Shakespeare

by Bill Bryson. 2007.

Following a less than enthralling autobiography, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, in one fell swoop Bill Bryson bounces back with this excellent biography of Shakespeare. What I particularly like about this biography is that it resists the temptation to make something out of nothing. Countless biographies of Shakespeare, faced with the lack of any hard evidence for large parts of his life, fill the gap with speculation and repetition of myth. Bryson is upfront about saying, we don’t know what Shakespeare was doing in this period – we just don’t know, alright? In fact, so little is known about Shakespeare’s life, that it’s amazing that any biography is possible – he appears to vanish into thin air. Bryson sets Shakespeare in the context of his eventful times, unveiling a vast wealth of social detail, some of it rather horrid. Lovers of interesting factoids will find plenty to enjoy. There are surprisingly few extracts from the plays or sonnets, however. Altogether Bryson comes across as well-read, critical, and a touch zany. Some will have an antipathy to his approach, but others will read him with bated breath.

In the above passage, words and phrase in red are first found in Shakespeare. The man’s genius beggars all description.

- John.

Letters of Ted Hughes

by Christopher Reid. Faber & Faber, 2007.

Reviewed by Ann Skea.

Writing a review after a number of major British newspapers and journals have already published theirs is an interesting exercise. Interesting, not because everything seems already to have been said and all the best quotes to have already been used, but because of what other reviewers select from the many letters and from the great range of topics about which Ted wrote. He wrote to a huge range of people - family, friends, poets, editors, scholars, teachers, schoolchildren, theatre directors, politicians, royalty. As he got older and more famous, the pressures of answering correspondents grew: "I've spent most of this week simply writing letters.", he told his aunt, "Even writing very briefly, they take me ages". Still, he managed to write about many things, some serious, some trivial, some at great length, others with exemplary brevity. So, what reviewers choose to write about from this treasury reveals their own preoccupations.


Those reviewers who are intent on feeding the public's seemingly insatiable curiosity about Ted's relationship with Sylvia Plath begin with that and make the most of the three letters to Sylvia which are included in the book and the many references to her in other letters (a long list of which appears in the very useful Index of subjects). They look up Assia Wevill in the index, too (a shorter list). Then, it seems, they browse a bit further, add something from Ted's letters to his children, Frieda and Nicholas, and note some of Ted's comments about a few famous literary figures.Ted's detailed and extensive comments about many of his poems, his descriptions of his poetic methods, of mythology, and especially his discussions of Shakespeare and The Goddess of Complete Being, leave them baffled and terse: "a little goes a very long way", one reviewer complained. Yet, these are the very letters which give the most insight into the thoughts and purposes behind Ted's work, and they reflect the passions which drove him to be a poet in the first place. Yes, they are long and complex, and often they represent only one fragment of a long exchange of letters in which discussion and explanation flowed back and forth between Ted and his correspondent, but they are a fine example of Ted's generous spirit and an important guide to his work and to aspects of his life which influenced that work.


There are many other far less serious letters to balance these lengthy flights. One which everyone can enjoy is Ted's letter to Frieda describing his visit to Buckingham Palace in 1974 to collect his Gold Medal for Poetry from the Queen. The preliminary visit to the clothing store, Moss Bros., for a hired suit, was disconcerting: "[My waistcoat] was short. Between the bottom of the waistcoat & the top of the pants, I had three inches of white shirt puffing out. I could see I was going to spend my time in front of the Queen, surrounded as I imagined by lords and ladies, pulling my pants down to cover my socks, then pulling them up to cover that waist gap from below, & pulling my waistcoat down to hide it from above, and I thought I'll look like a right hick". When he mentioned that he would be meeting the Queen in an hour's time, however, a more dignified-looking outfit was immediately found for him. The rest of the letter is similarly graphic and funny - a wonderful picture of the whole visit painted for his school-age daughter.


Christopher Reid, the editor of this book, has done an excellent job in selecting letters from the hundreds which were made available to him. It can't have been easy to decide what to include and what to leave out, but he had complete editorial freedom in this matter. Nevertheless, he is well aware that some aspects of Ted's interests have not been well represented. One reviewer, Ed Douglas, chose to fill in some of the gaps that Reid was obliged to leave in the interest of keeping the book a manageable size. Douglas, as a fisherman friend of Ted's, is well situated to write about Ted's little-known work as an environmental activist. 'Portrait of a poet as eco-warrior' (The Observer, Sunday November 4, 2007) is a fascinating and informed supplement to Ted's letters..


Poet, Craig Riane's review in The Times Literary Supplement (Nov. 21, 2007), on the other hand, is a curiosity which would surely provide food for thought for any psychologist. Raine seems to be obsessed with combing the letters for hints about Ted's sex life. He begins with a completely irrelevant reference to a sexually explicit self-portrait by Egon Schiele, then extrapolates from there, quoting selectively, to demonstrate that Ted left "a paper trail for posterity" which shows him to have "remained 'untamed, undomesticated, unruly and animal' ". Ted's astrological interests are dismissed with a sneer, and a few Birthday Letters poems are dismantled (questionably) for good measure. "It is easy to be censorious", says Raine, but he goes ahead with his speculative accusations anyway. Strange, when Ted's letters to him, when Raine was poetry editor at Faber & Faber, are friendly and generously appreciative of his work.


John Carey's review (The Sunday Times, Oct. 21, 2007.) is perhaps the best, broadest and most objective of those recently published. Yet, for many years Ted and Carey were not on speaking terms with each other. The bad feeling began after an angry public exchange of letters over Carey's review of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and was exacerbated when Carey's signature appeared (amongst others) on a public letter concerning Sylvia Plath's grave. Ted's own description of the many problems Sylvia's more radical fans had caused over her grave appears in two letters in this book. As does Ted's last letter to Carey, seeking to heal the "misunderstanding" between them and written just a couple of weeks before he died.


Christopher Reid states quite plainly in his introduction that this book is not a biography in disguise". Nevertheless, the chronological ordering of the letters and the incidental and, sometimes, specific biological content provide a far more vivid, truthful and very personal picture of Ted's life than any biography could achieve. There is amazing variety in this book which contains not just letters but also photographs, and, for example, an astrological chart for Philip Larkin; another made for Sylvia Plath in 1956, with a note about the suicidal placing of Saturn (which, according to astrologer Neil Spencer shows that Ted was very good astrologer); a diagrammatic method of comparing "sensibility and temperament" in the work of various poets; and a sketch which Ted made of his Order of Merit medal for his Aunt Hilda, which is part of the last letter in the book. Reid's note that Ted died nine days after writing this letter provides an appropriate but chilling ending. For me, nothing can compare with the sense of Ted's presence which I feel when looking at his handwritten letters. His strong energetic handwriting, his characteristic dashes, the occasional indecipherable word which has to be puzzled over, the odd spelling mistake and the inserted afterthoughts, all convey his character. A printed transcript on the white pages of a book loses that sense of energy and immediacy. Nevertheless, the letters collected in this book display a whole range of emotions, enthusiasms, interests, concerns and obsessions: there is warmth, humour, occasional bleakness, passion, love, dedication, pedagogical instruction, self-questioning, self-discipline and everything else which characterized the man himself. The letters span Ted's life from his teenage years to his death, and they tell us a great deal about him. Above all, as John Carey rightly says, "No other English poet's letters, not even Keats's, unparalleled as they are, take us so intimately into the wellsprings of his own art".


A series of extracts from letters included in Letters of Ted Hughes was published in British newspaper, The Telegraph, November 27 -29, 2007.

Autobiography of my Mother

by Meg Stewart. Vintage Books, 2007.
Cover design by Christabella Designs.

Reviewed by Ann Skea. http://ann.skea.com/

What do you do if you have spent hours talking to your mother and recording her memories, researched some of the family history, and published it all as a ghost-written autobiography, and then you read a chapter headed 'Mistress and Wife' in someone else's book and realize that there was something your mother omitted to tell you?

This is what happened to Meg Stewart, whose mother, Margaret Coen, was a well-known Australian artist and whose father, Douglas Stewart, was an equally well-known Australian poet.

Margaret Coen's 'autobiography' begins with the story of her grandmother, Margaret O'Connor, who arrived in Australia in 1844 as a sort of mail-order bride. Her husband, Patrick Moloney, was a prosperous 'New Chum' who was thirty years her senior. He had migrated to Australia in 1838 to work on the land and he had done well. He saved enough money to buy a property in sheep country south west of Sydney and then, not wanting to marry a convict woman, he wrote back to his parish priest in Ireland and asked him to find him a wife. So, Margaret O'Connor, aged eighteen, set off for a new life in Australia. Between them, Paddy and Margaret Moloney produced eleven children in twenty years, and their seventh child was Margaret Coen's mother, Mary Moloney.

Margaret Coen's paternal grandfather was also Irish. He had been attracted to Australia by the discoveries of gold, but he soon bought a hawker's cart and did so well that he eventually established a General Store in Yass. He became a wealthy and prominent citizen but died at the age of fifty-six. Grandma Coen, who was also considerably younger than her husband, took control of the store and ran it for the rest of her long life. The Coen family, who were staunch Catholics, also prospered and grew, and religion in Grandma Coen's house was taken very seriously. There was daily family prayer, one son became a Passionist priest and three daughters became nuns. Margaret, who was born in 1909, spent much of her childhood in her grandmother's house and was so impressed by the religiousness that she decided she was going to be a saint. Fortunately, she remained a very normal, mischievous child, and her memories of those early years are fascinating.

Equally fascinating, are her memories of her unusual schooling at a small Sydney boarding school, Kincoppal, which was run by the Sacre-Coeur nuns, many of whom were French.

A major part of the book, however, is devoted to Margaret's memories of life as a budding artist in Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s, and her later years as an established artist, familiar with all the most prominent artists, poets and writers of the time. The Circular Quay area of Sydney at that time, was a place full of art-schools and artists' studios. During the depression years of the early 1930s, space could be rented in old buildings very cheaply. This suited the artists, because their earnings, too, were meagre. They clearly enjoyed life, however, and hardship probably bonded them together more firmly than financial security might have done. Margaret Coen remembered an easy-going group of artists, art teachers, artists' models and other creative people who frequented their own chosen coffee houses and pubs in the area, where they would sit and talk for hours. She especially remembered the parties. The annual Artists' Ball was the highlight of the year, and it was obviously a very lively and uninhibited affair. When Margaret's mother, concerned for the reputation of her daughter, ordered an older brother to escort Margaret to the ball, Margaret worried that he might be shocked. Luckily, he dropped her off and disappeared for his own night on the town, then returned to pick her up later.

Amongst the artists and poets Margaret knew were Antonio Datillo-Rubbo (who taught her), Grace Cossington-Smith, Thea Astley, Donald Friend and Ken Slessor. She also befriended a visiting American illustrator, Jack Flanagan ( whose work she had long admired) who filled her head with stories of famous artists in New York, fed her Clover Club cocktails, and introduced her to another artist, Norman Lindsay. Lindsay, whose many paintings, etching and sketches of nudes had made him notorious in Australia, was a driven man. When he was not painting, etching or writing books, he worked on model ships for which he made every piece himself. Margaret tells of one attempt he made to relax by taking up cards: he cut out and painted every single card himself. Margaret had clearly idolized Lindsay because of his work. When she eventually met him, he became her mentor and taught her a great deal about water-colour painting, at which she became expert. And Lindsay, so it seems, also became her lover. In remembering her life, Margaret told her daughter nothing about this.

The unexpected revelation of this affair to Meg Stewart as she read Joanne Mendelssohn's book, Letter and Liars, left her distressed and, as her mother's biographer, "stricken". The term 'mistress’, with all the connotation it has acquired, particularly upset her. What did she do? She set about finding out if it was true. Family, when she consulted them, knew nothing and didn't believe it. The author of a book about Lindsay's art charted the progress of the affair from Lindsay's work. And although her mother's undated correspondence with Norman Lindsay (which, after her mother's death, Meg had deposited unread at the State Library of New South Wales) revealed an "undeniable bond" and real affection between the two which lasted until Lindsay's death in 1969, there was nothing "salacious" in them.

So, Meg Stewart updated her mother's 'autobiography' with newly revealed facts about her art, then simply added an extra chapter about her own researches in to the 'affair'. She describes the process of reading and dating her mother's correspondence with Lindsay as "by turn tantalising, tacky and addictive", and her conclusion, finally, is "What does it matter?". Her mother was loved by two remarkable and creative men, her own father, who had also been a close lifelong friend of Norman Lindsay, and Lindsay himself. If she chose to forget "the sexual indiscretions or passions of youth" or to keep them secret from her daughter, it was nobody's business but her own.

Meg Stewart's Autobiography of My Mother is the sort of book many of us would like to have written about our mothers but left it too late to sit down and record all the details of their memories. It is a fascinating account of a life and a fascinating picture of Sydney in the early years of the twentieth century. Sadly, there are only two of Margaret Coen's painting reproduced in black-and-white in the book, but there are photographs which show that she was a beautiful young woman, and an etching of a party by Norman Lindsay in which someone who Meg says looks "very like my mother" is dancing, scantily dressed, for an appreciative audience.
Copyright Ann Skea 2007

Dead lucky: Life and death on Mount Everest

by Lincoln Hall. Random House, 2007.

Reviewed by Ann Skea. http://ann.skea.com/

At 7.30pm on May 26th 2006, at 8600 metres on the face of Mount Everest, Lincoln Hall died. At 9am that morning he had stood on the summit and spoken by radio-phone to Alexander Abromov, the expedition leader at Advance Base Camp. He spoke briefly, letting Alex know that he and the three Sherpas, Lakcha, Dorje and Dawa Tenzing who were with him, were on their way down. One hour later cerebral oedema struck him and he began to hallucinate. For the next few hours he lapsed in and out of coherent consciousness. At times he was lucid and capable, at other times crazy: he refused his oxygen mask, fought to go back up the mountain, and tried to jump off Kangshung Face. The three Sherpas, soon joined by another, Pemba, pushed and pulled him down the mountain.

At Mushroom Rock, still 300 metres above Advance Base Camp, the Sherpas were exhausted, they had no oxygen, no food or drink, Hall was unresponsive and dying, and the weather forecast was bad. The Sherpas were ordered to cover Hall with stones and leave him.No-one had ever survived a night on Everest at 8600 metres. Exhaustion, hypothermia, lack of oxygen, the retention of fluid in the brain so that the whole metabolism is affected, snow blindness, detached retinas, all these things are common at this altitude and all can be fatal.

At the time of Hall's descent eleven climbers had already died on the mountain in the few months of the climbing season, the last just hours before Hall and the Sherpas reached Mushroom Rock. Alex, at Base Camp, phoned Hall's wife, Barbara, and broke the news to her that at 7.30pm, on Everest, her husband had died.

Barbara told their two teenage sons, rang a few people, and family and friends began to rally round to support her. Amongst others, she contacted Ang Karma, a Buddhist friend in Kathmandu, and asked him to perform the appropriate Buddhist ceremonies for her dead husband, who had become a practising Buddhist in the late 1960s. Only late in the evening of the next day did Barbara hear that her husband was still alive, but that he had only a 50-50 chance of surviving.

Hall had tackled Mount Everest twenty-two years earlier but had been forced to turn back before he reached the summit. He joined the 2006 expedition as an experienced, high-altitude cameraman for a fourteen-year-old boy, Christopher Harris, and his father, who intended to climb the highest mountains on each continent, seven summits in all. Unfortunately, Christopher had experienced a severe drop in blood pressure shortly after leaving Advance Base Camp. A second attempt had produced the same result, so, recognizing that it was too dangerous for them to press on, he and his father turned back. Hall however, was urged to go ahead, and did.

Lincoln Hall is a very experienced mountaineer, veteran of some thirty-six years of mountaineering expeditions both as a climber and a guide. He is also a writer and film-maker, and he is co-founder of the Australian Himalayan Foundation.

Dead Lucky tells the story of his last expedition to Mount Everest, his death and his survival. Even for a non-climber like me, it is a fascinating story. His account of the difficulties of the climb, the expeditions and climbers he met, the harrowing descent, and his subsequent treatment for frostbite is gripping and well-written. He has no doubt, just as the Sherpas had no doubt, that he died. His description of his psychological state, his hallucinations, and the few moments of lucidity which surrounded that death alone on the ridge at 8600 meters is totally absorbing. I was surprised to read of the large number of people who now climb Everest during the brief season when summiting is possible. I was surprised, too, to read of the fixed ropes and crevasse-crossing ladders which are put in place by Sherpas each season for some expedition organizers and which make the ascent marginally safer. Nor did I expect to hear that Hall reach the summit after passing a number of dead bodies, some of which have lain there for years, and that the summit was littered with empty oxygen cylinders and marked with yellow urine stains. I was shocked to read his account of the two Sherpas who were sent to help him when another climber found that he had survived the night at Mushroom Rock, and who bullied and threatened him, cut a rope at one critical moment, and attacked him with an ice pick (he had bruises to prove that this was no hallucination). Luckily, other Sherpas arrived in time to save him.

In spite of the organized expeditions, the final stages of the ascent of Everest are still extremely hazardous. Survival above 8300 metres is, to use Hall's word, "desperate". The oxygen level is so low that even with oxygen support just speaking is exhausting. The final stages of the ascent are begun in darkness, vision is restricted by an oxygen mask, and clothing is cumbersome. Gaining the summit and the euphoria of doing so often takes all the climber's energy, so descent is even more hazardous. As Hall discovered.

Dead Lucky tells an amazing story. Occasionally, I found the listing of names daunting and confusing. Hall seems to have felt obliged to name everyone on the mountain that year. His acknowledgements, too (thankfully tucked at the back of the book) run to seven pages and even include the cafe where he typed part of his manuscript whilst attending hospital for the treatment of his frostbitten fingers and toes. Nevertheless, the book is a pleasure to read, the photographs are interesting and the glossary useful. One is still left wondering what prompts anyone to expose themselves to the agony, danger and trauma of trying to reach the top of Mount Everest. Hall's own list of reasons doesn't solve that riddle. Looking back, he sees the mountain as a mirror into which climbers look to find themselves. His brush with death has given him a new perspective on life and, as he says at the very end of the book, now that he has summited Everest his life can move on.

- Copyright Ann Skea 2007

Shakespeare's wife

by Germaine Greer. Allen & Unwin, 2007.

Reviewed by Ann Skea. http://ann.skea.com/

Introduction: considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millennium.

In this introduction to her 'Introduction', Greer spells out for us the theme and nature of her book. Ann Shakespeare is the maligned or disparaged wife in question and Greer intends to rescue her from this sorry state. She takes on all the well-know biographers of Shakespeare and points out where they err, and she offers her own biography of the wife of the Bard. As usual, she is argumentative, challenging and controversial. As usual, she will infuriate some readers and delight others. But she is tilting at windmills: and given that she provides us with chapter headings in the manner of Cervantes in Don Quixote, she clearly knows this.

In Chapters One and Two, Greer gallops through the genealogies of both Ann and William at such a pace that the reader is left reeling. Parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, births, marriages, name-changes, contracts, deaths and wills fly past but ultimately prove nothing other than that we don't know and probably will never know why Ann (or Agnes) Hathaway (or Gardner) and William Shakespeare married, or what their marriage was like. All Greer proves is that she can speculate as well or even better than the "bardolaters", in particular the male ones, whose work she frequently quotes. She speculates along the way that Mary Shakespeare, William's mother, married for status and spent her time gossiping and showing off her finery, rather than helping his father in the family business; that a young, love-lorn William wooed Ann with his poems (which, of course, is very likely); and that Ann was blind (although this is probably sarcasm), a milkmaid, or an employee in John Shakespear's gloving business.

Other chapters contain similar gallops through fragmentary archives concerning Stratford, its history and its citizens. Mostly, these chapters concern people whose lives may have been somewhat similar to that of Ann Shakespeare or who may have had some association with her. They provide support for Greer's claims that, for example, Ann was a respected and influential, financially independent townswoman. Which is quite possibly true. Often, however, these chapters bog down in details and connections which are just confusing. They offer speculation supported by too many random and often irrelevant details, which is pointless.

When Greer gets down off her high horse and writes about facts related to contemporary custom and society in general, rather than fantasy, she is very good. Chapter Six, for example ("of handfasts, troth-plights and bundling, of rings, gauds and conceits, and what was likely to happen on the big day"), offers a delightful description of Elizabethan marriage practices, beautifully illustrated by apt quotations from Shakespeare's plays. This chapter is a pleasure to read and provides us with a deeper understanding of the plays as well as some idea of the way in which a sixteenth century audience would have understood them.

Another chapter which I thoroughly enjoyed is that which argues that some of Shakespeare's love sonnets may have been written for Ann, not for some mysterious dark lady (or man). Greer quotes freely from the sonnets and argues her case selectively but well. The romantic in me would happily believe that Shakespeare truly loved his wife and missed her during his long absences from Stratford, but nothing can be proved either way.

It is a pity that in her gallant effort to rescue Ann from oblivion, Greer sometimes contradicts herself. In several places she notes that many people made the three day journey between London and Stratford, and she suggests that Will did this between terms, when the theatres were closed, and for family occasions. At other times she writes of him as having been "estranged from his family for more than ten years". She is also inclined to lapse in slang (Mary Shakespeare was "spoiled rotten", John Shakespeare's business had "flat-lined", someone else "gets an earful"), which is a pity given the overall excellence of her writing.

None of this matters, of course. In the end, all biography is speculation. What does matter is Shakespeare's work, not his life or that of his wife.

As Greer writes in the penultimate paragraph of her final chapter, in which she, "the intrepid author", suggests that Ann may have been very much involved in the publication of the First Folio: "All this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice".

Exactly!

Copyright Ann Skea 2007

Love is a mix tape

By Rob Sheffield. Random House, 2007.

This is the first book I’ve been really excited about in a while so had to share it! Written by music journo Rob Sheffield, this is memoir told with the aid of mix tapes. If I was being corny I would say: ‘the soundtrack to his life’. Having many shoeboxes full of mix tapes myself, this concept really ‘struck a chord’ with me. And for me, like Rob, listening to the tapes is like dredging up whole parts of your life, and this is what Rob does with the book.

Each chapter starts with the track listing of a tape and the rest of the chapter expands on where Rob was in his life when the tape was important to him. The music is mostly nineties alternative – a genre I really love, and I was introduced to some great music I had never heard through the book, including Pavement (where was I?). Mostly the book is a sad but joyful elegy to Rob’s wife Renee, who died tragically young. But I was laughing in parts as well as crying. Yes, crying. Not something I do often with books, but this one was worth it.

Here’s the official website for the book. It can be found at NFPB/BIOGRAPHY in Manly Library.

- Anne