The literary world is paying homage to Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96. Here is an excerpt from the Times’ obituary (£).
‘The curtailment of his formal education was compensated by his intellectual curiosity and by the civilising influence of his mother who introduced him to the pleasures of art and literature. His gifts did not necessarily fit him for regimental duties or reconcile him to the restrictions of peacetime soldiering. His inclinations were rather those of an 18th-century patrician eager to scan the broader horizons offered by the Grand Tour. And so, shortly before his 19th birthday instead of joining the Army, he sailed to Rotterdam and set out on foot for Constantinople.
That solitary trek across a Europe in the mid-1930s developed his linguistic talent — already fluent in French and German, he added Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian to his languages —
and also his ability to hit it off with people of various nationalities and walks of life. This was just as well, for he sometimes had to eke out his meagre funds by odd jobs and was forced more
than once to rely for food and shelter on the generosity of strangers. Sojourns in palaces and castles would alternate with bivouacs in barns and doss-houses.’
The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony profiles Alan Hollinghurst, whose latest
novel (only his fifth in 23 years), The Stranger’s Child, is to be published on 27 June.
‘Hollinghurst is not a writer who rushes his words. His exquisitely poised sentences and vividly realised scenes emerge from a stately process of refinement. He estimates that he completes on average between 300 and 400 words in a day of writing, although there are many days in which nothing is forthcoming other than gestating thought. He is said to have spent two years thinking about The Line of Beauty before embarking on the first chapter.
Yet while the final result of this deliberation is unfailingly polished, it’s very seldom precious. Instead, his novels are engorged with a playful wit and a powerful eroticism. Since his stunning debut, The Swimming-Pool Library, which Edmund White labelled “the best book about gay life yet written by an English author”, Hollinghurst has been burdened with a reputation as an explicitly gay writer. If he finds the designation annoying, he has maintained a largely diplomatic stance in public.’
The Paris Review has revived last year’s interview with author and ex-con Norman Rush.
‘Anything we wrote [in prison] was subject to confiscation, so I did it secretively. I wrote on onionskin paper, jamming tiny letters onto both sides of each page, then built a very funny-looking chessboard at the prison’s wood shop, and stashed half my novel inside. As for the other half, I prevailed on a visitor, a friend of my uncle Henry, to sneak it out. I hid it in the visitors’ bathroom before he arrived, in the cardboard tube of a roll of toilet paper. I thought I was very clever, but when the time came, my uncle’s friend was terrified. He was a local lawyer. He had come out of the goodness of his heart, as a favor to my uncle. Involving him was stupid and reckless on my part. I’m still ashamed.’
Writing in the pages of the Telegraph, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviews Franny Moyle’s revision of the life of Constance Wilde.
‘Constance Wilde has usually been thought of the same way [a tragic heroine], as the long-suffering wife who remained loyal to her husband Oscar even after he was convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency” (that is, consensual sex) with other men. Her contemporaries recognised as much, as when the actress Ellen Terry wrote to her as “Dearest Constancy” in the weeks before the trial.
The circulation of such stories indicated a widespread desire to establish Constance as something other than a wife crushed by rejection and betrayal. She was a marital martyr, the standard of loving constancy against which her husband’s errant ways should be judged.
Fortunately, the evidence of Franny Moyle’s fine biography, the first to draw on more than 300 of Constance’s unpublished letters, is that she was far more interesting than this. Like one of Wilde’s epigrams, in fact, Moyle takes pleasure in turning our assumptions on their heads.’
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