This week’s issue of the Spectator is packed with book reviews. Here’s a selection of quotes to whet your appetite.
Old China hand Jonathan Mirsky finds much to applaud in Rana Mitter’s history of the Sino-Japanese war.
‘Into the Fifties, as Mitter outlines, a storm gathered in the US over ‘who lost China’; and those Americans who had praised Mao and had urged Washington to deal seriously with him were vilified — chiefly by Senator McCarthy — as ‘Comsymps’ who had engineered the ‘loss’. All this is well handled by Mitter. But he appears not to know that one significant figure, John Service, a China-born foreign service officer, more than admired the Communist side. During the Chinese civil war, he gave military secrets relating to Chiang Kai-shek’s army to a Soviet agent. He revealed to me years ago, not long before he died, that while at Yanan he knew nothing of Mao’s violence against his critics. ‘I wanted the Communists to win,’ he said.’
Jane Rye discusses the life and work of the painter Paul Nash (above – ‘Event on the Downs’ 1934), the subject of a new biography by Andrew Causey.
‘Nash was a slow starter (amazingly only teaching himself oil-painting in 1918 in order to undertake large-scale commissions for the Imperial War Museum). His first ambition was to be a painter-poet like Rossetti or Blake, but his poetry was not up to scratch (‘verse equivalent to Dutch Elm Disease’ is how another commentator describes the poem he wrote to accompany a 1912 drawing of three trees).’
Roger Lewis takes little pleasure in reading Robert Sellers’s account of Oliver Reed’s hell-raising.
‘Myself, I find no amusement in dissipation, but Sellers seems always to be impressed and tickled by Reed’s nasty pranks: sticking a lit candle up his nose for a bet, chewing light bulbs or putting cigarettes out on his tongue. He loved to climb up a pub chimney and leap into the grate as a demonic Santa Claus. He liked to beat up waiters, hoteliers and chauffeurs.’
Joanna Wootton, who was born deaf, reviews Gerald Shea’s memoir of hearing loss.
‘At the age of six, Gerald Shea had scarlet fever. The sounds of birds passed into memory to be replaced by the sound of locusts. Not only had Shea developed tinnitus, he had lost the ability to hear high frequencies. Broadly speaking, he could only hear vowels, not consonants. If you can hear vowels, you can grasp the intonation and the feel of what is said, but not get much meaning. He calls this his ‘language of lyricals’. Neither Shea nor his family realised that he was now partially deaf, and thus slightly out of sync with the world. My own experience of deafness is different: I was born deaf, so having ears that don’t work is ‘normal’ for me. And unlike Shea, I always knew that most people could hear, whereas I could not.’
Peter Conradi is gripped by the latest revelations from the Dostoevsky archive, uncovered by Peter Sekirin.
‘Previously unknown are some early stories here of Dostoevsky’s frequent and frightening epileptic seizures, about which he wrote in The Idiot, and which each time for a while wiped out his memory; contradictory versions of his arrest and near-execution; the revelation of a love affair in Siberia; his military service; his relations with other writers and support in particular for women writers; and stories of his fame and recognition as a great prophetic figure towards the end of his life. His funeral attracted 50,000 mourners.’
Roland Elliott-Brown reviews Constance by Patrick McGrath, an interesting new literary novel from America:
‘At the decline of the Romantic age, railroads represented satanic modernity and sexual revolution. Patrick McGrath, setting his tale against the decline of American rail, has them lead instead to oppressive family melancholy at Ravenswood, Constance’s childhood home, near where her real father perished under an Albany train. The house is a semi-analogue for Penn Station: once classical in style, but turned by her grandfather into a ‘gothic horror house’ in 1861 — around the end of the romantic period. Constance and Sidney belong to separate genres, but their love may still work: in American literature especially, romanticism and the gothic overlap.’
Emily Rhodes reviews Deborah Leby’s sensitive take on George Orwell’s understanding of why writers write.
‘Levy begins one spring when she was crying on escalators, ‘at war with my lot’. She flies to Majorca, where, stuck on a mountain the night she arrives, she takes comfort in ‘being literally lost when I was lost in every other way’. Reading her notebooks later, she alights on a Polish director’s advice to a young actress: ‘to speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish’. As Levy guides us along thoughtful diversions through ‘the suburb of femininity’ and motherhood, we infer that her ‘political purpose’ is for women to be able to speak up in this way.’
Duncan Fallowell is mesmerized by the memoirs of an uneasy writer and sexual pioneer:
‘Meanwhile there were many pick-ups or affairs, mostly with men, sometimes with women. Quite often he doesn’t fancy the people he does it with, but there’s little or no coercion. He moves to Greece, spiritual home of bisexuals, but returns to gay Brighton, the nearest thing to an anchor in his life. He is perhaps a casualty of the transition in social mores. Being born 15 years later, in a less sexually neurotic age, might have suited him better; or perhaps he was a pioneer, tacking through terrible storms towards the island of pantheism and free love (the book is among other things a startling indictment of the tortures of enforced secrecy). Maybe he should have married another bisexual like Harold Nicolson did.’
Mark Mason gets under the skin of his adolescent hero, Jimmy Connors.
‘Connors’s anger, he reveals in his autobiography The Outsider (Transworld, £18.99), stems from the day he was eight and saw his mother beaten up on a tennis court by two yobs who wouldn’t turn their radio down. She lost her teeth, needing hundreds of stitches in her mouth. Jimmy reached for that memory whenever he needed motivating; he was very good at tennis because he was very good at getting angry.’
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