extreme legibility

*Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson (Europa, 2008)

 

This is the third in JHP's series of comic novels about Gerald, an eccentric homosexual Englishman who has lived most of his adult life abroad, pursuing artistic and culinary fame.  I read the first book, Cooking with Fernet Branca, many years ago and remember it is as being quite clever and funny but tiresome.  Rancid Pansies (the title is an anagram of Princess Diana, whose ghost figures in the screwball plot) finds our hero now living in Tuscany (although his secluded villa has collapsed in a landslide) inventing new recipes featuring field mice and black ink, and writing an opera about Princes Diana.

Chapters written by Gerald in first person are cleverly alternated with emails written by Gerald's younger (and saner) boyfriend, an oceanographer, to an academic colleague.  These emails give a slightly more straightforward account of the action.

Gerald is a brilliantly entertaining narrator -- clever, funny, and delightfully deluded.  The book is very silly and very smart, a combination that seems better sustained and more engaging  here than in Cooking with Fernet Branca, where silliness seemed to predominate (if my memory serves, which it probably does not). 

JHP is a accomplished and talented writer, and I'd like to read one of his less incessantly comic novels, to see how his intelligence and talent inform a more serious work.

 

*The Firewalkers by Frank Cauldwell [Francis King] (John Murray, 1956)

 

Published as a memoir written by Frank Cauldwell, The Firewalkers is actually a novel written by Francis King.  I'm not sure why it was published in this manner -- perhaps because of the benign but overtly homosexual content?

Frank Cauldwell is a rather enigmatic and personality-free young English man living in Athens and supporting himself by giving "lessons" -- one assumes in English.  Although he lives with his wealthy  Greek friend Dino, who is somehow connected to the international diplomatic community in Athens, Frank spends most of his time at the home of General Theo Grecos, an elderly Greek man who had been a heroic flying ace in the first World War and is presently haplessly striving to establish himself as a celebrity in the artistic world, failing as fashion designer, composer, and assemblage artist.

Theo seems to be bisexual and lives apart from his glamorous and hectoring White Russian wife.  Also living in Theo's crumbling house, which is stuffed with junk and artifacts, is Herr Joquim Gotz, a brutally ugly young German man whose disfigurements (a hairlip and albinism) does not deter  him from relentlessly pursuing young Greek women.  The third occupant of Theo's house is Cecil, a young upper-class English homosexual who is drawn to the Mediterranean  in pursuit of Greek sailors.

This short amusing book -- a sort of Hellenic Christopher and his Kind -- loosely revolves around Theo's attempts to establish himself as a celebrated artist.  This pursuit of fame involves the four men with many many colorful characters and scenic excursions.  A delicate web of melancholy (and death) is deftly woven into this minor, but delightful and accomplished book.

The Attempt by John Hopkins (Viking Press, 1967)

All I Wanted was Company by John Hopkins (Arcadia Press Ltd., 1999)

 

 

Two beautifully written and extremely engaging and transporting books by a writer I increasingly admire the more I read him.

Both of these novels (they read like auto-fiction) feature the same rather stoic and affectless narrator who leads a solitary and frugal life in an undeveloped country.  The Attempt is set in Peru, with our narrator based in Lima but frequently traveling to the interior of the country.  All I Wanted was Company (I love this title) finds a similar character traveling to Morocco with a wealthy older woman, and then having a dispassionate but poignant affair with a charismatic Moroccan woman of Spanish and Jewish descent.

Like all great travel writers, Hopkins is a brilliant observer of landscapes, architecture, and people.  He recreates them all with a clear-sighted sympathy and appreciation that makes his books very pleasurable to experience, for one doesn't read them so much as one exists within them.

 

a link to John Hopkins obituary

 

*Dreadful: The Short Gay Life of John Horne Burns by David Margolick (Other Press, 2013)

 

While searching for other books by John Horne Burns (he only published 3) I came across this biography by David Margolick and bought it, as I thought it might be interesting to read.  It was.

John Horne Burns (JHB), whose first book, the wonderful The Gallery, was published to extraordinary acclaim and success in 1947, died at the age of 36 in 1953.  He was born in 1916 and grew up in and around Boston, one of the many children in an upper-middle class family.  He was educated at Andover and Harvard and then taught at Loomis, a prep school in Connectitcut.  JHB was brilliant, and very musical, but his intellectual and creative gifts estranged him from almost everyone.  He felt superior and made no attempt to hide this feeling: he was smug and mean and generally unliked. 

He spent the war censoring letters in North Africa and then in Naples, where he fell in love with Italy and Italians.  After the war he returned to the US and taught once again at Loomis, where he was miserable, published The Gallery to great acclaim, and then published his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, a satire of prep-school life obviously set at Loomis and skewering many of his colleagues there.  The book was unmercifully (and perhaps deservedly) savaged by critics, and JHB banished himself back to Italy, where he drank himself to death -- every evening in the bar of Hotel Excelsior -- in three short years.

Margolick does a wonderful job bringing this tricky and unsympathetic character to life.  He writes clearly and honestly (it seems) yet compassionately about Burns.  His story is truly tragic -- one wonders if he were able to live and love openly as a homosexual how different this sad and short life might have been.