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| The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov Claire Armitstead, Sarah Crown and Penguin editor Alexis Kirschbaum debate the morality of publication and literary merit of Nabokov's fabled final novel, The Original of Laura. Should The Original of Laura have been published? Leave your comments here.Claire ArmitsteadSarah Crown feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Mall says sorry to Sarah Palin for foreign reporter 'ban' on book tour Mall of America in Minneapolis said 'English-only' rule was 'internal miscommunication'She is no longer chief executive of Alaska, but Sarah Palin should still be called "governor". And in English only, please.That was the message from officials at the Mall of America shopping mall, who told reporters planning to cover the Minneapolis stop on Palin's Going Rogue book tour they must address the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate by her former title.The guidelines also banned foreign reporters, allowing "only English-speaking press". Mall officials said it was a mistake and apologised today to Palin for the mix-up, which they called "an internal miscommunication"Sarah PalinUS politicsUnited Statesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A Genius for Failure by Paul O'Keeffe Andrew Motion on a painter obsessed with the bigger pictureBenjamin Robert Haydon dreamed of becoming the British Raphael and has ended up a footnote. He crossed paths and swords with Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, and a host of early 19th-century painters and politicians. He was a friend of Wordsworth, and painted him, in what has become one of the classic images of the poet. He knew Keats, too, and left some vivid glimpses of him in his enormous journal. But his main ambition – to establish a pre-eminent school of British historical painting, and to be its chief exponent and ornament – came to nothing. By the time Haydon killed himself in 1846 he had been in prison four times for debt, was out of favour with commercial marketeers and public commissioners, and had almost none of his works on show in galleries.Paul O'Keeffe's achievement in tracking this descent into the abyss is considerable. The book has all the thoroughness of his previous lives of Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska, and all their willingness to unpick knots of difficulty. It is calm, capacious and very sympathetic to its subject. The problem with the book is a part of these strengths. Encouraged by the richness of the journal, O'Keeffe takes us into virtually every nook and cranny of Haydon's life. The result is simply a much longer investigation than we are persuaded the subject deserves.Yet at the same time some parts of the book need bolstering – especially those that might help us understand why Haydon espoused this particular tradition of painting. What was the national or his own psychological need? The questions become all the more urgent when we look at the kind of talents Haydon had at his disposal. Although some of his contemporaries took him at his own estimation (he believed that at least three of his canvases showed "indisputable evidences of Genius"), the reality was that his sense of structure was faulty, his figure-painting stiff, his ideas about grouping clotted, his emotional range constricted and his colouring unremarkable. His career was an accident waiting to happen.Haydon's misplaced ambitions were settled at an early age. The son of a Plymouth bookseller and historian, he showed some aptitude for drawing as a child, was resisted by his parents (who anticipated a life of struggle), overcame their objections, and moved to London, where he knocked on the doors of the great and good and laid siege to the Royal Academy. As he immersed himself in anatomical drawing, he also sought to establish himself as the champion of the historical school.In both respects, he showed phenomenal energy and concentration. He spurned the chance to make money by painting portraits. He hurled himself into the creation of large canvases which told historical and biblical narratives. He argued bravely about the merits of the recently arrived Elgin Marbles, urging the government to buy them. He berated academicians about the way his works were hung.One of the best things Haydon ever painted was a small portrait of Keats among the crowd of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, which was completed in the early 1820s. In profile, mouth open and showing its over-bite, looking passionately heated, intense and defiant, this is the real Keats – a far cry from later Victorian images of the sickly invalid. But Haydon wasn't much interested in things on this scale. Size mattered to him almost as much as content, and this led to problems on every front. With a wife and rapidly growing family to support, he had committed himself to a way of working which meant long periods with no income, then anxious show-times when he hoped to gather fees from the crowds he expected to flock to see his work, as well as money from the sale of the picture itself.Things almost never worked out as he expected. He was first arrested for debt in 1821, and for the remaining 25 years of his life lived close to bankruptcy. Astonishingly – one might say foolishly – he kept his momentum, slowly churning out vast, dull pictures and lobbying senior politicians (including several prime ministers). His religious faith was evidently a help to him (he was in the habit of praying in front of his canvases before beginning work), but in most respects his self-belief seems increasingly manic. Hazlitt put the matter with an unusual politeness: "Mr Haydon has strength: we would wish him to add to it refinement."In the last phase of his career Haydon regained some momentum by agreeing to paint two colossal public works – The Reform Banquet, which shows people who had worked to extend the franchise, and The Anti-Slavery Society Convention. Each of these pictures includes more than 100 portraits: an impressive achievement in its way, but one so overshadowed by structural tedium (tiers of pink faces receding into the distance) as to seem almost pointless in art. Most contemporary reviewers thought so, too. Even more crushing were Haydon's failures to win the opportunity to build the memorial to Nelson in Trafalgar Square or to work on the new parliament building when it was rebuilt after the devastating fire of 1834. The rejections were not surprising. The inscription he suggested for his Nelson temple read: "A Little Body with a Mighty Heart".The last few years of Haydon's life make for unhappy reading, but O'Keeffe deals with them well by combining sympathy with clear judgment. Several of his children died. Debt collectors kept up a more or less constant barrage. Every new friend he gained (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance) was outnumbered by a host of detractors. Eventually the weight of disappointments became too much and he committed suicide. But even this he bungled, failing to kill himself with a pistol shot to the head, and only succeeding in cutting his throat at the second attempt.Misapplied energy, lack of self-knowledge and vaingloriousness had first sapped then corrupted the near- heroic energy and devotion to high ideals that he had shown in his early days. They also distracted attention from the things he really did do well, even if he didn't value them much: writing a great journal, painting a few good portraits, and giving, as he said (in an epitaph he wrote for himself 20 years before he died), "indisputable evidence . . . that no affliction is considered an adequate punishment for having told Truth to Power".Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.BiographyPaintingAndrew Motionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
David Peace talks to James Ellroy David Peace interviews James EllroyDavid Peace Pete Bondurant appears as a minor character in White Jazz and then becomes one of the principal characters in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand – is that where the spark for the whole Underworld USA trilogy came from? With you wanting to run with this character, to see where Pete took you?James Ellroy There was an overlap that began with my reading of Don Delillo's novel Libra. I saw that it was so superbly done that I couldn't write another book specifically about the assassination of John F Kennedy. But that's when I began to see that the harbingers of the assassination started to percolate in '58. And I saw that I could do a book where the assassination could be a concluding event, but appear off-stage. And then turn it into a trilogy. So I was originally going to use the real-life private eye Fred Otash, who's been a supporting character in three or four other books, but I was going to pay him because I didn't trust him.DP Is he dead now?JE Yes, he's dead now. So I could've used him for free. But I had already created Big Pete, so I decided to use him.DP Did you write American Tabloid knowing it would be the first book of a trilogy?JE As I began the finishing of Tabloid, I saw that it was a trilogy, and I saw that the second book would be the big book about the 60s.DP Had you also envisaged the third book?JE Not in any kind of detail, no. Because the politics and the social upheaval of America during the 60s are so obvious – you got the anti-war protests, the civil rights movement, the racism of the South, Howard Hughes buying up Las Vegas – I had a lot of it right at the gate. But when you go into 1972, as this book [Blood's a Rover] does, it's less charted territory.DP At what point did you decide on the various timeframes for each novel?JE I had decided to end the first two books with the assassinations (of JFK in 1963, and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968), and then the death of Hoover in '72 unfolded as the logical conclusion to the trilogy.DP These are huge stories, huge histories. What are your research methods?JE They are threadbare. I hire researchers who compile factsheets and chronologies for me, so that I won't write myself into error. And then I extrapolate, fictionally. Which is what you do; you just extrapolate . . .DP Well, I use the library a lot more; I spend a year in the library. And then the fiction comes. So I admire your ability to do this without a net . . .JE I like to lie in the dark, Mr Peace. I just lie in the dark and I . . . think. And history has been kind to me. I am a good thinker. I am a single-minded man. I spend so much time . . . do you have a family?DP Yes, I do.JE I don't have a family. I've never had a family. It's the strangest thing. I am 61 years old. I'm very healthy. I am more obsessed with women than I've ever been. And I've finally met the woman. I've finally met her. But I'm the guy with no place to go on Christmas and Easter that ends up getting, you know, some pitiful invitation, shit like this. So I spend a lot of time alone, thinking. And I avoid the culture. I don't go to movies. I don't read newspapers. Here's what I mean: I'm not a rich man. I pay alimony. I pay taxes. But I don't have to support a family. So I have this assistant. So I don't have to go to the fucking store. I don't have a computer. She does my email.DP That must be very useful.JE Yeah, I live a very, very simple interior life that allows this stuff to build in me and come to me slowly over time. And the voices come to me. And the situations come to me. So I don't think about very many things. And those few things I think about, I think about intensely. So I am able to take small bits of information and infuse them with verisimility.And so I sent the researcher for Blood's a Rover to the Dominican Republic. Haiti's too hazardous to go to. She came back with slides for me. She had three hours of slides. After one hour I said, "Kid, that's enough! Jesus Christ, I can see it! I've got the maps. I've got everything I need." And part of this is viewpoint. It's that you got this dipshit kid, Crutchfield, out of the States for the first time, looking at this impoverished third-world country, blithely watching kids dive into sewer-infested waters for crawdaddy.DP This character, Don Crutchfield, he's an actual person . . .JE He's still alive, yeah.DP At some point, then, were you lying in the dark, thinking this real man, this Don Crutchfield, could work as a character within this fiction?JE Here's what happened – I had a nervous breakdown. I was on a book tour. My marriage went to shit. I fell in love with a woman in San Francisco. A leftwing woman named Joan. Red Goddess Joan. It went bad. Big time. Fucking. Bad. I got the fuck out of LA. Then I met a married, pregnant woman . . .DP Bloody hell.JE Yeah. Ha! We had a thing. You know?DP Right. And Don Crutchfield ?JE Well, I'd already paid Crutchfield to be in the book. And my ex-wife Helen Knode, crime writer herself, was saying, "Get back to a more explicated style. Show your heart!" And I wanted to write a book about ideology, about bad men cracking up, and I wanted to honour Joan, and I wanted to honour the real woman Cathy, who is Karen in the book, and I saw that this kid Crutchfield, who in reality is 13 years older than me – I'm 61 and he's 74 and so I made him 23 when I was 20 – this dipshit kid is the voice of American history. He is malleable. He is politically naive. He's never been laid. He spends four years tracking one woman to have 20 minutes with her and then spends the rest of his life looking for her. It's fucking heartbreaking. The last hundred pages of this book are heartbreaking.DP And very different from The Cold Six Thousand. Reading that book, I wondered how you could go beyond that; it almost seemed a dead stop.JE I think it's flawed. I think I needed to go back to an easier read. And especially since these people [in Blood's a Rover] were ideologically inclined. These people think about things. And you've got such a diversity of character and motive. So I could not use that hyper-concise style one more time.DP You alternate narratives from chapter to chapter. When you are writing the book, do you go from chapter to chapter; chapter one, two, three? Or do you follow one narrator all the way through and then go back?JE No, I have a 400-page outline of the book: chapter one, two, three; viewpoint, viewpoint, viewpoint; Holly, Crutchfield, Tedrow. Holly, Crutchfield, Tedrow.DP So even the outline is broken down into the separate chapters?JE I start out where I have the research notes. I have pages of notes on character. Historical events. Soon things start coming together. And then I do a shorthand version of the entire story and then I flesh it out into a big outline. And the outline is just, Chapter one: Pete Bondurant / Beverley Hills Hotel / Watching Howard Hughes shoot dope / Following leads / Following information / Boom, boom, boom.DP You are writing about a period you lived through, 1968-72. How much memory is involved in the writing?JE I have a very dim social sense. I recall the time. I recall the specific events. But I didn't give a rat's fucking ass. I was self-absorbed. All I wanted to do was drink, use drugs, perv around after women, unsuccessfully. And read. I didn't give a shit. I was never leftwing. I was never a war protestor. I would just steal and hole up in libraries and sleep in parks and act like an asshole, in a minor way. But I read and nurtured notions of being a great writer. And I sensed history bombing around beside me. I knew I was living through tumultuous history. And I had a sense, even then, of the human infrastructure of big public events. The guy with the attaché case holding the gun. The Bondurants. The Ward Littells. The Crutchfields. And they came back to me consciously when I was plotting American Tabloid.DP Some of the characters in Blood's a Rover are making a political journey, from right to left, and I think that also separates this book from the others . . .JE It is a political journey. It's also a racial journey. It's the symbiosis and synthesis of the left and the right meeting each other and their contrasting, conflicting and cohering agendas. The most moving part of the book for me is when Joan says to Dwight, What do you want? And he says, I want to fall and I want you to catch me. That's always what I've wanted; I want to fall and I want someone to catch me. And the surprise of this book is that Dwight Holly and Joan Klein are lovers in blood and to the death. And you think she'll betray him, you think she's using him. No, she's a woman deeply in love.DP Blood's a Rover has an element of personal redemption but the trilogy overall is still, I think, an indictment of a country and its political system. It doesn't make me want to vote. Do you personally feel this cynicism and distrust towards the political system, towards politicians?JE No. I trust our system of governance. But I am not a liberal and people find that shocking. Just utterly shocking. And I wanted to honour in this book the lessons learnt from a woman whose beliefs were inimical to mine and to talk in the abstract about the necessity of conversion and of revolution. But I have not moved left. I have just described the journeys of people who have done so.DP Knowing what comes later in the 70s and 80s, with Reagan and Iran-Contra, will you go on – another book, another trilogy?JE I actually greatly admire Ronald Reagan. History has been very kind to him. And I think history will continue to be kind to him. And so this is it. This marks the chronological conclusion of my life's work as a historical novelist.DP Being presumptuous, looking in from the outside, I would have thought that Reagan was the logical conclusion, the perfect character, for your writing, the marriage of Hollywood and Washington.JE I always assume people are more leftwing than me.DP I think it's a fair assumption.JE Well, I am quite often right. And I tell people who are rightwing, you cannot read the James MacGregor Burns or the Joseph P Lash biographies of Franklin D Roosevelt and not dig him. And I tell people who are leftwing, you cannot read Edmund Morris's Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan and not come away admiring Ronald Reagan. You will dig him. He was a titanic human being. And even his sternest biographer, Lou Cannon, said, I never knew him to lie. And so I think during Iran-Contra, he had already begun to go senile. So then you're just in a territory I don't want to enter.DP In England, we get quite hysterical about the difference between fact and fiction, particularly writing about "real events" and recent history in novels. So I'm going to ask you a question I get asked a lot: why do you write history as a novel, and not as non-fiction?JE Because I want to change things. If I don't like something and the way it plays out, I don't want to be beholden to the facts. And I want to tell the private stories. If you look back at what I call the private nightmare of public policy, then these fictions of mine are actually valid. I can just imagine the web of bad people, dubious people, that even clean politicians know.DP Is there a difference for you when you are writing about someone who actually lived and a character you've imagined?JE I get a kick out of writing someone like Sal Mineo. Because he kills his boyfriend. He keeps falling in the shit . . .DP But what about someone like Bayard Rustin? This man is a legendary civil rights activist and pacifist . . .JE Well, I had a biography on him and I read a subversive persons summary list on him. It's a document insert in The Cold Six Thousand. I didn't copy it over verbatim but that's pretty much his real story.DP But don't you feel a responsibility to that person who lived?JE I want to be fairly true to the real-life people, yeah. I want to be true to their lives. And then I want to have fun with it and fuck with them.DP You've written a second memoir . . .JE Yeah, The Hilliker Curse. It's about women and me.DP You wrote the first memoir, My Dark Places, between American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. Was that difficult for you, going from a novel to a memoir and then back to a novel?JE It was easy for me. GQ magazine gave me a big commission to go look at my mother's murder file, and I saw that I could turn it into a book that would be her biography, my autobiography, the chance for me to investigate her death, and I jumped at it. I knew I could always come back to the novel.DP And what was the motivation to write a second memoir?JE I saw that my mother and I were not a murder story, we were a love story. And I was just thinking, what is the single-biggest fixation in my life, and it's women. And it always has been. And this was after Joan. And just as I was meeting Cathy. And now I've met the ultimate woman, so I've got to expand the text.DP But is it an uncomfortable experience writing such a memoir, or is it cathartic? Can you shine that light on yourself?JE Yes, I can. And you know what it is, Mr Peace? I'm just an exhibitionist.DP John Dos Passos . . .JE Never read him.DP Well, in 1932, John Dos Passos wrote that the novelist should aspire to be "the architect of history". And I think that is what you have achieved in your best work. Would you be happy with that description, the architect of history?JE I'd be happy with that.DP Do you feel blessed or cursed to have lived through the times, the histories you have lived through?JE Blessed. Yeah, blessed.James EllroyCrime booksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church | Robert Burns by Robert BurnsHa! whar ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?Your impudence protects you sairly;I canna say but ye strunt rarely,Owre gauze and lace;Tho' faith! I fear ye dine but sparelyOn sic a place.Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,Detested, shunn'd! by saunt an' sinner,How daur ye set your fit upon her-Sae fine a lady?Gae somewhere else and seek your dinnerOn some poor body.Swith, in some beggar's haffet squattle;There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,Wi' ither kindred, jumping cattle,In shoals and nations;Whaur horn nor bane ne'er daur unsettleYour thick plantations.Now haud you there, ye're out o' sight,Below the fatt'rels, snug and tight;Na, faith ye yet! ye'll no be right,Till ye've got on it-The vera tapmost, tow'rin heightO' Miss's bonnet.My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out,As plump an' grey as onie grozet:O for some rank, mercurial rozet,Or fell, red smeddum,I'd gie you sic a hearty dose o't,Wad dress your droddum!I wad na been surpris'd to spyYou on an auld wife's flainen toy;Or aiblins some bit duddie boy,On's wyliecoat;But Miss' fine Lunardi! fye!How daur ye do't?O Jenny, dinna toss your head,An' set your beauties a' abread!Ye little ken what cursed speedThe blastie's makin:Thae winks an' finger-ends, I dread,Are notice takin'!O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie usTo see oursels as ithers see us!It wad frae mony a blunder free us,An' foolish notion:What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,An' ev'n devotion!Robert BurnsPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |