Green Lights

Of all that’s been written about the latest film adaptation of one of the most iconic works in American literature, this much is true: it is inherently faithful to the spirit of the novel — or, as the headline for critic David Edelstein’s review in New York magazine put it, “The Colossal Vitality of His Illusion.” And that’s no small thing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is all about illusion, and though I approached director Baz Luhrmann‘s depiction of the piece I most cherish in American fiction with trepidation, it is that very faithfulness that won me over. At its heart, the film very much captures those elements so integral to the novel’s lasting hold on generations, and which keeps this sometimes over-the-top interpretation by the maker of Moulin Rouge! from being a sort of hip-hop Gatsby Bergère. (Movie trailer to the contrary.)

Gatsby’s “green light” at the end of the pier has never become a hackneyed concept to me. The poignancy of this enigmatic character, who so doggedly places all his hopes and dreams in someone intrinsically unworthy of the purity of his inspiration, has always had tremendous resonance. Far beyond its significance as a paragonic parable of American culture in the 1920s, and its timeless truths about the callousness of the rich, Gatsby is at its core about one man’s mythical invention, which, though folly, reflects a touching dignity that stands as a testament to the tenacity of the soul.

The beauty of Fitzgerald’s writing carries a luminescence that hovers over any reading (and I think I’ve read it at least half a dozen times). In an article that appeared in the same issue of New York as the Edelstein movie review, writer Kathryn Schulz debunks the novel from a literary perspective with particular relish, yet nevertheless describes Gatsby as “a single crystal, scrupulously polished.”

She also alludes to an interesting aspect that struck me as I watched the film, which has to do with the pronounced lack of romantic chemistry between the actors at the center of the story — Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in this case, for those who’ve been hiding in a cave — and which I intellectualized as being perhaps not an important thing, because in the end, the character of Daisy Buchanan is no more than a blank canvas upon which Gatsby alone sketches his solitary and imperturbable imprint.

As it turns out, Schulz writes that Fitzgerald himself had once admitted that he “gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.” It really was all about the green light, bigger in mind and memory than any of the more pedestrian aspects of love and desire.

Call me idealistic (or sentimental), but I’m always moved by those lines at the conclusion of the book about how “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther,” before it ends with what I think is the most perfect closing in American literature. (Something about boats and currents…)

Gatsby believed in that green light. And he wasn’t the only one.

Inner Visions

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, now out in paperback, isn’t a particularly soulful exploration of the inner mindsets of the more introspective among us — who happen to comprise at least a third of the human population — but its scientific and empirically based analysis provides a surplus of information that lends insight into the importance and impact of the introverted personality in a variety of practical settings.

With the premise that the introverted disposition faces distinctive challenges in the “Culture of Personality” which pervades our world, the author (herself on the shy side of the spectrum) lays out a series of scenarios that provide invaluable understanding of the rewards that are reaped from tapping the unique thinking processes of introverts, especially in the workplace.

The introversion/extroversion model can be summed up by a concept put forth by the eminent psychologist and analyst Carl Jung in the 1920s, which believes that introverts derive their energy from solitude, while extroverts need their batteries constantly “charged” by social stimuli. (In other words, the introvert is the first to leave the party, while the extrovert has to be dragged away.) To quote Jung, from his essential Modern Man in Search of a Soul, “One cannot be introverted or extroverted without being so in every respect.” (“Ambiverts” may disagree.)

Quiet, however, under-elaborates on the Jung theories and psychological perspectives in general; Sigmund Freud merits only one mention. Even the venerable Myers-Briggs test, so familiar to many in its gauging of introverted/extroverted traits, and based on the Jung blueprint, is also glossed over. (A makeshift quiz to assess your personality type does appear in the introduction to the book.)

Straight from the Heart

It is not only necessary to love,
it is necessary to say so.
— French proverb

There’s no better day to wallow in the agelessness of romantic emotion, perhaps no more wonderfully expressed than by some of the most exalted figures in world literature. I remembered a small treasure of a book (still in print) called Love Letters – An Anthology of Passion, which celebrates what’s now lamentably a lost art, with its colorful detailing of the amorous correspondence between an assortment of famous writers, artists (and other lesser-known personages) — complete with reproductions of the original letters, inserted into envelopes, seals and all. Just a handful of excerpts:

You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.-– Poet John Keats to Fanny Brawne, October 1819

Believe me, nothing on earth is given without labour, even love, the most beautiful and natural of feelings.-– Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to his fiancée, Valeria Arsenev, November 1856

You have lifted my very soul up into the light of your soul, and I am not ever likely to mistake it for the common daylight.-– Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, August 1846

Places that are empty of you…are empty of all life…-– Painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Jane Morris, February 1870

Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.-– French writer Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, August 1846

Lofty sentiments for sure, but I’ll stray a bit from the literary luminaries and end with an entry that’s short and to the point, and charming in its simplicity. It’s a note, circa 1840, from one Prince de Joinville, a French adventurer, to an actress, Rachel Felix, on seeing her for the first time:

Where? When? How much?
Her reply:
Your place. Tonight. Free.

Turning the Page

“The page as an object, like all object-symbols, resonates with meanings that have no mass, no displacement of physical space, their dimensions measured by the degree of reflection they inspire. Our living of the last two millennia is a progression coerced by the turning of pages — they are finger ripples in our clay past. On the surfaces of pages, as on the walls of caves, humans have been fulfilling an imperative crafted by their long-journeyed evolution — they navigate the mind’s stubborn synaptic pathways, forge new passages, shape, sculpt, and conjure ephemeral wisps, map their invisible neuralscapes, and perform the alchemy of a weightless thought, an idea expressed.”  — Stephen Nowlin

[Stephen Nowlin is co-curator of the exhibit, Pages, an exploration of paper as a medium of creativity through the ages -- which runs until January 27 at the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.]

(Photograph: Cara Barer)

The Emperor of Ice Cream

The title comes from a famous American poem, by a writer who epitomized paradox in avocation and appearance, as exemplified in the portrait shown left, from 1952. “Poet” would not be the first description that comes to mind in this photograph of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who looks more like a buttoned-up CEO than any cliché image of a creative type. Indeed, Stevens’ day job was as an insurance executive, but he became one of the great voices of modernist poetry. (The image is among those featured in Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets, on view through April at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.)

As I read through that great compilation of his work, The Palm at the End of the Mind (including the aforementioned “Emperor,” with the indelible line: “bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds”), there were two poems that especially brought me back to the percipience of Stevens, both offering intriguing connections to the realm of art.

In an analysis of the astonishing “Sunday Morning” the writer Robert Buttel saw Stevens as establishing himself as a kindred spirit to Henri Matisse, in that both artists “transform a pagan joy of life into highly civilized terms.” Based on a languid woman’s spiritual reveries on a Christian sabbath, and replete with religious allusions, its opening lines are among the most descriptively scene-setting in modern American poetry:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

And while the kindred-spirit aspects that Buttel alluded to in the connection to Matisse were no doubt philosophical, it’s not a stretch to see a visual bridge between the opening tableau of “Sunday Morning” and a piece like Interior with an Etruscan Vase (left) by the French painter, which followed many years later.

If the Matisse comparisons are subtle and under the surface, “The Man With the Blue Guitar” is an overt homage to another artistic soulmate, Pablo Picasso, whose The Old Guitarist was painted in 1903. Again, a poem that features a striking Stevens opening:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

David Hockney played that guitar forward when he reexamined the Picasso work after being fascinated by the Stevens poem, in a series of drawings from 1977 (one of which is seen right), entitled The Blue Guitar: Etchings by David Hockney Who Was Inspired by Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired by Pablo Picasso.

Talk about full circle. Which, incidentally, is so much of what art is all about.

Notes on a Classic

Henrik Ibsen has always been one of my favorite playwrights and, for whatever reason, I recently remembered and decided to re-read one of his pieces that always kept a place in my literary thoughts: the impeccably concise and supremely structured Ghosts – first staged 130 years ago in of all places, the United States (specifically Chicago, Illinois, in May 1882). Its themes reverberate as strongly now as they did when I read it in younger years.

Henrik Ibsen

It is Ghosts that’s based upon that famous line we’re all familiar with, “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.” And Ibsen, already having given us an early prefeminist icon with his character of Nora in A Doll’s House, followed that up with Helene Alving here – a woman whose realizations about the verisimilitudes to be found in freedom (“the joy of life”) may appear quaint now, but were quite revolutionary at the time. (As were many of the topics addressed in the play, from premarital sex to venereal disease and assisted suicide. In England, the work was greeted as “An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged.” And that was one of the kinder reviews.)

So many truths, so little time: it’s still a wonder how Ibsen manages to navigate 30 years in the mere 12 hours that are the basis of the play; the decades are melded together by incredibly crafted expositionary dialogue that seamlessly moves the story forward while at the same time taking it back. The scene settings, with their dreary backdrop of rain-washed Norwegian fjords, create the perfect atmosphere for the dark drama taking place on the stage.

I guess what resonates the most philosophically (again, not a novel concept, but consider the context) is the theme of repression as the perpetrator of all that chokes the human spirit, as true then as it is now, as is the idea that it’s more or less impossible to escape those legacies that we are at a loss to change (as the character of Osvald says to his mother Helene, “I didn’t ask you for life…I don’t want it – take it back again!”)

And it is Osvald who utters that beautiful line at the end of the play, the devastating entreaty, “Mother – give me the sun.”

Magnificent literature – and perfect for a rainy day.

Next Chapters

Maybe it’s because of her recent passing, but I couldn’t help but think of Nora Ephron and her last compilation of essays, I Remember Nothing, as I read Anna Quindlen‘s new memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. Their similar backgrounds as successful journalists may have something to do with it; certainly the perspicacity so characteristic of these two brilliant women plays an even bigger part. Probably, though, I recalled Ephron’s wistful “The O Word” from her final book — “O” standing for “old” — and its sentiments hovered as I pondered Quindlen’s counterpart exploration of the inexorable journey towards the sunset of life.

But I should hasten to add that Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is anything but wistful. Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and novelist, who’s been called America’s “laureate of real life,”  infuses her recollections as a baby-boomer facing late middle age with relentless optimism — and humor. Whether she’s discussing marriage, raising children, or lessons learned as a beneficiary of the societal transformations brought about by the upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, particularly as they pertained to the role of women, her razor-sharp perceptions harbor the wisdom of a participant who lived the changes uniquely first-hand.

Motherhood is one theme that she revisits from a post-feminism vantage point. In the chapter, “Generations,”  she talks about “my place in the succession of women who came before me,” including of course, her own mother, whom she describes as “a housewife, a rather reserved person with a sweet nature and a powerful ability to control her children through the simple exigency of spontaneous and utterly sincere tears.” In terms of her sacrifices, and in retrospective appreciation, the daughter recognizes that, among other considerations, “the closest thing my mother had to a windup baby bouncer was her arm and hip.”

The Pencil and the Brush

This year’s bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, who defined the era he lived in much as William Shakespeare did in his time, is being universally celebrated with a host of special events, exhibitions, performances, and festivals that highlight the novelist’s deep influence on the society and culture of the Victorian age. His impact on the visual arts was also significant, and is examined in a UK exhibition titled Dickens and the Artists, which runs through October at the Watts Gallery in Guildford, Surrey.

No less than Vincent van Gogh is credited with having said, in 1883, “There is no writer, in my opinion, who is so much a painter and a black-and-white artist as Dickens.” And his own daughter, herself an artist, commented that her father’s novels could only have been produced by “a writer with an innate feeling for artistic effect.”

Though not household names to us now, painters like William Powell Frith uniquely interpreted the richly textured world of Dickens’ imagination in tableaus inspired by the writer’s depictions of life on the streets of London. Frith’s Crossing Sweeper (1893), below right, is at immediate glance a microcosm of the Dickensian scenes we are all familiar with; other Frith works, like Night Haymarket (1862) are likewise awash in the moods, colors, and subtle pandemonium that so memorably permeate the Dickens oeuvre.

Dickens himself had a reputation as a savvy art critic, often outlining his thoughts in the magazine he edited, Household Words, and commenting on his interest in both contemporary artists, as well as the Old Masters, on his many tours of Europe. His passion for the theatre is often overlooked in light of his literary success.

In reality, Dickens was perhaps the quintessential Renaissance man, reborn in 19th-Century England. A newspaper article from 1892 noted:

“It has been confidently asserted that when Charles Dickens adopted literature as a profession, the stage lost one whose dramatic instinct would have made him a brilliant luminary in the theatrical world; and physiologists might assuredly contend that had his natural gift for art been specially cultivated and duly developed, he would probably have made an equally prominent name for himself as a wielder of the pencil and the brush.”

Little wonder his genius continues to resonate –  200 years on.

(Illustration/ top: Red Nose Studio)

Of Plums and a Poet

Reading the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams over the past weekend, I realized a deeper affinity on the part of the great American poet for an edible I thought he had only immortalized in his imagist masterpiece of 1934, “This Is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Self-portrait, 1914

Some still debate whether the “plum poem” is really nothing more than a glorified post-it note left on a refrigerator, but I’ve always thought  “Just to Say” captures more mystery in its mere 28 words than many full-length novels. With striking simplicity, it almost implores us to create our own backstory for the circumstances behind what appears an otherwise uncomplicated communication, all the while poetically brilliant in its alliteration and sensual (“so sweet”…”so cold”) use of description.

The peripatetic plums of Williams’ imagination appear again in the stark and haunting “To a Poor Old Woman”:

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

And from the lovely “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” with its triadic line breaks (W.H. Auden once called it “one of the most beautiful love poems in the language”) comes another, albeit brief, appearance:

There the pink mallow grows
                and in their season
                                  strawberries

and there, later,
                                  we went to gather
                                                       the wild plum.

I don’t know if it all quite qualifies as a significant motif, but those plums sure were responsible for some magnificent poetry…

Hardly Carly

The buzz on More Room in a Broken Heart, Stephen Davis’ unauthorized biography of pop-music staple of the ’70s and ’80s, Carly Simon, was pretty bleak, but as a longtime fan of Simon and first husband James Taylor, I felt compelled to take a look at this first attempt to explore her life in book-length form.

From “Coming Around Again” (1987)

Alas, I should have heeded before jumping. More Room (subtitled The True Adventures of Carly Simon) is one of the lazier nonfiction efforts I’ve encountered in a while, with Davis brazenly structuring the book around previously published material, without notes or bibliography, nor acknowledgments or attributions, beyond just a “thanks to the great journalists who covered the Carly Simon story in the past.” You can add pedestrian writing and factual errors to the mix, and the only original content comes via the author’s analysis of the Simon song library – album by album – and this is none too incisive, either.

With ex-husband, pop/rock icon James Taylor

A shame actually, because I was looking forward to a more deserving examination of Simon’s life and work, for myself and many others who remember the glory years of the artist responsible for such defining standards of the singer/songwriter era as “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be,” “Anticipation,” and of course, “You’re So Vain.” In her personal life, Simon shared a stormy, creative, and utterly fascinating relationship with the iconic troubadour James Taylor (their marriage lasted 11 years), and her childhood background as the daughter of publishing magnate Richard Simon (of Simon & Schuster) provides even more color to an already riveting life story. (It’s not every kid who has memories of Rodgers and Hammerstein coming over to the house to play the piano.)

Shock and Pa

Carrie Fisher’s latest offering, the cleverly titled Shockaholic, is a markedly similar follow-up to her Wishful Drinking, which was released in 2008 and eventually parlayed into a successful one-woman show on Broadway. For those who are partial to Fisher’s sharp and acerbic take on things, her sense of the absurd clearly derived from first-hand experience, Shockaholic (if not exactly shocking) doesn’t disappoint.

In this slim and admittedly self-indulgent collection, the novelist/actress (Princess Leia in a long-ago and far-away Star Wars incarnation), reprises her riff on an often surreal life as child of Hollywood stars, ‘50s sweethearts Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, in an anecdotal memoir that could have been titled “Before I Forget.” (For the majority of those too young to remember, her parents’ marriage ended when her father ran off with screen siren Elizabeth Taylor, quite the scandal in those days.)

The name of the book is a play on her recent experiences with electroshock therapy, a treatment that has proven successful in her ongoing struggle with bipolar disorder (a subject covered in her novel, The Best Awful).  It comprises the opening chapter, where Fisher goes on the record about the amnesiacal after-effects of ECT, as it’s called, which results in loss of short-term memory. (She admits to “blanks” at various stages throughout the volume.)

In typical Fisher fashion, she finds humor in the madness: ”One could argue that by having regular ECT treatments, I’m paying two – that’s right, two – electric bills. One for the house and one for my head.” But on a more serious note, she adds that it “punched the dark lights” out of her depression.

Oh No, the “O” Word…

Don’t let the title mislead you. Much of Nora Ephron’s I Remember Nothing, now released in paperback, is about remembering many things.

Director, producer, and screenwriter of such films as When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and Julie & Julia, Ephron has also long been known for her wit as an essayist, her pieces routinely appearing in publications like the New Yorker, New York Times, Vogue, and, in recent years, The Huffington Post. (Some may also remember an early Ephron novel, Heartburn, based on her marriage to philandering Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame; it was later made into a movie with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.)

I Remember Nothing follows her successful and similarly packaged compilation of previously published essays about middle-aged angst, I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006), which is probably the better of the two anthologies. Thematically scattered, the subjects in Nothing range from Ephron’s beginnings in journalism to observations regarding momentous issues such as “No, I Do Not Want Another Bottle of Pellegrino,” and “My Life as a Meat Loaf,” about a recipe’s short-lived incarnation at a tony New York restaurant.

But the mini first and last chapters, (“I Remember Nothing” and “The O Word”), that are the whole point of this collection, are enjoyable and on the mark. In the former, the 70-year-old, doesn’t-look-it Ephron shrewdly notes that the “Senior Moment” has become the “Google Moment.” So true. You forget something, you immediately finger the iPhone or Blackberry or whatever, and (snap!), there’s your answer. Cuts the time for berating yourself for forgetting.

“The O Word” (O is for “old”) is a contemplative summing-up (“My memory, which I can still make jokes about, will be so dim that I will have to pretend I know what’s going on”). In between, the best (though out of place) piece is “Pentimento,” about her friendship with the playwright Lillian Hellman; Ephron paints a vivid picture of the woman with one of the more memorable countenances in American literature.

The book ends with “What I Won’t Miss”/”What I Will Miss,” a series of one-liners (e.e. cummings-style) that are a bit of a throw-away, but nevertheless an appropriately breezy conclusion to a light and amusingly astute read.

[First published as Book Review: I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron,
on Blogcritics.org.]

The Hidden Life of a Nanny

The story of a heretofore unknown photographer, much of which remains a mystery, will eventually be folklore, not only because her talent remained in the shadows until after her death at age 83 – but for the unlikely fashion in which her work came to see the light.

In a twist on one of those masterpiece-found-in-the-attic tales, a Chicago real-estate agent named John Maloof came across a box of negatives at an auction in 2007. Hoping they were historic photos of his Portage Park neighborhood, he paid $400 and stored the 30,000 negatives away for later review. When he took a look, what he saw, though not what he expected, was captivating – prompting him to hunt down what turned out to be another 70,000 pictures. When he posted some of the images on Flikr, his instinct regarding the greatness of the pieces was confirmed; hundreds of e-mails followed.

The creator of those photos, Vivian Maier, had died shortly before Maloof could contact her after his big find. (It wasn’t until 2009 that he discovered her name, scribbled on an envelope buried in one of the batches of film.) It turned out she had been a nanny for several affluent families in the Chicago area throughout the ’50s to the early ’90s, toting her Rolleiflex on assorted trips and outings, quietly capturing just some of the images now featured in the book Vivian Maier: Street Photographer  — released this month and compiled by Maloof after the incredible acclaim that followed their widespread dissemination on the Internet, along with subsequent exhibitions in Norway, Denmark, and England.

In approaching Maier’s work, one is struck by the naturalistic similarities to the craft of the Depression-era photographer, Walker Evans: the second-in-time spontaneity, the cut-to-the-heart facial expressions, the prosaicness of the everyday street scene taken to a sublime level. Maier photographed people from all walks of life, young and old, black and white, rich and downtrodden. Like all great street photographers, she understood that moments matter. And the expansiveness of what would now be called her portfolio shows that her curiosity about what lay behind those moments never wavered.

Her pictures are not titled and can just be described by their subjects – faces, places, and instants that only an outstanding eye could grasp: the simple sidewalk scene of a group of women shot from the waist down, with a pair of rotund legs unexpectedly revealed by a sudden burst of wind; a quizzical glance by a bystander at a man inexplicably attired in a hat, jacket, and boxer shorts; an aging, wealthy doyenne in mink, her haughty look implying impatience with the camera.

There’s irony in the fact that Maier’s newfound reputation owes itself to the networking of the digital age. Described as a highly private woman, she never made a point of sharing her secret passion with anyone, and were it not for Maloof’s accidental discovery, and her photography subsequently going viral, the treasure trove would sadly have remained undetected – and unlauded. As it is, the Maier archives are a unique contribution to the annals of American photography.

[First published as Book Review: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer,
Edited by John Maloof, on Blogcritics.org.]

“Found” & Foundering

I picked up Found: A Daughter’s Journey Home, by Tatum O’Neal, after watching her and father Ryan O’Neal on several talkfests plugging their reality show Ryan & Tatum: The O’Neals, finding myself curiously fascinated by the train wreck of a relationship that’s the basis for both the book and the series on the OWN network.

Though Found is essentially a vehicle to promote its TV counterpart, you can still sense an underlying honesty at the heart of O’Neal’s attempt to find harmony with the man she calls “Ryan” …and rarely, “Dad.” Oscar-winning child actress, ex-wife of John McEnroe, mother of three, and a lifelong struggler with addiction, O’Neal went over some of the same material in her previous A Paper Life (2004), but the hook here is her determination to make amends after a 20-year distancing from her father, precipitated by his relationship with the late Farrah Fawcett.

Happier times: “Paper Moon” (1973)

“Golden Boy” star of such films as Love Story, What’s Up Doc? and Barry Lyndon in his ‘70s heyday, Tatum recounts that daddy Ryan considered her the apple of his eye until the pivotal time of his involvement with twin “Golden Girl” Fawcett, a relationship that began in 1979, setting off the estrangement that divided them for decades.

”I had been his favorite, his girl, his constant companion,” O’Neal writes. “Then I wasn’t anymore.” (Ryan, for his part, claims Tatum forced him to choose between her and Farrah.)

It was in 2007, when Fawcett was seriously ill, that Tatum was able to make peace with the love of her father’s life, in a quiet and heartfelt visit at her bedside in Los Angeles. In a tragicomic twist, this was followed by Tatum’s encounter with O’Neal Sr. at Fawcett’s funeral two years later, where he laid a pick-up line on his daughter, whom he didn’t recognize, as she greeted him outside the church – a story he denies.

The idea to present their lives as a docudrama fit into O’Neal’s larger desire to explore the dysfunctional dimensions of the father/daughter relationship, seeking answers to issues that have plagued her since childhood. But in reality, excuse the pun, it really should have been a family affair. As much the conflicted daughter that Tatum was, brother Griffin (involved in an infamous shooting-related fracas with his father in 2007) and half-brother Redmond (O’Neal’s son with Fawcett) aren’t chump change in the troubled-child department, either.

Game, Set…and History

As that most hallowed of tennis events, Wimbledon, unfolds in its 125th staging at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, Stephen Tignor’s High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, and The Untold Story of Tennis’s Fiercest Rivalry, serves as a lively look back at what’s widely regarded as the sport’s “Golden Age” and the personalities who defined an era.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, as High Strung encompasses much more than the Borg-McEnroe rivalry (it’s bookended by two now almost-mythical matches between the champions: the 1980 Wimbledon and 1981 U.S. Open finals). It chronicles the time when tennis bridged its genteel and stodgy pre-Open past to the wild, freewheeling, and fan-riveting years of the ‘70s and ‘80s, with names like Jimmy
Connors, Ilie Nastase, and Vitas Gerulaitis, in addition to Borg and McEnroe, as headliners.

Tignor, a former executive editor at Tennis magazine, displays a deep knowledge of the nuances of the game, as well as a knack for colorful description — Borg: the “Angelic Assassin,” with “a headband for a halo”; McEnroe: “The Dark Prince of Queens,” with “the insouciance of the born improviser” — that makes High Strung a tennis lover’s delight. His overview of the key elements that shook the foundations of the sport forever, as well as the athletes who contributed to the seismic changes, provides a detailed picture of an institution in a radical state of flux.

Technical aspects so critical to the evolution of the sport are also examined, as the author notes how the arrival of the Czech “techno-man” Ivan Lendl was a precursor to the power game that would bring McEnroe’s days as the feathery maestro with a wooden racquet to an end. (Tignor notes that by the time McEnroe transitioned to the next-generation midsize racquet, it was too late for him to master the demolishing forehand later employed by players such as Andre Agassi. McEnroe was the last to win the U.S. Open using wood, in 1981.)

But no doubt it’s the “fire and ice” contrast of Borg and McEnroe that’s the fascinating crux of the book. (A documentary on the two, also called “Fire & Ice,” currently airs on HBO.) The methodical and enigmatic Swede, whose “mind never seemed to get in the way of his muscle memory,” is a storybook foil for the brash “superbrat” McEnroe, who always wore his heart (and mouth) on his sleeve, and whose tantrums (and unequaled poeticism of strokes) became the stuff of legend.

The Tudors Revisited

Both serious students of 16th-Century England and those with a passing interest in the period will find The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty by G.J. Meyer a comprehensive look at that momentous span of history, along with essays that provide supplementary context to the saga of this most examined of British royal families.

Now released in paperback, the book is also a refreshing reality-check grounded in fact after the entertaining fictions of the recent past that have figured in the public imagination, most notably The Tudors, the TV series on Showtime, which took the term “historical license” to a new – and outrageous – level.

The background entries lend flavor and perspective to the times, such as “Bestsellers,” which explores the advent of printing and its impact on the scholars of the day. “They Were What They Ate” is a taste of typical Tudorian fare and recipes (“Take a necke of mutton and a brest to make the broth stronge and then scum it cleane”), along with speculation as to why many of the Tudor lineage deteriorated at young ages (with the exception of Elizabeth I, who apparently ate sparingly).

The book is the first in a while to tackle the Tudors in such an ambitious fashion, and the critical analysis is for the most part (with one notable exception) on the mark. The focus on Henry VIII, for example, is as “Monster,” an apt description, and not just due to his reputation as Bluebeard-ish barbarian and decapitator of two wives. Henry’s reign of terror actually began prior to his marriage to doomed second wife Anne Boleyn, and in the chapter “First Blood,” Meyer describes his initial victim, a 27-year-old nun named Elizabeth Barton (the “Nun of Kent”), put to death due to her opposition to the King’s intentions of divorcing his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

The Writer’s Heart

Lesley McDowell’s Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers, an insightful exploration of several entwined literary and personal relationships, some well known (Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre), and not as well known (Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker), is viewed from a neo-feminist perspective. The author posits that a cursory overview could make it seem like these poets/writers compromised creative accomplishments as a result of life with their male counterparts, but in actuality emerged empowered despite their often ambivalent, mercurial, critical… and unfaithful partners. (Ernest Hemingway among them.)

Early Sartre and de Beauvoir

The book is set up in three sections and by decades ranging from the 1910s to 1950s, and McDowell assigns monikers (“Companion,” “Ingénue,” “Survivor”) to each of the women, as snapshot summaries of their primary identities within the context of the alliances. The descriptions are well chosen; for H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) a lifelong dependence on Ezra Pound as mentor left her a psychological “Novice” despite her own vast body of work as a poet. The union of the intellectual powerhouses of Sartre and de Beauvoir (the “Long-Termer”), that lasted in one form or another for 51 years until Sartre’s death in 1980, was, not unsurprisingly, complex. (Sexual issues included, with de Beauvoir sharing her female companions with Sartre, as a means, many said, to maintain her control over him. They had what they called a “morganatic” marriage.)

There’s little fresh to impart regarding the well-chronicled coupling of Plath and Hughes, but I found an unexpected discovery in reading about the pairing of English poet George Barker and the “Chaser” — Elizabeth Smart. (A name, quite honestly, I had until now only associated with the Utah kidnap victim of a few years ago.) A sort-of fatal attraction (on Smart’s part) of the poetic persuasion, the Barker-Smart connection lasted over four decades, produced four children, and never a marriage.

But it did result in a quite magnificent prose-poem by Smart titled (and what a beautiful title!), “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.” First published in 1945, acclaim came after its reissue long afterwards, in 1966. An operatic and extraordinary rendering of her roller-coaster emotional ride with Barker, the work ends with a sad, solitary, and ultimately futile expectation of a reunion at the landmark train depot. Newfound knowledge of Smart and this classic made Between the Sheets, absorbing in and of itself, even more of a treat.

[First published as Book Review: Between the Sheets:
The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century
Women Writers by Lesley McDowell, on Blogcritics.org.]