Of his vast and star-studded clan the most endearing is gay Uncle
Posted in General on 26. Sep, 2010
Of his vast and star-studded clan, the most endearing is gay Uncle Eddie, on whom Evelyn Waugh based Miles Malpractice. Eddie’s death in a small, hot flat in Athens is one of this book’s many dazzling set-pieces.Half an Arch is also pervaded by a sense of time and place. His portrait of his impoverished, alcoholic parents is immensely moving. It’s only £60,000 each, at the end of the day, but that is enough, in 1976, to buy a house and no longer sponge off girlfriends.Gathorne-Hardy writes best when he drags his eyes away from his mishaps and looks with compassion and wisdom at the world around.
Endless descriptions of his poverty conclude at Sotheby’s, where he and the co-beneficiaries of his “bugger” uncle Bob’s estate watch a Michelangelo drawing and other works of art sell for £928,766.25. Highlights of that frustrated period include his mother’s discovery of a used French letter on the lawn – he’d been practising – and an unsuccessful visit to a Berlin brothel. Not until he meets Nell Dunn at a Wiltshire house party does our hero experience “the peace that passeth all understanding”.But the story that follows is far from calm, and the author’s money, or lack of it, introduces an enthralling, or maddening, subplot. A disturbed child, who burst into tears on seeing Botticelli’s Primavera, the author spent his early years wanting to be a nurse and threatening to wear women’s underclothes under his policeman’s uniform but later regales the reader with his guilt about not being homosexual.
And with his long struggle to lose his virginity. He has written a life of Bloomsbury-ite Gerald Brenan, a much-reprinted history of the British nanny, a book on public schools and 20 or more other quirky works.In this complex, speculative, semi-slapstick and sensual autobiography, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, now 71, strips himself naked and performs a danse macabre with his own and his family’s dirty linen Half an Arch is mainly about sex and sexual identity. Nick and Susy Lansing, married but doomed by their penury, drift and plot through their wealthy pals’ palazzi in search of a better deal. A luscious, worldly, sensuous read, surely the equal of its most obvious offspring – Tender Is the Night.
This is probably the best, certainly the most open, book ever written about fallen gentlefolk, the injustices of primogeniture and the sweat of being born on the edge of the aristocracy. His most recent, a biography of the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, is the basis of the film starring Liam Neeson. His first published work was an article in Time & Tide, “How to Go Mad”. Its author is an imperiously inspirational figure – handsome, popular, penniless, prolific and ever so slightly demented. But he’s always excellent company – bitchily honest, chatty and fun. CPGlimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (PUSHKIN PRESS £12 (328pp))Dating from 1922, Wharton’s unjustly neglected novel of US social climbers on the make in Italy supplies a missing link between (her close friend) Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald. Noting that the social responsibility of Shell and BP is regarded by Exxon Mobil as “wimpish hogwash”, Olins suggests that “if nobody bought fuel from Esso for one month, it would have a dramatic effect on policy.” CHDress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris (ABACUS £10.99 (257pp))Take pity on Sedaris’s family.
Willingly or not, they offer the bulk of the material for the wry and extremely funny memoir-cum-musings that have made him the wackier, wisecracking, gay younger brother of Garrison Keillor and Bill Bryson. He’s best when giving free reign to the absurd; worse when he allows adult self-consciousness to intrude. CHOn Brand by Wally Olins (THAMES & HUDSON £12.95 (256pp))Sloshing the No Logo brigade, Olins maintains: “The brand itself is neither good nor bad; it is how it is used that’s truly significant.” The brand guru writes with passion and honesty, but is he right in ascribing the continued success of Virgin despite its dire trains to Branson’s “high popular profile”? Surely, people who buy Virgin cosmetics do not associate them with trains Yet we have the power to affect brands. CHCollected Memoirs by Julian Maclaren-Ross (BLACK SPRING £8.95 (440pp))Skip the first 200 pages – an extended childhood memoir with the less-than-enticing title The Weeping and The Laughter – and plunge into Forties Soho with one of its finest chroniclers. Here’s Cyril Connolly turning down a Maugham story: “Good enough to be accepted by Horizon but not quite good enough for me to publish.” Dylan Thomas on his health: “They might try taking my liver out and scraping it again.” The poet Tambimuttu on the scrounge: “I’m a prince in my country and princes don’t carry money, you know.” The authentic 50- a-day breath of old Soho rises from these pages. Sex looms large; so do drink and obscenity (the C-word is “possibly from the Sanskrit for trench”) The quotes are great. John Updike: “Celebrity is a mask that eats the face.” Some entries are a bit dubious (were cocktails “a delicious source of mockery” for Evelyn Waugh?), and there are one or two errors: Oscar Wilde’s father was an eye surgeon, not “a fashionable dentist” To be fair, Bayley describes his book as “a misguided tour”.
In this epic, enthralling yarn, Sattin tells the story of early African adventurers, from the stoical Mungo Park to the protean Jean-Louis Burckhardt. Timbuktu was first reached in 1826, by Gordon Laing, who wrote that it “completely met my expectations” before being strangled. A more realistic account came from Ren?ailli?”mud houses surrounded by jaundiced sand”. CHA Dictionary of Idiocy by Stephen Bayley (GIBSON SQUARE £5.99 (196pp))Intriguing and surprising, this book is destined for the posher sort of loo.