Chunkster: The Age of Edith Wharton

It's been a while since I've posted here, but a lot of the past few weeks has been devoted to the wildly thorough and very entrancing biography of Edith Wharton by Oxford professor Hermione Lee. Lee, whose previous biography was that of Virginia Woolf (one that, though I am a big Woolf fan, I haven't managed to get through just yet), is quite interested in biography, or in her and Woolf's words, life-writing. She actually has a book of essays on the topic. But enough about Professor Lee's own biography.

This narrative about one of New York's and America's greatest writers at the turn of the century isn't interested in the bare facts. That wouldn't be Lee's style, who is writing in the veins of Woolf and Coetzee and others who have turned their back against the traditional bare facts way of telling a life story. Instead, Lee sees several different themes of Wharton's life - her affair with Morton Fullerton; her success with The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence; her issues with modernism and 'jazz' writers; her interest in interior and exterior house and gardens design - and lumps what she can into chapters devoted on such topics. If one doesn't mind creating one's own timeline for Ms Wharton's life, then one will find this to be a terrific vision of a writer's life.

Through this biography, we get transplated to the Gilded Age of America (though I don't think the term was used in this work), to see Edith grow up in a wealthy household. At a young age, she was not interested in entertaining friends; in fact she would walk around her home with a book in hand (it could have been upside down too) and told her mother that she was 'making up' and that it would be best if she [her mother] would entertain the friends. Wharton, who is never formally educated, finds her way to an unhappy marriage to Teddy Wharton, who becomes more like Camille Raquin, phlegmatic and detestable, not interested in bettering himself physically or mentally. There are questions as to whether he abused her in any way. But he did philander, which is how they later got a divorce.

That's not to say that Ms Wharton didn't have sexual issues of her own. She fell in love, hard, for Morton Fullerton. And for someone who was terribly conscious of what others were saying about her, who was interested in the utmost secrecy and had her friends burn her letters after she died, who wouldn't be able to handle being in the gossip columns of tabloids, she had to work to make sure that people weren't suspicious. Of course close friends knew of the affair - her first collaborator, Ogden Codman, an eccentric man who helped write The Decoration of Houses with her; and Henry James, the writer, the 'Master', whose writing hers would always be compared to, whose friendship is legendary at this point.

Lee takes us into her convoluted relationships with her publishers - from those serialising her work to Charles Scribner (of Scribner fame). She writes about Wharton's interest in Scott Fitzgerald, who she wishes would control himself in The Beautiful and Damned, who should have given Jay Gatsby a more tangible back history in The Great Gatsby. She tried to keep abreast of contemporary writing, but it seemed that she was usually contemptuous to it, disregarding Hemingway and Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf.

As you can imagine, there's way too much to discuss here, but Lee does a terrific job of looking at the life and works of Wharton (she does a terrific job at looking at The Age of Innocence, and it's worth just sampling that chapter). I feel like I've received quite enough information about this woman, received in an entertaining manner. I'm not even terribly enthusiastic about Wharton. But now I'm planning on relooking at some of the novels of hers I read back in high school. And some of the novels that I now feel are necessary reads.

Review: And the tree was happy

I assume everyone has read The Giving Tree. Or at least read a poem from Where the Sidewalk Ends. Everyone from my generation likely knows Shel Silverstein, but what most of us don’t know is the eccentric life he led before becoming one of the most well known children’s story writers of all time.

Marv Gold’s biography Silverstein and Me follows Shel from his rambunctious childhood, through his years at the Playboy Mansion(!), and his ultimate decision to write children’s books. The piece is subtitled “a memoir,” but Mr. Gold makes few appearances—the title of the entire work should really be “My Understanding of the trials and tribulations of Shel Silverstein,” but why split hairs when the subject is so interesting?

Mr. Gold grew up with Shel (then Sheldon) around Logan Square, Chicago around WWII. Both Gold and Shel spent their days getting into trouble and sneaking in movies; each loved to read comics. Gold remembers Shel being a talented and intelligent youth with absolutely no ambition and many lofty dreams. Shel and school never clicked and by his third stint in a college of some sort, he wanted nothing to do with higher education.

Answering an advertisement in the paper, Shel met with Hugh Hefner and agreed to draw cartoons for Mr. Hefner’s burgeoning gentlemen’s magazine. Being part of Playboy since its inception granted Shel a few rights—he was able to secure for himself a private apartment in the Playboy Mansion while he drew his cartoons. But ever restless, Shel grew tired of Playboy and asked Hugh for the opportunity to travel. Whilst spanning the globe Shel got into some trouble smuggling hash from Marrakech—two years in jail was his punishment.

That's one of numerous stories Gold tells about Shel. There’s simply too much information about Shel Silverstein to fit into one review or one biography. There isn’t a lot about Marv Gold in his memoir, but it’s still a worthwhile read if you are interested in Shel. Gold’s anecdotes tell various pieces of Shel’s life, but don’t tell the whole story.

Shel was a favorite of mine growing up. My mother frequently read the poems from Where the Sidewalk Ends to me and I loved the bombastic humor (and I assume my mother appreciated the sardonic undertones). At some point later in my teens I learned that not only was Shel a jetsetting world traveler—I assumed all children’s writers stayed home and tended to children—but also that he frequented the Playboy mansion. Looking at all I know about Shel--much of which I learned through this biography--it seems apropos that my childhood hero was there at the inception of the world's largest pornographic empire. Nothing is what it seems; perhaps that's the lesson Shel Silverstein had been proffering through all of those zany poems.

And if you didn’t already know Shel Silverstein wrote the lyrics to “Boy Named Sue.” He did everything!

What’s your favorite Shel Silverstein poem?

Review copy provided by Author Marketing Experts, Inc.

Review: Everything that rises must converge

On a whim, I decided that it was necessary to augment my American fiction knowledge - especially that of the South. I've read a couple of books by Southern authors - a smattering of Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Walker Percy - but unfortunately none of the greats ever really caught my attention. When I came across Brad Gooch's biography Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, I thought that this would be a fantastic introduction to an author I know little about and whose work I perhaps know even less.

My high school and university English classes did not include 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find', Ms O'Connor's most famous story that is to creative writing courses for the short story as Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is to the novel. In fact, a couple of months ago when I was bored at work, I took it upon myself to read the tense and charged story - and it's easy to see why it has unsettled readers ever since its publication. So thinking back to that cringing, I determined that Flannery was going to be my girl.

Brad Gooch does a fine job weaving together the humour and inspirations that made up Flannery O'Connor's life, which apparently was more difficult than one would think. For the epigraph, a statement by O'Connor herself, reads: 'As for biographies, there won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.' That touch of self-debasement and blunt honesty not only pervaded her fiction but also her life.

As if searching for something to talk about in the beginning of the book, Gooch relies on architectural description and house numbers - items that probably could have been easily omitted but for a small group might be interesting. He moves on to Flannery's deep attachment to her father (who dies while she's a young girl), her somewhat on again/off again relationship with her mother, and her deep roots in Catholicism that grounds her fiction regardless of how nihilistic it may become. We watch her as she remains this reticent but powerful young girl who attends to a woman's college in Georgia and then the prestigious Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa and then the Yaddo Colony in upstate New York where she finishes her first novel, Wise Blood, a work which received mix reviews, as any classic usually does.

What kept this read interesting was Flannery herself, her intense writing and reading regimen (which was as intense as a graduate programme in English and philosophy, including readings in Simone Weil, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), her odd nicknames for things (after she contracted lupus and had to walk around on crutches, she called them her 'flying buttresses'), and her outlandish axioms that enchanted her audiences ('I have finished my opus nauseous and expect it to be out one of these days').

Gooch is able to make sure that we understand the biographical prospects behind her fiction, trying to dive within the artist's world without relying on psychology or too many statements that suggest real life occurrences are the sole reason for most of her fiction. He makes sure that we don't come away empty handed from her theories on writing, as she once said that 'modern writers must often tell "perverse" stories to "shock" a morally blind world. "It requires considerable courage," she concluded, "not to turn away from the story-teller."' Which reminds me of Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize speech/fable about the blind griot stuck with a terrible riddle of two vicious children hiding a bird, asking whether she knows if it's living or dead. At the end of the speech, the griot is able to convince the children of their wrongdoing, they exclaim, 'Tell us . . . ! Tell us . . . !'

And Brad Gooch did his job well enough that I'm off and reading the story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find - and thus far am loving it. Gooch's Flannery has set me on a cleared path, removed the felled trees, and provided acute insight into the fiction of Ms O'Connor. It's a decent payback for the time spent with this biography.