Tag: male writer

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE by Johann Peter Eckermann

I knew this was an ambitious one, but as I have enjoyed such apparent stinkers as BOSWELL’S LONDON JOURNALS 1762-1763, I thought I would give it a go.  I gave it a good two hundred pages but: yikes.  The beginning is pretty interesting, when it is less about Goethe and more about Eckermann.  Eckermann came from a really poor background – his family where subsistence farmers (and I mean for real; they only had one cow).  He was clearly a bright and ambitious boy, and managed to get himself into school, where he has his socks blown off by what I can only call LITERATURE.  You’d think coming from where he comes from, that he’d want to study e.g., law or e.g., medicine, something with money in it, but oh no.  As he explains: “. . .I was dead set against undertaking a course of study simply for the purpose of getting a paid job.”  However after a while he realizes he will have to at least appear to compromise, and agrees that he “would choose a course of study that led to a proper job, and devote myself to jurisprudence.   My powerful patrons, and everyone else who cared about my worldly fortunes but had no idea how all-consuming my intellectual needs were, found this course eminently sensible.”

I just love that part, about his all-consuming intellectual needs.  Poor guy.  He drops out of university, and then makes a lot of generally bad financial choices of the kinds artists do make, but then luckily for him he meets Goethe.  At this point, the book takes a turn for the dull.  Goethe bangs on about a lot of stuff, mostly about how younger generations need to learn from him and his elderly compatriots and etc etc.  Perhaps this dullness is not Goethe’s fault; maybe anyone whose conversation is recounted by someone who is a massive fan would seem boring.  But in any case, I had to quit.  One thing I did find oddly reassuring was how enormously famous Goethe did seem to be in his day, and how rather unfamous he is today.  I guess it’s a comfort in its own way to know that no matter what you do, unless you get to Jesus or Hitler levels, history will not care. 

SEVENTEEN by Joe Gibson

A memoir by a man who at 17 was groomed by his female teacher into a sexual relationship.  He does a fantastic, horrifying job of telling it very much from the perspective of his 17-year old self – how wonderful he found her, how frightened he was of her, and etc.  It must have been very hard to do, because from any adult perspective you can tell she is a strange and manipulative woman, delighted to find someone who will follow her creepy script for romance.  You can tell the author shares this adult perspective, as the post-script takes us to him at 35.  The detailed story ends at his prom, but then he tells us that he ends up getting married to her in his first year of University (in his home town, because ‘you can’t go to Oxford,’ she tells him, because then we’ll be separated); and having a baby in his second year; and another baby in his fourth.  Once he is capable of earning a wage, she never works again.  He hates his job and she convinces him it is his duty to stay with it.  Though he does not talk too much about it, the book absolutely aches with regret for the young years he lost.  What is particularly sad is how clear he makes it that many people – including people in the power structure of the school – who knew what was happening and ignored it, because it was inconvenient for them for it to be happening.  A complete heartbreaker of a story. 

THE INHERITORS by William Golding

Here is a book about the meeting of neanderthals and homo sapiens, told from the neanderthals perspective.  Unsurprisingly, our species does not come out of it looking good.   It really is incredible how our first instinct is to kill, and our second is to abduct.  You do feel sorry for these Neanderthals. 

The first part is the most successful, where you follow a band of 7 Neanderthals as they move from their winter to their summer locations.  There is an impressive inhabiting of a mind that (from our perspective) is sort of half-way there.  Then they meet the ‘bone-faced men,’ who surprise them by being bone-faced, and even more by existing, as the group had previously thought they were the only bipedals in the world. 

From very first meeting you know it is going to end badly for someone, with the Neanderthals watching with interest as ‘small straight twigs’ are thrown at them by the bone-faced men.  These are of course arrows, and it goes downhill from there.

I have to admit I gave up close to the end.  There was a very very long section in which the Neanderthals were watching the early humans go about daily life in a clearing.  I appreciate Golding was having fun sharing his research with us but I got bored.  However, that said, I still enjoyed it. 

PS: I learnt from the introduction – did you know Golding’s other book, LORD OF THE FLIES was widely rejected by agents while in draft?

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell

A few pages into this book, I started to wonder if I’d read something by this author before. And indeed I had, THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, a memoir about the author’s mother dying of the Spanish Flu. What tipped me off was first the style, and second the fact that the narrator’s mother had just died of Spanish Flu.

Bizarrely, what the child narrator is narrating to us is a real-life murder from his home town. A man’s wife falls in love with his best friend, and leaves him in an ugly and very public divorce. He murders his friend, cuts off the corpse’s ear (?) and then drowns himself. The perspective changes from the child’s, to various of the adult’s, to a dog’s. The dog’s part is by far the saddest.

I admired this book greatly, but at the same time didn’t enjoy it. It was just kind of sad and I wasn’t sure what I gained from it.

PROMISE AT DAWN by Romain Gary

There are plenty of memoirs from people with daddy issues; here is one from someone with mummy issues. To give you a sense of the scale, please enjoy this section, which is where the book’s title comes from:

“In your mother’s love, life makes you a promise at the dawn of life that it will never keep.  . . You will go hungry to the end of your days.  Leftovers, cold tidbits, that’s what you will find in front of you at each new feast.   . . You will walk though the desert from mirage to mirage, and your thirst will remain such that you will become a drunkard, but each sweet gulp will only rekindle your longing for the one and only source. “

I have not Wikipedia-ed Gary, but I will be amazed if he has been married less than three times.  His mother is truly a titanic figure.  A penniless Jewish actress from Lithuania, she got pregnant outside of marriage, then drags herself and him across Eastern Europe for many years, determined that he will become a Frenchman, and not just a Frenchman, but a famous Frenchman in the best tradition of the nineteenth century novel: a famous artist (exact artform TBD), a decorated soldier, and a diplomat.  Incredibly, he is all those things, winning both the Prix Goncourt (best possible literary prize) and also the Croix De Guerre (major military medal). 

She is so sure of his destiny that I can only call her unhinged.  At one point, when the neighbours in their dodgy tenement in Poland get her in trouble with the landlord, she drags her son around to each one, haranguing them about how sorry they will be when this 9-year-old is an Ambassador.  Can you imagine: he has to go to school the next day with these people!  She is just utterly sure that his success will make up for all she has suffered.  He says:

“I had always known that my mission on earth was one of retribution; that I existed, as it were, only by proxy . . “

There is much to enjoy outside his mother.  At one point, he gives a little girl he has a crush on three apples, without ever having spoken to her, and then:

“She accepted my surrender as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and announced: ‘Janeck ate his whole stamp collection for me.’

Such was the beginning of my long martyrdom.  In the course of the next few days I ate for Valentine several handfuls of earthworms, her father’s collection of rare butterflies, a mouse, a good many decaying leaves, and, as a crowning achievement, I can say that at nine years of age . . . I took my place among the greatest lovers of all time and accomplished a deed of amorous prowess no man, to the best of my knowledge, has ever equaled.  I ate for my lady one of my rubber galoshes!”

I can’t even get into his time in the WWII AirForce, it being utterly hair-raising as he lays out how all his friends die in various crashes.  He also gives this awful snippet of the red-light district in Marrakesh, where he says it was not unusual for women to be subjected to a hundred men a day; and that “sometimes a girl, half-hysterical from over-work or hashish, would rush naked, screaming, into the alley .”  This is haunting, and I can only hope he is exaggerating.

SPOILER ALERT.  All through his three years in the war, he gets undated letters from his mother.  After the liberation, he goes to see her as quickly as he can, so she can see he is returning a second lieutenant, with a medal, and a book deal (i.e, he has finally succeeded, her life has meaning, etc). He finds she has been dead almost all the three years, and spent the last days of her life writing him hundreds of letters that could be sent on, so he wouldn’t know she was gone.

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING by Alan Sillitoe

I am always struck by how vanishingly rare it is to read a book by a working class person before about 1950.  Here is one.  It’s a hair raising account of heavy boozing and factory work in Nottingham, and you know all you need to know when I tell you this book is where the expression ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down’ comes from.  Try this sample:

“Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you’re still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. . . .  Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.”

‘It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken!’  I love that

This author began life as a factory worker, but then married a poet and used his army pension to move to Spain to write.   I was touched to hear he wrote this under a lemon tree at Robert Graves’ house, who was the person who encouraged him to write the life he knew.  I love Graves’ GOODBYE TO ALL THAT,  a wonderful book about binning your life and becoming a bohemian, and it was sweet to meet him at second-hand through this other writer. 

THE WALL by John Lanchester

In this book set in the far (near?) future, England is surrounded by a wall which is perpetually guarded against ‘the enemy’ who are desperate to get in. 

The exact situation is not described, but you get the impression there has been a massive raise in sea levels globally, and that the enemy is desperate climate migrants.  Much of the book is a straightforward adventure / romance story, focused on one man who is serving his mandatory two years on the wall.  SPOILER His unit allows an incursion, so they are all set adrift in the ocean.  Despite it not really going anywhere in terms of plot after this, I still found it a compelling story of an all-too-possible world.  Probably my favourite part was how it was well understood by the entire culture that the older generation was entirely at fault and they were ostracized appropriately. 

MONEY by Martin Amis

This was one of the more famous books of the 1980s. I cannot say I am feeling it. It tells the story of an author whose book is being made into a movie. He has an alcohol problem and rolls joyfully/miserably through various excesses of his private and professional life. It is a novel of voice, the exuberant voice of the alcoholic, and I think we are supposed to be shocked and titillated by how transgressive he is. A woman at a bar is a ‘big bim,’ he has lots of thoughts on black New Yorkers, etc. I just found it kind of snore.

SIDE BAR: I am 100% sure that this author has daddy issues, just on general principles, because men like this always do. I note that Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, was also an author and wrote the book LUCKY JIM, also a novel in the voice of a disillusioned man. This one, just as transgressive, is wonderful and heart-warming and made me feel free to hate my life. I am sure these two books are in some kind of dialogue, but can’t be bothered to Google to find out how.

COLD CREMATORIUM by Jozsef Debreczeni

Here is a really stomach-churning account of the Nazi death camps.  It is written by a Hungarian journalist, who brings his professional eye to describing how he survived.  I was amazed it is not more famous. The Introduction tells me this is because it has only recently been translated from the Hungarian.  The book begins with the author, Jozsef Debreczeni, being captured in June 1944. Arriving at the first of the camps, the old, young, and female are separated out to the left.  Then the Nazis say that those on the left will get to ride in a truck up the hill, so anyone who feels they cannot walk up the hill should also go to the left. Debreczeni nearly takes the offer, but is fortunate to hear an existing prisoner whisper to him to stay.  Of course all those on the left go directly to be gassed. 

Those on the right go on to hard labour, which is pretty horrifying, but not nearly so bad as what happens when he is somehow sent on to a hospital camp.  Here he lies naked, 2-3 to a bunk, in huge dormitories with almost nothing to eat, and with no one clearing up the sewage, so it is ankle deep at all times.  They do hear news of the front, so they understand that the Nazis have lost, but the question is if they can stay alive long enough for the Russians to get to them.  When the Red Army appears with sausages and throws it on his bed I felt like weeping. 

One thing that really surprised me in this story was his account of how much of the camp order – and how much of the decisions on who and how to deprive of food – was made by fellow prisoners. Apparently the Nazis created a hierarchy, and those prisoners at the top were, in his view, quite merciless to those below.  They loom as much larger villains than their actual captors.  Once the Nazi soldiers decide to run away, what is interesting is the prisoner hierarchy run away too, and while none are caught in the author’s camp, in others they were hanged by the other prisoners.

THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER 1864-1875 by William Finaughty

As always with these kinds of books one is just left stunned by how very much more wildness there used to be in the world.  Try this:

We had scattered out, Mr Price being on my right, when he came racing along by the side of about 300 to 400 giraffe.  It was a wonderful and beautiful sight.  It seemed  a pity to shoot them, but we bottled up sentiment and got five of them.

300-400 giraffe?!? I’ve never seen a group larger than about 10. I didn’t even know they would naturally herd in that size, because I guess there just aren’t enough of them alive to do so. He also at one point sees an elephant herd a MILE AND A HALF LONG.  Even if he’s exaggerating, it’s still enormous.

I learnt a lot from this book, not least that older male giraffe do not make good eating, and so are colloquially known as ‘stinkbulls.’  It is sad to note the collapse of the ecosystem even in his lifetime.  When he first came, he could shoot into a herd and elephants would not even run, they were so unused to bullets.  After ten years, if you sounded a gun anywhere, you wouldn’t even see any elephants for days. 

Apparently he went on to gold prospecting and gambling addiction.  A full life.