Saturday, February 28, 2009

A life in writing / TC Boyle

TC Boyle
A life in writing: TC Boyle
'Writing is the best rush I've ever found. I'm utterly, hopelessly addicted to it. I go into a kind of dream every day'
Interview by Richard Grant
Saturday 28 February 2009 00.01 GMT



L
ife, says TC Boyle, "is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all." He is sitting contentedly with a glass of wine in the west room of his Frank Lloyd Wright house in Montecito, California. "Science has killed religion, there's no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all."

T Coraghessan Boyle, as he used to call himself, has always enjoyed making mincemeat of conventional pieties. He emerged in the 1980s as a satirical novelist and short-story writer with a black sense of comedy and an exuberant prose style. He dressed like a rock star, and his self-chosen middle name, pronounced Cor-rag-essan, sounded like a battle cry. In 1993 he gave a famous free reading in Central Park with Patti Smith, and today, at 60, with 12 successful novels and a 750-page volume of short stories lined up in hardback on the burnished redwood shelf above his fireplace, he still looks like a punk Mephistopheles.
The house is a low, spreading, cruciform structure of redwood and glass, built in the prairie style with a Japanese influence, and Boyle's latest novel, The Women, is about its architect. "I really didn't know much about Frank Lloyd Wright when we bought the house in '93. Living here, I got curious and started reading about him and found out what a bizarre, outlandish character he was, with all this incredible turmoil in his personal life, and I knew I had to write about him."
Architecture is touched on in The Women, but the novel's main concern is Wright's scandal-racked love life and how it was experienced by the four women involved. "All the events in the book are taken from the newspaper accounts and biographies, and I really put my soul into trying to keep the details accurate," Boyle says. "Where the fictional process is at work is when I enter the heads of the characters and imagine what they were thinking, and why they did what they did." He based his main narrator, a Japanese apprentice called Tadashi Sato, on the many international architecture students that Wright charged for the privilege of doing his cooking and cleaning, and who were required to obey all his commands without question.
Wright's first wife was the long-suffering Kitty Tobin. They married young and had six children, and then he fell in love with one of her best friends, an early feminist called Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who was also married with children. Publicly announcing their freedom to follow their hearts and hounded by the press, Frank and Mamah went off to live together at Taliesen, a shimmering country estate in Wisconsin that Wright built as his own private utopia. In 1914, while Wright was away on business, Mamah was murdered there by a crazed manservant with an axe. In the same rampage, he killed her two visiting children and four other adults, wounding two more and setting a fire that burned Taliesen almost to the ground.
The next woman in his life was Maude Miriam Noel, a passionate, morphine-addicted Southern belle, and for Boyle, the most enjoyable character in the novel to write. "Miriam was beautiful, delusional, heartbreaking, and she did all these wild, insane things which to her made perfect sense. She came to dominate my life and the book because I found it so interesting being inside her head."
After she left Wright, and he realised he no longer wanted her back, Miriam became consumed by vengefulness and spent the rest of her life trying to destroy him with increasingly deranged lawsuits, criminal complaints and media campaigns. Wright, meanwhile, had taken up with Olgivanna Milanoff, a statuesque Montenegrin beauty and follower of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff, who bore him two more children and became known as "the Dragon Lady" among the coterie of apprentices at the rebuilt Taliesen.
"Wright was a classic narcissistic personality," says Boyle. "The kind of person who doesn't care what other people want, or who they are, and can't even imagine that they might have emotions and desires of their own. Other people existed only to serve his needs, and I find that fascinating in a cautionary way."
Frank Lloyd Wright is not the first domineering genius to move from the pages of history into a TC Boyle novel. That distinction goes to John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes, who was the subject of his 1993 novel The Road to Wellville and the film of the same name. Then came the sex researcher Alfred C Kinsey in The Inner Circle, published in 2004. "I suppose the three of them do make a trinity, although I didn't realise it when I started on Wright," Boyle says. "They're the great egomaniacs of the 20th century. I don't think any of them would have made a good companion, let alone a husband, and if the three of them had ever met, they probably would have killed and eaten each other."
All three surrounded themselves with acolytes whom they abused in various ways, and all three were genuine visionaries, who permanently changed the way we see personal health, sex and the possibilities of architecture. "The most bizarre was certainly Kellogg with his enema regimes and his crazed health-food obsessions, but he also had some good ideas - that we should eat less meat, take exercise and get fresh air. Kinsey was essentially a sexual predator who was bisexual at a time when that couldn't be admitted, especially in his position as a respected professor of sex research. And Wright was a con man and he had to be. For me to make my art, all I need is a room, a computer or a typewriter and a ream of paper. For him to make his art, he had to convince a patron to lay out all this money, and it was never enough for what he wanted to do."
Wright had very few repeat clients, and it wasn't just because of financial chicanery. "He was so much of a control freak that he hated the idea that someone was going to move into his house, bring in their baggage and ruin his beautiful design. In a couple of cases he got all his own furniture made for a house and even designed the clothing of the housewife. It's like a kid playing with a dollhouse and manipulating figures who aren't really human."
Similar criticism has been levelled against Boyle's fiction. "Boyle is not psychological," Lorrie Moore has written. "He's all demography and zeitgeist." The critic Bill Seligman has argued: "[He] can write and he can imagine, with more energy than any of his contemporaries. But energy isn't enough; there's only so far you can go on sheer technique. And until he goes further, he'll remain a satirist cut off from the oxygen of morality."
He has been accused of lacking proper sympathy for his characters and taking too much pleasure in heaping calamities on them and watching them squirm and flail. "It's my universe, and by god they're going to suffer," Boyle says with a laugh. "Look, when I write funny, satirical stuff, I get criticised for not being serious. When I write moving, naturalistic stories, I get criticised for not being funny."
More broadly, he's been denigrated as an entertainer, a crowd-pleaser and laugh-getter, and to this he pleads enthusiastically guilty. "If we lose sight of the fact that writing is entertainment, then writing is doomed. Books are up against TV and movies and video games and a multimedia society that is so busy that people don't have contemplative time any more. I worry deeply about this. In fact I worry about everything all the time. I used to be a punk. All I wanted to do was tear everything down, and that was so much easier."
Boyle grew up in the leafy suburbs of Westchester County north of New York City. Born in 1948, he was a child of the 1960s and alcoholic parents. When he was young, he tried particularly hard to please them, as the children of alcoholics often do, and then at 15 he rebelled, rejecting Catholicism and embracing vandalism, alcohol, drugs, maniacal driving and the writing of Aldous Huxley, JD Salinger and Jack Kerouac. At 17 he arrived, saxophone in hand, at a small liberal arts college in Potsdam, New York, intending to study music and become a musician. He failed the audition and signed up instead for history and English, which had been his only good subjects at high school.
"One of the classes was the American short story, and that's where I discovered Updike and Bellow and Flannery O'Connor, and it really changed everything. Then I got into black humour, Beckett and John Barth and Robert Coover, and the Latin Americans like García Márquez and Borges, and it was all a big inspirational stew that kept getting stirred. Then I blundered into a creative writing class and here I am."
It wasn't quite that simple. There was a weekend heroin habit that lasted two years until a friend overdosed and scared him into cleaning up, which took another two years and a lot of pills and alcohol. He wrote a story about his heroin experiences called "The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust", which was published by the North American Review. That inspired him to apply to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where so many of his literary heroes had studied, or taught, or both. He was accepted on the strength of that one story.
"Iowa is like a conservatory for writers instead of musicians. You go there to study with a master and that master may impart nothing to you, or he may be your coach and push you on your way, and you take your chances. I had three teachers - Vance Bourjaily, John Irving and John Cheever - all of whom were extremely generous to me and essentially said what I needed to hear: you've got talent, you're on the right track, keep it up. I got time to learn, and time to write, and be in a place where writing is revered, and so many great writers came through there to read their work and stumble around drunk."
He spent five and a half years at Iowa and left with a degree in creative writing, a PhD in 19th-century British literature and a friendship with Raymond Carver. "He was a very unpretentious, shy, demon-haunted and beautiful man, and I admired him greatly." Carver was the leading short-story writer of his generation, well known for his bleak, minimalist style. Boyle yearned to emulate him but his style was already in the opposite camp - hectic and garrulous, full of quips and asides - and when he left Iowa, he hurled himself into a novel, writing in the morning for four or five hours, seven days a week.
That first novel was Water Music, a picaresque comedy about the 18th-century explorer Mungo Park, published in 1981, and Boyle has been working to the same schedule ever since. Despite the pessimism of his worldview, he counts himself as a happy and fortunate man, and this is because he takes such pleasure in his daily hours of writing. "It's the best rush I've ever found and I'm utterly, hopelessly addicted to it. I go into a kind of dream every day. It's wonderful."
He writes in his study upstairs, always to music - "gloom, rain and suicidal cello concertos are best" - or in a remote house in the mountains of northern California, where he sequesters himself for weeks at a time, hiking, snowshoeing and fishing in the afternoons. Like so many contemporary American writers, he also teaches creative writing and is currently professor of literature at the University of Southern California, with a very light teaching burden.
"I have this wild-man image and I am a little crazy," he says. "But at the same time I'm a tenured professor, hardworking and diligent and a good family man. Karen and I have three grown children and I must be the only American writer of my generation who has had only one wife."
Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, who required chaos and tumult to create his art, Boyle needs calm and order, a good dog and a restful night's sleep. He begins his novels in a burst of creativity, slows down in the middle as he works out the irksome problems of plot and theme, and then, with the end in sight, goes into a frenzy to reach it. "I'm too exhausted at that point to begin another novel, so I write short stories instead. And when those peter out, it's usually time to begin a new novel. It's a good cycle for me. It keeps me from having that horrible blockage and downtime that so many novelists have after finishing a project."
A new collection of his stories, Wild Child, will be published next year, and he has amassed another volume of his lifetime collected stories. This summer he hopes to complete his 13th novel, about ecological restoration in the Channel Islands off the California coast. "More and more what I write about is man's relationship to nature, and my take on it is extremely depressing," he says. He tackled climate change and ecological collapse in A Friend of the Earth, published in 2000, and now he has even less hope that an apocalyptic future can be averted. "I think it's going to turn out like Cormac McCarthy's The Road within 50 years. We'll eat everything left to eat and then we'll eat each other. But my plan, personally, is to die. That's how I'm going to deal with it."


Boyle on Boyle


None of the doctors could help her in Los Angeles or the provincial outpost of San Diego either, little people all of them, sniveling types, handwringers, an army of effete bald-headed men in spectacles who were mortified of the law - as if this law had any more right to exist than Prohibition, because who was the federal government to dictate what people could and couldn't do with their bodies, their own minds, their personal needs and wants and compulsions? Were they going to regulate needs, then? Dole them out? Tax them? Miriam was so furious, so burned up and blistered with the outrage of it that she must have been overly severe with the cabman - the driver with his hat cocked back on his head and his trace of a Valentino moustache - because when they got to the border at Tijuana, he stopped the car, turned around in his seat and demanded payment in full. Insolently. Out of insolent little pig's eyes.
 From The Woman, published by Bloomsbury

"This is my first chance to deeply inhabit a close third-person point of view of Miriam, the crazy harpie wife who would ultimately try to destroy Frank Lloyd Wright. She is clearly outraged about something but the reader doesn't yet know what it is. Miriam, my favourite character in the book, is a woman with multitudinous problems, but here, as I introduce her, her problem is very simple. She needs morphine."


Thursday, February 26, 2009

Emily Blunt / Down to Earth, Even When Off the Wall

Emily Blunt

Emily Blunt

Down to Earth, Even When Off the Wall


By ELLA TAYLOR
Published: February 26, 2009
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.



FOR someone who broke into Hollywood playing a hysteric, Emily Blunt is remarkably hard to flap. On a cold, bright day at the Chateau Marmont hotel here, this friendly 26-year-old British actress — whose tightly wound turn as Meryl Streep’s groveling girl Friday all but stole “The Devil Wears Prada” from Anne Hathaway — shows only a mild interest that Brad Pitt has rolled up on his motorcycle. Unlike Mr. Pitt and seemingly every other guest at the funky-cool Chateau, who dress like rock stars fresh from shopping at their local Goodwill store, Ms. Blunt arrives looking somewhere between saucy and demure in a short green flowered dress over black tights and knee-high copper boots, her face blessedly free of the pounds of blinding green eye shadow she piled on for “Prada.”
The eye shadow returns under different cover in Ms. Blunt’s latest film, “Sunshine Cleaning” (opening March 13), a cheeky if sentimental minor pleasure directed by Christine Jeffs. In person Ms. Blunt gives off a distinct whiff of Kensington, but she brings a capable American accent, red and purple hair extensions and bags of trashy brio to the movie, in which she and Amy Adams play sisters traumatized by the death of their mother long ago who find salvation cleaning up bloody crime scenes. Though the meatiest role goes to Ms. Adams as the responsible elder sister, Ms. Blunt cannily underplays both the comedy and the tragedy of the vulnerable Norah, whose good intentions far exceed her life skills.
“Norah’s hopeless, like a bull in a china shop,” Ms. Blunt said fondly. “She has great potential, but she’s stuck, despite yearning for more than her situation. She wants to know what happened in the past, and no one wants to talk about it. She’s funny and heartbreaking, and I love her curiosity. I’m always drawn to people who are a little off the wall.”
That taste for the offbeat and a fetching lack of vanity when it comes to playing disagreeable women have made some of Ms. Blunt’s choices happier than others. She seductively preyed on a young woman in her first major role as a coolly enigmatic beauty in Pawel Pawlikowski’s “My Summer of Love” (2004).
But she has also, at some peril to her career, been the best thing about a few terrible movies, notably as the ominously efficient assistant of Susan Sarandon’s screen husband in the roundly panned “Irresistible” (2006), which Ms. Blunt cheerfully calls “the most resistible film in the world.” Her lithe body shows up briefly and mostly undressed in“Charlie Wilson’s War” and dressed to kill as a sexy Ms. Wrong for Steve Carell in “Dan in Real Life” (2007). She juices the comedy “The Great Buck Howard” (set to open March 20) as a publicist for a has-been magician played by John Malkovich. She won a Golden Globe for her regal dignity as the neglected daughter of a New Labor image maker played by Bill Nighy in a bloated 2005 television drama, “Gideon’s Daughter.”
On the other hand, her adventurous spirit has also allowed Ms. Blunt, despite her rosy glow and patrician diction, to avoid getting stuck in the muslin-and-bonnets period pieces that have sapped the careers of fine actors like Jennifer Ehle overseas. Ms. Blunt paid her dues early on, appearing on British television in “Boudica,” about the British warrior queen who took on the Romans, and in a two-part series as Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard.
She might still be endlessly reprising what she calls the “head girl demeanor” had her agent not pushed her to audition for “Prada.” She convinced the film’s director, David Frankel, that the part, though written for an American, might work better with a British accent.
Ms. Blunt brought both killer timing and a touching pathos to this fashion victim who leaps to gratify her abusive boss’s every whim while heaping scorn on Ms. Hathaway’s hapless underling. She waded into broad comedy with the character of Emily — who flounces around in Vivienne Westwood threads Ms. Blunt chose herself — with the same verve she brings to suiting up in head-to-toe fumigation gear in “Sunshine Cleaning.” That gear, she said, made her and Ms. Adams look like “a couple of blue condoms.”
Ms. Adams, who proudly laid claim to introducing Ms. Blunt to the American mall during the shoot in Albuquerque (a town Ms. Blunt describes as “very beige”), describes her as “a very strong gut actress who really trusts herself, even when she’s asked to do a lot of physicality.”
“The Devil Wears Prada” may be no more than a well-turned piece of Hollywood fluff, but Ms. Blunt’s fearless embrace of her prickly character nimbly skewers the way abuse of corporate power at the top filters down into petty bullying at the bottom.
A gifted mimic who never went to drama school and plunders the quirks of people she knows (“I’m combining, so it’s not stealing, it’s research,” she said gleefully), Ms. Blunt was raised in the stockbroker-belt London suburb of Roehampton, which provided her with an abundance of Sloane Rangers on whom to base Emily. She also drew on her encounters with Hollywood workaholics.
“You meet a lot of people in this world who are defined by the job they do,” she said. “It’s sad, because they cease to develop on a human level, they’re so fear-driven. So I’ve had to sever the two existences.”
For someone whose résumé is stacked with unhinged women, Ms. Blunt seems serenely well prepared for life, not to mention Hollywood life, which she enjoys without taking it too seriously. One of four children, she comes from a loving family and is very close to her elder sister, a literary agent who lives around the corner from her new apartment in Notting Hill Gate. Her mother, Joanna Mackie, is a former theater actress turned teacher, and her younger brother is a film student, but Ms. Blunt had little acting ambition until she started performing in school plays, where the shelter of “pretending to be someone else” incidentally helped rid her of a powerful stammer.
Still, she was “drifting around, shrugging my shoulders like every other 16-year-old” when her future agent noticed her in the musical “Bliss” at the Edinburgh International Festival. Instead of going to college to study languages and become a translator, she went straight into West End theater, then into television before landing “My Summer of Love” when she was 20.
“Acting became something I grew accustomed to doing rather than something I’d always desired,” Ms. Blunt insisted.
Spend time with her, and you discover at least two Emily Blunts. One is the self-deprecating young woman who calls herself lazy, snorts at the idea that she can sing (an Internet rumor based on backup vocals she did for an album by her former boyfriend, the Canadian musician Michael Bublé) and laments that the cello she plays rather beautifully in “My Summer of Love” mostly sits in her apartment “staring balefully at me.”
The paparazzi can’t seem to catch her doing anything worse than running errands at a Los Angeles supermarket with her current beau, John Krasinski of “The Office.” A self-described homebody, Ms. Blunt rarely hangs out on the Hollywood scene. After filming “Prada,” she moved into the guest house of Wendy Finerman, the producer of “Prada,” where she lived for six months and “became part of my family,” Ms. Finerman said. “I couldn’t wait to keep passing her along.”
Ms. Blunt said: “I have level-headed friends separate from the business, people I grew up with. I look to those to find sanctuary.” Polishing off a great slab of chicken sandwich, she leaned back and said: “Great. I inhaled that.”
Then there’s the other Emily Blunt, the one who is always looking for new roles and fresh ways to layer her characters and make them harder to read, the quick study who, according to Mr. Frankel, came to the “Prada” set every day even if she wasn’t working and gave notes about the blocking. This fall Ms. Blunt will appear as Benicio Del Toro’s love interest in a remake of the horror movie “The Wolf Man,” which, she said, “veers away from the slasher movies back to the classic ghost stories.”
She added with a touch of defiance, “I don’t care if people think I sold out doing ‘The Wolf Man.’ It’s a great movie.”
Ms. Blunt is frank about having to pay off her apartment, but she meets the suggestion that her career might bog down in supporting roles if she’s not more selective with forceful asperity. “You’ve got to see ‘The Young Victoria,’ ” she said, in which she plays the queen as, of all things, an irrepressible rebel madly in love with Albert.
“Emily has the potential to become one of the great actresses,” Mr. Frankel said. “She’s beautiful and sexy. She’s a great mimic.” And, he said, in a business full of slick talkers, she sees through phoniness.
Ask Ms. Blunt for role models, and she reels off the usual suspects: Streep, Sarandon, Mirren, Dench. Ask her whom she wants to be like, and she interrupts you midsentence with one crisply enunciated word: Blanchett.







Saturday, February 14, 2009

A life in writing / Amos Oz

Amos Oz
Photo by Kobi Kalmanovitz


A life in writing: Amos Oz



'If every last Palestinian refugee was settled in the West Bank and Gaza, it would still be less crowded than Belgium'


Interview by Aida Edemariam
Saturday 14 February 2009 00.01 GMT



A
mos Oz works in a study that has the subterranean feel of the basement flat in which he grew up in 1940s Jerusalem - except that up the stairs and outside there are no narrow streets full of refugees fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe, but blue sky and rocky ochre desert and the clearest air, through which the sound of fighter jets resonates for miles. He was a bookish child, wanted to grow up to be a book; here in Arad, where the Judaean desert meets the Negev and drops towards the Dead Sea, he has created a burrow lined with books, most in Hebrew, a good number by him.

Oz has often protested that his novels - experiments in verse, in epistolary narrative; meditations on family, on, in the case of his novel Rhyming Love and Death, published this week in the UK, how the creative imagination works, the devious way it feeds on reality - are not crude allegory: or, as he has rather impatiently said, a father is not necessarily the government, the mother not necessarily the old values, the daughter not necessarily a symbol of the shattered economy. But when we meet, the Gaza offensive is only just over, Israeli elections are two weeks away (Oz is campaigning for Meretz, a Zionist-left, social democratic party), and it isn't long before politics obtrudes. "I am outraged with both Hamas and the Israelis in this war," he says. "I feel an anger I find difficult to express because it's an anger in both directions."

Do many people feel that way? "I'm not sure. Israelis were genuinely infuriated, as was I, about the harassment and bombardment and rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages for years and years by Hamas from Gaza. And the public mood was 'Let's teach them a lesson'. Trouble is, this so-called lesson" - which Oz supported - "went completely out of proportion. There is no comparison between the suffering and devastation and death that Gaza inflicted on Israel for eight years, and the suffering, devastation and death Israel inflicted on Gaza in 20 days. No proportion at all." He is appalled by the numbers - "300 dead children. Hundreds of innocent civilians. Thousands of homes demolished" - and while he would like to think that bombing UN structures was accidental, he is also appalled by reports that white phosphorus may have been used, and Dime bombs: "There is no justification. No way this could be justified. If this is true, it's a war crime and it should be treated as a war crime."
Some have suggested that the two-state solution is now dead, but for all his anger, Oz refuses to go that far. "It is the only possible solution. There is no other possible solution. And I would say more than that. Down below, the majority of Israeli Jews and the majority of Palestinian Arabs know that at the end of the day there will be two states. Are they happy about it? No they are not. Will they be dancing in the streets in Israel and in Palestine when the two-state solution is implemented? No they will not. But they know it."

Oz, 70 in May and thus nine years older than his country, remembers when there was dancing in the streets of Jerusalem - on 29 November 1947, when the UN voted to create two states on the territory of the British mandate. Oz's memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003), as well as being the story of a family disintegrating, is a vivid account of the birth of a state; of how necessary it felt to Jews at that time, the utter relief of it, just a couple of years after the extent of the Nazi genocide became known. It also offers a clear-eyed observation of the fault lines in the nascent state, often filtered through his parents: the beautiful mother whose romantic longing curdled into depression and finally suicide when Amos was 12; the revisionist Zionist father, overqualified for professorships yet denied them because Jerusalem contained so many more scholars than students; both pouring the weight of their disappointment and hope on to the shoulders of their one, precocious child.
"In those days," Oz writes, "I was not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a little chauvinist dressed up as a peace-lover, a sanctimonious, honey-tongued nationalist, a nine-year-old Zionist propagandist." When, half a century later, he came to write his memoir, that the Israeli novelist David Grossman calls "his masterpiece", he was a very different person: he tried to imagine how the Arabs felt at those shouts of joy, and he made much of the couple of encounters with Arabs he did have pre-1947. Yet those brief encounters are required to carry too much baggage, and are, as David Remnick later remarked in the New Yorker, the only false notes in a great book.
There were all sorts of internal divisions, too: as highly educated, first-generation immigrants, his parents spoke, between them, 16 languages, and read nine more, "but the only language they taught me was Hebrew" - even though Hebrew, for them, was still very far from a language in which to live an intimate life. "It was necessary," Oz says, "because nobody could talk to each other when they arrived. The only common language they had was prayerbook Hebrew. So if they had to ask directions to the Wailing Wall, or rent a business, or buy bread, or sell a pair of shoes, they had to resort to prayerbook language." The distance between ancient Hebrew and modern is not large: "It's easier for a six-year-old Israeli boy to read the Bible in the original," as Oz puts it, "than it is for a six-year-old English boy to read Chaucer." The Israeli connection to the biblical lands is likewise telescoped, and so Hebrew both grew with the state and consolidated it. No one is more aware of this than Oz, on the level of both the literature ("writing in modern Hebrew is a bit like playing chamber music inside a huge empty cathedral. If you are not very careful with the echoes, you may evoke some monstrosities") and the state: "Whenever war is called peace," he once wrote, "where oppression and persecution are referred to as security, and assassination is called liberation, the defilement of language precedes and prepares for the defilement of life and dignity."
At 14, he rebelled against everything by changing his surname - from Klausner, which claimed him for Jerusalem's intellectual aristocracy, to Oz, meaning "strength" - and going to live on a kibbutz. He stayed on Kibbutz Hulda for 31 years, marrying Nily, daughter of the kibbutz librarian, and raising three children. Initially he tried to erase his hyper-articulate self by trying not to talk much; he tried not to write, too, but soon found himself sitting on the toilet seat in their small house in the dead of night, smoking and writing fiction. The kibbutz gave up on him ever being a useful labourer, and sent him to study literature so that he could teach it; his first book, Where the Jackals Howl, was published in 1965, and he has since published 25 books, both fiction and non-fiction.
His novels can sell 70,000 in hardback, and he has been known to sell 10,000 copies of a new book in a single day; Grossman ascribes this to "the way he manages both to describe the most intimate aspects of our lives and to place them in the Israeli echo-box, with all the voices that are sounded here. Especially if you read his memoir, you see how Amos is the offspring of all the contradictory urges and pains within the Israeli psyche."
"He has also been brave," believes Jacqueline Rose, professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London, and co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices. "There's a very early short story called 'Nomad and Viper', in which Jews on a kibbutz decide to lynch a group of nomads who are, it is implied, unfairly accused of theft. It's a very strong exploration of the dehumanising of the Arab in the mind of the kibbutzim." She refers, too, to his first major novel, My Michael (1968), and argues that it is, "in some ways, his most revolutionary novel. The central character is a woman, Hannah, who goes mad, haunted by two boys who disappeared from Jerusalem after the establishment of the state of Israel. It was a way of writing about the devastating effect of Zionism on the minds of Israelis who can't acknowledge what Zionism did, and expresses the dilemma of what it means to be Israeli incredibly powerfully. The problem is that the dilemma of the Israeli seems to be the only thing that matters. The damage is done to the Israeli soul rather than to the Palestinians as a people."
Oz fought in the 1967 war, then in the Yom Kippur war in 1973, and both gave him a "gut hatred of war and fighting" - but not, he clarifies, any shame for having done it. "I am not a pacifist in terms of turning the other cheek. There is a difference between myself and some of the peace people in Europe: whereas they think that the ultimate evil in the world is war, I think the ultimate evil in the world is aggression, and aggression sometimes must be repelled by force. I will never forget the words of a relative of mine, who spent the years of the Holocaust in Theresienstadt concentration camp. Although she was a peace activist, she said to me, 'You know, we were liberated from the concentration camp not by peace demonstrators carrying placards, but by American soldiers carrying submachine guns.'"

Twenty years ago, Oz wrote an essay in which he asked: "What is one justified in dying for and what is it permissible to kill for?" "If I am not mistaken," he says, when I put it to him again, "my answer was life itself, and freedom. And nothing else. Not holy places, not national interests, not resources. But life and freedom." Never popular with the increasingly powerful Israeli right and disenchanted with Labour ("bankrupt ... it made itself available for any coalition at all, including potentially a Netanyahu coalition"), Oz is also not of what he calls the "radical left". He gave self-defence as his reason for supporting Israel's initial bombing of Lebanon in 2006 (although, when Israel expanded its operations, he held a press conference with Grossman and AB Yehoshua to demand a ceasefire). Self-defence is why he argued for the Gaza offensive, even though friends such as Grossman disagreed. Commentators further to the left than Oz argue that blaming Hamas for the war, as he has done, ignores the economic blockade and siege of Gaza, and underplays the sharp increase in Jewish settlement of the West Bank that accompanied the Gaza pullout of 2005.
This last is not entirely fair, because Oz considered that expansion "atrocious. I think all those settlements, or most of those settlements, will have to go", to fit his vision of an Israel within pre-1967 borders; and because he has never been silent on the matter of settlement and occupation. A couple of months after the 1967 war, he wrote a letter to the newspaper Davar calling for the government to begin immediate negotiations about the West Bank and Gaza, because "even unavoidable occupation is corrupting occupation". As a result of his views, often trenchantly expressed (in 1994, he described extremist Jewish settlers as "Hezbollah in a skullcap"), he has been called a traitor, been assaulted and received death threats.
Over the years, he has developed a formulation that he repeats like a refrain: the situation in the Middle East is "a clash between right and right - the Palestinians are in Palestine because they have no other place in the world. The Israeli Jews are in Israel for the same reason - they have no other place in the world. This provides for a perfect understanding and a terrible tragedy." Hence, for him, the requirement for a two-state solution, land for peace, advocated first through Peace Now, which he co-founded in 1978, and now through Meretz.
"My precondition for peace," he says, "is a comprehensive solution for the Palestinian refugee problem, on the soil of the future Palestine" - which he sees as being the West Bank and Gaza, linked by a corridor, or underground tunnel, and cleared of almost all Israeli settlements. "And I would insist that this is my primary requirement for selfish reasons - for Israeli security reasons. As long as those people are rotting in dehumanising conditions in refugee camps, Israel will have no security, peace contract or no peace contract."
Palestinians such as the novelist Samir el-Youssef, who grew up in a refugee camp, see things slightly differently. "Oz sees Palestinians as a problem which the Israelis ought to get rid of as soon as possible," he says. "His ridiculous suggestion that all Palestinians could be heaped up in the tiny space of the West Bank and Gaza shows that he sees Palestinians as nothing but old furniture which should be stored away." Oz's answer is short: "If every last Palestinian refugee was settled in the West Bank and Gaza, it would still be less crowded than Belgium."
Oz believes that Palestinian Israelis should "become full-scale Israeli citizens, which they are not right now" - but he would rule out any right of return, "because if they return, there will be two Palestinian states and no home for the Jewish people. They have to be resettled in Palestine. After all, they are Palestinians." He doesn't object to the security wall, in principle, except that "they are building the wall in the middle of Palestine" - if there has to be one, it should trace the pre-1967 border. He would talk to Hamas, though only if it recognises Israel.

This week's elections, and the rapid rise of the far-right leader Avigdor Lieberman, who now finds himself able to dictate terms, have proved that the Israeli public is in distinctly hawkish mood. Labour came in fourth with an unprecedentedly few 13 seats, Meretz only just survived, with 3. Oz sees this as a direct result of Ariel Sharon's Gaza pullout and the Hamas rockets that followed it. "They hardened Israelis and brought about both the military offensive in Gaza and the result of this election." On a technical level, "Meretz will have to think hard about how many leftwing voters wasted their votes on irrelevant parties that didn't even get a seat. Our system is outdated." As for the future, "it is hard to be a prophet in the land of the prophets," he says, "but we have seen the right make great concessions in the name of peace before" - Menachem Begin gave up Sinai, and Sharon gave up Gaza, he can only hope it happens again.
Because although Oz shares with many Israelis a primal fear for "the existence of Israel", he insists that "anything is possible here. Nobody ever predicted, a week before President Sadat came to Jerusalem in 1977, that his arrival would be the beginning of a peace process that would end up in an - unhappy - Israeli-Egyptian peace. We have seen peace with Egypt, we have seen peace with Jordan, we have seen the handshake between Rabin and Arafat - things are possible. And moreover, they can happen quite swiftly, and quite unexpectedly."

Oz on Oz

"Once in a while it is worth turning on the light to clarify what is going on ..."
(From the closing paragraph of Rhyming Life and Death, translated by Nicholas de Lange, published by Chatto & Windus)
If I had to describe in the simplest of words the purpose of my writing, these will be the words.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Rachel Cusk / The good, the bad and the ugly

 


The good, the bad and the ugly

A tendency to sneer mars a singular travel memoir. 

By Justine Jordan
Saturday 7 February 2009


R

achel Cusk is a prodigiously gifted novelist whose black comedies of domestic compromise and claustrophobia are so merciless that they are painful to read. She has exposed herself in memoir once before: A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother differed from the usual narratives of transformation in that it charted her efforts to maintain and defend her integral self amid the onslaught of childbirth and child-rearing. As well as praise for its grand style and emotional honesty, it drew accusations of whingeing, barbed comments on her mothering and the sort of general teasing serious women get for taking themselves too seriously. The force of public reaction left Cusk shaken and regretful that she had written the book.

The Last Supper is similarly hard not to take personally - that is part of the point of life-writing, after all, especially within Cusk's area of focus, self-expression in the heart of the family - and Cusk may expect some more personal opprobrium, particularly from Bristolians. "Man, woman and child, they found sensitivity intolerable." Bristol is the city on which Cusk's dissatisfaction with the relentless round of domestic life is writ parodically large; its "primitive" inhabitants keep Cusk awake at night with their "demoniacal groaning . . . from a region that outlay human identity", spurring her to sell up and, with her husband and two young daughters, take off for a three-month interregnum of sun, sand and art in Italy. The operatic treatment of this adventure, and the intensity of its focus on the family unit, can be indicated by the comparison of Cusk's helpful mother-in-law, making breakfast before the early-morning ferry to France, to "a part-time mythical functionary, a night worker, or one of those people in Shakespeare who appear only in the first and last scenes".

As they begin the drive south, spirits lift, the temperature gauge rises, and Cusk's eye follows the changing landscape with her inimitable dispassionate intensity. Whether considering language, food or national habits, she has an amazing ability to strike to the heart of things, to look afresh and not to overlook, which is suited to this journey into otherness. Once escaped from the house they rent in expatland near Umbria, she writes brilliantly about the architecture and animating spirit of Florence and Rome, Naples and Pompeii. Yet the book is scarred throughout by a tendency to sneer at almost every traveller who dares to cross their path, from the "torpid, expressionless" family on the ferry to the "grey, narrow, pinched-looking couple" they are forced to dine with at a B&B, the idiotic herds of tourists on the art trail ("Do they not want to be passionate themselves, and sublime?") and the subhuman pilgrims at Assisi ("polyps on the ocean bed"). This, combined with early passages that abandon her own voice to conform to the clichés of travelese, and a tendency to magnify her own doings - an entire chapter on playing tennis, on a court that, naturally enough, "reminds me of the sacred spaces of the ancient world" - tries the reader's patience. There is a bathetic mismatch between event and epiphany: the sneaky tennis opponent who prompts the realisation that "people are by nature exploitative", or the badly planted roundabout that makes her wonder "what became of the human instinct for beauty, why it vanished so abruptly and utterly".

Yet Cusk's sections on art, as she follows the Piero della Francesca trail or explores the museums of Florence and Naples, are lively, ardent and suffused with generous empathy; they read more like family therapy than art criticism as she applies a psychoanalytic reading to Raphael or St Francis of Assisi ("like Jesus, a misfit who has become an orthodoxy"), constantly privileging human reality over the divine and putting forward the theory that the "psychic health" of the Renaissance artists stemmed from unusually supportive fathers. Cusk worries throughout the book about distinguishing between "the good and the bad"; sometimes this feels to her like art's highest function, sometimes like mere indecision, as when she considers the anxiety of choice over the "artist's palette" of the gelateria. How can one "choose without transgressing the truth of one's own fundamental ambivalence"? She ruefully admits that "some people are more easily made unhappy than others, that much is clear. Often I do not eat a gelato. I sit at a table while the others choose, and think about something else."

Travel can be a passive state - hence Cusk's contempt for tourists; she smartly distinguishes between the foreigner, "isolated, observant, displaced", and the tourist, who "feels at home when he is not" - but it is also an endless, exhausting string of decisions, an artistic process of distinguishing between the good and the bad. At home, with career, partner and primary school-age children in place, it can seem that all the choices have been made: it is this that Cusk found stultifying. But the trip, of course, resists Cusk's guiding artistry; a ferry strike prevents them describing an elegant loop around Capri before turning north again, the Vatican museums are closed (possibly a good thing, as the crush in the Sistine chapel might have induced apoplexy), and the adventure peters out in campsites and dingy holiday parks. Were they to settle in Italy, the family of four - so gloriously self-sufficient and free at a seaside campsite with nothing but a tiny tent and a second-hand volume of Shakespeare - would send out the same "ripples of effect" that anchor us wherever we stop.

There is a tension in the book between the wider experience of the psychic weather Cusk explores - boredom, restlessness, the separation between children and parents as they trundle along the separate grooves of school and work, the desire for desire itself - and her fierce insistence on her own "single nature". Her self-distancing from more of those vile Bristolians, as she watches orange-skinned homecoming tourists pour in through the arrivals gate at Bristol airport and go "whooping out" into the night, is grating even before she muses unconvincingly that "In a way I envied them. I have never been able to evade the issue so . . ." Is her own more considered sojourn any less of an evasion? Doesn't everyone locate their dearest selves in dreams of escape from the everyday? Cusk's spotlight on her personal journey is so bright, so tightly trained, that the rest of humanity can fade to grey.


THE GUARDIAN


Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Edward Albee / Part-time pussycat

 

Eward Albee


Edward Albee: Part-time pussycat


Charles McNuly
February 4, 2009


Edward Albee, without question our nation’s greatest living playwright, lives just the way you might expect him to -- in a rarefied artistic ozone that feels completely at home to him.

African sculptures and 20th century European and American paintings proliferate in his TriBeCa loft like wildflowers on a sunny hillside. An elevator opens directly to the apartment, where a flirty feline named Abigail, a part Abyssinian acrobat, insists on making friends before allowing entry into this heightened realm, in which a Kandinsky and a Chagall stare each other down, a little Picasso etching lurks on a back table, and alarming masks and seemingly animate artifacts track your every move.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Classics corner 004 / Bulldog Drummond by Sapper



Classics corner 004: Bulldog Drummond




Sunday 1 February 2009 00.01 GMT

A
recent, admittedly not very broad, straw poll I conducted on the subject of Bulldog Drummond elicited a common response. Yes, all respondents had heard of the character and um, well, yes, they uniformly thought they'd read the book, before confessing, well, actually no, they didn't think they had.


Bulldog Drummond by Sapper
1st_edition cover, 1920


I'm happy to admit that I, too, fell into that category, but having romped through this splendid new edition from Atlantic, I have made good that gap in my reading. And what a riproaring read it is. Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, late of the army and hungry for adventure after the Great War, places a newspaper advertisement seeking employment: "Legitimate if possible, but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential."


And so begins a classic tale of good versus evil, with Drummond pitted against a group of baddies who are led by a devious mastermind, bent on world domination. The story is set against a Britain convulsed, thanks to the Russian Revolution, by the threat of anarchy and the overthrow of the established order.


Yes, it's an age-old plot, but Sapper, the pen name of Herman Cyril McNeile, delivers it with panache and no little wit. By the denouement, Drummond and his ex-army pals have vanquished the mastermind (or have they?), Drummond has the girl and good has trumped evil. It's a simple book, but speaks of a more innocent age of virtue, courage and decency.
Republished in the same series by Atlantic is The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton, an altogether more enigmatic study of anarchy after the First World War. They make very happy and readable companions.