The poet Christopher Logue has died aged 85. The obituaries make for fascinating reading. For instance, did you know that the author of War Music also edited Pseuds’ Corner and collated the True Stories column in Private Eye? Or that he was an occasional actor? Aren’t some people almost too blessed?
Perhaps, but Logue’s beginnings were difficult. He joined the Black Watch in 1944 and was court martialled during a fractious tour of Palestine in 1946; he was imprisoned. Determined to write, he travelled to Paris in the early ‘50s, where he fell in with the expat writers’ crowd: that band of artistic Anglo-Saxons who fled the suffocating British Isles after the war. His career as a poet was very slow. Like many aspiring writers at the time, he to write a pornographic novel for the notorious publisher Maurice Giordias, for which he was well remunerated. These dramatic beginnings were followed by the extraordinary artistic achievement of War Music — his version of the Iliad. It took him 40 years to write. That’s the sort of life you’d expect to find in an eighteenth century novel.
A new portrait of Jane Austen has potentially been unearthed by Austen scholar Dr Paula Byrne, the Telegraph reports. The sketch shows a sharp looking woman, who contrasts with the demure spinster who usually adorns Austen covers. The Telegraph speculates that the portrait shows Austen’s ‘true feisty character’, and her good looks.
The old Austen looked like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and kindly Kurt Vonnegut didn’t seem to have a sad bone in his body. But, Charles J. Shields has disinterred a different Kurt in his new biography, And So it Goes. The Guardian reports that Shields believes Vonnegut suffered from depression and was prone to cruelty. Above all, Shields finds that Vonnegut’s alluring self-confidence, evident in this famous clip, was not a constant, and he also worried he was ‘never taken seriously’ by the literary establishment. Vonnegut’s loneliness was so intense in later life that Shields decided to title the final chapter ‘Waiting to die’.
Some years back, Shields wrote a life of Harper Lee, which was limited by Lee’s stubborn refusal to come out of hiding and shoot the breeze. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin’s jaunty review will warm your bones this rheumatic morning.
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