biography

The Name's Bond

Gary Lucas — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 14:41:35 +0000

The Name's Bond Gary Lucas April 7, 2022 - 10:41

Topics

Tags

Just finished reading Bond Behind the Iron Curtain by Ian Fleming's nephew James Fleming -- a fascinating discursive book handsomely illustrated and published by The Book Collector (UK) -- which gathers, translates, analyzes and lovingly reproduces several major Soviet-era hit pieces in print on Bond published in Pravda, Izvestya and Novy Mir, no less -- all of them denouncing Bond as a typical Western sexist swine / capitalist stooge and thug in the service of British royalist and imperialist ambitions to overthrow glorious Mother Russia.

The best one of these hit pieces published (almost at the same time as the film of From Russia With Love came out in 1963) is an extremely well-written attack in Izvestya by Jewish intellectual Maya Turovskaya, obviously on the KGB's payroll (Rosa Klebb's doppelgänger?) Now none of Ian Fleming's books had been published in Soviet Russia officially of course at that time (nowadays, they are available freely there in Russian translations).

In fact, both the books and films were banned in the Soviet Union for years. Pravda, the official newspaper of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, denounced them by saying:

"James Bond lives in a nightmarish world where laws are written at the point of a gun, where coercion and rape is considered valour and murder is a funny trick."

From Russia With Love

But samizdat copies had been circulating for years in Russia -- as did prints of the early films -- and anyone lucky enough to travel out of the country was instantly made aware of the worldwide Bond-mania (way bigger than Beatlemania) exploding in the global culture, courtesy of hit screenings of the films in cinemas around the world, which reached its fullest efflorescence with the release of the movie Goldfinger in 1964, followed by 1965's Thunderball.

Also in this little gem of a book is an attack on Bond by Karel Zeman (hard to believe that this is the celebrated Czech film director and animation pioneer of the same name -- but it well could be), published in Prague magazine MY in their March '67 issue -- as well as an amusing account of a 1989 attack on Bond in Polish communist journal Trybuna Ludu (People's Tribunal), just happening to coincide with the appearance of a bootleg translation of Moonraker in Polish aimed at the Polish market (no publishing royalties were paid to either Ian Fleming, or to the Polish communist government, apparently -- hence their attack).

In light of the current geopolitical situation, this book is a scintillating read and elucidation of the Soviet mindset, which seems to be back with us in full effect (unfortunately).

Where is James Bond now when we really need him ???

Add new comment

Walk on the Wilder Side

Dusty Wright — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 11:37:10 +0000

Walk on the Wilder Side Dusty Wright September 13, 2017 - 07:37

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

Lou Reed: A Life

Anthony DeCurtis (Little, Brown and Company)

Lou Reed has to be one of the most audacious and iconic rockers to have committed his dark muses to his music and poetry. And writer/professor Anthony DeCurtis's new must-read bio of Mr. Reed perfectly captures the ethos of this misanthropic rocker. Let's be clear, Lou's outrageous life story is truly stranger than fiction. But then again, so are many of our most celebrated artists, especially those who not only create but also live on the edge/fringe of society, pushing their artistic vision on, for the most part, a rather pedestrian audience.

From Lou's humble middle-class upbringing on Long Island that included his life altering electro-shock treatments to his dying breath, his life was filled with passion and for pushing people, fans and critics alike, to explore the darker side of life; to if not to "walk on the wild side," at least explore it. Make no mistake, Lou's work was groundbreaking. His art-rock band The Velvet Underground remains one of the most influential bands ever. The music is timeless, the subject matter startling and disturbing; it's easy to understand why many consider them the true originators of the entire alt-rock genre.

Mr. DeCurtis was one of the few critics that Lou actually respected. To his credit, he's dug deep. He's interviewed Lou's childhood friends, past lovers and wives, former managers, many of the musicians he played with, et al. In doing so, he exposes how Lou operated -- how he created his music, how he lived his life, who he deeply loved, and how he maintained his artistic vision until his final days. Most Lou fans know of his relationship with his Syracuse University mentor and creative writing professor Delmore Schwartz, but who knew that Lou had pet dachshunds? That he loved doo wop music. Or that he was a hopeless romantic and, even at his worst social behaviour, longed to maintain a sense of "home" life with a "wife" when he wasn't on stage. I didni't know that Lou's cherished transsexual lover Rachel was referred to as "Lou's babysitter" by those close to him.

Long Island lawyer Alan Hyman, one of his oldest friends and the drummer in his college band L.A. and the Eldorados, states, "One of the things about my relationship with him is that he liked to shock me. He really liked to say provocative things and see what my reaction would be." That would certainly define Lou for the rest of his days. Five decades earlier, songs such as "Heroin," "Waiting for My Man," or "Walk on the Wild Side" were obviousily shocking when they were released. And yet five decades later, those lyrics and music can still produce strong reactions. In fact, few rock bands today are this bold and dynamic. In today's sanitized PC culture, one would have to look at rap music to witness such brutal honesty.

Lou Reed had a very "rich" life, and Mr. DeCurtis shares just how remarkably rich it was.

Dean Dixon: Negro at Home, Maestro Abroad by Rufus Jones Jr.

Steve Holtje — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 18:27:23 +0000

Dean Dixon: Negro at Home, Maestro Abroad by Rufus Jones Jr. Steve Holtje December 9, 2015 - 13:27

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

Dean Dixon: Negro at Home, Maestro Abroad

by Rufus Jones Jr.

(Rowman & Littlefield)

This is, I'm pretty sure, the first book-length biography of conductor Dean Dixon (1915-1976), the first African American to conduct the New York Philharmonic, and his story is so interesting yet largely unknown that it makes for a fascinating read.

Born and raised in New York City by immigrant parents (from Jamaica and Barbados), he started playing violin when he was three, at his mother's instigation, studying technique with a Russian teacher; by nine, he was playing on WNEW. He was also encountering racism; one prospective teacher cut off his lessons after Dean's second appearance, apparently because the building's residents didn't want a black child there.

Dixon was a good enough (if sometimes reluctant, it seems) student that he was consistently accepted into progressive, integrated schools. Once he determined to make music his career (after his mother was persuaded not to push him into studying to be a doctor), he passed an audition with Frank Damrosch to enter the Institute of Musical Arts.

Dixon's mother did, however, insist that he study to be a music teacher, as that seemed to offer the promise of steady work. It resulted in double the workload, but also set him on a path to form his own Harlem-based orchestra. He also got into the graduate programs at Teacher's College and Juilliard -- and attended both, simultaneously.

In the wake of the 1939 Marian Anderson/Daughters of the American Revolution contretemps, Eleanor Roosevelt lent a promotional hand to Dixon as well, which allowed him to lead his orchestra outside of Harlem for the first time in 1941 -- a concert which was attended, partly because of Mrs. Roosevelt's presence, by NBC's Music Director and the head of RCA, resulting in Dixon being hired to conduct the NBC Summer Symphony in two nationally broadcast concerts. His success at these concerts led to a regular-season engagement leading the NBC Symphony and a summer concert slot conducting the New York Philharmonic. And he was still in graduate school.

You would think this describes the start of a highly successful career arc, but that's not how it turned out. He got more guest appearances (one with the Philadelphia Orchestra soon followed), but no permanent conducting jobs, and he was unable to continue to financially support his Harlem group. Dixon then founded the American Youth Orchestra. Between that, his music-appreciation classes both in the city and on radio, and the lack of permanent conducting positions, he found himself typecast as more of an educator (the "baby specialist," as he put it derisively).

By this point, Dixon was married with a family to support. Lacking an American conducting post, he took an offer to go to France for two concerts with the French National Radio Orchestra near the end of 1949. Europe wasn't working out much better for Dixon until December 1951, when he stood in for the ailing Igor Markevitch at a Helsinki Orchestra concert radio broadcast, conducting Sibelius's Fifth Symphony (among other works). The composer heard the broadcast and praised the performance, and Dixon was invited to meet him, which he did. In Helsinki, Dixon also met the woman who would become his second wife.

Not only did the number of guest spots Dixon was offered shoot way up after he'd received the Sibelius seal of approval, he got a recording deal as well, and in 1953 he finally was hired as a principal conductor, of the Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden. He remained a resident of Europe for the rest of his life, better received there (and in Australia, where he also got a conducting post) than in the U.S.

Heroes are supposed to be simple, not complex or flawed, especially not in the age of gossip columnists, but as the ancient Greeks had already noticed millennia earlier, heroes do have flaws, and Dixon was not perfect. He had three wives, his time with them (which is not to say the marriages) overlapped, and he did not treat his first wife well post-divorce. Jones does not ignore these facts, but he does downplay them to a certain extent, preferring throughout to keep the book's focus on Dixon's career. He thus notes that Dixon's lack of appearances in the U.S. after his move to Europe were, at least for a while, partly because he turned down invitations, ostensibly because they didn't fit his schedule, but really because he could be in legal trouble if he returned to the U.S. while being sued by his first wife for being delinquent in his alimony and child support payments. At first his delinquency is excused by pointing out his still-precarious financial state, but this non-payment issue persisted into a period during which Dixon owned two homes in Europe. Kudos to Jones for including some discussion of Dixon's legal difficulties with this issue and acknowledging the connection, but we do not get any explanations or documentation of Dixon's emotions regarding his marriages and the endings of two of them. When the legal situation was resolved --not by Dixon paying off the debt, but by a friend of his doing so for him -- suddenly Dixon's schedule did allow him to accept relatively short-notice guest conducting invitations in the States, including a triumphant return to New York in 1970 at the helm of the Philharmonic for a summer concert.

I could criticize Jones's talents as a writer -- the book's tone is sometimes a bit gee-whiz -- but first, he's a conductor who wrote this book because he saw the need for this biography and nobody else was doing it, and second, I'm guessing he deliberately kept it at a reading level that young readers could be comfortable with, and that non-musicians could understand, in order to get this story out to the masses. Despite Dixon's regrettable issues with his first wife, his life is an inspirational story of a man overcoming the linked adversities of poverty and racism to rise to heights in his profession that no black man before him had reached in the United States, and within that framework, Jones tells the story well, and certainly more thoroughly than anybody before him, which is why this book is both needed and recommended.

All This And Something More...

Robert Cochrane — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 17:52:14 +0000

All This And Something More... Robert Cochrane November 22, 2012 - 12:52

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

Tony Fletcher

A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

(Crown Archetype)

For a band whose dying gasp came over two decades ago, the Smiths' brief, entire career has been barely scrutinized. Initially there was the stodgy Severed Alliance by Johnny Rogan, which has long just about sufficed in the absence of anything more, and there has been a ceaseless, incoming tide of books about the songs, and the aura which surrounds their apostle-like leader, Morrissey, when all that was really required was a clear-headed history, a factual consideration, as to why they sprang into life. Tony Fletcher has finally created that with A Light That Never Goes Out, a reasoned, logical, and unhurried recreation of their initially unlikely route to fame.

Johnny Marr wasn't the only kid on the block who wanted to be a guitar hero, but he had immense talent on his side, along with street intellect and charm. The world of popular music is Jackson Pollocked with the exploded guts of grand intentions, and the lingering stench of all that might have been, turned sour. What is amazing was his ability to connect with another, equally ambitious soul, by simply beating a pathway to his door, casually strolling towards it, and knocking with the wish to write some songs. Morrissey, a bookish devotee of Oscar Wilde, the New York Dolls, and Sixties girl singers, had been idly loitering for such a call of fortune. There the fable could have ended, because many have dreamt thus and failed. However, within a matter of months they were releasing songs, garnering a devoted following, as they became akin to a beacon of hope for the eager lost souls of their generation.

Fletcher's success resides within his ability to recognize the value of the band's individual histories. By doing his research, and presenting it in a lively and dynamic way, he presents the almost inevitable route to fame taken by people who might otherwise not have been notable beyond their Manchester confines. One third of his diligent tome concentrates on the petri dish days of occasional letters to the press and other literary ambitions by Morrissey, and precocious sauntering into music on the back of Marr's blossoming abilities, and how along the way another two first-generation Irish Mancunians, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, completed the squaring of their circle. What emerges from this is a sense of something waiting for the moment to arrive, and when it did and all aligned, their spark into being, despite many potential disasters, flamed brightly, and whose ember still one quarter of a century later, provokes and inspires.

Morrissey remains one of the most inventive and literary lyricists of any generation, but the freshness of his outlook in a bleak and Thatcher-governed Britain is now almost lost because we have become accustomed to his way with words. His unapologetic vegetarianism influenced a generation via the Meat Is Murder album, and his choice of covers stars, mostly obscure (The Smiths never graced their own front of sleeve), was akin to a sharing of secrets. Being Smiths aware was to be included in a coterie, an education of sorts with a sense of positive exclusivity. Morrissey was the man who sold his world, the perfect and rare conclusion of a fan in waiting who finds himself iconic. Combined with Marr's ceaselessly inventive guitar work, and driven along by the restless powerhouse of Rourke and Joyce, they were a force, and one with a burgeoning influence that could and would not be denied, even though they said it, largely and emotionally, with flowers.

And so it couldn't last, but that it did for so long is in itself a testament to the power of creativity once unleashed. They never had a proper manager, held a quaint and Canute-like disdain for promotional videos, ragged their relationship with their record label Rough Trade, and if Morrissey didn't want to do an interview, or even embark upon a tour, he simply didn't show up. Fletcher steers his way through this and more, without the need to proffer judgment or to take a stand. He presents the narrative, and leaves readers to inform their own opinions. When it all grinds to a halt, Morrissey again in absentia and his three band mates exasperated in a chip shop, it couldn't be a more parochial, nor therefore appropriately English setting, a terribly suitable place for all to end.

With hindsight the creative marriage and friendship between Morrissey and Marr couldn't withstand the outside influences of success and excess. Marr gradually became a victim, albeit a genial and largely rational one, of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Morrissey, naturally insular, felt the endless pressure of being a spokesman for his generation, when he was only really expressing himself. Rourke went from a casual user to a near casualty, and only Mike Joyce seemed to remain remotely akin to the person he was upon arrival.

The Smiths had the literacy of the Kinks, the swagger of the Stones, the effeteness of T.Rex, and the eclectic nature of the Beatles, but such attempts to contextualize them fail to grasp their unique quality, or the intoxicating perfume of their genius. They had the luck to exist and connect, and in their wake have bequeathed a genuine treasure trove of inspired youthfulness. That is the light that continues to shine, even as their days succumb to amber.

Still Somewhat Against The Grain

Robert Cochrane — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:45:44 +0000

Still Somewhat Against The Grain Robert Cochrane July 21, 2010 - 09:45

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

Life Class by Diana Athill (Granta)

Growing Old Disgracefully BBC documentary

Diana Athill published Stet in 2000, her amusing and revealing account of her life as an literary editor, when she was 82. One could have been forgiven for considering it an astute piece of literary housekeeping, the final gasp of a pen that was about to be laid down for good. It was her fourth installment of memoirs.

The first -- Instead of a Letter -- had candidly handled her first love disappointment at the hands of a man, five years her senior, with whom she fell in love when she was fifteen, but who dropped her from afar and was then killed in the Second World War, a blow whose repercussions shadowed her existence with a sadness she found almost impossible to escape. Published in 1965, it was an unusual work for the time, when such cathartic and disarming honesty was far from the norm. Candidness was seen as a loss of face, not a brave serving of truth. She followed it with a brisk and witty novel, Don't Look at Me Like That, about a girl of Bohemian tastes, who has affairs, but none of the guilt one might anticipate in less liberal times. It remains a pithy breath of fresh air, free from apology, modern and astute.

Her second attack of the memoirs, After a Funeral, continued in her theme of personal trauma as means of literary excavation. Appearing in 1986, it was the long view of a momentously sad event. Her friend, the charming, but unstable Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali, with whom she fell in love after publishing his novel Beer in the Snooker Club. Athill provided him with sanctuary and support, but he ended up living with her, mentally abusing her kindness and infatuation by leaving his diary open so she could view his toxic reflections upon her failings in both personality and physical attractiveness. His ultimate act of selfish selflessness, was to commit suicide in her flat in 1969. In her detailing of their emotional tryst and trauma, they slept together once after a drunken collision in her flat, she is terribly unflinching in her dissection of her motives, weaknesses, and the sadly inevitable outcome.

By the time Make Believe appeared in 1993, a possible theme had become a glaring actuality. Another brief sexual relationship with another vain, but charismatic man, Hakim Jamal, the black American radical. A follower of Malcom X, and lover of the actress Jean Seaberg, he was eventually gunned down in his native Boston in 1972. He also believed himself to be God. His other English lover, Gail Boston, the daughter of an MP, was murdered in Trinidad after following him there; her sorry plight became the basis for V.S Naipaul's novel Guerillas. Again Athill dissected the experience in cool, calculated prose, as much an observer of herself as she is of others.

Her first book, a collection of short stories, An Unavoidable Delay, was published in the early '60s, but only in America. By the time of Stet it seemed that Diana Athill was a six-book wonder, a minor literary figure, a footnote in the lives of famous writers. In the decade since she has become a curious arrival: a major literary figure, a success in her own right, and most definitely on her own terms.

In 2002 she cast a long, affectionate, but unsentimental look at her childhood in Yesterday Morning. The book went through several editions, building upon the interest she had kindled with her previous works which were falling into print again. Her unexpected breakthrough came with an unfashionable topic, and an unprepossessing subject, Somewhwere Towards the End which appeared as the author turned ninety, exploded myths of old-age, and many of the expectations one has of those in the elderly bracket. It became a literary, and a commercial wonder, winning the Costa Prize for biography, the near perfect next installment in a long life, and a happy account of a time we fear. She was soon a regular feature on the literary circuit making "Sold Out" appearances at Festivals in Bath, Cheltenham, and Hay on Wye.

Last year saw the publication of Life Class, a doorstop-sized compendium of her memoirs, and again her audience grew. Diana Athill was on the radio, on TV, and in magazines as both a contributor and an interviewee. At the age of 92, she had arrived. Then she confounded expectations by giving up her flat, winnowing her lifetime of possessions and books, by moving into an old person's home. She also became the subject of a profile by Alan Yentob for BBC television.

Athill has a voice for radio and a face of which the camera approves. The documentary of her life took her back to the places she recreates in words. Her grandmother's palatial house, her school as a student in Oxford, her office at the publishers Andre Deutsch (now an artist's suppliers), the graveyard which holds various family members, even her abandoned flat where Ghali ended his life. Much of hers was spent editing the work of others, a list that reads like a "Who's Who" of current greats and the gone -- John Updike, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, V.S Naipaul, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and Jean Rhys, to name but a few.

She holds Rhys in particular esteem, because she feels she learnt the most from her reductive approach to refining prose. Given that Andre Deutsch could be mercurial, it was often left to Athill to soothe the ruffled feathers of startled authors. She wryly recalls that some were not so easy to console, and despite the famously cranky V.S Naipaul acknowledging her as the best editor he ever encountered, she admits that in times of trial, she would console herself in the knowledge that at least she wasn't married to him.

Recently she had to write an introduction to a reissue of Ghali's lone novel, which has become a surprise best seller in Egypt. Speaking of him, and his suicidal passing was the only time you saw the veneer of resolution almost crumble, and the sadness she successfully discharges in concise prose, return to almost draw a tear. It was momentary, and once again she is off, remembering, analyzing, clutching her cane. At one point she observes her amusement at sharing the stage with a woman in her sixties to discuss the topic of age. As she correctly states that old age from your nineties is a totally different place. She has lived, a long, unconventional life, but her experiences prove that in affairs of the heart, the route that doesn't follow the footsteps of convention, hold greater, unexpected rewards. Her on going friendship with the lover of her life partner, whom she allowed to reside with them after their physical relationship had dwindled into a sexless companionship, proves that dictum.

Diana Athill has recently been diagnosed with cancer, but because of her age it is being monitored, but not treated. She hopes she can get away without pain or fuss. I share that wish for her, but hope that it comes as she desires, but not for a good while. She is the editor, who became a writer in her own right, but who managed to take the advice she had long given others into her heart, and apply it to her own efforts. She recently cast her eye over my work, and wrote that she liked the themes but that I should make my lines longer, it would make the poems stronger. It was a simple piece of advice, but once applied, I knew I would always carry it with me. A reminder from someone who knows.

She says she is tinkering with another book, but has no desire to discuss what it entails in case it might derail the project and it comes to nothing. Given the strength of her past performances, this seems a rather unlikely outcome.

Purchase her books on Amazon

The Garbo of the Printed Word: J. D. Salinger 1919-2010

Robert Cochrane — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:55:05 +0000

The Garbo of the Printed Word: J. D. Salinger 1919-2010 Robert Cochrane February 4, 2010 - 14:55

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

For an author who published little, J. D. Salinger had immense influence on successive generations. His literary creation Holden Caulfield became the American Everyboy, a Huckleberry Finn for baby boomers and beyond. Salinger succeeded in encapsulating adolescent distance from the adult world.

It was a literary feat he seemed incapable or reluctant to repeat. Secretive to the point of paranoia, he became a brooding, beguiling enigma, a one-book wonder, the Garbo of the printed word.

Publishing nothing for half of his long life, this secretive individual maintained that he wrote for his own pleasure, without facing the contradiction that The Catcher in the Rye touched the emotional lives of countless millions.

As he aged, a strange Dorian Gray-like relationship evolved between the elderly hermit and the perennially youthful outsider he had breathed life into. He guarded his privacy with ferocious observance, and only last year, successfully sued in order to halt the publication of Sixty Years Later, an unauthorized sequel to his masterpiece. If Salinger wasn't going to bother to add to his slim output, then nobody else was going to do so either.

Salinger was raised in uptown Manhattan; his Jewish father was a successful importer of fine cheeses. J.D. saw active service in the Second World War and was an Intelligence Officer for the Allies. It was during this period that he met and married a German girl, but the union was childless and short-lived. At the age of 31 he took a 16-year-old schoolgirl admirer as his bride. After twelve years and two children, they divorced. It should be no surprise, although it is of more than spurious interest, that all his significant relationships were with younger women who contacted him as fans.

His year-long affair with Joyce Maynard, when he was 51 and she 18, resulted in a memoir written by her. His final marriage was to another fan, forty years his junior, who had also contacted him by letter. In the 1950s, secure in the trappings of success, he withdrew to Cornish, New Hampshire, where he maintained an extraordinary feat of subliminal privacy. Salinger fended off all attempts at engagement. He steadfastly avoided efforts to make his literary world flesh.

Despite overtures from the likes of Billy Wilder, Steven Spielberg, and Elia Kazan, Holden Caulfield, the eternal troubled boy, never appeared in shimmering gray or Technicolor. His depiction remains a wordly creation. A neighbor tantalizingly admitted that Salinger had ten completed novels under wraps a decade ago, and now the literary world waits to see if death proves the unlikely breaker of Salinger's silence. His major contribution to modern literature was his ability to provide misunderstood adolescents with a voice.

Even now The Catcher in the Rye maintains that feat of freshness; although some of the language may seem a little dated, the feelings and emotions beat as true to life in the new century as they did fifty years into the old one. The swearing it contains caused the book to be banned from schools and libraries, a cruel irony that frustrated Salinger because it was placing his work beyond the reach of those he wished to connect with. His collection of stories For Esme-With Love and Squalour (the title in England; in the U.S. it was called Nine Stories) provides a tantalizing taste of a literary feast that barely reached the first course. Whatever his motives, his lingering presence as an absence was at best eccentric, though it eventually came to seem tiresomely cranky. Books abound that try to crack his enigma.

The British poet and critic Ian Hamilton wonderfully annotated his frustrated efforts to interview his subject. The resulting In Search of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life (1935-65) is a perfect testament to the means the man employed to avoid exposure. In a suitably cryptic remark, Salinger once admitted, "I am a kind of paranoid in reverse: I suspect people of plotting to make me happy."

Hurling Abuse

Robert Cochrane — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:29:52 +0000

Hurling Abuse Robert Cochrane January 21, 2010 - 20:29

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

Come What May by Donal Og Cusack (Penguin Ireland)

The death of Stephen Gately rang out the bells of irony, but their chimes were absent from the mournful proceedings in Dublin. What occurred amounted to a state funeral, in a Catholic country. The deceased, an openly gay, married pop star, was given respect, the kind of respect he would still have been denied had he not been famous.

Ireland pretends to be a modernist state, but the Catholic Church still casts a disquieting shadow over the lives of those of whom it disapproves. Priests have been routinely exposed as child abusers, money has been paid to the victims, yet their church continues to rail against homosexuality, without ever wondering if truncating the sexuality of young men might not be the major mitigating circumstance in such unhealthy manifestations later on.

Recently it has finally admitted, after years of pressure from the victims who refused to remain silent, the full level of collusion it undertook to protect men who didn't deserve such understanding. It still cannot say why; to do so would require much soul searching from those who are supposedly in the business of saving souls.

A mere smattering of weeks after Gately's pomp and circumstance, the bastions of Irish expectation took another kick to the vulnerable parts when one of their major sporting heroes, hurling star Donal Og Cusack, announced that he preferred the physical company of men. Tea cups rattled, pints of Guinness were spluttered into, and what had been an occasional rumor became an undeniable fact.

Cusack used his autobiography, Come What May, as the vehicle to explain himself. It was serialized in the Daily Mail, the paper that suggested Gately's death was a result of his sexuality and lifestyle but seemingly saw no contradiction in praising the bravery and honesty of its new exclusive.

Cusack has been remarkably direct and unapologetic, appearing on television, giving press interviews; the conventional world momentarily faltered, gawped, then dusted itself down and got on with things. However, when he took to the field in Semple Stadium, Tipperarary, in front of 50,000 fans, a disgruntled idiot with a megaphone kept chanting: "He's gay! He's bent! And his arse is up for rent!"

This sort of treatment has been more difficult for the parents than their son, who retorted:

"A guy like that? I don't really care. If he wants to amuse himself by calling me brokeback, or imagining my arse is up for rent, he has paid to see me play. I'm playing the greatest game in the world in the mecca of the game. I'm playing with my friends and comrades for the place I come from. I'm doing something I love. Fuck it! His little problems don't concern me. I'm obviously far happier for being what I am than he is."

But Cusack's mother no longer goes to watch him play because of the homophobic abuse she hears vented towards him.

The book bristles with passion, but not of the sexual kind. There is little soul searching or sexual pondering. Cusack's heart belongs to hurling, a violent, often brutal sport which in Irish homes rivals Catholicism in the influence and drive it exerts. What gets him through the occasional night isn't much discussed, although what does keep him awake is doing badly in a match, especially losing one.

He was instrumental in fighting against the injustices heaped upon players by self-serving officials, even instigating strikes to improve their facilities and their medical and personal care. The moment he confessed all to his parents and siblings was tactlessly lightened by his brother suggesting that the news would give their father something to broaden his mind with.

Surrounded by the family trappings of a sport he has loved for all his life, I felt for his father; he had little reason not to expect the conventional result from his son's sporting life. Come What May isn't really a gay book, it is a fairly standard sporting memoir -- but one where the author mentions, in a few brief chapters, that he isn't quite what he seems.

Og Cusack remains a hurling icon, his masculinity hasn't been altered from what it was before. If people saw him as such, he remains as such. That he doesn't look gay is part of the fascination and his value as a breaker of conventional stereotypes. He isn't the only gay hurler, or whatever other sport may spring to mind, but he will likely remain the only publicly recognized one for quite some time. His treatment from the stands would suggest that erring on the side of caution might not be a bad idea.

In 1982, only yards from Croke Park, the scene of many of Donal Og Cusack's sporting triumphs, a young gay man, Declan Flynn, was lured to his death. Eventually his killers had their manslaughter sentences suspended, and the local community took it upon themselves to organize a celebratory march through the area. Flynn wasn't protected by the trappings of fame, and his treatment is more telling than the bowing and scraping involving those in the glare of the spotlight. Sport is a forger of powerful emotions, strong bonds, and blurred boundaries. Generally, the news has been greeted with a positive air, and his teammates have been refreshingly supportive. One shocked friend touchingly arrived with a list of handwritten questions.

Donal Og Cusack is going to be a subject of speculation and gossip, but the world changes slowly, and his stance will make life easier for others, because he comes from a sport many respect. In a very Irish way, Cusack wasn't in the closet, he didn't confirm nor overtly deny, he went to clubs that suited his nature, and he seems pretty sanguine about needing to make a public issue of something he was merely dealing with. As usual the press had other ideas. Gay or straight, his achievements remain. In the end, that is all it should really come down to. Sadly, as we know, that isn't the case.

In Homage to the Sorrows

Robert Cochrane — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:11:12 +0000

In Homage to the Sorrows Robert Cochrane November 7, 2009 - 16:11

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

Rock and roll poets are few and far between, and the modifier suggests something less than the genuine article, someone who would never be courted by the literary world, a maverick imposter in the hallowed house of words.

Jim Carroll was that rare, exotic creature, a rock interloper whose talent could not be airily dismissed. A lauded contradiction who was equally at home in a rock band and a literary salon. He had also been a budding basketball player, the handsome embodiment of the American dream, but Carroll's early sporting promise took a turn towards darkness. He would never really emerge from these shadows, but that made him the Rimbaud of Manhattan and beyond.

It wasn't the desire for Hollywood gloss that landed Leonardo DiCaprio the part of Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries; he looked very much like the man he portrayed on screen. The movie turned Carroll from a counter-culture icon, and minor Warhol-ite, into a more rounded (and more wealthy) kind of celebrity. It was never a role he'd ever craved, but one that kept falling his way. Talent and looks gave Carroll an incredible allure.

When questioned about the Columbine shootings, he gave short and withering shrift to those who attempted to engage him on the matter.

"Artists have nothing to do with the deranged, vaguely connected actions of a few celebrated nutcases" was how he resisted the requests to appear as a talking head on the matter.

Artistic influence is one thing, but trying to make artists responsible for such events is merely reflexive scapegoating by those who need someone to blame, and Carroll knew that from experience.

James Dennis Carroll was born August 1, 1949 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where his father owned a bar. His fall from clean-cut teenage sportsman, attending the prestigious and private Trinity School on the Upper West Side, where he'd won a scholarship in 1964, was slow and initially undetected.

He'd discovered hard drugs at the age of thirteen, resulting in a strangely comic double life of male prostitution to fund his heroin habit, and sporting accolades at the National High School All Star Game in 1966.

By the time he turned 18, Carroll had already published a pamphlet of poetry, Organic Trains, having been a regular at the Sts Mark's Poetry Project in Greenwich Village. When extracts from his journals were trailered in the Paris Review in 1970, the The Basketball Diaries were germinated.

He dropped out of Wagner College and Columbia University, which lead to his inevitable inclusion in the Warhol set, where he wrote dialogue for the silver-wigged wonder's experimental films.

In that year he met the budding artist, and then occasional poet, Patti Smith. It was Carroll who advised her to concentrate on her writing more. By the end of that decade she would return the favor by encouraging him to follow her route into music.

Jim and Patti were perfect bookends of masculine and feminine androgyny and downward mobility. Carroll was a strange amalgam of two Davids, Johansen and Bowie, betraying the vulnerable harshness so evident in both men, but adding a strange other-worldliness of his own.

He shared a loft with Smith and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, a period he brings vividly to life in The Downtown Diaries, 1973, published 1987. He was also a resident of the legendary Hotel Chelsea.

When his first full collection of poems was published by the prestigious Grossman & Co., Carroll had arrived at the age of 23. The collection betrayed a wise and mature eye at odds with the youthfulness of its creator. Drawing praise from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, he became the new kid in town. An attempt to get clean by moving to San Francisco resulted in his marriage in 1978 to Rosemary Klemfuss.

His collection of stories The Book of Nods appeared in 1986. In the late 1970s, Carroll acted on Patti Smith's advice, and with Rolling Stone Keith Richards's help he secured a record deal with Atco, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records.

His debut album, Catholic Boy, was a blistering tour de force that dented the American album charts in 1980. Carroll was photographed standing between his parents by Annie Liebovitz, an iconic visual contradiction of conformity and dissidence; she also provided the cover shot for the follow-up, Dry Dreams, and he became a major draw on the college circuit. At a sell-out show at TRAX in New York, Keith Richards made a guest appearance.

The Jim Carroll Band released the wonderfully focused I Write Your Name in 1983, but despite a snaking version of "Sweet Jane" enhanced by Carroll's junky-yelp phrasing, and tracks that suggested greater things to come, especially the Cramps-like "Black Romance" or the heartbreakingly sad "Dance the Night Away," he'd lost interest in the music side of things. Three albums seemed enough for his short attention span, and although he would collaborate with Blue Oyster Cult and Boz Scaggs in the '80s, his true interest was spoken word recordings.

His Praying Mantis collection means the listener will never be able to think of the assassination of J.F.K, veal fillets, masturbation, and Barbra Streisand without smiling repeatedly.

It is an added irony that Carroll's paean to departed friends, "People Who Died," soundtracked the opening scene of Spielberg's E.T.

Jim Carroll published two further collections of poetry in the 1990s, Fear of Dreaming in 1993 and Void of Course three years later, but the man who'd long ago relished "When I was nine years old, I realised that the real thing was not only to do what you were doing...but to look totally great while you were doing it" became a shambling, skeletal shadow of his once elegantly wasted self.

The Basketball Diaries was a cautionary tale that became an epistle of heroin chic. It still exudes an air of effortless cleverness and poise.

Carroll was a poet of pared-down brilliance, but that attribute of his poetry he also imposed on his own physicality. He seemed a man from another time, someone who embodied a sensibility lost in these quickly changing times, but one who elicited a tremendous respect from his peers.

His is a select but perfectly formed canon of work. In the words of one used them sparingly, his "POEM" requests:

Pay homage to the sorrows

Make your sadness graceful

If possible

Your confessions as well... peace.

Enigmatic Celibate

Robert Cochrane — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:33:14 +0000

Enigmatic Celibate Robert Cochrane August 23, 2008 - 11:33

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

Meetings With Morrissey

Len Brown

(Omnibus Books)

For an artist who has widely shared his heroes, his obsessions, and his occasional anger, Morrissey remains an enigma, retaining a certain aura of mystery one normally associates with a different era. He is a rock original who has no rock and roll habits. He doesn't do drugs or drink to excess. A vocal vegetarian and a man who has a way with words, he is the ultimate iconic ironic. A man who lives in the heads of his fans, but remains myth-like and remote. A familiar stranger.

Morrissey is the perfect fan turned perfect star. Even before fame came calling, he was championing the New York Dolls, James Dean, and a sundry collection of obscure girls, suicides, and failures. An advocate and patron of the lost and ignored. After fame arrived, he continued to do so, a rare example of compassion in a business where everyone is out to talk, and talk, and talk even more, about themselves. He has become the bard of coy wit and playful ridicule, his recent success eclipsing the seven-year silence in which he released nothing. Contentious and mocking, he manages to render his interior world a source of pleasure for his adoring public.

Few stars are as loved as Morrissey, but then few stars are like him. He has remained consistently the same, a touchstone of familiarity in the fickle world of Pop. The crown prince of indie, he has rendered his Englishness a commodity that has worldwide appeal, dragging such British oddities as the comedians Charles Hawtrey and Kenneth Williams into rather unfamiliar and foreign limelight.

Quotable and sharp, he is something of a throwback in a cheap world of disposability and the fleetingly cruel fame of "reality" and "talent" television. Unlike Bowie, he hasn't been a trend chameleon trying to catch terribly inappropriate passing bandwagons. An enigma with a Pandora's Box of obsessions, he is a unique character, but what informed the creation of this charming man? His librarian mother certainly fostered his interest in books.

As a child he took refuge in the stories of Oscar Wilde, and a passion evolved for the martyred dandy, a fervor he still retains; this fixation is the basis for Len Brown's wonderfully readable Meetings with Morrissey. Brown attempts to slip behind Morrissey's facade by attempting to deconstruct him via his eclectic interests. As a premise it initially works, but in the end it fails to reveal the inner workings of a complex personality.

It begins with the author and his subject meeting at the Cadogan Hotel in the room where Wilde was arrested for his homosexual dalliances, before his vilification and sentence to two years hard labor. He spent his final years in Parisian exile, dying in poverty, deprived of his children, at the age of forty-six. This tragic, almost Christ-like persecution resonated with the shy boy from Manchester, who had few friends and was always something of a loner.

Over the years Brown has become a reluctant Boswell to Morrissey's rather elusive Dr. Johnson. Recognizing the veiled nature of much of his conversation, he delves and dives, and creates a figure that is both honest and elusive. Any effort to pigeonhole the former Smith fails, but what emerges is a likable man, who draws comfort from former times when Britain seemed to be a better place because life moved a slower pace, and things had their place.

Morrissey appears to be essentially an outsider who is attracted to the bashed, broken and vilified. A singing Statue of Liberty, he gathers up these poor wretched creatures, and tries to repair their lives, even if posthumously, as in the case of the late Jobriath, the maligned American Glam star who succumbed to AIDS in 1983, whom he has single-handedly championed in recent years. Brown's idea works, but the enigma retains that intoxicating air of mystery.

Brown's investigations don't crack the illusion; by his meditations he enhances it. Morrissey remains the Garbo of rock that speaks, but coyly, in aphorisms, and with conviction. It gets him in trouble, but that is precisely why he is interesting. His long-maintained celebration of the celibate life has whetted many a curious hack's appetite. In Brown's book it would seem that he is just as he claims.

Perhaps he hasn't got as far as Gore Vidal, who advocates that we should only have sex with people who we really don't like, but it remains a spurious topic for the curious. It matters little. Few other artists have emotionally triggered and emotionally liberated their audience in the way Morrissey can and does. George Michael is no more interesting than k.d. lang. In fact, knowledge of the flesh they prefer adds nothing to the appreciation, or indeed the content, of their work.

Rufus Wainwright, Pete Burns, and the Antony are entirely different because their gender orientation fires and informs their art. I guess it depends on the gay one is discussing, or in Morrissey's case, the celibate.

Wainwright has encapsulated the problem thus:

"Whether he's gay or not, he is the gay Elvis. He is among the greatest entertainers of our time. The banter, the dancing, the stage-craft, it all conspires and you know exactly what Morrissey is. He is heroic. He is a total package, like Dean Martin or Prince."

In the final chapter Brown over eggs the Oscar Wilde thing, which is rather a shame. There's Wilde in the woodwork, behind the chair, in whispers misheard. Morrissey makes no secret of his passion for the Irish wit, but Brown makes too many connections that really don't hold water, and does Morrissey something of a disservice in the process. He is more than his major influence, despite having borrowed and stolen from him for all of his creative life. Where Morrissey has succeeded is in his ability to harness his interior world by drawing upon it for his own art. By so doing he has created a shared experience for his audience, which is where genius arrives.

He loves old British black-and-white movies such as A Taste of Honey, Carry On campers like Hawtrey and Williams, deathly drunks like Yootha Joyce, and Coronation Street vixens like Elsie Tanner. He brings them on as ushers to his world. Whilst in The Smiths, he draped his heroic divas and deviants over his record sleeves; being a fan became educational, and indeed Brown in the final pages lists many of Morrissey's figures of fascination. It is an assortment of strong women, effete men, drug addicts, and transvestites. In this collage of oddities, what does it reflect of the man in question? They are all components of himself, which he has honed into aspects of his audience like tiny arrows.

Len Brown has written an entertaining and informative work. It isn't a biography as such, but it does make Morrissey a more flesh and blood reality. If you don't like him, it might just convert you. If you do, it will divert you. Love him or loathe him, you cannot dismiss him.

Morrissey once referred to the passing of Charles Hawtrey as "the last death wheeze of the real England." He could easily have been penning his own obituary. By his desires you shall know him, but never completely. There lie the mechanics of enigma. We are all composites of our earthly desires, but some make better jobs of hiding the stitches than others. Morrissey, the master tailor of words and gestures, wears his influences terribly well.

Poet, Bum and Fool

Robert Cochrane — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:30:01 +0000

Poet, Bum and Fool Robert Cochrane January 28, 2008 - 20:30

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

biography

Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell (Vintage)

Some characters are a writer's once-in-a-lifetime gift. In Joseph Mitchell's case, his came in the bedraggled guise of Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated Bowery bum and panhandler. At times a likeable rogue, at others a Grade A pain in the ass, Gould was served well by the generous attention that Mitchell afforded him. Mitchell wrote honestly, but never unkindly, about Gould's life and misadventures in a feature for The New Yorker in December 1942. This turned Gould into more of a minor celebrity than even he usually believed himself to be.

Joe Gould's Secret is a small, urbane gem of a book. (It was published by Vintage in 1999 and still available as a used book on Amazon.) It is in fact two New Yorker features combined, the second written in the early '60s, several years after Gould's death in 1957.

The unraveling saga tells the reader as much of Mitchell's benign nature as it does about his eccentric, and frankly exasperating, subject. Gould claimed, with the justification of experience, to be the victim of "the three H's" -- homelessness, hunger, and hangovers.

The book amounts to a wonderful act of kindness to someone who would have been a long forgotten low-life, were it not for Mitchell's understated and effortless prose. For years Gould had been telling those who wished to hear, and those who didn't, that he was embarked upon the writing of his magnum opus, a project he'd christened the Oral History (he may have invented the term), a book longer than the Bible, whose manuscript was taller than Gould himself. He stored his numerous notebooks in the closets of long-suffering friends, but the bulk of them were kept in a hen house in upstate New York.

The history was a collage, America in the authentic overheard conversations of strangers and stragglers, anyone who became part of Gould's orbit. He maintained that it would cement his reputation as one of the greatest-ever writers, but this would be a posthumous accolade.

In writing about him, Mitchell bequeathed upon Gould a certain air of respectability, which he turned to his canny advantage. A small, bedraggled creature with a white scraggly beard and a battered hat, Gould had come to New York in 1916. After a half-hearted stab at journalism, he sank to the depths of poverty, where he remained for the rest of his days.

He knew e e cummings and had work published by Ezra Pound, but this altered little. It seems that he aimed low in life and missed. Gould claimed to be able to understand the language of seagulls. He would often give impromptu performances of this unique talent, at parties, in diners, or in the street, to equal amounts of bewilderment and alarm.

He was known in the Bowery as Professor Seagull, the title of Mitchell's initial profile. He was tolerated, pitied, or avoided, depending on the mood he found, or left, those who contributed coins to top up Gould's meager existence, his self-titled benevolent fund. He was a kind of talisman, a Bohemian touchstone, privy to some of the swankiest parties.

Mitchell, who died in 1996, entwined his own legacy to this unfortunate figure, who reads at times as more of a Dickensian fiction than a real person. The book was turned into a film some years ago. Gould was remembered not for his writing, but for being himself. Not perhaps what he would have liked, but what it seems he deserved. In reading about him we come to realize that we are all a composite of flaws.

This is a small book about a small man who told tall tales. By the end of it we know Joe Gould's secret, but we are also left all too aware of the grubby nature of our own.

Purchase thru Amazon