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| Arts | Westchester: After 96 Novels, Still Waiting for a Best Seller Todd Strasser of Larchmont often uses fictionalized versions of nearby towns and schools in his novels for children and young adults. feeds.nytimes.com |
Nicolas Sarkozy provokes French left by honouring Albert Camus • 'Anti-intellectual' leader accused of point-scoring• Author's admirers wary of posthumous recognitionFrench intellectuals have heaped scorn on a proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy to bestow the country's greatest posthumous honour upon the writer Albert Camus, accusing the rightwing president of trying to cash in on the thinker's popularity with little respect for his politics or personality.Sarkozy said in Brussels last week that he thought it would be an "extraordinary symbol" to transfer the Algerian-born author's remains to the PanthĂ©on, the resting place for heroes of France, on the 50th anniversary of his death in January."I thought it would be a particularly pertinent choice," he told journalists, while cautioning that no decision had yet been taken. "[It is] a project which is extraordinarily close to my heart." An ÉlysĂ©e adviser, Georges-Marc Benamou, told journalists last month that Camus's "non-conformism in relation to France's elites" appealed to the president, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who prides himself on not having come from the conventional politician's background.But the idea of a rightwing leader often accused of authoritarian tendencies and anti-intellectualism celebrating the life of a man who made a career out of political resistance and literary endeavour has outraged many Camus experts.They suspect Sarkozy is using a golden opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of a charismatic hero, whose ideas are being feted by the mainstream half a century after he died in a car crash."I don't think Albert Camus has any need of Sarkozy. I think Sarkozy has greater need of some intellectual sparkle," said Olivier Todd, a biographer of Camus, on French radio.Jeanyves GuĂ©rin, another academic, said that while the author of The Outsider and The Fall deserved to be honoured, other politicians had had more right to order it than the current French president. "Sarkozy is the friend of [George W] Bush, [Muammar] Gaddafi, [Vladimir] Putin, [Silvio] Berlusconi. His politics are the antithesis of the values and ideas which Camus defended," he claimed.Sarkozy, for whom the Nobel prize-winner would be the first addition to the PanthĂ©on, has said he would only be able to act with the approval of Camus's children, who hold the rights to his estate. The writer is currently buried in the cemetery of Lourmarin, the village in southern France to which he moved in 1958.Catherine Camus, his daughter, has said she has "only doubts" about the move, while acknowledging its potential to be a "great symbol" for hope given her father's humble origins and subsequent fame. More worryingly for the ÉlysĂ©e, Jean Camus, her twin brother, is believed to be set against it. According to Le Monde, he feels the transferral would be "contradictory" to Camus's life and work.Aside from questions over Sarkozy's motives and legitimacy, others agree that the "PanthĂ©onisation" of a notoriously discreet man would be inappropriate no matter who ordered it. Jean Daniel, an Algerian-born French journalist, said: "Camus is the author ... of measured heroism. I do not see that the PanthĂ©on glorifies measured heroism."However, Alain Vircondelet, author of a biography to be released in January, said that neither the unease with grandeur nor the president's supposed manipulation should get in the way of what could be an "extremely symbolic" move."This should be something that transcends that," he said, adding that although he is not a Sarkozy supporter he was "irritated" by attempts to turn "a real event" into a political row. "The left is saying 'hands off Camus', but Camus doesn't belong to them. He was a person who went beyond [party] politics."Home for heroesInscribed above the entrance to the PanthĂ©on on Paris's Left Bank are the words "Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante" ("To great men the grateful homeland"). Beneath its pale dome lie the remains of dozens of men – and one woman – decreed worthy of their country's most distinguished burial ground. For presidents, choosing who to add to the long list of names can be a tricky business. Jacques Chirac picked just two people – Alexandre Dumas and AndrĂ© Malraux, the writer and former culture minister. François Mitterrand selected many more, including the scientist Marie Curie. If Nicolas Sarkozy succeeds in transferring Albert Camus's ashes from Lourmarin, the 20th-century literary giant will be among the likes of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Emile Zola.FranceAlbert CamusNicolas SarkozyAlgeriaLizzy Daviesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'My father died and I thought, I'll try and make that funny' Roger Lewis's book, converting the calamities in his life into comedy, has become a word-of-mouth sensationYou can't help being sucked into the world of writer Roger Lewis. Reading his new book, Seasonal Suicide Notes, on the train to Worcester, I become obsessed by two middle-aged women who are talking in voices of such volume they could be on the main stage at Stratford. I hear the words "new patio" and "septic tank", and have to put earphones into my ears even though I have no iPod to listen to. It is a Roger Lewis moment.Seasonal Suicide Notes, which has received fantastic reviews (though, possibly significantly, mainly by men of a certain age and iconoclastic temperament), records five years in Lewis's mildly tortured life. It is, by turns, funny, tragic, tender and vicious. The recently deceased are dispatched with venom, and old enemies Sheridan Morley and Alexander Walker get a special kicking. But while you might sometimes recoil at Lewis's capacity to hate, mostly you laugh at the absurdity of his life and observations.One reviewer described it as the book Lewis, previously best known for his biographies of Peter Sellers, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Burgess and Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey, was born to write. He has what publishers might call a word-of-mouth sensation on his hands, and it is already being reprinted. But when I eventually reach his home in the small town of Bromyard (station-less and a half-hour taxi ride from Worcester – Lewis, naturally, doesn't drive), the succès d'estime does not appear to have lightened his gloomy worldview. "The book came out in October and no one's phoned," he says in his lilting, slightly camp Welsh accent. "In the last six weeks, I've earned less than ever." He fears that his cousin Jeremy Lewis, a fixture in the book world, may be getting all the spin-off commissions.Lewis (Roger, not Jeremy) is a proud hack who reviews mainly for the Express, Mail and Telegraph. "I don't think I've ever turned anything down ever, from any source," he says. "Back in the 1980s you could make quite good money out of being a literary journalist. When I started, I remember getting 95 quid for a review; I did something last year and I got ÂŁ125, and that's after a generation. Being able to read and write, and think about books and talk about culture, is an unwanted skill now. It's an antiquated trade. I may as well be thatching a house or sailing a sail ship."I ask him whether he is really as broke as he makes out. After all, he has this book-lined house, a flat in Austria (bought because he likes snow and fading Hapsburg grandeur), and, as the book makes clear, is no stranger to fancy London restaurants. "But I want that all the time," he says, his sing-song voice rising an octave or two. "Not just now and again. I've got various other friends in the business, and they're earning a fortune. They're earning hundreds of thousands of pounds as columnists. I sometimes can't get to a literary party because I can't afford the train fare. But it is my own fault, because I think the only way to waste money is to save it."This combination of bile and self-knowledge is what gives Seasonal Suicide Notes its comic edge. Lewis is torn between believing in his own genius and bemoaning his eternal misfortune, and by blaming the world for not giving him his due he can have it both ways. Much of his malice can be traced back to the reception his biography of Anthony Burgess received when it was published in 2002. The Guardian review called the book "idle, fatuous and self-regarding".He stands by the book – misguidedly, because it really doesn't work – and says the reviewers misunderstood his attempt to marry content with form. "What I was trying to do with all my biographies was find a form that would suit the subject matter. So for Peter Sellers it's this long, crazy, labyrinthine book, because that was a kind of prose version of him. And then the book on Olivier is very cold, sharp, astringent and ferocious, which he was. For Burgess I did this bombastic, music-hall book that was meant to be his personality, and the reviewers all hated it. They said, 'Oh what we really want on Anthony Burgess is a proper literary biography'. That's the last thing you want, because Anthony Burgess was a great charlatan, so the book is full of all these mock-scholarly footnotes. I thought I'd pulled it off, and then the reviews came out and they were homicidal."Sales were terrible – "I think we sold seven copies last year worldwide" – and Faber, which published the book, stopped returning his calls. Lewis was mortified by the hostility. "I thought I'd never want to write anything ever again. I went into a depression. I thought, why bother if I'm just going to get this mockery and disdain?"Seasonal Suicide Notes is his first book since the Burgess biography and in some respects represents his riposte to the literary world which shunned him. "I just thought, well I'm not going to bother being polite and tractable about this any more. I thought I'd start throwing hand grenades around." He admits that, to a large extent, all his biographies were to some extent about him – not an ideal starting point for a biographer. Here, at last, he can write freely about his favourite subject, creating a comic portrait of himself and a world that fails to appreciate his self-advertised greatness.Publication was a happy accident. Detesting Christmas round robins, Lewis started sending seasonal antidotes to friends – a yuletide howl of rage and despair. "You get these dreadful round robins with people boasting about their wonderful children's successes at Cambridge, the villa in the Dordogne or Tuscany, Pony Club triumphs, and I thought, my life isn't like that, never has been. My children are not even fairly competent on the recorder. If they get a grade C in an exam, we pop open the Pomagne. So I thought, I'll write about that. Then my father died and I thought, I'll try and make that funny, start off with a funeral." In fact, he makes it moving as well as funny. Artfully, he ends the book with his eldest son, Tristan, who is in his early 20s, graduating as a circus clown, thus completing the filial sequence.The friends, including well-placed journalistic ones such as Craig Brown, Francis Wheen and Lynn Barber, adored Lewis's barbed seasonal greetings. "The more horrible my life was, the more they were laughing hysterically," says Lewis. "Cancer, funerals, pennilessness, all my calamities – they just found it funny. And I thought, well maybe that's the only alchemy you can trust – turning tragedy into comedy." The reputation of the annual letters grew, and eventually a publisher came calling. Lewis expanded the entries for the earlier years, wrote up 2008 with a view to publication, and will include 2009 in a paperback planned for next year. Typically, as he was finishing the book his computer blew up, and the text had to be retrieved by a police technology expert who specialised in extracting evidence from the hard drives of paedophiles. Some of the episodes are so bizarre that I wonder how true to life they are. "It's just turning moments of reality into a cartoon," he says, "but it all happened."We are talking in the sepulchral front room of the house Lewis shares with his wife Anna, an educational psychologist, who is portrayed in the book as a saintly figure. Within half a minute of arriving, he has handed me a large glass of red wine – he calls himself a "365-bottle-a-year man". The large, low-slung table beside which we sit is laden with books, including the new volume of TS Eliot's letters and a huge picture book called Fellini's Book of Dreams, bought as a present for himself on the day Seasonal Suicide Notes was published. He is a bibliophile and has about 20,000 books. He is also a poor sleeper and, judging from entries in his new book, spends the early hours reading and watching films and TV, about which he is vastly knowledgeable.He is the ultimate cultural omnivore, and his streak of fuddy-duddyism – he likes artists who can draw, is obsessed with "elf 'n' safety", is suspicious of multiculturalism – is offset by his love of South Park, Crossroads and the Carry On films. He calls himself an anarchist – in some ways, of course, a conservative position – and the only sort of party that would appeal to him is one where he can drink himself into a stupor and put his head through the television set. As indeed happens when he goes to visit the parents of his son's girlfriend.Occasionally he goes too far. There are hints of homophobia, and one crude phrase I can't bring myself to repeat here. I'm convinced Lewis is not homophobic, but sometimes his comic rhetoric gets the better of him. "I think there is something in my book that will offend absolutely everybody," he says. "It's very democratic in that way. That's the glory of it." He points out that he is far harsher about the Welsh, old women, babies and other people's children than he is about gay people.What about the recurrent digs at multicultural Britain? This is a trickier one for Lewis because, while no racist, there is a streak of Little Englander (or is it Little Welsher?) about him. He frets about the charge and, after our meeting, sends me several emails on the subject: "I love the chaos and excitement of the big modern metro-polis," he writes, "but I want to be reassured that a timeless Betjemanesque England is still there underneath, and is not being destroyed." He doesn't just love the Carry On films; he loves the Britain in which they are set, and of which Bromyard may be the final vestige.Lewis, who is 49, is the son of a farmer-turned-butcher, and lived above the family shop in industrial South Wales. His father was a frustrated litterateur ("he was one of the few butchers in South Wales who took the New Yorker"), and Lewis found it hard to get close to him. He studied English at St Andrews and then did a PhD – on his then hero Burgess – at Oxford. Academic life beckoned, but he decided it didn't pay well enough. He had married at 22, and quickly accumulated three young sons. He started to write book reviews and then biographies, the advance for the Sellers book enabling him to take his family off to Normandy to write it. His precarious life as a freelance had begun, though he says he still dreams of a well-paid visiting professor-ship at an American university.His wife is not in evidence when I visit. Nor are his sons, now in their late teens and 20s. Tristan, the eldest, is away with the circus; Oscar is at art college; SĂ©bastien is pondering joining the Marines. When we arranged to meet, Lewis had suggested he make me lunch – or luncheon as he prefers to call it – and he ends the interview after 40 minutes or so to bake a pie. When he eventually unveils the meal, it is monumental: the pie, a quiche, ham, pâtĂ©, potatoes, tomatoes, spring onions, chutney, a carafe of red wine – a proper country meal prepared by a man who rejects modernity's obsession with quickness and convenience.My memory of what is said thereafter is a blur. By late-afternoon we have finished, and I have a train to catch, so I call a taxi for the journey back to Worcester. A quarter of an hour later, I hear a car pull up, open the front door and see a taxi-shaped vehicle arriving. I say a swift farewell and try to clamber in, much to the distress of the woman driver. Then I realise that the vehicle is pink and has "Cake Creations" emblazoned on the side. It is not my taxi, but a local delivery van. Another entry for Lewis's comic confection.• Seasonal Suicide Notes is published by Short Books (ÂŁ12.99). To order a copy for ÂŁ10.39 with free UK p&p (ÂŁ11.99 after December 12) go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847.Stephen Mossguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books: Dissertations on His Dudeness As a new generation of “The Big Lebowski” fans emerges, Dude Studies may linger for a while. feeds.nytimes.com |
Nonfiction Chronicle A history of Playboy, a biography of Barney Frank, a memoir of Jack Kerouac and a collection of essays from David Hajdu. feeds.nytimes.com |