Sunday, February 7, 2010

My hero / Francisco de Goya by Diana Athill

 

Detail from a Self-portrait of Goya


My hero Francisco de Goya by Diana Athill

Diana Athill
Saturday 7 February 2010


M

y hero is Goya – hard to explain when so little is known about him, his very few extant letters being so flat (like those of a cabinet-maker, someone said). And given a "fact", such as that he knew French, because he once signed a letter written in that language, it is promptly contradicted by an old friend of his who said he arrived in Bordeaux as an old man "without a word of French". But we do know that when near death he made the splendid statement: "And still I learn." And his work never ceases to demonstrate his loathing of cruelty and stupidity. Never does he romanticise horror, he is not frightened, he is disgusted almost (but, heroically, never quite) beyond expression. And when he loves – oh, the life quivering in his portraits of the doctor who saved him, his friends Sebastián Martínez and Tiburcio ­Pérez y Cuervo and, above all, in that exquisitely tender portrait of the young and pregnant Condesa de Chinchón, first caught by him as a charming child peeping out of a family group. When I think of that I have to say that perhaps he is less my hero than my love.

THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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Saturday, February 6, 2010

My hero /Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín

 


My hero Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín
Saturday 6 February 2010

I

n his short poem "The Last", Thomas Kinsella catches a late glimpse of two towering figures in Dublin – the political leader Eamon de Valera and the painter Jack Yeats. "Standing stone still on the path, with a long pale chin / under a broad-brimmed hat, and aged eyes / staring down Baggot Street across his stick. / Jack Yeats. The last."

Yeats, who died in 1957, was the younger brother of the poet WB Yeats. He dedicated his life to the most difficult and intractable issue – the instability of Irish light. He saw its swirling, cloud-laden movements as pure gift. He loved anything that moved and relished crowds and gatherings. He loved theatres, horses, circuses, swimmers, the wild sea. But he also paid homage to the drama of the isolated individual, all the more alone because of his use, both frenzied and disciplined, of competing colour and thick pigment.

I like how Yeats was both serious draughtsman and expressionist dreamer as he wandered in the streets with the world in the grip of his gaze. In the letters of Beckett or the diaries of Lady Gregory, he comes across as polite, engaging, modest, mysterious. I love the idea that he never in his life discussed anything that was of great private concern to him. There were too many other things to talk about or look at, it seemed. As a painter, he went his own way, paying no attention to fashion, and became an example to the painters who followed him in Ireland, heroic figures too, such as Patrick Collins, Basil Blackshaw, Camille Souter and Barrie Cooke.

There is a long room in the National Gallery in Dublin dedicated to his work and that of his father and his sisters. This is one of the sacred spaces in Dublin for me. I don't think I would have been interested in meeting him, but I would love to have seen him, as Kinsella did, on the street, and sometimes as I wander around here I imagine I do see him and that his gaze is as sharp and all-embracing as ever.

THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Martin Amis / My life, my work, my women


Martin Amis and Isabel Fonseca

Martin Amis:
My life, my work, my women


Martin Amis talks candidly about life, work and women in this compelling extract from an interview which appears in the March issue of GQ magazine


Martin Amis at home with his wife Isabel Fonseca and their daughters Photo: ELEANOR BENTALL


By Alex Bilmes
7:00AM GMT 02 Feb 2010

When Martin Amis's hero and mentor, the novelist Saul Bellow, was on his deathbed in 2005, an old friend came to visit. The friend, Amis tells me, decided to be brisk, since the great man was slipping in and out of consciousness. "Well, Bellow," he says, in Amis's telling, "what have you got to say for yourself?" And Bellow says to his friend, "Gene, which is it? Is it, 'Here goes a man?' Or, 'Here goes a jerk?'" Amis elaborates: "Bellow wasn't thinking about his books, his Nobel Prize and all that. He was thinking about his three children by different women, his four marriages, now a fifth marriage. He was thinking about all that. I just know he was."
There's a passage near the beginning of The Pregnant Widow, Amis's substantial new novel of the sexual revolution and its aftershocks, in which the narrator remarks on the protagonist's prescience: "Unusually for a 20-year-old ... Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life." In the final analysis, acclamation, money and success – even such blazing artistic achievement as Bellow's, or Amis's – count for little, if one's personal history is a cause for regret.
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The film that changed my life / La Règle du jeu by Jean Renoir (1939)



The film that

changed my life

La Règle du jeu 

by Jean Renoir 

(1939)


Bernardo Bertolucci
Sunday 28 February 2010 00.05 GMT

I
was 19 or 20 when I first saw La Règle du jeu, or The Rules of the Game, by Jean Renoir. It was five years before I saw it for a second time but it remained in my head like a dream. I couldn't remember much detail, just the sense of the movie itself. So powerful. Watching it was an event for me, a movie event. In the 1960s it wasn't easy to see a film like this. There were several versions of it but there were no videos and no DVDs. Maybe a powerful film club was able to have a print delivered... but La Règle was hard to get hold of at all. Then, in the 1970s it became easier, and I saw it again. I went on to watch it every few years until I was about 50.

It was shot in 1938, just before the second world war. There is a scene where a group of people, gathered together for a long weekend at a villa near Alsace, go hunting. They start killing these birds and rabbits, and it becomes like a massacre. You cannot avoid thinking this was some kind of prophecy, about the massacre that would soon sweep over Europe.
Renoir is like a junction between the France of impressionism (the France of his father, Auguste Renoir) and the France of the 20th century. Sometimes it's as if he were making films about characters from his father's paintings. But what is really extraordinary about Renoir, particularly in La Règle, is that he loves all his characters. He loves the goodies and baddies, the ones who make terrible mistakes. He loves the ones who are on screen for just two minutes. This is something I have always tried to do. When I made my first film, at 21, I hadn't seen La Règle again. But it was always in the back of my head. Later, when I made an Italian epic called Novecento (released in the UK as 1900), I was filming a wedding scene, a long sequence, and I was feeling very influenced by Renoir. So at the end of it, Bob De Niro says: "It's late, it's going to rain soon, let's go back inside the house all together." There are the words from the end of La Règle.
I was casting for that film in Los Angeles when I received a call saying that Renoir had seen one of my films, had liked it very much, and wanted to see me. I went to his house in Bel Air with my wife. It was 1974 and Renoir was 80 years old, but he was so alert about everything. We spoke about practical things, shooting. It was like talking to a young man.
Bernardo Bertolucci is the Oscar-winning director of Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor



THE FILM THAT CHANGED MY LIFE




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Saturday, January 30, 2010

My heroes in Postman's Park by Christopher Reid



My heroes in Postman's Park, by Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid
Saturday 30 January 2010

I
find it difficult to nominate any one person as my hero. Heroism seems to me a more common, if hidden, quality than is widely supposed. It may even be a defining characteristic of humanity, although instances of its opposites – cowardice, selfishness – flourish around us.


When I contemplate the word "hero", no particular face or figure, no documented life – with its compromising flaws and peccadilloes – comes to mind. I do, however, have a topographical focus. This is the patch of green in the City of London that has come to be known as Postman's Park, from its proximity to what was the General Post Office across King ­Edward Street.
The park stands on the old burial ground of St Botolph's Aldersgate. Along one edge there is a sort of ­arcade or loggia, like a single side of a cloister, lined with ceramic plaques memorialising the bravery of individuals who died while saving the lives of others. I say "individuals", and of course that is what they were when they lived, but little or nothing is now known about them beyond the courageous actions recorded tersely in the Arts and Crafts lettering of these plaques. If we did know more, then we might have to take into account that X, who, snatching a stranger from a river, was drowned himself, was also a rogue and wife-beater; or that Y, who rescued children from a fire but was ­fatally burned in the process, had the morals of a slut.
In literary terms, these citations are not unlike the gleanings of newspaper reports from 1906 that Félix Fénéon collected privately and which were published not long ago as Novels in Three Lines. But whereas Fénéon's treatment emphasises the brutality and folly of human behaviour, the shrine in Postman's Park, which the painter GF Watts paid for just a few years earlier, presents, in a contradictory spirit but without false piety, reasons to be humbled and hopeful. So my almost vanished, multiple heroes are to be found in this sacred place.
THE GUARDIAN






2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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