. 

This time around I also enjoyed the first hand account of the battle of Waterloo (as Stendahl marched with Napoleon – including on the way back from Moscow – yikes).  I also really enjoyed learning more about the world pre-democracy, where the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ was considered a passing ‘cult.’  Here is someone telling the main character, a nobleman called Fabrizio, about a government functionary who greatly respects the nobility:

“But when he is front of the prince, or even in front of me, he can’t say no.  Truth to tell, if I’m to produce my full effect,  I have to have the big yellow sash on over my tunic.  In a frock-coat he’d contradict me, so I always put on a uniform to receive him.  It’s not for us to destroy the prestige of power, the French newspapers are demolishing it quite fast enough.  The obsession with deference is hardly going to survive as long as we do, and you, nephew, will outlive deference.  You will simply be a man!

At one point, Fabrizio considers running away to America, and his aunt (with whom he is in an incestuous relationship, but don’t worry about that): “explained to him the cult of the god dollar, and the respect that must be paid to merchants and artisans in the street, who by their votes determine everything.”  What a nightmare!

THE BEGINNING OF SPRING by Penelope Fitzgerald

This is the story of a man whose wife leaves him, with the children.  She returns then returns them at the first opportunity.   It is set in Russia in the early twentieth century.
I was stunned by Fitzgerald’s THE BLUE FLOWER, which mysteriously out of a few bits of nothing created a profound meditation on life’s brevity.  This was also a few bits of nothing, but somehow it didn’t quite come together in the same way.  Like THE BLUE FLOWER, those bits of nothing are in their own way remarkable.  Based on the last book, I thought she must be some kind of expert on domestic life in eighteenth century Germany, so specific and detailed was the world.  THE BEGINNING OF SPRING makes me think that in fact she must be an expert on twentieth century Russia.   Really I guess she is just some sort of magician. 

ZORBA THE GREEK by Nikos Kazantzakis

Here is a novel on the exciting subject of dealing with your philosophical problems while also mining lignite in rural Crete.  In my endless quest for something to read I often pick up books in the category of minor modern classic, having finished all the major ones long ago, and usually it’s a good call.  This one: jesus. 
Some tortured young man is off to mine lignite.  (What is lignite?  Nobody knows.  But strangely it also came up in this book that I read this year).  He spends a lot of time writing tortured letters to some friend about a set of what we would today call #firstworldproblems about the meaning of life and the nature of Greek identity.  Then he meets this man Zorba, a peasant who tells him all about his love of a musical instrument, the santuri:

If the wife says one word too many, how could I possibly be in the mood to play the santuri?  If your children are hungry and screaming at you, you just try to play ! To play the santuri you have to give everything up to it, d’you understand?

Yes, I understood.  Zorba was the man I had sought so long in vain.  A living heart, a large voracious mouth, a great brute soul, not yet severed from mother earth.

He’s profoundly inspired by Zorba’s connection to the earth and ability to live in the moment.  It’s so classist I can’t tell you.  It’s a really laughable version of the myth of the noble savage that goes completely unexamined.  Or I assume goes unexamined, because I didn’t get to the end. It was just too stupid.  And the misogyny was hard going.  Regular readers know I give a pass to lots of misogyny, because otherwise there’d be hardly anything left to read from the western cannon.  But this one was tough.  You may have noticed how unreasonable Zorba’s wife was to mention the children starving.  He has lots of other strong ideas like this.  Here is how nefarious of us it is to have children when birth control hasn’t been invented yet.

 

What can you expect from women? He said. That they’ll go and get children by the first man who comes along.  What can you expect of men?  That they fall into the trap.  Mark my words, boss!

And here’s the part where we enjoy getting raped in war zones. 


How they had entered Novo Rossiisk; how tey had looted shops; how they had gone into houses and and carried off the women.  At first the hussies cried and scratched their own faces with their nails and scratched the men, too, but gradually they became tamed, they shut their eyes and yelped with pleasure. They were women, in fact. . .

I just couldn’t do it.  Indeed, if this is a classic it is extremely minor.  Or perhaps it is a major classic, but of a quite different kind than I had been thinking.

ARABELLA by Georgetter Heyer

I really enjoyed this one.  It had a kind of standard Heyer plot, though the romantic lead is a bit more of a bad boy than usual; but it struck me as funnier than the others.  Here is an older lady, about who she comments: “Time had done more to enlarge her body than her mind,” and . .. provided she was not expected to put herself out for them, or to do anything disagreeable, she was both kind and generous to her friends.”
Or perhas I was just in the mood for Heyer.   Apparently I am on a real kick in 2019, and I blame is all on Bognor Regis.