Literature

Survivor of Stasiland

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:54:07 +0000

Author:Anne McElvoy

I have my work cut out defending to Standpoint readers an East German author who was revealed to have been a Stasi informant in her past and thought that utopian socialism was a better bet than liberal capitalism.

In the case of Christa Wolf, who died in December, it is a risk I am happy to take.

Powell's Penpal

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:43:18 +0000

Author:Robert Low

To read a new cache of Anthony Powell's letters is an unexpected delight; it is even more welcome to find that their recipient was an equally entertaining correspondent. This was Robert Vanderbilt, a young, enthusiastically europhile New York bookseller who wrote to Powell out of the blue in February 1952 proposing to publish some of his Thirties novels which were either out of print or had never been published in the US.

"His project was naturally an extremely agreeable one to myself," Powell recorded in his memoirs, and an 11-year correspondence ensued. The Powell-Vanderbilt letters have now been published in a limited-edition paperback by Maggs Brothers, the London antiquarian bookshop, mirroring Vanderbilt's own move from bookselling into publishing 60 years ago.

Mart's Art is Not Just Smart

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:43:53 +0000

Author:George Walden

Martin Amis: A British author who matches up to some of the American giants (Isabel Fonesca)

What's in a first name? If you're writing a literary biography of Martin Amis and call him Martin throughout, quite a lot. Assumptions of intimacy negate critical distance, the whole point of the book. Bradford's excuse — that he has to distinguish between Amis senior and junior, and that he'd seen a fair bit of junior when compiling his biography — might just wash, were it not that Amis the younger comes out of it embarrassingly well. Embarrassing, that is, for Martin.

Clive's Indian Summer

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:39:39 +0000

Author:David Barrett

His masterly voice: Clive James at work

On YouTube there's a clip of Clive James and Robert Hughes being interviewed for Australian television in 1959. The programme is about Beat culture and James reads from Jack Kerouac's On the Road. When he's finished the presenter asks him: "Well, what do you think of it? What do you think of the formless prose?" James taps a pen on the page and replies: "It's overrated." That was half a century ago, and half a world away. And while I suspect James's criticism of Kerouac's prose hasn't changed — time has proven it to be pretty solid — the man who once practised lighting cigarettes with his head tilted to look like Albert Camus certainly has.

A Wee Dram of History

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:33:55 +0000

Author:Eric Ormsby

In her new collection, The Bees (Picador, £14.99), her first since becoming Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy is unabashedly bibulous, and all the better for it. She is tipsy not only on "John Barleycorn", the title of a rollicking ballade (one of her finest), but on words themselves. She celebrates bees, those emblematic insects, but her bees are also words themselves, "brazen, blurs on paper,/besotted". Names too enchant her, as "John Barleycorn" makes plain in its loving litany of pubs:

Novelists at Arms

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:47:00 +0000

Author:Paul Johnson

Ernest Hemingway: Always searching for that elusive Second World War novel (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)