| Writers That Mattered for Our Time |
A Writer Remembered |
| Writers on Art, Film, Politics, War, Mortality , Culture of Modernity , March 19, 2025 |
These writers- a small number among many- are ones that I have admired and enjoyed over many years. They are all connected, in different ways, to commentary on arts and culture. They are on my own bookshelves. In the long time of lockdowns they served me well iin the re-reading. 18 November 2021: Jan Morris “Clare has a professional background in radio and the programme, layered in chapters, makes for an elegant and eloquent sixty minutes. He opens with a technique he has used before. He is physically there to the westward side of Snowdonia. The waters of the Dwyfor may be heard. The house outside Llanystumdwy has busts on the roof, one curiously of an admiral, Jackie Fisher. Clare is awed by the vastness of the library inside. But then writers are always readers. “A strong range of contributors has been gathered: biographer Paul Clements, Michael Palin, Sathnam Sanghera. Sarah Wheeler paints the background. Travel writing was a genre that had flourished from “Eothen” to the 1930s. At the time when Jan Morris made the move from journalism to literature the genre was moribund. Twm Morus provides a family context. The sound of the typewriter was eternal. The writer wrote every day, including Christmas Day,” * * * * 26 November 2020: Jan Morris “Considering her life, as she most liked to, from the sprawling stone stables of Trefan Morys in north Wales among trees, owls and waters, Jan Morris divided it into three parts. For the first 35 years she had been James Morris, a soldier and an intrepid reporter. For a decade after that, as she took the hormone pills that gradually lightened and rejuvenated her, she was an androgynous creature, untethered and strange. Then, from 1972 and the procedure in Casablanca that permanently altered her body, she was herself. * * * * 30 July 2020: John Peter “At Terry Hands fierce production of “Pygmalion” Peter observed of Higgins: “Philip Bretherton plays him with a face like Max Mosley and the polished, self-admiring joviality and schoolboy swagger of upper-class Englishmen.” Linguistic liveliness is a bedrock of critical writing. Peter had a colossal depth of knowledge of Shakespeare. At an “Othello” he observed two of the characters. Iago: “You wish for more serpentine stillness…His squinty gaze roves over the audience but an unblinking stare of concentrated malevolence might be more convincing, certainly more unsettling.” Desdemona: “the necessary poise of a grown woman with outbreaks of of girlish pertness and spirits, and a voice of tremendous measured clarity.” * * * * 28 September 2019: Clive James “James was an unquenchable source of poetry, essays, four novels, five books of memoirs, and a vast quantity of television. Julian Gough: “James is an absolute master of surface, and the great critic of surfaces, not because he is superficial but because he believes that the distortions on the surface tell you what’s underneath. Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth. With the essays and the poems – which I think you have to consider as one great project – he’s built an immense, protective barrier reef around western civilisation.” * * * * 13 September 2018: Meic Stephens “The tribute to Meic Stephens of July 20th praised the quality of the writing that ran across the obituaries. That quality continues in this third collection, itself posthumous, of 41 obituaries from the years 2012-2017. The original publishers were the Independent in the main, with four in the Telegraph and one in Barn. “Variety of subject is inevitable, the obituarist going where his women and men lead. The politics of Wales are revisited. When Gwynfor Evans took Carmarthen in the by-election of 1966 the Labour candidate was Gwilym Prys Davies. “His defeat was a personal blow for Davies” writes Stephens, and he continues in analysis of the factors of defeat. A flair for the hustings and a common touch on the doorstep are little connected to capability for office. “I couldn't see things in black and white” Davies confessed.” * * * * 30 January 2018: David Sherwin “David Sherwin died January 18th 2018 at the age of 75. He has a permanent place in the highest pantheon of British cinema. He was scriptwriter for a trilogy of films that has no like. All three were directed by Lindsay Anderson and had Malcolm McDowell in the lead as the same character, . Mick Travis. “If.… “ in 1968 was the trailblazer. “O Lucky Man!” five years later was less classic1960s, more picaresque and surreal. “Britannia Hospital” in 1982 was a no-holds-barred satire in which the stressed-beyond-hope establishment is metaphor for the nation. The Daily Telegraph loved “the exuberance of the comic invention”. Sherwin was delighted to see that it drove British guests to storm out of its screening at the Cannes Film Festival. “Success!” he wrote.” * * * * 1 August 2017: Anthony Burgess * * * * 15 December 2016: A A Gill “AA Gill (1954-2016) liked to hang out with the car-man and a similar air of tabloid disingenuousness pervaded the writing. The carapace of assumed Scottishness felt fake. The piety towards the old was hopelessly unrealistic. The tendency towards misogyny was perhaps, like the lung disease perpetrated upon the disadvantaged, just a bit of a laugh. “He was a fool on the subject of Wales. But then the nations of the disunited kingdom are all a bit of a laugh among the party-going chums who command the media. General Melchett was given an asinine line on Wales in the “Bob” episode of “Blackadder.” It is still a classic of comedy.” * * * * 15 July 2016: Anthony Minghella “Minghella- ten commandments. On research “The world has to be real for you. Go to this place yourself. Be in that world.” On the self “Write from the place of exposure/ ask yourself exactly why you are writing?” And the essence of writing for acting: “The action follows a course A-B; what you are writing are the obstacles.” * * * * 03 July 2016: Michael Herr “The adjective most used for Herr's book was “hallucinogenic.” Its meaning is hazy when applied to prose but the reviewers were responding to the mix: long unfurling sentences, many unfamiliar words, fact of the author's own heavy use of drugs. Herr was never the journalist needing a story to file for the next deadline. He was engaged. “I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it." Most of all he was engaged with the men, who were his juniors in age.” * * * * 01 July 2016: Michael Herr “Michael Herr was in Vietnam from 1967-1969 as the correspondent for Esquire. “Have you come to write about what we’re wearing?” a soldier asked him, knowing the magazine’s focus on fashion for men. Herr left in a condition of illness at a time prior to post-traumatic stress disorder as a diagnosis. During his time in the country he filed relatively little. But, eight years in the making, his experience coalesced into the book “Despatches.” * * * * 30 November 2015: Philip French “Criticism is a small world, but a big event took place this August. On Sunday 25th the Observer published the last nine film reviews to be written by the eighty year old Philip French. These last nine completed a critical oeuvre that runs to more than two and a half thousand reviews and six books. The newspaper did their best columnist proud in gathering tributes from film-makers of distinction from across the board. Their contributions cumulatively illustrated the critical art across the spectrum of different hues.” * * * * 03 October 2014: Dannie Abse “His last part opens with another tale from life’s winter. An exhausting lecture tour in America sends him to London’s Royal Free Hospital, the doctor in him knowing the right word “angioplasty”. Old age brings acclaim for late work, the pleasure of old friends and comrades and the curious bustle of the literary life. He looks deep for meaning into the life he has made. The claims he once found for the nobility of poetry, those of Shelley and Eliot, no longer carry much weight, “hollow post-Auschwitz and Hiroshima.” * * * * 16 January 2013: Tom Lubbock “Tom Lubbock was chief art critic for the ‘Independent’ from 1997 until his death in January 2011. He received news of the decision to make a book from his reviews-cum-essays two months before he died. His two years of decline, suffering a brain tumour, are movingly recorded in ‘Until Further Notice, I Am Alive’, published by Granta in 2012. The writings collected for ‘Great Works 50 Paintings Explored’ have the hallmark of a critic who is likely to endure.” * * * * 05 December 2012: Robert Hughes “Criticism that lasts a year or so is not uncommon. Reviews that leap fresh from the page two decades on are to be treasured. The ninety-four reviews and essays, written during Robert Hughes’ tenure as New York art critic, cannot help but reveal their time. Topical references are, however, few and scattered. In the inconceivable era of pre-revolutionary Iran Reza Pahlavi is a swaggering presence on the art scene. Warhol even is a favoured visitor at the Court of the Peacock Throne. ‘Seurat in the parlour’ as Hughes sardonically puts it, ‘SAVAK in the basement.’ * * * * 30 August 2012: Christopher Hitchens “Language is Hitchens’ tool of trade and he is pugnacious in its defence. The mighty New York Times comes in for a drubbing when it indulges in some afflatus on the topic of Iran and uranium: ‘the slack and neutral language of the headline reinforces the pseudo-objectivity of the article’. The deployment of verbs in the passive is a regular of gutless organisations, be they US newspaper leader-writers or British higher education spokespeople. ‘The confusion between the active and the passive is’ he writes ‘an indicator of a wider and deeper reticence, not to say cowardice’. He deplores the enforced resignation of a senior US government officer who has used the word ‘niggardly’ in a budget statement. ‘Hatred will always find a way, and will certainly always be able to outpace linguistic correctness.’ In democracy’s dealings with the world Hitchens sees ‘a masochistic cultural cringe somewhere in our discourse’. * * * * 01 June 2012: Paul Fussell “Paul Fussell was the author of twenty-one books and editor or co-editor of another four. ‘The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations’ and ‘Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays’, six years later, run to five hundred and fifty pages and contain forty-eight essays. This first book has thirty-four briefer pieces on Americana, literary topics, travel and war. The essays in the second book are longer and their subject is battle. “The best of essays intertwine several writerly gifts. One is the ability to evoke, to carry the reader elsewhere. Fussell is with the young Boswell at the head of an Edinburgh mob, later boring Voltaire to such an extent that the Master of Ferney puts on a fainting fit. Cast down by a severe gonorrheal attack, Boswell attends a Garrick Shakespearean festival in the costume of an armed Corsican bandit.” * * * * 24 January 2012: Christopher Hitchens & Philip Gould “Both writers appear to enter a zone of exalted experience. Hitchens: ‘I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.’ ‘For me to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.’ “The last section of “When I Die” contains moments of profundity. ‘I feel I have entered a world which is not as I thought it would be. It is much better than I thought it would be. The ground rules, the nature of reality, in this world are different.’ Daily trivia slip away. Gould: ‘when you enter the Death Zone the intensity is either overwhelming or extraordinary in its possibilities…You map your course according to the coordinates of emotion and feelings, love and compassion.’ |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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