Reviewing My Collection-Passionate Minds by Claudia Roth Pierpont

One of the greatest blessings of being an Indie writer (which is every bit as cool as being an Indie rocker, I insist), is getting to write only on subjects that engender extremes of passion,interest or curiosity in my mind.Nothing short of fascination will induce me to pick up a pen or tap the keys.I've tried, and discipline in the service of money simply does not work for me.While my intellect is fecund, and the range of my appetites immense, I seem to return to the same core of pet subjects.I love history, I love writers, I love richly textured lives and I love reading.'Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World' by Claudia Roth Pierpont contains all of those requirements.

The dozen women profiled between the covers are a lively,forceful, and eclectic bunch.They were outsiders and stratosphere-dwelling superstars,conventional and ahead-of-their time,of enduring and fleeting appeal.They were all dedicated to their craft but pursued the muse in a thousand different ways. They would have made for interesting party-guests but probably wouldn't have gotten along,at least not past the first round.
Among the stamp-sized icons are Margaret Mitchell and Anais Nin.The former wrote the most colossal novel of her--or any--time."Gone with the Wind" is, I am sorry, not a great book, though its controversy still sets people to talking.No wonder,then, that it was more of a commercial success than Tolstoy, in his wildest Russian dreams, could have hoped to achieve.It made the diminutive Southern lady a star, for a time, in the same frenzied sense that movie queens are stars.
Anais Nin was a diarist and writer of erotica. She was, for a time, the paramour of Henry Miller, for which she is best known.Maria de Madeiros played Nin in the acclaimed biopic "Henry and June" (1990).Although she possessed artistic confidence,her real legacy is as a sexual icon.It is for both of those things that she is included in this critical study.Roth Pierpont structured the book around three themes:sexuality,religion and politics, which explains the strange and enthralling cast of characters.Mae West and Gertrude Stein,Doris Lessing and Marina Tsvetaeva have seemingly little in common.The author's complex and enlightening approach (and her acute biographical-critical break-down) to such disparate voices is refreshing and inventive.
Individually, they made interesting if not always tangible or measured contributions to literature.They often seemed to be working against themselves: it is no coincidence that many of the women were thorny specimens.Collectively,they are joined only by the incidental fact of vocation.To quote the biographer herself "These are lives in which success is hard won,retreat and even breakdown are common, love is difficult, and children are nearly impossible, lives in which all that is ever certain is that books and plays and poems are being written." I have difficulty in believing that anything has really changed.

Capsule Review-"MAIN STREET" by SINCLAIR LEWIS

This article originally appeared in December 2004 issue of The Atomic Tomorrow. I am reprinting it here for Kate Gabrielle of 'Silents and Talkies', who loves Sinclair Lewis. Enjoy!!

Set largely in small town America in the second decade of the twentieth century, "Main Street" is a bold and unvarnished appeal on behalf of non-subversive individuality and practical feminism. Viewing marriage as something of a lark, and men as beings to be conquered, Carol Kennecott leaves her urban life behind to settle in the wilds of Minnesota, with her new husband, a doctor.

Artistic but insensitive, she sets out with a near-missionary zeal to bring culture to the inhabitants of Gopher Prairie. Initially tolerant of her odd ways, and her proud otherness, they are confident that she will soon soften her sharp individuality and learn to blend in, while she is arrogantly blind to the small yet genuinely artistic efforts of her neighbors.

We follow Carol, and her kindly ponderous husband, through a shifting mosaic of defiance, submission, flight, and compromise. She is not a heroine as such but a richly flawed woman; not always likable, she is deeply human. She grows and matures in the ways real people do, by starts and fits, with a sometimes imperfect understanding of what it is she is striving for, and working against.

The society that author Sinclair Lewis rails against,as opposed to that of Ayn Rand,his ideological opposite in the fight for personal sovereignty, is markedly our own. His ideals of individuality and freedom are attainable, though conditionally and at great cost, in this world. In Rand's novels, the only characters capable of achieving severance from the expectations of the world-at-large are such intellectually and physically superior specimens as to defy categorization as human. They are god-like inhabitants of a sordid, corrupt version of America; denizens of a fantasy universe of extreme and unthinking conformity.

Carol eventually finds a limited but hopeful place in the context of her chosen milieu, within the workings of fast-changing, modern society, where even the flawed, the weak, and the impotent can find ways to assert their uniqueness. That this is ultimately not enough to satisfy the spirit of humanity is the deeper truth that is hidden behind this story of one woman's struggle to adapt and thrive in an environment, and amongst people, she doesn't understand.

PHOTO: SINCLAIR LEWIS

REVIEWING MY COLLECTION: LIVING AUTHORS Edited by DILLY TANTE

I have a nerdy, abiding mania for several things. The one that has been with me the longest is my passion for reference books: dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs. Anything with the express purpose of imparting information and wisdom of a linguistic, geographic or historic nature sets my heart to twirling. As a writer, I also swear by all manner of odd and informative fact, trivia, date and biographical books. 'Living Authors'is the latter.

I picked it up around five years ago, from the discount purveyor Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller. I have scored some amazing finds from that catalogue but this has been the most used, appreciated and enjoyed.

It is a thick book, chock-a-block full of enticing, informative and brief biographies of, yes, living authors. The catch, which is exactly what made the tome so alluring to me in the first place, is that it was initially published in 1931.So, if you were hoping to read tasty tidbits about Dan Brown or Anne Rice, then this is not your volume. However, if you enjoy the works of some of the greatest writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or want to discover lesser-remembered lights of that era, then it is well worth finding a copy. Mine is a 2001 reprint.

The book profiles nearly 400 authors, including a photo or illustration of each, as well as a description of their looks. You learn about their backgrounds, careers, and personal lives. While there is no gossip, there is trivia both odd and insightful to be found.

It has proven to be a handy, one-of-a-kind data resource for my columns and reviews, much-thumbed,and infinitely inspirational.'Living Authors' is the perfect book to flip open randomly, while sipping a cup of tea or lazing on the sofa. It takes you back to a time when the world was fertile with wordsmiths of every ilk who, even after separating the talent and the person, were bewitching, engaging and unique individuals in their own right.

Even if I had to eviscerate my collection, 'Living Authors' is one of the last volumes I would part with:it has a charm, approach and immediacy impossible to duplicate.

PHOTOGRAPH: Then-Living Author LOUISE BOGAN.

An Epistle for Charlotte, A Postscript for Enid:Bronte/Bagnold

I have it easy. I work, but am not beholden to anyone. I love, but am not reliant on others' good graces. I write, but am not required by polite mores to hide it from the world. I am female, middle class, and a writer at a time when those are not inherent handicaps. I am not intimidated into making my voice, my stature and my intellect smaller than they are, naturally or through ambition.

Charlotte, the eldest surviving Bronte sister, had gifts, abiding and abundant,of brilliance and insight, intellect and sensibility and the ill luck to be born at a less encouraging time. The Bronte siblings, of course, have come down to us in legend as sad symbols of ill fortune and neglected talent, wasted away and dead while hardly beyond youth. Branwell the ne'er-do-well, Emily the mystic, Anne the forgotten and Charlotte, for awhile, the survivor.
Charlotte, she of the longevity, lived to write more words and volumes than her sisters. Her legacy relies on much more than 'Jane Eyre', which is an accomplishment rich and textured, by turns dramatic, complex, yearning and simple.
'Villette' is a glowing achievement. Her Lucy Snowe is a heroine both worthy and ordinary, a woman of good family and little means with no greater ambition than making an independent, if limited, living. She is sensible, determined rather than brave, pragmatic yet undeniably individual.She is quietly defiant, yet unapologetic in her stance, only when there is no other way. She is not a character to be pigeon-holed as this way or that, as good or bad, lily-white or a vamp: this is what makes her irrefutably, appealingly modern.

Charlotte, with an existence that seems limited to modern eyes, was not a recluse by the standards of her day. She went away to school (it was this same educational institution that claimed the lives of her elder sisters), traveled to London, and taught, bittersweetly, abroad. As with so many informally or haphazardly educated nineteenth century female writers, the erudition of her literary voice, so powerful and keen, is extraordinary.

Although destiny kept it brief, she was the lone Bronte child to wed. It is believed that she was pregnant at the time of her death, just shy of 39. A sturdy,strong and profitable cult has grown up around the 4 Bronte siblings who made it to adult-hood.This was started with the publication, shortly after Charlotte's death, of a biased, not-exactly truthful biography written by Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, a casual friend. She is the source, with nothing solid to back it up, of Mr. Bronte's reported bad nature and occasional ill-treatment of his offspring. It is an image that has never entirely been shaken off, even after 150-years and countless better-sourced and researched critical studies. She is also the culprit behind the earlier-mentioned cliched images of the siblings which, at this juncture, seem hardly likely to budge.

The other 3 famous Bronte children are seemingly doomed to wander through eternity, desperately unhappy,and misunderstood: Branwell, forever a drunken adulterer, his artistry forgotten. Emily, the aesthete, walking the moors and yearning for, then welcoming, death. Anne, talented and neglected, living sadly and resignedly in her sisters' tall shadows.

Only Charlotte, granted an extra decade, seems a fully-fleshed, complex human being. She is neither a stock character, nor a literary genius created in a vacuum. She lived in a world, firm of earth and fresh of air, that is like ours, not something out of countless biographers' imaginations. Perhaps that, as much as her magical way of commanding words on ink and paper, is why she remains on our radar, on our shelves and in our hearts.





POSTSCRIPT





Enid Bagnold is little known today yet two words send familiar, colourful and energetic images spinning through our heads: "National Velvet". The film based on her novel made 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor a star. It is charming, sweet, spirited and, after a fashion, dramatic. It remains a classic of its kind,, in both literature and film.


Additionally,she wrote The Chalk Garden, a play also adapted successfully to the silver screen.


The acclaimed English author--Lady Jones in her private life--had a career of impressive duration, dying at 90. She did a lot of interesting things in her time, more than can be chronicled in a few slim paragraphs. Her 'Autobiography' (yes, that is its title), published in 1969, is a good place to strike up your acquaintance.





CHARLOTTE BRONTE: April 21, 1816-March 31, 1855


ENID BAGNOLD: October 27, 1889-March 31, 1980





PHOTO: CHARLOTTE BRONTE

GBS Quotes

Some words of curmudgeonly wisdom from Shaw, George Bernard Shaw-

"A fashion is nothing but an induced panic."

"Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."