Gonzalo Rojas, the arch enemy of General Pinochet, has died aged 93. The former exile was regarded as the equal of Pablo Neruda among South American poets. His death has been described a “great loss for Chilean literature”.
Charles Nicholl charts the renaissance of Thomas Wyatt, epitomised by Nicola Shulman’s new biography.
Thomas Wyatt was the finest poet at the court of Henry VIII, but this has not always earned him much respect. The early 16th century is generally accounted one of the lowlands of English literature, a period of mediocrity between the pinnacles of Chaucer and Shakespeare. CS Lewis dubbed it the “Drab Age” and said of Wyatt: “When he is bad he is flat or even null, and when he is good he is hardly one of the irresistible poets.” Today his reputation is much higher: we have been alerted to subtleties of mood and meaning beneath his brusque-seeming style, and Nicola Shulman’s trenchant new study takes us further down this line, delving with gusto into the political background of the poems and finding in them “secretive messages” which could not have been expressed openly.
Wyatt was pre-eminently a court poet, writing for a private audience. None of his poems was published in his lifetime – they survived in manuscript collections, one of which (Egerton MS 2711 in the British Library) contains more than 100 lyrics, mostly in his own hand, and some extensively reworked on the page. They are of interest to literary history for their pioneering use of continental forms, particularly the Petrarchan sonnet; but for Shulman they are mostly of interest as a veiled but intimate account of life inside the claustrophobic court of Henry VIII, with its fretful young men and women “fettered with chains of gold”, its jockeying for power and prestige, and those sudden and often fatal reversals of political fortune which are hinted at in the opening lines of Wyatt’s most famous poem: “They flee from me that sometime did me seek / With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.”’
Rob Lowe will be at this year’s Cheltenham Festival, the New York Times’ Janet Maslin reviews his memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends.
‘Any discerning reader who gets as far in Rob Lowe’s memoir as the photo on the front cover will notice that Mr. Lowe is good looking. Very good looking. So good looking that it’s almost a liability, and that his memoir, “Stories I Only Tell My Friends,” has to take his appearance into account. He had to decide how to handle this, his boo-hoo problem, in a book.
False modesty was one option, but Mr. Lowe turns out to be too smart for that. Indignation and whining were others, but he’s too self-deprecatingly funny. So often in this book he marvels at the sheer absurdity of his circumstances, as when he sat weeping at the deathbed of his beloved grandma, only to have a nurse ask for his autograph. That same grandma once had to fend off three drunken teenage Lowe fans who barged into her bedroom in the middle of the night, hoping that Handsome was home.’
Jake Kerridge talks to David Lodge about the craft of biographical fiction.
‘This sort of legwork is important to Lodge – “You can look at photographs in books, but they don’t really give you a sense of the setting, of what he could see when he looked out of his window” – and also fairly new to him. When he wrote the comic campus novels with which he made his name in the 1970s and ’80s he allowed his imagination free rein by setting them in “Rummidge”, a place, he once wrote, “which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps”. When he writes about real people (he began in 2004 with Author, Author, a novel about Henry James), does he miss the freedom of pure fiction?
“Yes, I feel very constrained, but that is the nature of the game, the biographical novel. I’m interested in keeping faithfully to the facts as we know them about a person’s life, but imaginatively exploring the gaps in between, including the subjective life … in order to give, I think, a more inward, animated sense of what that person’s life was like to be experienced. It is a controversial form but a very popular one at the moment … Oddly, at the very same time that some critics were pronouncing ‘the death of the author’, the reading public was getting more and more interested in the personal lives of authors. In some ways it’s gone much too far, with the author as celebrity, an object of public curiosity.”’
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