Zoo in the head

Special

I came across this today:

From the jacket:

"...Original as ever, Mr. Wheatley has produced a new type of hero in Robbie Grenn, a charming but mentally retarded young man who, owing to an injury when young, has never been to school, and is regarded by his family as almost a moron. Espionage would hardly seem to be his metier, yet to prove that he is as good as other men Robbie takes up the challenge that lands him in peril of his life many times."

Feel free to insert your own Cretan joke.

£2 from the secondhand boxes outside Broadway Books in Hackney.

i.m. Richard G. Stern

Richard Stern died on 24 January: the New York Times obituary has warm praise from Philip Roth:

“He was an inspiring figure as a literature professor and an ace of great virtuosity as a novelist, short story writer, essayist and raconteur[...]"

Mr. Roth recalled an afternoon in the mid-1950s when he and Mr. Stern were having lunch.

“I began telling him the story of how I spent my previous summer in New Jersey,” Mr. Roth said. “And he said, ‘Write it down.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Write it down.’ And that was ‘Goodbye, Columbus’ ” — the title novella of Mr. Roth’s first book.

The headline calls him a "writer's writer". The Paris Review puts it nicely: "a lion of the literary world whose name was little known outside the den". It also has one of his stories online.

I blogged about his novel Golk three years ago. Here, as a special treat, is another Penguin cover:

From the back cover:

"...that almost impossible rarity, a novel that can be seriously recommended for its style alone" NEW STATESMAN

Two adventurous Americans, Baggish and Schreiber, set out immediately after World War II to exploit the sprawling, winded continent of Europe.

Schreiber, older, fat, divorced, is looking for a love to compare with his wartime French girl Micheline. Baggish, younger, sharper and less disillusioned, is out for anything he can get.

What they get, and how they get it, makes a very good story...

The epigraph is from Nietzsche: "Every man of character has a typical experience which recurs over and over again."

Originally published 1961; this is the first Penguin edition, 1966, cover design by Lou Klein. Not common: my £4.50 on eBay was good going.

Reading notes: "Dirty Money"

Richard Stark's last Parker novel. A perfect ending:

"If you leave me here," the guy on the floor said, "he'll kill me tomorrow morning."

Parker looked at him. "So you've still got tonight," he said.

Other things and a Penguin

I haven't been posting here – indeed, have written hardly anything longer than 140 characters – since August. The business of getting divorced and the anxieties that accompany it have made it hard to concentrate on the things (Penguin covers, zoos, old films) that this blog has generally been concerned with. It only occurred to me today that perhaps trying to stick to all the old bollocks was the problem, and if I try to write about divorce and the collapse of self-confidence the words will come easier. That goes against the grain: I've always taken it for granted that good writing strives towards self-effacement, even if it never gets there, and that you don't air your dirty laundry in public. Then again, this blog, still disturbingly reliant for traffic on the public yen for animal porn and Pokémon pictures, is a fine and private place, and it ought to be possible to write about myself without involving others (the ex, our children). Other things being equal I would rather write about almost any subject than myself, but I have to write about something and myself seems to block my view of everything else. Let's see how it goes, eh?

In the meantime, here's a rather neat Penguin cover:

Ellin's stories have a queasy, boiled-cabbage smell – his characters are dreary, frustrated, humourless types, murdering in the name of advancement, professional or social, or just to satisfy Ellin's rather Roald Dahlish notions of irony: Ripley without the laughs. The best is the title story, about a bizarrely exclusive restaurant that wraps its specialty – Astrakhan lamb – in mystery. Even if the cover illustration didn't give it away, you can guess early on that cannibalism comes into it; but Ellin maintains a kind of suspense: what the characters know, what their motives are, are tantalizingly unresolved.

This is the first Penguin edition, 1968. Cover by Michael Trevithick, who did one or two Penguin covers and some stuff for Punch but is best known for the surrealist painting on the cover of Nick Drake's album Pink Moon. He also contributed art to a peculiar children's TV series, Tomfoolery – animated versions of nonsense poetry (Edward Lear, Gelett Burgess, etc.). This copy cost me a fiver or so on eBay - meh.

A trivial note on book covers

I just bought László Krasznahorkai's Sátántango, mainly because it was translated and recommended by the insomniac Hungarian genius George Szirtes, whose Twitter stream is the most riveting literary experiment operating in this country. The cover tweaked a memory: I dragged this down from the shelf:

There are differences of detail, but in look and mood they're virtually indistinguishable. That was the paperback, from 2003, but here's Viking's original hardcover edition, from 2001:

At least there's a (human?) figure here, though hardly in the foreground. This is one of the odder pieces of stereotyping I've come across: those crazy Hungarians with their forests and their Garamond and their embossed gold titles and their overpowering air of melancholy, eh?

 

The rich: the difference

New York Magazine presents the results of a number of recent studies which, taken all in all, suggest that wealth makes people "more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes."

A lot of the research reported there sounds weak (for instance, correlating desirability of car with assholeishness — assholicity? — of driver). But I think we can still say, same as it ever was.

An opportunity to quote from a novel of Amis Sr.'s underrated middle period: I Want It Now (1969), in which you can detect the last gasps of the leftism of Kingsley's youth. One day I'll take you through his Fabian Society pamphlet Socialism and the Intellectual.

In pursuit of the beautiful Simona Quick — known, puzzlingly, as Simon — Ronnie Appleyard has spent a good deal of time in the company of her appallingly rich family and their friends, and been appalled. Appearing on a television panel programme with Simon's mother, he takes the opportunity to lay into her class:

Some rich people have got the strength of character it takes to be rich and remain a human being. I'm not talking about them. They're rich in the sense that they have more money than we have, Hemingway's rich. I'm talking about Fitzgerald's rich — I don't know why everybody seems to think he lost that exchange, he saw more than Hemingway did, as always — I'm talking about the rich that are different from us. They're different, and they're worse, not because they're worse by nature, but because of their opportunities. Opportunities for power without responsibility ... If you're rich you can afford to abandon reason, justice and good manners whenever you feel like it.

Or is it the other way round: abandoning reason, justice and good manners is the high road to fortune? I can see how that would work.

Midweek Penguin: Auks and a death-wish

What a lot of readers find hard to take in Michael Innes's detective stories is the superficial snobbery — the excessive attention to people with titles, to grand houses and social forms. Which can get wearing, I admit.

What I like about him is the way that, under the formal surface, nightmares seethe. The apparatus of nightmare infests his books: doubles, chases through endless dark spaces, messages that evade sense, vanishings, substitutions, betrayals. Often, the stories seem to be elaborate constructions designed solely to contain scenes snatched from dreams (an early book, Appleby's End, is set at a country house called Long Dream). Pigs, women and simple-minded yokels are turned to statues. A boy in a cinema realizes that the boy sitting next to him in the cinema is himself, and that he is committing a murder; on a night train, a middle-aged man encounters an elderly midget, an eight-foot schoolboy, a Chinese lady holding a white monkey on a chain, and a living mummy. A young man on a beach by night falls under the spell of an older, naked man who emerges from the sea. Lions cringe like lapdogs; a man is addressed by a child dressed as a cat; a girl seeking her vanished lover thrusts herself down a darkened crevice into the Library of Babel...

In the Forties and Fifties, Innes was mildly obsessed by the nightmare of mass destruction, of atom bombs and uncontrollable viruses — but hey, wasn't everybody? This is the nightmare of Hare Sitting Up (1959), offered at the very beginning. The title page carries as epigram a quotation from Women in Love:

You yourself, don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

The story revolves around a vanished scientist, his twin — so nearly identical that nobody can tell the difference — and a mad, bird-loving lord who wants to leave the world free of the burden of us. Along the way, Sir John Appleby, our hero, is distracted by a big red herring in the shape of the great auk, or garefowl, close relative of the penguin: a rumour surfaces that it has been spotted on a Scottish island, a century after it was hunted to extinction.

As always with Innes, there's a lot of hyper-literary chitchat, some Latin tags ("But there just have to be limits, it seems to me, to the fiat justititia ruat coelum attitude" ...  "Ne sutor ultra crepidam is my motto.") and some dreary whimsical banter. But he chills the whimsy with some lines from Measure for Measure: "Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die."

This is the first Penguin edition, 1964. The cover has one of Alan Aldridge's simpler, more striking designs on a Marber grid. Abundant and cheap, so hold out for a copy in good nick.

 

1973: A pretty good year for Peter Boyle

When Peter Boyle died in 2006, all the headlines could think to say about him was that he'd been the grumpy dad in Everybody Loves Raymond and the monster in Young Frankenstein. But at the start of his career he was a tough, charismatic character actor who added individuality and intelligence to a number of films.

He got attention in 1970, in the title role of Joe — in effect, Archie Bunker with a gun. In 1971 he turned down Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, leaving it to Gene Hackman to collect the Oscar. That may have been his big career mistake: Hackman became Hollywood's bald character actor of choice. But Boyle was more interestingly and aggressively bald than Hackman, with an ugly fringe of black hair around the edge of his scalp: perhaps that was too much of a fuck-you to Hollywood standards of beauty and grooming for him ever to make it really big. Still, he kept getting work, and he was on an upward curve in 1973, when Slither and The Friends of Eddie Coyle were released.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an adaptation of one of George V. Higgins's crime novels, about a small-time Boston hood who makes money by selling guns to bank robbers and stays out of jail by snitching. Robert Mitchum played Eddie: he looks worn out and ripe for a fall, and it's a shame that he gets stuck with some lengthy speeches about the hardships of the criminal life — they feel like a clumsy lunge at significance by a director who doesn't have enough faith in plot, action and actors. (That's Peter Yates, by the way: if you ask me, it's the same problem that afflicts Bullitt, where poor old Jacqueline Bisset gets stuck with some very dreary stuff about the brutalizing effect of Steve McQueen's police work.) Boyle has better luck with his part: he's Dillon, a barman in the bar Coyle likes to visit — ordinary looking, but quite early on we learn that he's snitching to the same Treasury agent as Coyle, whining about his money problems and how much he needs the puny twenty bucks the Treasury guy pays him every week. Turns out he's a hitman, though, at five grand a pop (the still above shows him negotiating his terms of payment). Like Coyle, Dillon's trying to play off both sides; but he's a lot better at it.

Boyle plays Dillon as a man without much of a personality, just a series of masks and ploys. There's nothing remotely romantic about his hitman — no samurai professionalism, no existential relationship with death, not even a particularly impressive fee structure. It could easily have been a turn — it could have been his Popeye Doyle; instead, he tries hard to make him real.

Slither was a change of pace, though it's still about crime and still about losers. James Caan, fresh out of jail, is given the secret of "unimaginable" wealth by a friend who's just been gut-shot and is about to blow himself up with some sticks of dynamite. To get the money, he has to find a man called Barry Fenaka, who turns out to be a danceband leader with a strong line in tacky comic patter and an enthusiasm for "recvees" (recreational vehicles). There are echoes of North by Northwest, but with the glamour and suspense all sanded away — Cary Grant gets trapped by the bad guys at an art auction; the same thing happens to James Caan at a trailer-park bingo game. And the language, with its calculated banalities and characters becoming obsessed with certain words, put me in mind of Charles Portis (The Dog of the South, not True Grit). It's a slow film, amusing rather than funny, aiming for puzzlement more than suspense. Caan has to carry it, but Boyle supplies most of the comic energy; and he wears what must be one of the most heroically self-sacrificing combovers in film history:

Great love hath no man than this: that he has really shitty hair for the sake of the movie. But shitty hair will never make you a star.

 Author's note: Just re-read this; it doesn't work. Will re-write later. Come back and have another look in a few days.

What I did in the holidays

Being a complete list of all the secondhand books I bought during my summer holiday in Norfolk, with my "reasons" for buying them:

The Pattern of English by G. H. Vallins Pelican 1957
“The developments in the construction of the English prose sentence from the earliest times to the present day.” I’m unsure now why I thought this was worth buying, except to make up the numbers on a five-for-a-pound deal at a village fête.

Hear us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place by Malcolm Lowry Penguin 1969
The cover has an attractive woodcut by George Tute; I like inscriptions: this one has the owner’s name, N. Ingpen, and the enigmatic note “(W.T.C. October 1970)”.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine, ed. with introduction by Isaac Kramnick Penguin American Library 1982
Nice cover: the Bennington Flag of 1776. You can’t have too many copies of Common Sense, and I only have two.

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Panther 1979
I’m writing about Hughes for the LRB, and needed a reading copy. This is an ugly commercial paperback; the main feature of interest is the jacket copy, which consists mainly of endorsements from Hugh Walpole, Cyril Connolly and Arnold Bennett - who, in 1979, gave a fig for their opinions?

Mario and the Magician and Other Stories  by Thomas Mann Penguin Modern Classics 1975
Cover badly creased but I wanted the opening story, “A Man and His Dog”, because I’m working with Tim Dee on a series for BBC Radio 4 about dogs in literature and life, to be broadcast late next year.

The Friendly Dog: An Anthology ed. J. Parson Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1912
See above

Penguin: Pighead

Back from a few days in Norfolk, walking the whippet and getting some bits of reading done. This book was in the shop in Holt which I still think of as Gough's, though it has been Simon Finch's for years now.

I have practically zero interest in totemism (though the book is cited by John Berger in Why Look at Animals?): no, this was a purely physical thing. John McConnell's designs for Penguin University Books are always attractive, with the studied utility of the typewriter face and the black background. This one is particularly fine, with the bold yellow line and unobtrusive symmetries (the head is centred on the page; the yellow line runs up to the centre of the lettering). It puts me in mind of the pig's head on a stick in Lord of the Flies, and may have been meant to.

Book published as a Pelican in 1969, reissued in this format in 1973. I paid a fiver; seven or eight quid is standard.