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Wednesday 30 May 2012

The Write Advice 014: DAVID IRELAND


I don't live or die by whether things are published, I live or die by whether I want to keep writing, whether I am able to get up in the morning and write.  That's what I do, seven days a week, I get to my desk and work, and try to think.  I love it.

Interview [The Australian, 7 April 2012]



DAVID IRELAND (b. 1927 in Lakemba, NSW) is one of only four authors to have won Australia's most prestigious literary prize, The Miles Franklin Award, more than once.  He has been unable to find a publisher for his work since his tenth, poorly-reviewed novel The Chosen appeared in 1997.

Use the link below to visit the DAVID IRELAND page at the Text Classics website:
 
 
 
 
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Thursday 24 May 2012

Bimbo (1990) by KEITH WATERHOUSE

  


Sceptre Books UK, 1990


 

 

But now I want to set the record straight. I have a dinky little tape recorder in the shape of a pair of Marilyn Monroe's lips which I kindly had bought for me in a Covent Garden gift boutique, and am dictatorising this all by myself, strictly no lecherising reporters present, alone on my ownsome in my Mayfair luxury pad – not lovenest as the Sunday Shocker made me call it.  Now the world will see the reel Debra Chase, not the sex-mad gold-digging bimbo I was made out to be.  Not that I have anything against s-e-x in its place (which is not always the bedroom!!!) but I am just not made like that.  Neverthemore this does not mean to say I am just a smalltime girl who struck lucky, even though I am sticking to the truth this time round there will be some starting relevations with the aid of my hithertofore unpublished Sex Romps Diary, so pin back your ears for the reel Debra Chase story as told by herself, exclusive.  



 

 

The Novel:  The life of a 'page three popsy' is not, as Debra Chase helpfully informs us, 'one long romp on a fur-lined bed.'  It is a long, difficult, often bumpy road from her days as third runner-up in a wet t-shirt contest to her reign as the top topless model in the Daily Stunner and the sizzlingly scandalous bedmate of Sir Monty Pratt, Member of Parliament and high-profile CEO of Pratt's Famous Pork Pies.  Along the way poor Debra is forced to endure the jealousy of friends and co-workers, the attentions of men both desirable and undesirable, as well as the media's unceasing efforts to portray her as a homewrecking sex addict whose well-publicized antics threaten to strike another blow at the always questionable credibility and ethics of the British Conservative Party.

 

Bimbo is her story, told by her in the tabloid-speak of the same newspapers – the Daily Stunner, the Sunday Shocker, the Sunday Sleaze she becomes the star attraction of for a few headline-capturing months.  Debra is a kind of modern Candide figure, innocent and sometimes astoundingly naïve but not entirely lacking in either intelligence or self-awareness, whose insatiable appetite for glamour takes her from the small town of Seathorpe to the sinful nitespots of London, exposing her to the attentions of randy soccer players, jaded photographers and the less-than-honourable ministrations of more than one rapacious peer of the realm along the way.  She's a vacuous star for a vacuous age –– plastic, evanescent, as disposable as the trashy periodicals which are glad to publish topless photos of her even as their reporters vilify her for being an immoral, gold-digging slut.  

 

By the age of nineteen, Debra has seen it all, done it all and survived it all to become the unwitting victim of her own dubiously earned celebrity.  Yet she remains unfailingly optimistic, her belief in a brighter future unshaken even after being forced to give up the man she affectionately calls 'The Sir' and the luxurious flat they share together in Mayfair to return to her dad's humble little home in another forgettable seaside resort town called Oceanview.  'Everyone has their ups and downs and I reckon I have had my share of both but this is not the end of Debra Chase's story by any means,' she says of herself at book's end, 'it is only The Beginning.'

 

Keith Waterhouse was a very smart writer and one of the smartest decisions he made in writing this pithy, poignant and very clever novel was to have Debra tell her own story in her own unique, verbally-challenged way.  Instead of making her seem trite and foolish, this technique allows Debra to become a person the reader cannot help but like and admire in spite of –– or even perhaps because of –– her self-confessed shallowness and sometimes painful to observe ditziness.  By the end of the book you care enough about her to hope she'll survive whatever life throws at her next and go on to enjoy other occasions when it will be impossible for her, as she so charmingly puts it, to 'congeal her jublifications.'  Happily, something tells you that she will, that no amount of scandal or slander can ever completely crush a spirit as irrepressibly resilient as hers happens to be.

 

 


KEITH WATERHOUSE, 2008

 

 

 

The WriterKeith Waterhouse once wrote that the art of writing 'consists simply of choosing a handful of words from the half a million or so samples available, and arranging them in the best order.'  Luckily for us, this was a theory he was able to practice consistently and entertainingly for more than half a century, beginning with his first 'real' job as a features writer for the Daily Mirror in the mid-1950s and continuing until his death in September 2009.  

 

In addition to his sixteen published novels, Waterhouse wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column for the Mirror and then (from 1988) for its rival daily newspaper the Daily Mail, several screenplays with his friend Willis Hall (including adaptations of his own novel Billy Liar, of Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving and of Mary Hayley Bell's Whistle Down the Wind as well as the 1980s children's TV series Worzel Gummidge) and the award-winning West End play Geoffrey Bernard is Unwell.  He became a CBE in 1991, by which time he had come to be seen as one of the grand old men of British literature –– a far cry from his humble beginnings as an undertaker's assistant in his native Yorkshire.

 

 

KEITH WATERHOUSE and WILLIS HALL, c 1962

 

 

Waterhouse first rose to prominence with the publication of his second novel Billy Liar.  He claimed to have written the book in three weeks and it was published in 1959, later spawning a successful play, a highly-praised 1961 film, a West End musical (which starred a young Michael Crawford as an all-singing, all-dancing Billy) and a TV series which lasted for two seasons during the mid-1970s.  Billy Liar remains an iconic British novel, a classic that deals honestly and humorously with the unforeseen consequences of self-delusion and the refusal of its loveable, commitment-wary hero to face facts and grow up.  In 1975, Waterhouse published a sequel, Billy Liar on the Moon, which saw the now-married Billy working for his local council while keeping a mistress on the side and leading the same rich fantasy life which had gotten him into so much trouble as a teenager.

 

 

KEITH WATERHOUSE, 1957

 

 

Like his most famous creation, Waterhouse was a native of Leeds, where he grew up poor on a council estate and was often charged with the unpardonable crime (at least in wartime England) of being considered the dirtiest child in his street.  His first novel There Is A Happy Land, published in 1957, draws heavily on these experiences and is a strikingly realistic study of early childhood and its associated difficulties.

 

Waterhouse left school at fourteen and found work as an undertaker's assistant (an experience he put to use in Billy Liar) and then as a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post –– an uninspiring job which nevertheless allowed him to tell editors he was experienced when he began applying for positions at major London papers.  The Daily Mirror initially turned him down for a job, but luckily he bumped into the features editor on his way out of the building and somehow talked the man into hiring him as a freelancer.  For the rest of his life he would turn out his two columns faithfully each week, never once missing a deadline, while still finding the time to do his 'other work' as novelist, screenwriter, playwright and well-known London 'luncher.'  His editor at the Daily Mail perhaps summed him up best when he said 'Keith was a genius, for whom the phrase "Fleet Street legend" could have been invented.  A consummate journalist, scintillating satirist and unrivalled chronicler of life and so much more.'  

 

He was married twice and fathered two daughters and a son.  His only indulgence, he said, was to drink an entire bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne each day.  It was a regimen that obviously agreed with him.  His last column appeared in the Daily Mail a few weeks before his death at the ripe old age of eighty.

 

 

Use the link below to read a selection of the articles KEITH WATERHOUSE wrote for the Daily Mail.

 

 

 

 

 

His autobiographies, City Lights and Streets Ahead, were published in 1995 and 1999 respectively.  There is no official biography yet but expect one eventually, given what a beloved British institution he was.  

 

The 1961 film version of Billy Liar, directed by JOHN SCHLESINGER and starring TOM COURTENAY and JULIE CHRISTIE, may be available to view on your preferred selected streaming services, which may also be the case with both series of the 1970s TV version which featured JEFF RAWLE in the title role.

 

 

 

 

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The Ten O'Clock Horses (1996) by LAURIE GRAHAM

 

 
Live Now, Pay Later (1963) by JACK TREVOR STORY

 

 
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Last updated 11 April 2023

  

Friday 18 May 2012

Ethan Frome (1911) by EDITH WHARTON



Signet Classic US edition, 1987


 

 

The words were like fragments torn from his heart.  With them came the hated vision of the house he was going back to – of the stairs he would have to go up every night, of the woman who would wait for him there.  And the sweetness of Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return to



 

 

The NovelAt what point does a life of selfless devotion to others become a life of self-defeating masochism?  Where should the line be drawn between our duty to those we love (or have at least grown used to pitying and unwillingly tolerating) and our no less important duty to be true to the demands placed on us by our own tormented hearts? 

 

These are just two of the questions Edith Wharton raises in her magnificent short novel Ethan Frome –– the story of a poor young New England farmer whose life is at first improved and then blighted by the unexpected passion he comes to feel for his wife's young orphaned cousin.     

 

In her kindhearted, guilt-wracked and ultimately doomed protagonist, Wharton created a character every bit as tragic as King Lear, Hamlet or Thomas Hardy's similarly damned Jude Fawley.  Ethan Frome is a man so burdened by the weight of his responsibilities –– his need to care for his sick complaining wife Zeena while somehow finding a way to save their failing farm –– that he's become as spiritually and emotionally dead inside as the bleak, snowbound landscape he inhabits.  The arrival of Mattie Silver, with her youth, charm and refreshingly cheerful disposition, seems to offer him the chance he's been longing for to escape the town of Starkfield (another symbolic name, like Mattie Silver, if ever there was one) and find the happiness that a life devoted to caring for his family –– first his crazy dead parents, now his nagging wife –– has never allowed him to experience. 

 

Even more miraculously, Mattie returns his affections, allowing herself to be kissed one day while Zeena is away from home seeking the advice of one of the many quack doctors she's so fond of visiting.  But fate intervenes in the form of a broken wedding dish and the advice Zeena brings home from the doctor.  The only way she can hope to get well again, she's been advised, is to employ a 'hired girl' to remove the burden of running the house from her frail suffering shoulders.  This means a choice has to be made between keeping the clumsy, dish-breaking Mattie with them or hiring a more efficient stranger to become her live-in replacement. 

 

Of course it is Zeena, not the procrastinating Ethan, who has the final say in this matter as she does in everything else.  By refusing to defy his wife and take his chances with Mattie, Ethan unwittingly sets in motion a train of events which will prove, did he but realize it, to have bitter, long-lasting consequences for all three of them.  What had once seemed so hopeful now becomes its opposite, existing, it seems, only to mock, humiliate and torment him. 

 

 

Everyman's Library US edition, 2008

 

 

Ethan Frome was a shocking book in its day, as much for what it said about life in what were perceived to be the 'idyllic' farming communities of rural North America as for its not very scandalous story of a dissatisfied husband who contemplates adultery.  (The fact that contemplating adultery is all that Ethan ever does only serves the emphasize the hopelessness of his situation.)  Wharton's New England is an isolated, windswept and harshly unromantic place, populated by self-reliant, taciturn people who are barely able to scratch a decent living from its thin rocky soil.  While this debunking of the myth of an 'agrarian paradise' might seem anything but shocking to anyone living in the post-industrial twenty-first century, this was far from being the case in the North America of 1911, when two-thirds of the population still lived on the land and made their living by farming it.   

 

The harshness of the landscape is reflected in Wharton's precise, painstakingly-constructed prose, with each word appearing to have been selected as much for its cumulative emotional impact as for its literal dictionary meaning.  Indeed, the precision of the writing lends the story of Ethan, Zeena and Mattie the sometimes dreamlike quality of a myth –– an effect enhanced by Wharton's decision to structure it as a narrative within a narrative, viewed through the eyes of an interested stranger who first spots Ethan crossing the town square as a scarred, prematurely aged man of fifty-two and becomes curious to learn more of his story.  Is the tale he weaves a true one or only a fanciful re-imagining of what might be nothing more than a case of three impoverished people choosing to stick together in what are tough and very uncertain times?  The answer ultimately doesn't matter.  What the narrator learns, as does the reader, is that it can be dangerous to sacrifice our feelings to a sense of duty that is neither appreciated nor reciprocated by those who have become our self-imprisoning responsibility as much in the moral sense as they are in the physical sense.  

 

 


EDITH WHARTON, 1880

 

 

 

The WriterEdith Newbold Jones (Wharton was her married name) was born in New York City on 24 January 1862.  She was the third of three children and grew up as the pampered daughter of wealthy 'old money' parents in New York and later in Europe, where her father relocated the family in 1866 to escape the depression that was ravaging the United States in the wake of that nation's recently concluded Civil War.  

 

Wharton was a studious, intelligent child who began to recite stories aloud before she learned to read, using an open book as a 'prop' to help improve the effect.  'At any moment,' she later wrote, 'the impulse might seize me; and then, if the book was in reach, I had only to walk the floor, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off full sail on the sea of dreams.'  She wrote her first unpublished novel, Fast and Loose, at the age of fifteen and three years later, with the aid and consent of her domineering mother, privately published a volume of poetry titled Verses.  One of her poems found its way to the famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who, in turn, passed it along to his friend William Dean Howells, novelist and editor of the prestigious literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly.  Howells published Wharton's poem but here, Lucretia Jones decreed, her daughter's literary career must permanently end.  A few months later she oversaw Edith's social début in the ballroom of a millionaire's house on Fifth Avenue, the object of the exercise being the crucial one of finding her daughter a suitably well-to-do man to marry. 

 

 

TEDDY WHARTON

 

 

In 1885, following a broken engagement and an inconclusive romance with a consumptive law student, Edith became the wife of Boston socialite Teddy Wharton.  The marriage, while socially acceptable, was never happy and the Whartons would spend much of the next twenty-eight years apart –– a situation made possible by the large inheritances Edith received from her father and a wealthy reclusive cousin.  In 1890 a short story, Mrs Mantsey's View, appeared in Scribners Magazine but it would be seven more years before the name 'Edith Wharton' would appear again in print, this time as co-author of a non-fiction book titled The Decoration of Houses.  Meanwhile, Edith spent several months in a sanitarium in Philadelphia being treated for depression –– an illness some scholars later attributed to the coldness displayed to her by her mother throughout her childhood and adolescence.  In 1899 her first volume of stories, The Greater Inclination, was published by the New York firm of Charles Scribners Sons, surprising everybody –– its thirty-six year old author included – by selling in excess of 3000 copies.

 

Lucretia Jones died in 1901, allowing Wharton to buy a 113 acre estate in Massachusetts she later named 'The Mount.'  A year later she published her first novel, a romance set in eighteenth century Italy.  It was not until 1903, however, after receiving a letter from fellow novelist Henry James urging her to abandon historical fiction in favor of writing a novel set in contemporary New York, that she began working on The House of Mirth –– a book which set out to expose and satirize the ultra-privileged Park Avenue socialite world she grew up in and was so intimately familiar with. The novel appeared in 1905 and became a runaway bestseller, its sales rising to 140,000 by the end of the year, making her even wealthier in the process.  

 

Other novels followed, including The Fruit of the Tree, The Reef and the savagely satirical The Custom of the Country, as well as many shorter works including Ethan Frome and its equally affecting companion piece Summer.  Between 1905 and 1937 Wharton published scores of articles, short stories and non-fiction books about subjects ranging from travel and the study of French manners to gardening –– work she was able to complete while continuing to lead an active social life and conducting an affair (which remained secret until 1968, when her private papers were finally unsealed) with British journalist Morton Fullerton. 

 

 

EDITH WHARTON, 1920

 

 

In 1909 she discovered that Teddy had embezzled $50,000 from her bank account, forcing her to sell her properties in New York and, in time, 'The Mount' as well.  (Teddy later repaid the money, using funds set aside for him in trust by his mother.)  The couple divorced in 1913, after which Edith returned to Europe, where she remained for the next ten years, basing herself in Paris where she tirelessly devoted herself to the task of raising money for war relief and helping the displaced, sick and homeless gain access to work, medical assistance and shelter.  This also allowed her to visit the Western Front and publish several articles about what she saw and experienced there in Scribners Magazine.  This later furnished the material for a new novel, The Marne, which appeared in 1918 

 

After the war, finding Paris too noisy, she purchased the Pavilion Colombe, a new home situated just outside the city, and began to divide her time between it and a rented château in the south of France overlooking the Mediterranean.  Financial pressure and an unstable stock market obliged her to abandon her plan to write another war novel and return to the familiar territory of Gilded Age New York for inspiration. The Age of Innocence, serialized in the Pictorial Review in 1920, would go on to win her the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, making her the first woman to be so honored.  (In 1993 the book was adapted into an Academy Award winning film starring Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, directed by Martin Scorsese.)

 

Wharton continued to travel through the 1920s and into the 1930s, publishing novels (including Twilight Sleep, which appeared in 1927 and satirized the Jazz Age), further collections of stories and receiving visits from a new generation of friends and admirers including F Scott Fitzgerald (a meeting described as being 'strained and awkward' for both parties), Sinclair Lewis (whose bestselling 1922 novel Babbitt was dedicated to her), Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, André Gide and Cyril Connolly.  A memoir, A Backward Glance, appeared in 1934 –– a work that has frustrated many scholars because it failed to be specific about the difficult life she led with Teddy or her passionate but long-hidden relationship with Morton Fullerton.  Her final novel, The Buccaneers, remained incomplete at the time of her death from a stroke on 11 August 1937.  It was published, along with her notes for the ending and an afterword by her friend Gaillard Lapsley, in 1938. 

 

 
 
 
Use the link below to visit the THE EDITH WHARTON SOCIETY, a North American organization devoted to preserving and promoting the study of her work:
 



 

 

 

There are many biographies of the writer currently available, the most recent of which is Edith Wharton by HERMIONE LEE, published by Alfred A Knopf (US) and Chatto & Windus (UK) in 2007.

 

 

 

Those interested in reading a contrasting view of the events depicted in Ethan Frome should seek out a copy of Zenobia, a short story by North American novelist GINA BERRIAULT reprinted in her award winning 1996 collection Women In Their Beds.  It narrates the events of Ethan Frome from Zeena's point of view and serves as a brilliant, thought-provoking and heartrending counterpoint to the original 1911 novel.

 

 

 

 

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Last updated 17 September 2021
 

Sunday 13 May 2012

Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip (2009) by STUART HAMPLE

© 2009 Naomi-Stuart Productions Inc & Hackenbush Productions Inc


Long before the phenomenal success of Midnight in Paris and the public festival of finger-pointing that was the whole Soon-Yi / Mia Farrow media debacle, there was another Woody Allen whom very few people seem to recall these days – the hapless, neurotic, self-deprecating title character of a 1970s comic strip titled, appropriately enough, Inside Woody Allen.

The strip, which ran from 1976 until 1984 in newspapers all around the world, was the brainchild of a newspaper cartoonist and former advertising artist named Stuart Hample.  Thankfully, Hample possessed the skill and talent necessary to make Allen's character as real and funny on the page as it was on the screen.  The gags he created — sometimes alone and sometimes with the input of Allen himself or with other writers — were literate, insightful and bursting with cultural and psychoanalytic references that seemed to capture the zeitgeist of 1970s New York while never allowing the reader to forget that this was a daily newspaper comic strip and not a philosophical dissertation they were reading.  While that may not seem like much of an achievement, it was actually quite a remarkable one for its time, particularly when you consider that Hample often had to battle the strip's distributors, the very powerful King Features Syndicate, over what kinds of gags he was 'allowed' to do so as not to alienate the strip's 'non-intellectual' readers. 




It also helped that the comedian liked the idea of being turned into a comic strip character and granted Hample unlimited access to his private notebooks.  Allen also gave the artist tips on how to present his character, insisting that he shouldn't be the sole focus of the strip and that it should occasionally feature real people from his own life.  (Suggestions the syndicate quickly vetoed, telling Hample they wanted the Allen character to become 'more sympathetic' and 'more lovable' and even suggesting that he should get married at one point so he would have a wife character to argue with on a regular basis.)  His cooperation made what could very easily have been a shlocky, exploitative exercise in milking a fast buck from a popular celebrity (Annie Hall was poised to win the Oscar for Best Picture the year the strip premiered) into something that stands alone in its own right as a worthwhile, funny and enduring piece of cartoon art.





I have a lot to thank Stuart Hample for on a personal level.  It was my avid reading of Inside Woody Allen each Sunday in the Sydney newspaper The Sun-Herald that introduced me to the work of Woody Allen and helped to form and develop my own sense of humor.  While I might not have understood every joke – some of these were a little too sophisticated for the average eleven year old to wrap his head around – I understood enough to realize that this was something special that I wanted to read more of.  I loved the strip so much that I used to cut it out of the Sunday Comic Section (alas, something which no longer exists in today's severely scaled-down, close-to-extinct newspapers) and paste it into an exercise book so I could re-read it at my leisure –– something I had only ever done with Peanuts before that.


STUART HAMPLE and WOODY ALLEN, 1976


One thing is certain: if you like Woody Allen's films, you are certain to enjoy this beautifully presented, lavishly illustrated book. 


Unfortunately, STUART HAMPLE died of cancer on 19 September 2010.  Use the link below to learn more about his life and work.  (He wrote and drew an earlier comic strip called Rich & Famous and later wrote plays and scripts for the 1980s sitcom Kate and Allie as well as creating many popular children's books.) 

 

http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/stuart_hample_1926_2010/

 


Use this link to hear a 2009 radio interview STUART HAMPLE gave to promote the launch of Dread & Superficiality:

 

http://www.inkstuds.org/stuart-hample/

 

 


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Last updated 14 April 2021

 

Friday 4 May 2012

The Write Advice 013: FRANÇOIS MAURIAC


I have never begun a novel without hoping that it would be the one that would make it unnecessary for me to write another.  I have had to start again from scratch with each one.  What had gone before didn't count... I was not adding to a fresco.  Like a man who has decided to start his life over again, I have told myself that I had so far accomplished nothing: for I have always believed that my chef d'oeuvre [masterpiece] would be the novel I was working on at the time.

The Art of Fiction #2  [The Paris Review #2, March 1953]




Use the link below to read an excerpt of the March 1953 interview with French novelist and essayist FRANÇOIS MAURIAC:

 

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5197/the-art-of-fiction-no-2-francois-mauriac

 

 

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