The Lovers of Amherst by William Nicholson, book review: Parallel passion and poetry in New England, then and now

The afterlife of the secretive recluse still ripples across academic circles and the popular imagination, but it is surprising nonetheless to learn that it was only as recently as 1984 that details about the illicit love affair between Emily Dickinson’s brother and their Amherst neighbour was first brought to public attention in Polly Longsworth’s sympathetic study, Austin and Mabel. More recently, Lyndall Gordon’s 2010 revisionist biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns, explored the facts in exhaustive detail.

But fiction has a truthful purpose, too. William Nicholson’s scrupulously researched story throws fresh light on the extraordinary love affair between Austin Dickinson, 55, and 24-year-old Mabel Todd. We cannot know for sure what they shared in the privacy of Emily Dickinson’s dining room, where they often met, or what she saw and heard, or the effect on her poetry. By interspersing his narrative with snippets of extant correspondence, diary entries, and secret notes, drawn, mostly, from Longsworth and his own research in the Sterling Memorial Archives at Yale, alongside some of Emily Dickinson’s passionate poems, Nicholson creates a solid historical base from which he imaginatively recreates the time period and personalities involved. Moreover, the physical act of researching “the very notes they sent each other with such secrecy” is an integral part of the story, adding an air of factual realism from which he speculates as plausibly as a biographer.

Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) arrived in Amherst in 1881 with her husband, David, the new director of Amherst College Observatory. Entering into Amherst society, she first struck up a friendship with Susan, Austin’s wife, and then entertained the Dickinson household next door. By then, the “Homestead” was occupied by Austin’s sisters, Emily and Lavinia (Vinnie), and their invalid mother. Although Mabel never met Emily (she’d listen at the top of the stairs while she played piano and sang), they communicated through notes and gifts.

Running parallel to the story of Austin and Mabel is the modern-day story of Alice Dickinson (no relation) who arrives in New England to undertake background research for her screenplay about their affair. Through her lover-turned-friend, Jack Broad, Alice gets in touch with Nick Crocker, a visiting professor (with a reputation), and she accepts his offer of temporary accommodation. Alice, Jack, and Nick pull us back to previous books in Nicholson’s interconnected series: in The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (2009) Nick has an affair with Laura Kinross (Broad), while in All the Hopeful Lovers (2010) Laura’s son, Jack, is put together with Alice through Facebook in much the same way that his response to her Facebook request for information about Emily Dickinson sends her to Nick’s door.

Rowing in Eden –

Ah, the sea!

Might I but moor tonight

In thee!

As she becomes caught up in her own affair, Alice reflects on romantic love and passion, and ponders the “I” in Dickinson’s poems, and the poet’s relationship to Mabel. “Something true and powerful is at work here. What if it’s something bigger than love? What is there that’s bigger than love?” In New England for just two weeks, her attachment to Nick is perhaps too quickly established, but it’s a necessary part of the storyline.

Emily Dickinson intrudes into the narrative: “Stand at the top of the stairs. Look down into the dark hallway below. She’s there with him, the one he loves, the one I need. A door opens. The rustle of a dress as a half-glimpsed woman passes quickly down the passage, and out of the back door.”

While fictional stage directions are a reminder of the writer of Shadowlands lurking in the background, something deeper is afoot. Alice’s problem (aside from tackling her first screenplay) is how to find a way into a story she doesn’t fully understand. With Nick, she discusses the process of storytelling; how to frame her fiction, and whether she needs to care about Mabel. The Lovers of Amherst is a rich writers’ resource.

Without Mabel Todd, we may never have known the extent of Dickinson’s creativity. It was Mabel who undertook the task of preserving the letters and poems that survive, bringing order to the 1,800 poems, and pushing forward to publication. Nicholson’s story continues on after the deaths of Emily and Austin to explore the motivations behind Mabel’s efforts. His greatest achievement, though, in The Lovers of Amherst, is to compel us to approach Emily Dickinson’s poetry with fresh eyes.

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me –

The simple News that Nature told –

With tender Majesty –

View the original article here

This week in books: Richard Flanagan, Stephen King, William Boyd on Bond

Stephen King at his home in Maine, US. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Guardian

Why do male authors still dominate our book reviews pages? This week, the Stella Count was released – Australia's equivalent of the US's highly publicised VIDA results. The statistics, revealing how many books by men and women were reviewed in our major newspapers and literary magazines, highlight a striking disproportion, and you can read my analysis of the disparity in the results here.

A fascinating examination of the history of publishing innovations consders how entrepreneurs such as Penguin founder Allen Lane would have reveled in the opportunities of the digital revolution. “Lane's brainwave was the biggest single book innovation of the 20th century, and in its day the equal of the ebook. For a while, his idea dominated the market. Households across Britain began sprouting those colour-coded spines. A format that at the outset seemed to threaten vested interests became an object of veneration.” Read Robert McCrumb on what Allen Lane would have made of Amazon.

"After writing a novel what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots and so on. I'd much rather listen always." In a beautiful interview, Richard Flanagan talks to Michael Williams over dinner, discussing his relationship with his father through his new work, his discomfort with the literary establishment, and his new novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which the figure of Weary Dunlop looms large over the book. "Dunlop is too extraordinary a character for fiction. God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions," he says.

William Boyd climbs into the interviewer's chair – and back in time – this week as he interrogates the subject of his latest book, Solo, secret agent 007, James Bond. "It was strange being back in Chelsea in 1969, the year of the moon-landing, the year of my first summer in London. Stranger still to be going to interview James Bond," he writes as he walks us through London to Bond's flat. "The door was opened by a rather severe-looking young woman with her brown hair styled in a schoolmarm's sexless bob. I introduced myself and said I had an appointment to interview Mr Bond for the Guardian newspaper. 'I'm afraid we don't take the Guardian, here,' the young woman said in a strong Scottish accent. I said I would make sure a copy reached Mr Bond, somehow."

In our Guardian Books Podcast we’re joined this week by Pulitzer-winning Jhumpa Lahiri who talks about her collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, her favourite short story authors and the challenge of writing from the male perspective. This week was Banned Books Week so we asked readers to send us a photo of their favourite censored books. View our gallery of readers’ favourite banned titles from JD Salinger to Henry Miller.

A book whose “deepest shiverings depend on no made-up devils,” Stephen King’s anticipated new work Doctor Sleep is a sequel to one of his most disturbing novels, The Shining. It follows Dan Torrance, the little boy from the first novel, now grown up. Stephen Poole reviews the latest book from an author who has “grudgingly been admitted by lit-crit folk into the ranks of ‘actually good writers’ as opposed to mere megaselling dimestore artists.” (And if you missed the Guardian's interview with King, you can catch up here)

“The race is now on to write the Worst. Book. Ever. And this may be it.” Lucy Ellmann skewers Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland, a work with a “total immersion in the banality it purports to expose.” It may be a critique of mass culture, “but if this book is satirical, it hides it well. An ironic hamburger is still (usually) a hamburger.”

In a similarly “good bad review” in our non-fiction section, Geoff Dyer applies his biting tongue to The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong by Guido Mina di Sospiro: the story of a man's deepening love of ping-pong with philosophical ruminations about the nature of the game. “And remember the match-winning point of the book: what we discover about spin in ping-pong can be found in 'other fields too'. Not in Mina di Sospiro's writing though. His prose is so lacking in spin and bounce the half-awake reader can see where a sentence is headed before it's left the author's pen.”

View the original article here

Review-a-Day for Fri, Jul 29: The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by Steve Wick A review by Richard J. Evans

William L. Shirer, born in 1904, was one of the twentieth century's great reporters. He witnessed many of the key events of the 1930s in Europe at first hand and wrote and broadcast about them in a graphic and accessible style, making their complexities comprehensible to his readers and listeners back in the United States. He saw the Nuremberg rally of the Nazi Party in 1934, Hitler's announcement of the German march into the Rhineland in 1936, the German takeover of Austria in 1938, and the invasion of Poland in September, 1939. He was with the German armies as they conquered France in 1940. In between, he reported on Nazi rule in Germany, and was one of the first foreigners to discover the Nazis' mass murder of more than a hundred thousand mentally ill and handicapped Germans in the gas chambers set up in mental hospitals by teams whose expertise was later used in the extermination camps to kill far larger numbers of Jews.

Shirer was shocked and disgusted by the Nazis -- by their aggression, their hysteria, and above all their anti-Semitism. He did what he could behind the scenes to help Jews, at one point renting an apartment in Berlin whose Jewish owners had fled the country, and wiring the rent to them despite the illegality of such actions. Shirer did not disguise his hatred of the regime. As a neutral American, he could stay on in Germany after the outbreak of war in Europe, but the Gestapo became increasingly suspicious of his endless ferreting around for real news -- and of his steadfast refusal to become a tool of Nazi propaganda by just seeing what the government and its agencies wanted him to see. Thus in September 1940 he left.

Shirer's reporting was not always congenial to his bosses in America, and in this book Steve Wick makes excellent use of Shirer's letters and papers to chronicle his often fraught relationships with them. Shirer was fired successively by the Chicago Tribune and the Hearst Universal News service before finding a longer-term job at CBS news; after the war, he was forced out of CBS too, a liberal victim of McCarthyism. Deprived of his living as a reporter, he turned to writing books, succeeding triumphantly with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, his best-selling history of Nazi Germany, which sold a million copies in hardback and is still the most widely read book on the subject.

Yet his effort was heavily criticized at the time by experts on Nazi Germany, and rightly so. Its main strength -- Shirer's closeness to the events that he was describing -- was also its main weakness. It focused too heavily on political and military history and paid too little attention to other aspects of the history of the Third Reich. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was not abreast of academic research even when it was published in the 1960s, and it is hopelessly out of date now. For all his critical acumen, Shirer seems in the end to have been taken in by Nazi propaganda that portrayed the regime as the fulfillment of long-held German dreams. He mixed with Nazi bigwigs to get information, but he did not make any effort to contact representatives -- inside or outside Germany -- of the millions of people, notably in the working-class districts of Germany's great cities and the industrial areas of the Ruhr, who disliked most of what Hitler was doing and had vehemently opposed the Nazis before they came to power. Of course, it would have been very dangerous to have done this, but others (notably the British consul in Hamburg) did so; and because of his skewed sources of information, Shirer rushed to sweeping conclusions about 'the German character' that were embarrassing to read even in the 1960s, let alone today.

These cliches are present even in the Berlin Diary, which Shirer published at the end of the war. But it is a far better book than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, owing to its greater immediacy. A genuine diary, it reported at the time much of what Shirer was unable to reveal publicly about life in Nazi Germany. The story of how he smuggled it out of Germany -- in the bottom of a valise, underneath officially stamped documents, after convincing the Gestapo to give the valise a seal of approval so it would not be opened by customs officials -- is one of the best and most exciting that Wick tells. A seasoned journalist, Wick knows how to tell a good story, and for long stretches his book reads like a novel. This is not, as he admits, an academic work of history, but still a good deal of careful research has gone into it, and the book has much of interest to say about the life of a foreign correspondent in the war-torn Europe of the 1930s and early 1940s.

But even journalists have to get their facts right, and it is a pity that Wick has not taken more trouble to read up on the historical background of the times he is writing about. His book is full of errors. Wick thinks that the hyperinflation that hit Germany in 1923 continued afterwards and led to a huge increase in the membership of the Nazi Party (it did not, and the Nazi Party virtually collapsed between 1923 and 1927); he misdates the April 7, 1933 law banning Jews from the civil service to a year later; he thinks the concentration camps were 'teeming' with opponents of the Nazis in the mid-1930s, whereas they held fewer than four thousand of them (at that time it was the state prisons that were used for repression); he does not seem to know that Martha Dodd, daughter of the American ambassador in Berlin, was a Soviet agent whose many affairs, including -- apparently -- one with the head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels (misidentified in the book), may well have served a political purpose; nor is he aware of the fact that only Jewish men were arrested in the Kristalnacht pogrom of 1938. He also repeats the myth that Polish cavalry charged German tanks during the invasion of 1939.

All this is a pity, because as an account of Shirer's life and work in Germany this is an excellent book. Yet it cannot be used as a guide to the times Shirer lived through. Wick has missed the opportunity to assess the accuracy of Shirer's reporting. He is too uncritical of Shirer's cliche-ridden opinions on the Germans. And while one can understand why he confined himself to writing just about Shirer as a foreign correspondent, his very cursory treatment of the McCarthy years and Shirer's life as an author leaves the reader unsatisfied. The reader may end up crying out for the full biography that this great American journalist deserves.

Richard J. Evans is Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at War.

Since 1914, The New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American culture and politics. At TNR, books, art, film, architecture, theater, dance, and poetry all invite the reader to indulge in the highest levels of aesthetic experience. Subscribe to TNR today for access to literary reviews, pop-culture essays, and nearly a century of writing from the best minds in culture and the arts. Powell's Books customers can save 70% off the newsstand price!

View the original article here

WHAT THERE IS TO SAY WE HAVE SAID: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell

Subscribe to Washington Post Book Reviews newsletter

Washington Post book reviewers

May 25, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Suzanne Marrs
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0547376493
499 pages
$35

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.

Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. Are there two more beloved figures in American literature of the second half of the 20th century? Folks in Jackson, Miss., still talk about Miss Welty in the way that people in Charlottesville, Va., have been known to refer to Mr. Jefferson. Shortly after Maxwell died in 2000, just a few of the admirers of this longtime New Yorker editor brought out a volume of "Memories and Appreciations." Contributors included such eminent fiction writers as John Updike, Donna Tartt, Alice Munro, Charles Baxter and Shirley Hazzard, as well as such comparably distinguished poets as Edward Hirsch, Anthony Hecht, Ellen Bryant Voigt and Michael Collier.

Welty first started corresponding with Maxwell in 1942 when she was 33 and he 34. She'd already published "A Curtain of Green" (1941), her first collection of stories, and novella "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942). Amazingly, at that time the New Yorker regularly rejected the work she submitted, and it wasn't until 1951 that Maxwell was able to persuade his masters to accept "The Bride of the Innisfallen." The next year the magazine took "Kin" and "No Place for You, My Love." (They would have been blind fools not to.) Yet from the beginning, this was more than just a professional correspondence. Maxwell not only worked with writers, he made them his friends, almost members of his family.

For Welty was, by no means, his only pen pal. According to the introduction to "The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell" -- a wonderful volume, by the way -- Maxwell also wrote regularly to John Cheever, Updike, J.D. Salinger, Frank O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Mary McCarthy, James Thurber and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. How he found the time is a mystery, since all his letters make clear that his wife, Emmy, and their two daughters were the axes of his life, along with his garden, the growing of roses and his favorite kind of reading: other people's letters. Somehow, though, he also managed to work on his own writing. "They Came Like Swallows," (1937), "The Folded Leaf" (1945) and "Time Will Darken It" (1948) transformed memories of a Midwestern childhood and family unhappiness into bittersweet works of art. While these novels were deeply admired, only his last, "So Long, See You Tomorrow" (1980), which won the William Dean Howells Medal, garnered the acclaim they all deserved. Today Maxwell's novels and short stories are, like Welty's, represented by two volumes in the Library of America.

Most letters between writers are largely given over to envy, spite, wisecracks, discussions of money, the short-sightedness of award committees, soured love affairs and the innumerable horrors of the literary life. Readers looking for such gossip will be disappointed by "What There Is to Say We Have Said." Welty never refers to her intimate relationship with Kenneth Millar (better known as detective novelist Ross Macdonald), nor does Maxwell tattle about his famous colleagues at the New Yorker. Instead, the two writers talk about family happiness and tragedy; they trade rose cuttings and books, describe their Christmas decorations. Throughout, they show to each other -- and to seemingly everyone they meet -- a gentle courtesy, a generosity of spirit, a love for people that is as strong as their love for literature. As Maxwell says at the close of one letter: "Well it's wonderful to be alive. Wonderful to be a writer. Wonderful to grow roses. Wonderful to care. Isn't it?"

Of course, Maxwell seems to lead a charmed life, full of long holidays and civilized pleasures: "We are having a lovely January, reading our Christmas books (V. Woolf's Journals, Berenson's Renaissance Art), having our ice skates sharpened, enjoying 10 inches of snow & collecting concert and theatre tickets in our bureau drawer against February torpor. This afternoon we are going to see the new wing at the Metropolitan." At times, Welty's might be the life of any genteel Southern spinster: "It's been 95 and 96 the last couple of weeks, regular courtroom weather, Edna Earle would say. Figs look hopeful this year, after none for the last two, and just the thought of a bowl of cold ripe ones with cream on them for breakfast is worth all the rest of July to the undersigned. I wish I could see you some. ... Now and then a few of us go up to a little country hotel and sit on the upstairs porch and rock awhile quietly, having drinks in the shade and country stillness, or we sit in the dark in somebody's Jackson porch to talk & play records."

When the pair do comment on their vocation, it's always worth paying attention. Maxwell describes writing as "moving sentences here and there, and getting effects and making the imaginary reader smile," then later defines the novel as "a long piece of prose narrative with the breath of life in it." Welty confesses, "As you know, I generally work at more removes or with more disguises from my own life than I did in this story." She nearly sinks a short novel with the dreadful title "The Flickering Light of Vision," but Maxwell persuades her to go with "The Optimist's Daughter." Later on, she bucks him up: "I wish you wouldn't have any fears about the stories, but as one of the same kind of sufferers over my own I understand -- that sudden dropping away of all confidence in any given sentence that looks you in the face." Both can be quietly funny. When Welty receives an unexpectedly large check from the New Yorker, she says, "Heavens! Heavens, I'm going to have the outsides of my upstairs windows washed by the Jackson House-Cleaning Service, 12 men on ladders! Thanks." On a trip down the Nile, Maxwell writes, "I feel I am in the land of Sunday School cards."

In her excellent introduction to "What There Is to Say We Have Said," editor Suzanne Marrs quotes Welty on the vivid intimacy, the "personal truth of a human being" that can be found in letters: "What we've been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago." Just so -- and what William Maxwell says of Eudora Welty's writing might also be said of this very book:

"I go about reading aloud to people, and what I read aloud ... is the passage (in the essay "Words into Fiction") about your being taken as a child to see Mammoth Cave. If I had to choose between it, and Plato's allegory, I would choose it, though I am fond indeed of the allegory. But this is the way all writing ought to be, a marvel, a joy, a joke, an experience in itself, something seen in an Easter egg, a treasure, I cannot tell you how you enriched me by writing it."

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Facebook Print

Keywords:

You are not logged in: Login | Register

View the original article here