The Frankfurt Book Fair is one of the highlights of year to me, but it is extremely exhausting. You could wipe the floor with me right now, and there's still one more day to go.
On to the narrative. Before getting to some of the books I browsed through, here's my literary celebrity anecdote of the week. One of the most famous specimens we have of those is Harry Rowohlt, who is most famous for, in no particular order, a) being a great translator (English-German, and there isn't a tricky pun he can't master), b) doing great readings for which the bookstore owners and publishers need to have enough beer ready (he supposedly gets through the occasional sixpack per evening), and c) being a male chauvinist of the first degree. For some reason or the other, I had never heard him read before, which is the equivalent of never having been to a Springsteen concert when you're into 80s rock'n roll, so to speak, and thus I was resolved to remedy this lack and go to a reading. Of which he did several: he has the translation of Mark Twain's memoirs
and of an essay and short story collection by Kurt Vonnegut out. I'd have gone for the Twain, but it took place simultanously with another obligation, and thus I ended up at the Vonnegut.
Now Harry Rowohlt as a reader is as good as advertised - deep narrative voice like a Hamburg foghorn, terrific individual character voices, and with his white beard and hungover face, he looks like a legendary seaman looking for his albatros, too. Being as good as advertised is a must to put up with him, though, as the male chauvinism isn't exaggarated, either. A female publisher friend of mine told me that her company once wanted him to translate something by a female writer, and back came the commissioning letter (these were the days before the internet, young padawans) as a fax with his handwriting on it saying "I don't translate women".
Anyway. Since he knew the late Kurt Vonnegut, has been translating him since decades, he was asked about anecdotes and what they talked about. Says H.R.: "Rarely something serious. When we were on the reading tour together, he was mostly busy hitting on the woman from Hanser" - their German publisher - "who'd been seconded to take care of us. She came across as somewhat shy and embarrassed because he was so much older than she was, and he said: 'Don't worry, the oldest woman I ever had sex with is my wife.'"
Said my female publisher pal that a lot of literary giants from abroad behave like this. She once had to babysit an author who wanted her to pick him up at his hotel room, and when she did, his bed was unmade and he said to: "Serious work took place here", pointing to the bed. When a (male, gay) editor friend of us heard this, he smugly commented that luckily this is a problem he never would have to face when babysitting foreign authors. "Not necessarily," I replied. "What would you have done if it had been Gore Vidal?" "I'd have said, You're too old for me, Mr. Vidal," he returned.
On a brighter note, today there was a truly gigantic cosplay competition, for which Richard Taylor of Weta and Lord of The Rings making off specials fame was the judge, and winners got a ticket to New Zealand and five days in Wellington with set visits. There was some adorable and very elaborate stuff, but the uncontested funniest was a couple of villains (Uruk-hai, Mouth of Sauron, Witch King, Nazgul) in search of a new theme song. By the time an Uruk-hai danced to the tune of Michael Jackson's "Bad", we were all in stitches. Also very funny was a group of hobbits and one Legolas who enacted a scene where Legolas takes Sam's wish to be like an elf literally and starts to coach the hobbits to move like elves, which turns into a funny desaster. Incidentally, the majority of cosplayers were female. We were all left cheering, much entertained and realy anticapatory for the filmed
Hobbit. (The moderator joked that Leonard Nimoy's unforgotten face palm hymn, "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins", would clearly make Nimoy belatedly the next Enya.)
And now for notes on some of the books I browsed through:
A short but creepy and intense novella by an Argentine author, titled "Wakolda", in which the German middle aged doctor developing an interest in an Argentine family with newborn twins and a twelve years old older daughter turns out to be Mengele. Mengele has been fictionalized before, memorably as a Hitler cloning ghoul in Ira Levin's "The Boys from Brazil" and only thinly, somewhere between fiction and faction, in Peter Schneider's novella "Vati" which was based on Schneider's interviews with Rolf Mengele, the son. And he's become proverbial for evil scientists. Whenever one shows up in sci fi, you can bet reviews will call him "a space Mengele" sooner or later. "Wakolda" isn't a thriller like "The Boys from Brazil", but it is very suspenseful because the readers know what Lilith, the twelve years old, and her family are unaware of, and as mentioned incredibly creepy - the author actually dares and pulls off a Mengela pov at times (the other times we're in Lilith's), and the chilling sense of dissociation, of not clinical craziness but the insanity of racism coupled with pseudo science when he contemplates skull forms and the degree of "degeneracy", and the implication of scenes as when Lilith says about her old doll she once tore off a limb and sewed it on again to know what it would be like and what the doll was made of, and "José" benignly thinks he entirely understands, is throat-constricting. Just the right length, too, because it's a novella, not a novel: spending any longer time in that mind would have felt unbearable to me.
Hunter Davies (editor): The John Lennon Letters. The good news is that the book offers both scans of the original documents and transcriptions, which since John's scribblings often came with little cartoons is a great advantage. The bad news is that very little of the collection is new. Of course, this only applies to nutters like me. If you only ever read one Beatles biography and/or one Lennon biography in your life, or none at all, then this will be all new to you, and it does illustrate various aspects of John's character very well: the love of puns, the wit, the ability to be very moving, or compassionate, but also the capacity for vicious over the top outbursts if he was in demolishing mode, and incredible paranoia. But as I said: if, like yours truly, you have already plugged your way through various people's memoirs and biographies, then the letters, post cards and even shopping lists (I'll get to that) will be familiar, and the only advantage is to have them all in one volume.
One reason for the relative lack of new material is that Hunter Davies seems to have gotten much of it not from the recipients but because a lot of it had been auctioned off and thus been scanned, photographed and otherwise put in the public domain. Or published in very limited editions, like John's postcards to Derek Taylor from the mid 70s which were previously available only in Taylor's hidiously expensive privately printed memoirs. (Since one of said postcards is the one - previously quoted but not shown in books like Peter Doggett's - that offers first hand proof John was indeed towards the end of his "Lost Weekend" toying with the idea of a Lennon/McCartney reunion in New Orleans, this was a kick for me.)
The copyright holder for all of this material is still Yoko, which brings me to another ambiguous point: the editing policy. Davies provides some linking texts but those are by and large disappointingly superficial. This becomes particularly grating where the choice of material to be included is only understandable if you're firm on your Lennon related literature, as is the case with the earlier mentioned shopping lists. Who aren't of any earthly interest - they're shopping list's, for God's sake! - and a casual reader must wonder why the hell they're included, except to provide some material for the later part of the 70s, and wonder whether there isn't anything else available. Well, the only bit in those lists that isn't about listing various items to be purchased by John's personal assistant, Fred Seaman, is a scribbled question whether Fred has stolen and sold John's boots as memorabilia. Why is
this relevant? Because Fred Seaman was among the disgruntled Lennon-Ono employees to write a book, "The Last Days of John Lennon"; not available in print because writing it went against the original contract with the Lennon-Onos he had signed; Yoko also successfully sued him for theft of various items. Additionally to presenting himself as John's only confidant in said book, Seaman was one of Albert Goldman's main sources for the description of later 70s John as a half crazed junkie hermit and the John/Yoko marriage on the brink of divorce when he died. The only thing about all of this which Hunter Davies mentions is that a footnote that Fred did turn out to be a thief. Which works just on the opposite way it was presumably intended. I mean, I'm all for demonstrating that as opposed to being John's bff, Fred Seaman was an already distrusted employe, but this could be accomplished via quoting just the "did you sell my boots?" remark in an explainatory text instead of asking me to see John's shopping lists as valuable contributions in a letter collection, and then not even bothering to explain the point here is a counter narrative to Seaman's descriptions of John and Yoko.
To present actually interesting texts from the later 70s to match the earlier ones would be even better. But alas. The interesting texts end around 76ish. During the 18 Lost Weekend months and in the one, two years afterwards John had intensified and in some cases resumed contact with various family members in England - his older son, sisters, cousins, aunts etc., before it started to slacken again. And here, again, I can see why some of the letters are included because of the background knowledge, but Davies doesn't provide it in his editing notes, which simply inform us that after his reunion with Yoko and the birth of Sean in 1975, John lived a happily ever after for the final five years of his life.
Now, both Cynthia Lennon in her second book of memoirs, Julian Lennon in various interviews, John's sister Julia Baird (in her second book) and his cousin Stanly in interviews with various Lennon biographers all have painted a negative picture of Yoko Ono and quite often accused her of intercepting phone calls between various family members, including Julian, and John.
The John Lennon Letters includes (as one of the few genuinenly new items) two or three letters by John to his cousin Liela who apparantly took him to task for his neglect of his older son; in reply, he accuses Cynthia, his ex wife, of preventing Julian to call him as often as Julian used to do during the Lost Weekend, of influencing Julian against him and of doing all of his to punish him for going back to Yoko because she wants him back herself. There are also some remarks about both Julian and other family members only contacting him when they want money from him.
Again: if you're aware of the larger context (i.e. the years of feuding between Yoko and various family members,
John's claim to Feminisism being made questionable by being the worst divorce seeking and then ex husband this side of Charles Dickens and his hugely and acknowledged by him as such relationship with his older son), this comes across as a defensive move, to show other versions of the tale than the ones given by the Stanley clan and Cynthia. But Davies provides no such context.
(Footnote: mind you, even knowing the context John logic strikes me as, err, special. I have no doubt that teenage Julian sometimes wanted money from his multimillionaire father from across the Atlantic. Or that the cousins and sisters weren't quite the purely motivated by love innocents who were kept separate from John by his evil second wife as they present themselves; again, he WAS a millionaire, they were not, and the sad truth is that from Ringo and Paul, both of whom got and get on well with their family, you have stories about how even family relationships irrevocably change once you're the embodied trust fund fpr everyone. But when it comes to the who neglected/did not contact whom side of things about his son and ex wife re phone conversations with Julian, Cynthia has John's mistress May Pang to back her up about the fact it was John who had to be pushed and reminded into them, Cynthia who was eager to encourage contact between Julian and his father, and documented years of bending over backwards to oblige John as a defense against the idea she was using their son to punish him. (Another book I browsed through at the fair, Philip Norman's new Mick Jagger biography, includes a chilling little reminder of this courtesy of a story Chrissie Shrimpton tells, who was dating Mick for a while and thus once visited the Lennons with him. They were playing a board game called "Risk" when:
"Cynthia was winning, and John started getting so nasty that she just gave up the game and went to bed. I remember thinking, 'She is so much under his thumb that she doesn't even dare to win a silly game.'")
Ironically enough, earlier Cynthia and Julian related letters and postcards show John from a far more sympathetic side. The collection includes not just the early love letters he wrote her (again, this isn't new material if you're familiar with Cynthia's books) and a letter about Julian from 1965 when the Beatles were touring America) that shows him tender, concerned and painfully aware he's not good at fatherhood, but a mid-70s/Lost Weekend era letter to Cynthia where he's downright relaxed and even joking with her as one does with someone you've known since literally your school days instead of paranoidly convinced she's on the warpath to reclaim him. There are postcards to Julian through the early 70s showing that if he had, pre Lost Weekend stopped calling, he at least was still writing, and trying to show Julian he wasn't forgotten. The most surprising element there, and this Hunter Davies duly notes, is that one of the post cards includes two lines from the much later song "Beautiful Boy", hitherto always assumed to be exclusively a Sean inspired song.
Also surprising, in a good way: John patiently answering fan mail in the early Beatles days (and it is his handwriting, which is where the reprints come in well), even giving the fan in question who evidently had asked whether the Beatles had siblings, the correct information about his two younger sisters, Paul's brother, George's siblings and Ringo's only child status. It's the kind of letter you'd think John would have shoved on some of Brian's people's shoulders, but apparantly not or not in the early days.
Not surprising, because I had read it before, but still good to read as a counterpoint to some of the other stuff: John exercising a rare bit of self censorship in the late 60s when asking Hunter Davies, who back then was writing the official Beatles biography, to take out again some negative stuff he'd said about his late mother's partner John "Bobby" Dykins, the father his half sisters, so little Julia and Jackie, back then teenagers, wouldn't have to read it and/or get teased about it at school. To my mind, that's far more sympathetic than his famed general let-it-rip attitude. Ditto also concerned remarks and questions about Astrid Kirchherr for quite a while after Stuart died, showing John not making that death into something only
he was hurt by but seeing it as primarily Astrid's tragedy.
Most glaringly missing, unless my time pressed browsing at the fair made me overlook the pages in question: letters to Yoko (true, the eighteen months of the Lost Weekend aside they were always living together, but you'd think at least some of the correspendance from India in early 1968 when he was falling for her would have made the cut) and letters to Paul (or George; there are two or so post cards to Ringo) other than the public ones ostensibly adressed to Paul and Linda but sent not to them but the magazine Melody Maker as part of
the musical and media blood bath of 1971. ("Who was right, who was wrong?" our editor asks rethorically and diplomatically tells us nobody can say.) Davies said in an interview that Paul declared the John letters he has to be private, which is understandable but means said public feuding letters are the only ones with a focus on the Lennon/McCartney relationship on the entire volume, which is a pity.
In general: could have been better selected and edited, but is still worth purchasing if you're a fan and want the publically known letters all in one volume instead of dispersed in various other books. I'm not sure that if you're not interested at all in either John Lennon and/or the Beatles already, reading will give you much, though, which is a great contrast to some other collected letters editions I've read. For example those of the poet Ted Hughes; many of these work even for newbies to Hughes's oeuvre, or for that matter the Plath/Hughes saga. Not least because they're far more thematically diverse and longer; someone brings up Wilfred Owen, Hughes comes back with a mini essay about the impact of WWI on the English psyche in general and on his family (his father was a veteran) in particular. Things like that.
This book fair also offered a good contrast, and with a focus on the 60s, no less, though the writer is nearly a generation older than the Beatles: the Richard Burton diaries, previously extensively quoted in both Melvyn Bragg's Burton biography and in "Furious Love" (book about the Burton/Taylor marriage), but this is the first publication of the diaries themselves. As opposed to the Lennon letters, these are properly indexed and footnoted, with a good introduction not only providing biographical background but also pointing out to the reader that it's worth wondering for whom Burton wrote his journals. Not only because he was far too famous not to be aware of the likelihood of postumous publication but because he was type of actor who always not so secretely wishes he was a writer instead,
and because the diaries themselves prove that he showed them to Elizabeth Taylor on occasion, so they are part of their marital dialogue as well.
Those thwarted literary ambitions make Burton's journals from what I could see enjoyable to read. He has a talent for the mot juste (about co-star Genevieve Bujold:
"She has the acting power of a gnat. Of a dying gnat."), is a good storyteller with a feeling for set pieces (the ghastly tale of one evening where Rex Harrison's wife Rachel Roberts becomes so drunk and appalling that the Burtons, no mean drinkers themselves, are genuinenly shocked, is very Edward Albee esque, interested in the people he observes, doesn't spare himself with criticism and manages what many a fiction writer does not: make an established relationship (the main diaries start when he's already together with Elizabeth Taylor) feel no less sensual and intense than a falling-in-love one. He's in various mixtures funny, tender, horny and never boring when talking about and occasionally to her, and there is no impression of passion lessening as the years goes on; their problems were others. He's also writing about their children, hers and his, on a regular basis, showing that superstardom kept neither of them from being involved parents. In conclusion: must aquire once I get home.
Speaking of getting home: I know I owe dozens of answers, but I won't have the chance until the train journey back tomorrow in the late afternoon, and/or Monday. But I will catch up with lj and correspondance then!
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