Acquired:
Night Soldiers, Alan Furst
Offloaded:
The Razor’s Edge, W.S. Maugham
Against the Country, Ben Metcalf
Progress Made:
Here Lies, Eric Ambler
The Russian Girl, Kingsley Amis
Martin Amis: The Biography, Richard Bradford
The Courts of the Morning, John Buchan
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings
Finished:
Cause for Alarm, Eric Ambler
A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
Only an idiot believes that he can write the truth about himself.
—Eric Ambler
I have been simultaneously reading biographies of three authors, and you might well ask, isn’t that confusing? It is, but this approach fits my short attention span. And I have been learning things.
For instance: Martin Amis’s father, fellow writer Kingsley Amis, was a philanderer on an epic scale, sort of the Tiger Woods of British letters. Richard Bradford’s book describes a “dinner party at their Swansea house when Kingsley went into the garden three times to have sex with each of the women guests.”
Bradford also says this about the elder Amis:
Throughout his adult life there was never one Kingsley Amis. He became a cabinet of gestures — some genuine, others fabricated — and release mechanisms, the latter allowing him to simultaneously advance and retreat from the same position. Friends, interviewers, critics; all would for a moment seem to gain knowledge of the essential Kingsley Amis only to have the illusion dispelled by an act or statement variously moving, candid or quixotic, and on further inspection anomalous.
But one thing is for sure: Kingsley was very good at his job. I didn’t think I was very into The Russian Girl, a later novel that is a bit sluggish at the start. Next thing I knew I was totally sucked into it and putting aside all other activities to read another chapter. I had momentum, it was a train on greased wheels, and then I lost the goddamn book somewhere. The replacement just arrived and is sitting on the table to my right; it will be my reward for finishing this post.
Another thing we can say for sure is that no one writes about hangovers like Sir Kingsley.
The next morning Richard thought that what he had heard in Harry Dobbs’ voice was someone pretty sure he was dealing with a bloody fool. This thought got in not long before nine o’clock, on coming to after what seemed a few minutes’ genuine unconsciousness after some hours in a state that combined sleep and waking, none of the good parts of one and most of the available bad parts of the other. He had at any rate passed them in a bed, his bed. To his profound relief he felt entirely normal apart from a burning thirst, severe nausea and a headache above the right eye like an emergent antler on the point of bursting through the skin. The thirst yielded to a couple of quarts of tap-water, which also reduced the nausea to a level at which he could hold it in check by swallowing every few seconds. And the headache stayed away while he remembered never to move his head relatively to his neck. That meant among other things that he had to lift his wrist to eye level to see the time and do a full about-turn whenever he felt the need to check on what was behind him. He could not laugh either, though that was not much in the way of deprivation.
On page 27 Selina Hastings’ Maugham bio, the crucial question of noms de plume is finally addressed via this diary entry:
In fact, I did not like either of my names, and spent much time inventing others that would have suited me better. The ones I preferred were Roderic Ravensworth and I covered sheets of paper with this signature in a suitably dashing hand. I did not mind Ludovic Montgomery either.
Shades of Withnail trying to decide whether to call himself Donald Twain or Desmond Wolf.
I’m still pretty early in W.S.M.’s life and look forward to getting into his espionage years and the mysteries of The Razor’s Edge… someday.
Re Eric Ambler, among the things I’ve learned is that his grandfather was a proofreader, and that his parents were stage performers who specialized in “living marionette” shows:
The art of the living marionette, once common in England, has now completely disappeared. The face was live, the marionette body was operated by the owner of the face through slits in a black back-cloth. Reg Ambrose [Ambler’s father’s stage name] was a technical innovator in the field, devising a back-he cloth which appeared to remain stationary when marionette moved sideways (it was stretched on spring rollers) and articulated marionette hands that enabled him to light a cigarette on stage and even play a miniature piano.
Another is that not everything Ambler writes is riveting. Here Lies started off well, with a dramatic story about a car crash; but when it circled back to his childhood it became a bit tedious. I’m hoping that once he grows up the pace will pick up a bit.
It took a sunny June day for me to tackle the last part of A Scanner Darkly, which is about as grim as possible. After a distinctly not-happy ending, Phil tacks on a requiem for all the drug casualties of his acquaintance, among which he counts himself. But having survived that I jumped straight into Flow My Tears, which while also dark is a weirdly breezy read. It will be on the list next month.
About this month’s comings and goings: The cover of The Razor’s Edge, which had been hanging tenuously when I got it out of the free box, came off completely in the course of my reading. So back into the box it went, but it is still perfectly readable and hopefully someone will get some value out of it.
Against the Country I got because I read an effusively enthusiastic review, but it took me about two pages to decide that I did not care for it. Flipping forward a bit confirmed me in the opinion that it is an extended exercise in not getting to the fucking point.1In a backhanded way I appreciated the writer being so annoying; this way I had no sunk cost to weigh when deciding to jettison the book. Maybe it will find its way to someone who sees in it what that reviewer did.
Finally, Friend of the Blog X recommended Alan Furst and specifically Night Soldiers. After some months of scouring used book stores, and turning up seemingly every other other book Furst wrote — and there are many — I broke down and bought it on eBay. It is next in the novel queue. And here I am writing mostly for myself; my reading life has grown complicated lately and I need a roadmap. If you’ve read this far you are a rare and special gem; do something nice for yourself today.