A Book of Secrets

The biography of Richard Burton mentioned in passing here comes in at a daunting 800-plus pages. Is anyone's life really worth 800 pages? Maybe a few greats, but the biography business - driven by modern research and documentation methods, publishers' demand for fat volumes, and the ever-grinding mills of Academe - does have a tendency to gigantism, to burying quite minor figures under great tombstone slabs of biography. Happily, some of our best biographers have a more supple, graceful - and mercifully more concise - approach. Both Richard Holmes and Michael Holroyd - with their monumental single-subject biographies behind them - are gravitating toward short lives and group biographies. At the same time, both are increasingly blurring the boundaries by introducing themselves into the biographical narrative - a development that, I gather from a recent conversation, is causing much excitement in the field of Biography Studies (although it goes back to, at least, A.J.A. Symons' Quest for Corvo).
I've just been reading Michael Holroyd's A Book of Secrets, a fascinating and immensely readable group biography of a set of people all linked to the Villa Cimbrone, the glorious gardens of which rise over the town of Ravello on the Amalfi coast. The villa and its gardens as they are now are largely the creation of Ernest Beckett, Lord Grimthorpe, an English politician of whom, I must admit, I had not heard before. He seems to have been quite a lad, with an eye for art and, especially, the ladies. The first part of the book follows the intertwined lives of Beckett and one of the loves of his life, Eve Fairfax, who became a favourite model of Rodin's. Much of the rest of the book is dominated by the relationships between three women, all of whose names begin with V, and all of whom are pretty ghastly: Violet Trefusis, daughter of Beckett by the famous Mrs Keppel (the Prince of Wales's mistress), Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf.
The more you read on, the more appalling these women seem in their dealings with each other and with the others in their lives - self-indulgent women with too much leisure and money and an inflated idea of their own importance and abilities (okay, that's a harsh judgment on Woolf, maybe). However, Holroyd handles them with a light touch, letting in plenty of air and light, commonsense and humour, and interweaving their stories not only with each other, but with his own, as he pursues his researches, visits the Villa Cimbrone and meets an Italian academic who seems to be posthumously in love with Violet. As a result of this approach, the three Vs are not the intolerably oppressive company they might have been. And it makes for quite a story, especially when Violet and Vita get going. Vita's treatment of her husband, Harold Nicolson, is bad enough (though at least the gay Harold was free to make his own amusements) - but it pales into insignificance against Violet's treatment of the man she eventually deigned to marry. Poor Denys Trefusis was a war hero, magnetically attractive to women - and Violet treated him like dirt. Part of the reason is suggested in this startling account of a conversation with Lady Sackville, Vita's redoubtable mother:
'On the point of separating from her unfaithful husband, Lady Sackville had grown fond of scatological stories and coarse sexual anecdotes of horrifying male lust. What she said opened Violet's eyes to what married life with Denys might entail. For though emotionally so alert, Violet seems to have been ignorant of the facts of heterosexual intercourse - until Vita's mother made the details of men's sexual habits 'dirty and hideous' to her. 'Thank goodness I have been spared this horrible knowledge for much longer than most people,' Violet wrote. '... No wonder I have always preferred fairy-tales to facts.'
I must say I rather warmed to Lady Sackville. She also described one of Vita's early novels as 'brilliantly dull' - a superb two-word description of a certain kind of writing. But most definitely not of this thoroughly enjoyable experiment in biography.

Lionel and Porker

The Nigeness archive features again on the super soaraway Dabbler.

Byron: Trying

It's wonderful what turns up at church bazaars - I've come across many good book finds myself over the years, including this remarkable volume. But it would take a lot to top this find of a tatty volume picked up at a church bazaar in Savannah, Georgia, having somehow made its way thousands of miles from the vault of a village church in Nottinghamshire. It's in a safe place now, and no doubt the contents will soon be published. Meanwhile, I like the description of Byron as 'a homosexual who was also reputed to have bedded 300 women'- that's not bad going for 'a homosexual', is it? Lynda La Hughes used to say on Gimme Gimme Gimme, 'There's no such thing as gays - they're just not trying'. So, full marks to Bryon for really trying.

'The Human Cost'

Mao's Great Famine, by the Dutch historian Frank Dikotter, has won the Samuel Johnson Prize. On a radio news bulletin last night, the subject of the book - the starving to death of more than 40 million people - was described as 'the human cost of Chairman Mao's reforms'. Isn't this a little like describing the death toll of the Gulag system as 'the human cost of Stalin's reforms', or the killing fields as 'the human cost of Pol Pot's reforms', or indeed the Holocaust as 'the human cost of Hitler's reforms'? Of course it wasn't a considered statement, and was probably caused by over-compression of the news item to fit a short bulletin, but it is perhaps significant that it got through unremarked. I remember the days, back in the late 60s and well into the 70s, when in Leftist circles Mao's 'Little Red Book' was virtually a fashion accessory - though even then a glance at the relevant entry in the Guinness Book of Records would have uncovered the fact that Mao had broken all records for mass murder (Mao's western pals dismissed this as a CIA fabrication at the time, but the figures turn out to have been about right). I fancy there is still a residue of that once-popular mode of thinking that always gave Communist-inclined mass murderers the benefit of the doubt, on the grounds that their intentions were 'good' and you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs (ignoring the fact that you can break eggs ad infinitum without making anything resembling an omelette). The survival of this mode of (double) thinking can be traced in the fact that Maoist or Stalinist memorabilia and iconography remain faintly chic - or at least inoffensive - whereas sporting the Nazi equivalent would be (rightly) considered anything but. Let's hope Dikotter's book opens many more eyes to the true horror of Mao's regime.

A Green Thought

In the Comments under my recent Marbled White post, Mary (a newcomer?) gives a cheering account of the wonderful effects of a relaxed mowing regime in her local park. Clearly a flowery 'meadow' in a municipal setting has a soothing and civilising effect, providing pleasure to the eye (and nose and ear - the scent of flowers, the sound of grasses) and relaxing the mind and body. There may well be deep-seated primal reasons for this - the evolutionary psychologists would no doubt say it's our nostalgia for the savannah (to which I would retort - Phooey!). At a less primal level, I would suggest that the 'natural' look of a meadow puts us in more of a country than a town mood, presenting us with something that looks like a landscape made by nature rather than man - whereas a municipal expanse of close-shaven lawn is evidently man-made and can be seen by the ill-intentioned as a blank canvas on which to express their antisocial tendencies, or a wide open arena in which to act them out. This new mowing regime is doubtless the result of financial strictures, but for once the law of unintended consequences has worked wonders. I hope the various authorities concerned are taking note of the benign effects of cutting back on the mowing. And thank you, Mary.

Marathon Men

In broadcasting, a surefire waste of good airtime is the post-match/pre-match/pretty much anytime interview with a sportsman/woman. With few exceptions, they have nothing to say, and they manage to say it in the most mind-numbingly boring manner. A prime example is Andy Murray, whose interview responses consist of a string of inarticulate grunts punctuated by 'y'know' every three seconds. Though naturally resistant to the notion that humans are 'really' automata, I do find myself having doubts when I listen to an Andy Murray interview, or indeed watch him play... However, on the radio this morning there was an interview with a sportsman that was rather engaging, frank and even amusing. The interviewee was ultra-marathon specialist Dean Karnazes, who, as can be seen here, has performed amazing feats of endurance running. Why does he do it? asked Evan Davis, gamely jogging along at his side in a London park. In the last analysis, Karnazes replied, 'because I'm not intelligent. I can't see what's ahead.' Excellent. Later Davis asked if he didn't sometimes find it rather boring. Hell yes, he replied (or words to that effect) it's 'the most boring thing on earth'. He can only get through it by listening to talking books... Of course, even Karnazes's ultra-running feats pale into insignificance compared to those of the strangely little-known Yiannis Kouros - but he probably gives a better interview.

When R.S. Met Liz

If I hadn't happened to read a review of a new biography of Richard Burton - and I wouldn't have happened to read it had I not noticed that it (the review) was by the excellent Byron Rogers - I would never have known that the craggy and fabulously austere poet R.S. Thomas once came face to face with Mrs Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor. Gwydion Thomas, R.S.'s son, was a talented actor at Oxford and - here I'll leave it to Rogers to tell the tale - 'was recruited by Burton to appear in his film of Faustus. On set, when served tea, Burton, he recalled with awe, had to have the cup glued to the saucer, because his hands shook so much the rattle was picked up on sound.
Then there was an extraordinary lunch after the actor had asked to meet Gwydion's father. In the course of this, R.S. Thomas tried to interest Elizabeth Taylor in small talk. The poet did this by broaching the subject of flatfish. "And have you tried plaice?" he asked the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.'
And have you tried plaice?... I pass this on purely because it made me laugh. But I've made a mental note of the line - you never know when it might come in handy.