Life is a memoir written by one of contemporary music’s great iconic figures, Keith Richards. It’s nearly 500 pages of extraordinary, crystalline recall crafted into a haunting, polyphonal narrative of many voices: while Richards’ voice is clear, crisp, and dominant, he occasionally lets others tell some of the story – his son, Marlon (named for Brando, yes); his long-time girlfriend and mother of three of his children, Anita Pallenberg; the ice Madonna of the Stones’ pieta, Marianne Faithfull; even that once-elfin model Kate Moss. But, even with the deft assistance of James Fox, a long-time “mate,” Life is a sustained solo. Actually, the memoir, like the life itself, is a high-wire act, an extended, sometimes blinding flash of performance art.

Life is a vivid chronicle of a working-class boy from Dartford, an industrial suburb of London, who would become lead guitarist and songwriter for one of the most successful bands ever. Devoted to music from an early age – he even slept with his first guitar beside him, this Dartford lad pursued his calling obsessively. As a schoolboy he met his future: Mick Jagger. From the 1960s on, they became the nucleus of the Rolling Stones; Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Ron Wood would be the more or less permanent other members of the group and rock ‘n roll history unfolded: in 1964, the year of the so-called “British Invasion” of the States, the Stones launched decades of wild music making laced with over-the-top behavior. And this now 68-year old rocker, who gave the world the likes of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Beggars’ Banquet,” “Sticky Fingers,” and “Exile on Main Street,” rocks on.

Life has its predictable – and perhaps ultimately repetitive and numbing elements – yes, there can be too many stories of women (“bitches,” “whores,” “chicks,” and “cunts”), though Richards would have us understand that he never merely consumed women, it had to be something more to motivate him. . . (right); and of drugs and police chases (the latter, in his own words, described as “busts and stray bullets and cars flying off the road’). The accounts of activity in both realms are often comic, at least superficially; but particularly beneath the latter lay a serious problem that landed him in jail (briefly and frequently) and in rehab (a half dozen extended stays before he kicked the habit for good). Keith Richards is a lucky bastard to be alive today.

Several unexpected elements make Life more than your run-of-the-mill aging druggie-rocker tell-all. First, Richards comes across as a serious musician, nearly as obsessed as Flaubert with getting the line (of music, that is) perfect. When he meditates a bit on his calling, he describes songwriting as an attempt “to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts.” Second, Richards’ deep and abiding sense of a base-line loyalty to his mates, observed almost without exception (yes, he did take Anita Pallenberg from his pal Brian Jones; and Marianne Faithfull from Mick) but these are rare and perhaps provoked episodes in the life. That Keith and Mick are no longer so close troubles Richards greatly. This former Boy Scout absorbed a life-long lesson in loyalty from Baden Powell’s boys. Third, and I think the most striking aspect of Life is Richards’ devotion to his family – it is no accident that the memoir virtually begins with an anecdote about his mother and literally ends with a crisp, if slyly comic, account of her death; for Keith Richards it is a mark of distinction to be a self-acknowledged “Mum’s Boy.” That devotion extends to Anita and their children as well as to his wife, Patti, and their two daughters.

Life is a valuable, irreplaceable, first-hand account of over fifty years of rock ‘n roll history, filled with insights about music making and music makers and told by one great high octane artist who emerges from these pages as endearing, if not lovable.

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One of seven children, and the last of six daughters, born to Lord and Lady Redesdale in 1920, Deborah Mitford (the Hon. Deborah Freeman-Mitford before her marriage), has written her memoirs, a veritable catalogue of eccentrics (don’t the English just specialize in nurturing outlandish characters who would be imprisoned or institutionalized in other countries ?) and a chronicle of twentieth-century life viewed from a posh perspective, if ever.  Lord Redesdale, described by his daughter as “impatient, intolerant, impulsive, loyal, courageous, loving, fastidious, unread, and possessed of great charm,” dominates the narrative of her early years; “I was my father’s favourite. . . we saw eye to eye about everything,” she writes.  Well, perhaps not everything:  he had read, he said, only one book in his life, Jack London’s White Fang, and found it so extraordinary that he never read another, fearing that nothing could measure up.  And speaking of measuring up, one wonders, despite the spin given to Deborah’s 60+ year marriage, if the stress and tensions that ramified throughout the course of that union were not in some measure due to the husband’s failure to meet the “standards” set by the father.  The portrait of Lady Redesdale seems to have been done with a revisionist brush; contrary to received opinion that she was vague, undemonstrative, and detached, her daughter presents her as assertive and loving, with an intuitive connection to each of her daughters.

The Mitford family

With scant education – some lessons from “Muv” (Mother), a little day schooling, and a couple of months at a curiously named London finishing school, the Monkey Club, Deborah was presented at Court, then married Lord Andrew Cavendish in 1941; because of the death of his older brother, the heir (married to JFK’s sister Kathleen), Andrew became the eleventh Duke of Devonshire.  The couple took possession of Chatsworth, the Devonshire seat in Derbyshire, a musty, crumbling pile of some two hundred ninety-seven rooms with hundreds of staff for the house and extensive grounds.  Chatsworth, by the way, was but one of seven properties in the Devonshire portfolio.  And so it began. . .

Deborah’s older sisters had already established themselves, after a fashion.  The oldest, Pamela, married and led what seem closest to an ordinary life, though that may need qualification:  she married Derek Jackson, described by Deborah as “vital, generous, courageous, bisexual, unfaithful, unpredictable, rich… rude.”  She goes on to say that “when she [Pamela] became pregnant he took her to the north of Norway and drove for miles over bumpy roads with the inevitable result of a miscarriage.”   Unity (“always the odd one out,” says her sister), fell madly in love with Hitler and, when Britain declared war on Germany, she shot herself in the head with a pearl-handled revolver in a Munich park, causing irreparable brain damage.  Diana, the great beauty of the family, had married Bryan Guinness, heir to the Irish brewing fortune and had two sons by him, only to have an affair with the already-married Sir Oswald Mosley, infamous leader of the British Fascist Party; both were imprisoned during World War II because of their outspoken politics laced with distasteful racist rant.  (Diana, was, as they say, a piece of work:  interviewed late in life, she refused to condemn Hitler, admitting that “he did have a sense of humor, you should have seen him mimic Mussolini,”).  Nancy, ever disappointed in love, turned her talents to writing, publishing several novels as well as acclaimed studies of Voltaire, Mme de Pompadour, and Louis XIV as well as an admired translation of Madame de LaFayette’s Princesse de Cleves. Twice Nancy took it upon herself to inform the English authorities that her sister Diana was a danger.  Jessica, after marriage to a cousin who died in the war, emigrated to the United States where she joined the Communist Party and became a journalist still remembered for her muckraking account of  the funeral industry, The American Way of Death. Tom, who would have succeeded his father as Lord Redesdale died in the war; like Diana and Unity, he was an ardent Fascist and admirer of Hitler.

Jessica, Nancy, Diana, Unity and Pamela Mitford in 1935

Thus, what you get in Wait for Me! is, from one perspective, a family story, the narrative of a rich and long life lived at the upper reaches of the English aristocracy.  The Duchess has been a confidante of the Queen for many, many years, and that has certainly given her access to the great and (perhaps) good – Harold Macmillan (“Uncle Harold,” by marriage), Prime Minister and Chancellor of the University of Oxford; Winston Churchill; the Kennedys (old Joe and Rose as well as the girls and boys of the clan); LBJ and Lady Bird; Prince Charles and Camilla.   The list goes on and on – but it’s never name-dropping, just part of the life.

Eccentrics abound, among them:

Evelyn Waugh:

The phenomenal amount of drink that the writer downed made him tricky company and, as I was still shocked by drunkenness, I kept my distance.  One night he poured a bottle of Green Chartreuse over his head and, rubbing it into his hair, intoned, ‘My hair is covered in gum, my hair is covered with gum,’ as the sticky mess ran down his neck.

Dame Edith Sitwell:

On another occasion when we lunch at Renishaw [the Sitwells’ house], she wore a feather hat and long fur coat that she never unbuttoned.  She told me that the chief things she remembered her mother saying were, ‘We must remember to order enough quails for the dance,’ and ‘If only I could get your father put into a lunatic asylum.’

Sir Edwin Marsh:

For exercise, Eddie tossed a pack of playing cards on the floor and picked them up one-by-one.

Some of what appears in Wait for Me! may raise the hackles of democratically-inclined American readers who have little patience with some of the quirks of the English aristocracy.  One of the most irritating, perhaps, is that of giving everyone in the group a nickname and using it consistently:  Deborah refers to her parents as “Farve” and “Muv,” never “Father” and “Mother”; to her son, Peregrine as “Stoker”; and she gives us the names assigned to all her siblings as well, including her own, given by Nancy to reflect her estimate of Deborah’s intellectual development in chronological terms:  “Nine.”  (The late Queen Mother was known as “Cake” and the Prince of Wales as “Friend.”)  Perhaps even more irritating are the sheer excesses of the aristocratic lifestyle: the endless rounds of parties, balls, hunts; the palatial houses: life lived well over the top.  In 2009 “Stoker,” the present Duke of Devonshire gave a party for nine hundred ten guests at Chatsworth.

The woman who emerges from this memoir is both remarkable and complex, off putting and endearing, irritating and admirable.  Remarkable, given that her birth was largely ignored and she knew it:  as she notes, “my parents’ dearest wish was for a big family of boys; a sixth girl was not worth recording. . .no one, except Nanny, looked at me till I was three months old and then were not especially pleased by what they saw.”  An inauspicious, if not damaging, beginning for one who has achieved a good deal – marriage, children, the efficient overhaul of a grand estate into a self-supporting operation employing hundreds of local folk, life-long devotion of friends, and nearly a dozen books to her credit.

Complex, too, yes – with the slight hauteur perhaps appropriate for the Duchess persona she’s inhabited all these years, Deborah Devonshire suffers no fools, takes no prisoners, one feels.  A certain spikiness comes out, most often when appropriate.  Those a little too grand are dispatched.  Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute, visited Chatsworth, and she found him a difficult guest, disappointed perhaps that the company wasn’t grand or intellectual enough; “I was thankful when the time came for him to leave and take his cold eyes and unpleasant personality with him,” she writes. Journalists get it too.  One who asked her about her experience of World War II heard her tell of the loss of her only brother, her husband’s brother, a brother-in-law, and her four best friends.  At the conclusion of that painful narrative, the journalist asked, “So. . .did the war affect you in any way?”

Leave it to an American to take the Duchess herself down a few pegs.  At the White House with JFK and two male friends, dinner was preceded by drinks in the gallery; dinner was announced and, she writes, “. . .being the only woman and a foreigner, I went without thinking to the open door.  On the threshold Jack threw out his arms and said, ‘No, not you.  I go first, I’m Head of State.’”  Discovering her flight from D.C. to New York was scheduled for the same day as his, he set her straight, if she had any thought of sharing the ride, “I go presidential, you go commercial,’ he said, putting me in my place.”  Perhaps he knew that years before, after dancing with him at a ball in London, she’d returned home and written in her diary, “Rather boring but nice.”?

The Duchess does have a sense of humor:  “When Lord Carnarvon came to shoot, I kept a loaded water pistol by my place at dinner and if the talk got altogether too much, I threatened his velvet jack with a short sharp shower.”    In 1957 her last child, Sophy, was born.  Deborah had lost three stillborn children since the birth of her first daughter:  “The fourteen-year gap between Emma and Sophy sometimes caused people to ask, ‘Who was your first husband?’”

In the end, we have not just a sketch but a portrait of a remarkable woman – devoted, observant, discreet (she writes of her husband’s severe alcoholism and its nearly breaking the marriage but not of his infidelities; asked in an interview if he had been unfaithful, she snapped, “Oh yes, of course.”), and loyal to her own.  She clearly has a talent for friendship.  Her occasional class and family loyalty involves some myopia (defending her sister Unity, she writes, “she was not the only English girl to fall for National Socialism… we knew the bad side, we knew she had condoned Nazi cruelty and that she had taken a flat from a Jewish couple who had been evicted; yet. . .there was something innocent about Unity, a guileless, childlike simplicity that made her vulnerable and in need of protection”) and her narrative of that tea with Hitler is curiously – but typically – lacking in censure or even mild disapproval; it ends thus, “Looking back, what is surprising is that he postponed his departure for two hours so as to be able to sit and chat to Unity and though her, to us.”  Looking back, what is surprising is that she spent time with the satanic monster who would maniacally seek to destroy the Jewish people, slaughtering at least six million of them and countless others in his megalomaniacal quest to achieve his warped vision.

Deborah Devonshire has taken to herself both the gifts of privilege and the considerable burdens placed upon her – whether the care of a difficult, failing husband or the supervision of a very large household, really a corporation.  She has suffered the loss of three children, family and friends in war, and the considerable vicissitudes of aging (she is now nearly blind) without complaint, without self-pity.  Never the victim, she has carried on, always rising above it; and now, at age ninety, having outlived all her siblings and so many of her own generation, she manifests a deep and abiding appreciation for what counts – her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren – and the memories of an extraordinary life.

The avalanche of memoirs from aristocrats on the other side of the water continues – the Duchess of Devonshire’s Wait for Me!, Lady Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go. . .now Viscount Norwich’s Trying to Please.  Of the three, he is the only one you could safely invite to your next dinner party – and be guaranteed that he would be a charming mixer:  witty, down-to-earth, open, without hauteur or attitude – a thoroughly good sort likely to stay and help clear things, if need be.

Norwich’s mother, Lady Diana Manners

John Julius Cooper, 2d Viscount Norwich, was born in 1929 to a famous couple:  his father, Duff Cooper, had distinguished himself in World War I then gone on to a career in politics and diplomacy; his mother, Lady Diana Manners, brought up as daughter to the 8^th Duke of Rutland, was a much-celebrated beauty and actress.  It was an unlikely, but successful, pairing: a penniless war hero and an aristocratic deb; in pre-paparazzi days, their wedding such a crush of onlookers that “a body of mounted policemen had to be detailed to control the crowds outside,” Norwich writes.

Norwich as a child

His early years centered on a nanny whom he adored, John Julius was educated at London day schools (the first, called “Miss Betty’s” sounds like a house of ill repute), then dispatched to another school in Canada for safety’s sake during World War II, then back to England for Eton, Navy service, and Oxford (where Isaiah Berlin was his tutor), then into the Foreign Office.  He held posts in Belgrade, Beirut and Geneva before deciding the life just wasn’t for him.  He resigned in 1964 and became a writer of bestselling books, establishing himself as the English-speaking world’s authority on Byzantium and Venice.  Well-known for some thirty television documentaries on a wide range of subjects (The Fall of Constantinople, Napoleon’s Hundred Days, The Treasure Houses of Britain)  and for his four-year stint as host of the hugely successful radio panel game My Word, Norwich, at the age of eighty, cuts a dashing figure and is a quickly-recognised man-about-town.

And so, after a couple of dozen books, Norwich published his autobiography, Trying to Please in Britain in 2008.  Axios Press, based in Mount Jackson, VA, acquired the American rights and have recently issued a handsome edition here.

Norwich is a born storyteller with a narrative gift and very considerable charm.  It may just be that his own beloved nanny told him what Nancy Mitford’s told her before pushing her into a room full of people:  “Remember, you are the least important person in that room.”  Norwich never makes himself the center of the story:  other people figure larger in the landscape, whether his parents, his wife and children, or his friends.  He is clearly someone whose friendship others value highly and he returns their loyalty and dedication.

As the son of parents near the centre of things and as a man who has made his own eminent way in the worlds of diplomacy, media and the arts, Norwich knows a good deal about twentieth-century arts and cultural life, particularly in Britain and Italy.  It seems he’s been nearly everywhere and met everyone – Churchill, de Gaulle, Bill Paley, Stavros Niarchos, Laurence Olivier, and the usual suspects from the Royal Family, the Queen Mother and Her Majesty herself (but not Princess Margaret?  What a shame!)  His accounts of two visits to the Vatican – one with his mother to meet Pius XII, the other with the Duke of Norfolk to represent the Queen at the coronation of Paul VI – offer glimpses behind the scenes of Vatican protocol and British diplomatic pageantry.

The narrative of the audience with Pius XII details a formal, indeed theatrical, experience:

We were led through a whole series of splendid rooms, each of which seemed to be inhabited by people of a different century:  from a nineteenth-century one full of elderly gentlemen in frock coats we would pass directly into what appeared to be the main reception room at Elsinore, with men looking exactly like Hamlet in black doublet and hose and clinking swords; then into a room full of Swiss Guards in their red, blue and yellow Michelangelo uniforms.  All the time the tension seemed to mount:  the whole process was theatrical in the extreme. . .we entered into the Holy Presence. . .we made our reverences. . .There followed a long silence.  The conversation, we had been assured, would be in English, in which the Holy Father was naturally fluent; this proved, however, to be something of an exaggeration.  My mother and I had to make the going, the Pope reacting favorably or unfavorably as required:  the favorable reaction was “very fine, very fine,” the unfavorable “very difficult, very difficult.”

The audience with Paul VI reveals a different pontiff, to be sure:

The protocol was nowhere nearly as elaborate as it had been when my mother and I had our audience with Pius XII; still, it was impressive.  In I went, made my carefully rehearsed reverences and received a blessing—accompanied, to my surprise, by a small leather case.  The Pope explained.  He had already given the Duke a commemorative medal bearing his portrait struck in gold; he wished me to have a silver one, but unfortunately the silver ones were not yet ready.  Mine would be sent as soon as possible (it was) but meanwhile he would like me to have something to take with me now.  ”And so,” he said, “I give you this silver medal of my predecessor, Pope John.  And believe me, that’s so much better.” I could see that he meant it, and felt the tears come into my eyes.  They do so again as I write these words.

Norwich today

For all the people who figure in this memoir, and for all his self-effacing humor, Norwich makes the most lasting impression, especially when he writes of his family.  What he treasures most – even beyond the magnificent decaying pile of his beloved Venice (the salvation and preservation of which he gives himself to with gusto and characteristic dedication) is that family –  his wife, his children, his grandchildren.  But maybe most of all his mother; he writes of her death with dignity and poignant affection: 

You can’t imagine what it’s like,’ she said to me one day, ‘lying here staring at the same bit of wallpaper all day, with nothing to look forward to.’  The words haunted me; they still do.  On June 17, 1986, I went to see her in the evening as usual and found her in moderately good spirits.  At eight the next morning. . .she was dead. . .We buried her at Belvoir [family castle], next to my father.  I walk or drive past her house almost every day—never without a pang.

John Julius Cooper, 2d Viscount Norwich, is an elegant grandee of taste and refinement, a man of no pretense and good cheer, someone who has lived a rare and good life and has the grace to acknowledge it without vengeance or reprisal.  Trying to Please is splendid testimony to that life as well as good reading for a chilly autumn afternoon.

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Portrait of Dame Joan Sutherland, taken in New York (1975)

Allan Warren

Sometimes, shrouded in pounds of silk, taffeta, and jeweled headdress,  she looked faintly ridiculous standing there on the stage, a large and commanding presence with a lasting, exaggerated grimace.  But, when she opened her mouth and sang, the angels in heaven fell silent.   Now she has fallen silent and joined them.   Dame Joan Sutherland, called “The Voice of the Century” by Luciano Pavarotti, died last Sunday in Switzerland.

Twentieth-century opera was dominated by a handful of great sopranos – Maria Callas, with her dark, edgy sound and electrifying stage presence; Renata Tebaldi, with her beautifully pure, lyric voice and dramatic ability; Birgit Nilsson, with a stentorian voice capable of such effortless ascent that it soared stratospherically above any orchestra.  The great opera stages of the world – La Scala, Covent Garden, the Met, the Theatro Colon were theirs —- and Joan Sutherland’s as well.

Joan Sutherland, a girl from Australia with an unusually powerful voice, trained by her mother and music teachers in her native land, made her way to London, spent a year at the Royal College of Music, renewed her acquaintance with another music student from Australia, Richard Bonynge, and auditioned for the Royal Opera.  On the third try (what was wrong with their ears?), she made it – and the rest. . .

Sutherland and Bonynge would marry, he would direct her away from the heavier German operatic fare towards the Italian bel canto and coloratura repertory that would bring her international fame with a voice and technique that would enthrall audiences everywhere in a career that lasted four decades.  She made the great roles written by Bellini (Lucrezia Borgia, Anna Bolena, Norma),  Donizetti (Lucia, Marie) and Verdi (Violetta) her own.  None of her rivals could toss off those glittering high notes, execute those extraordinary coloratura cascades  with the seemingly effortless abandon of Joan Sutherland.  When she turned her voice to lesser operas – Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Massenet’s Esclarmonde and Le Roi de Lahore, Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur – she burnished them to a new luster.

And when she was joined by that young Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti – ah, a match made in heaven.  He credited her with teaching him how to breathe, and his voice became what we all now remember.  She was an ethereal Violetta to his Alfredo, a magnificent Lucia to his Edgardo, a melting Desdemona to his Otello.  When they were joined by the brilliant American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, the fireworks never stopped.  Their Lincoln Center performances were sold out in minutes.

Sutherland’s voice, with its three-octave range and gorgeous middle register, brought down the house wherever she sang.  Her apparently effortless ability to hit Cs, Ds, Es, even Fs while extending and embellishing the vocal line with extraordinary flourishes made her voice never failed to send chills through her listeners.

Critics carped about her sloppy pronunciation, her imprecise diction, her lack of acting ability, at least earlier on (one critic snapped that her idea of acting was to just stand on stage and let everyone else move around her).  So what?  These are minor considerations in listening to a voice of such purity and flexibility, such nuance, color, and tone, such breathtaking shimmer that we are unlikely to hear its match in our lifetime.

Farewell, Dame Joan!

For a generous sampler, listen to Decca’s two-CD set, “La Stupenda” (what the supercritical Italian critics called her after her debut in February, 1960 at Venice’s La Fenice).  Pay special attention to:

Santa di patria. . .Allor che I forti corrono from Verdi’s Attila

Les oiseaux dans la charmille from Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffman

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls from Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl

Il dolce suono mi colpi di sua voce from Donizetti’s Lucia

Casta diva from Bellini’s Norma

In questa reggia from Puccini’s Turandot

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On 25 February 1980, the distinguished French literary theorist and cultural critic Roland Barthes (b. 1915), walking home from a lunch party given by Francois Mitterand, soon to become President of the Fifth Republic, was struck by a laundry van outside the College de France, where he had taught for some time.  Although his injuries were minor and the doctors predicted a complete recovery, Barthes withered away, almost as if he had willed himself to death.  Perhaps he had.  His death on 25 March 1980 followed that of his eighty-four year old mother by less than three years.  They had lived together for more than sixty years.  Only those close to Barthes knew how deeply affected he had been by her passing.  Now, with the publication of Mourning Diary (published as Journal de Deuil last year in France), others will know, and share the dark privacy of his consuming grief.

The publication of this volume, and another, Carnets du Voyage en Chine (Notebooks of a Journey to China) shocked the Parisian literary crowd not just for the intimate moments and tastes disclosed (e.g., Barthes’ fondness for oral sex with men), not just because both texts are really fragments, certainly unfinished, but because neither was ever intended for publication.  Perhaps those who tend the flame of Barthes’ memory feared that his magisterium would be undermined or subverted if the public were to know too much about the great man (in the Chinese notebook he laments not having seen a single Chinese penis).  Has Barthes been betrayed by the revelations in both texts?  I think not.

The night after his mother’s death, 26 October 1977, Barthes began the habit of jotting down brief reflections or concern in pencil or ink, on sheets of typing paper, quartered like index cards.  Without fear, hesitation, restriction, or apprehension about future publication, Barthes recorded his most intimate and searching responses to death and life, ultimately providing an index of sorts to his writing.  He reflected on his own grief as well as the new solitude he experienced, while meditating on the larger mysteries of being and time, recording how he viewed his own mental state with disarming frankness (“Not even the desire to commit suicide,” he notes in one entry).

Struck by the abstract nature of absence; yet it’s so painful, lacerating. Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better: it is absence and pain, the pain of absence—perhaps therefore love?

Images courtesy Michel Salzedo

In his daily jottings, Barthes attempts – ultimately, without success – to come to terms with this catastrophic loss which, of course, prefigures his own death.  Without the consolation of traditional religious faith – but with an occasional flickering of speculation about souls and the afterlife – Barthes carries on in Existentialist fashion, choosing to continue living in the flat they had shared for so many years, intermittently wracked by nightmare and crying jags, tortured by the question, “from now on, what meaning can my life have?”  In the process of the daily round – for Barthes this meant not only the little chores of ordinary life but also preparation for his extraordinary lectures at the College de France and writing three of his most important works – Camera Lucida, A Lover’s Discourse, and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes – all the while charting the geography of solitude and cataloging excursions into the realm of paradoxical contentment for a grief-stricken man desperately craving anonymity.

The Barthes of Mourning Diary is an epic heroic figure, confronting and accepting his own mortality.  He emerges as a deeply private and sensitive man devoted to his mother.  Suffering, pain, and a certain fragility imprint the text. The writing is so fresh, so honest, so revealing, that at times the reader may feel that he should not be reading these notes – it is almost a violation of a cherished intimacy and, like the greatest of loves, something not meant to be known to any but the participants themselves.

Embarrassed and almost guilty because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion.
But all my life haven’t I been just that: moved?

Images courtesy Michel Salzedo

Farrar, Straus has produced an exceedingly handsome text to complement Richard Howard’s nuanced and masterful translation of Barthes’ notes.  Nathalie Leger established and annotated the text, no easy task to judge from the handwriting.  Eight pages of black and white photographs of Barthes, sometimes with his mother, personalize the experience of reading Mourning Diary; of greater importance are the careful reproductions of a number of the “cards” on which Barthes recorded these meditations:  the handwriting, sometimes an elegant cursive, sometimes a hasty scrawl desperately in need of a palaeographer, breaks the barrier between author and reader, generating a final irony:  Mourning Diary may be the strongest evidence to refute Barthes’ most influential notion about “the death of the author.”  The cards inscribed, translated, and stacked in the textual deck of this book are a royal flush that may well trump Barthes’ most cherished axiom.

In one of the first things he set down in Mourning Diary Barthes asked, “Who knows?  Maybe something valuable in these notes?”  Nothing more valuable than the clef to the roman that was this man’s life and work?

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Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), conductor, composer, author and pianist, was one of the very few American musical talents to achieve and maintain an international reputation.  Most often associated with the New York Philharmonic, where he served as music director from 1957 to 1969, Bernstein enjoyed a close professional relationship with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic.  A prolific composer of both classical pieces (including three symphonies, the Chichester Psalms, the Mass commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.) as well as music for ballet, opera, Broadway stage, and film.  He is perhaps best known for composing the score for West Side Story, an updating of Romeo and Juliet undertaken with Jerome Robbins.  Renowned teacher – on television, at Philharmonic concerts, and at Harvard, where he delivered the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures (1973) and raconteur, Leonard Bernstein was a prodigal and charismatic figure on the arts scene.  Here are some of his observations on life and music.

1.

Music…can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

2.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

3.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another. . .and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

4.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing. To know music.

5.

Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is total embrace.

6.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

Willem Mengelberg (1905)

Mid-twentieth century European classical music was dominated by four titan-conductors:  Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Willem Mengelberg, and Herbert von Karajan.  Toscanini, refusing to have anything to do with Fascists or Nazis, fled to the United States.  The other three stayed in Europe and found ways to deal with the tsunami of repression, deportation, and extermination unleashed by Hitler and his collaborators.

Furtwangler continued to conduct in Germany and Austria and never cleared himself of charges of collaborating with the Nazis; he never joined the Party – unlike von Karajan who joined not once, but twice, to insure his career (indeed, he was known as Hitler’s favorite conductor).  Mengelberg, born to German parents in the Netherlands, served as principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra for fifty years (1895-1945).

In the days immediately following the end of World War II the fates of these four men diverged.  Toscanini returned to Europe in triumph; von Karajan shed his Nazi skin like a snake and became an international celebrity, a glamorous star of matinee idol looks who favored fast women and faster cars; Furtwangler never recovered his reputation: he denied charges of Party membership and collaboration before a de-Nazification tribunal, but died a broken man.  Mengelberg’s case shows some similarity to Furtwangler’s:  he lost his position and after being interrogated by the Dutch Central Arts Council was forbidden to conduct the Concertgebouw for the rest of his life – exiled, he died in 1951.

The cases of Furtwangler and Mengelberg have been the subject of plays:  Ronald Harwood’sTaking Sides (1995) illuminates Furtwangler’s dilemma by focusing on his interrogation by an American army major.  Broken but not unbowed, Furtwangler flashes a well-known imperial defiance as he defends himself and the observer is left to determine the truth (though the weight of dramatic evidence seems to fall against him).

Now the case of Mengelberg provides the material for a play of its own:  Daniel Klein has revised his never-filmed screenplay, The Titan, into Mengelberg and Mahler. His collaborator on the screenplay, the Dutch filmmaker Emile Fallaux, directs the production, which received its world premiere at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts on 12 June.

Robert Lohbauer

Kevin Sprague

Mengelberg and Mahleris a one-man show with Robert Lohbauer taking the role of the Dutch conductor, an assignment that keeps him on stage for ninety uninterrupted minutes.  The play opens and remains set in the year 1947, in Switzerland; the seventy-six year old Mengelberg is in disgraced exile at his mountain villa.  For collaborating with the Nazi regime in the Netherlands, the Dutch Council for Honor in the Arts had initially denied him the right to conduct his beloved ensemble ever again; but that sentence had been reduced to five years and the Mengelberg we see and hear in the play eagerly awaits expiration of the sentence, or perhaps reprieve and an immediate return to Amsterdam.

Structurally, the play is a monologue and though we never actually hear the words spoken by others (Mengelberg conveys their words occasionally), what we have is a series of phantom dialogues as Mengelberg reviews major moments in his career:  his first meeting with Gustav Mahler (in the early 1900’s), whose “decadent” music he championed; his interrogation by Arthur Seyss Inquart, the Reichskommissar during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (1900-1945); his later interrogation by the Dutch Council; and his interaction with the Concertgebouw.

What is singularly fascinating here is the absence of a dialogue between Mengelberg and his conscience, but that is the point, I expect.  For what Mengelberg engages in here is an impassioned self-defense, an elaborate exercise in excuse-making for his reprehensible actions.    We may initially feel some sympathy for the suffering artist-in-exile, deprived of what he needs more than anything else in life, his instrument, the Concertgebouw, but as the dialogue with Mahler unfolds, we hear perhaps more than Mengelberg wants us to hear:  vicious racism and the temperamental taunts of any ageing artist directed not only at the great composer who chose a different way – and whose work was so appropriated by Mengelberg as to become his and not Mahler’s – but at the Jewish people and the Dutch who flocked to Mengelberg’s concerts.  Mengelberg sees himself in multiple roles, but the one he likes best is the Redeemer, crucified for all-consuming love (of music, he would have us believe, of himself we do believe).

In the course of his self-mythologizing, Mengelberg rehearses his orchestra and much more.  In his responses to Reichkommisar Inquart we hear him become so accommodating that he will do anything if only he can continue to make music.  No “sacrifice” is too great:  he accedes to the request that the sixteen Jewish musicians in the Concertgebouw be moved to the back of the orchestra, then to their being expelled altogether (the “purification” of the orchestra).  They were allowed to form an all-Jewish ensemble and performed at their own hall for a while, so it’s all right, isn’t it?  That the concentration camps were only a short remove from their hall, well. . .

By the time we hear of Mengelberg’s exchanges with the Dutch Council, he has sunk below our sympathy, certainly below our pity, his response nothing more than elaborate denial and a transparent tissue of evasion and rationalization. Whatever pity we might have felt for him early only, whatever belief or faith we might have invested in him has evaporated.  All that’s left is contempt and the faint whiff of sulphur said to filter through the air in the devil’s presence.

This is drama with a point – thought-provoking and intellectually-engaging – from a dramatist, director and actor too wise to interpret for us:  Like Mengelberg, we are left on our own to decide.  While it may be possible to still feel pity for Mengelberg by the end of the play, we are more likely to come away feeling that this is a deeply flawed human being who valued music too much, who made fatal compromises with evil all the while rationalizing bad choices in the name of art.

In the end, at least three of the sixteen Jewish musicians expelled from the Concertgebouw Orchestra were exterminated in the death camps among the millions of other Jewish victims of Hitler’s insane campaign; Seyss Inquart was sentenced to death at Nuremberg; but Mengelberg lived on, dying in Switzerland in 1951, just shortly before the expiration of  his sentence.

Shakespeare and Company has succeeded in staging a difficult play – the perils of producing a one-person drama are well known; here, in addition, that device of having the protagonist play the roles of several antagonists through relayed speech and description becomes just a little formulaic and tedious.  That aside, the production shines:  Lohbauer gives a demanding performance of sustained passion and flair, appropriately shaded with nuance and gesture.  Emile Fallaux’s direction is sure-handed and non-intrusive.  The main stage with its three-part division into office, podium, and sitting room is economical and evocative; the use of black and white film footage screened against the backdrop wall and the integration of gorgeous excerpts from four of Mahler’s symphonies and the Kindertotenlieder enhances the experience of Mengelberg and Mahler.

“Summer theatre” this is not:  Mengelberg and Mahler is theatre.

Picasso looked at Degas all right – early on and often throughout his long and prolific career.  The question is, what did he see and what did he do with what he saw?  This major exhibition, tucked away in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, answers those questions and far more.

The result of over ten years’ work by Elizabeth Cowling and Richard Kendall, curators at the Clark, and undertaken with the generous cooperation of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona and Picasso’s heirs, especially his grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, “Picasso Looks at Degas” is an extraordinary and invigorating excursion into the mystery of creativity, at once an informative lecture and a caution about our own prejudices concerning what Harold Bloom has called “the anxiety of influence.”

Connections between Picasso and a number of his predecessors have been long acknowledged and fairly well researched-certainly the Old Masters of the European tradition, particularly Delacroix, Ingres, and Velasquez, since, despite impressions generated by the later work of the mature artist, Picasso was an academically-trained painter capable of producing works in the tradition.  Likewise, connections between Picasso and the modern artists like Manet, Rodin, and Cezanne have been documented.  But, though as early 1901 Monet, Pissarro, and Degas were advanced as likely influences on the iconoclastic Spaniard, until now, no one has explored any one of these three.

Picasso traveled to Paris several times before settling there in 1904.    He and Degas became neighbors in Montmartre several years before Degas’ death in 1917; but they never met.  And that is perhaps not so surprising.  Though they frequented some of the same haunts (cafes, theatres, brothels) and shared a predilection for certain subject matter (ballerinas, prostitutes, cabaret singers, café habitués), they were vividly different characters.  Certainly Picasso knew Degas’ work – how could he not, given their affinities?  And though it seems to have been customary to focus on the year 1958, when Picasso purchased some of Degas’ work, as the moment of connection, “Picasso Looks at Degas,” with its witty, uncanny, and extraordinary juxtaposition of  works by the two men from early on in Picasso’s career makes the case for much earlier influence and connection.  And that – aside from the concept of the exhibition itself – is the genius of this show:  patient, careful, and detailed laying out of an aesthetic and cultural argument in six galleries:  to move through them in sequence is to follow the logical thread of argument from hypothesis to conclusion.

(Left) Degas, Study for “Dante and Virgil”, c. 1856-57.

(Right) Picasso, Academic Study from Life: Male Nude, from the Side, with a Pole; Sketch of Head and Bust of Male Figures, 1895-97.

Gallery One provides an introduction and overview.  Gallery Two, “Early Years:  Drawing the Human Figure,” emphasizes the academic training of both artists and starts the sequence, beginning with self portraits set side-by-side, Picasso’s done when he was a mere fifteen years old, tousled-haired, melancholy, and introspective; Degas’s done at age 23, the image lacking the bravado of Picasso’s, but infused with the same wistful self-absorption, with the subject positioned so like Picasso’s.  Of the other studies juxtaposed here, two sets stand out:  Degas’s “Study for ‘Dante and Virgil’” (1856-7) and Picasso’s “Academic Study from Life:  Male Nude. . .” (1895-97), each demonstrating sure, elegant line;  and Degas’ “Standing Nude” (1860-65) alongside Picasso’s “Female Nude” (c.1899),  both breathtaking in the artists’ ability to create sinuous line and shadow whether in pencil (Degas) or in charcoal (Picasso).

In Gallery Three, “Paris:  Picasso Discovers Degas,” the canvases proliferate, pulsating with scenes of la vie Parisienne:  theatre, café, cabaret, and the rather more intimate bathing scenes.  Picasso had seen some of Degas’ pastels and painting on visits to Paris before he settled there and at very turn the influence of the older master shows.  The viewer experiences the shock of similarity on seeing Picasso’s “The End of the Performance” (1901) in the same space as Degas’ monotype, “Café-Concert” (1878-80).

Degas;The Tub, ca. 1876–1877

Gallery Four, “The Private World of Women,” focuses on representations of women bathing and arranging their hair.  Degas had shown his models in real life settings going about ordinary, everyday activities; and his images were greatly simplified.  Again the older painter’s influence is telling; in the years after Degas’ death, Picasso, time and again, returned to this very same subject matter.  The debt of pose and composition is nowhere more telling than in the juxtaposed “Leaving the Bath” (Degas, 1879-80, dry point and aquatint) and “Woman in the Bath” (Picasso, 1921, pencil on paper).

Picasso; The Blue Room (The Tub), 1901

Gallery Five, “The Ballet:  Homage and Humor,” centres on Degas’ best-known sculpture, “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” (1879-81), the only sculpture exhibited in public during the artist’s lifetime and emblematic of his longstanding interest in the world of ballet.  The extent of that fascination became known only with the sale of the contents of his studio after his death (1917), when so many similar images were discovered.  Paris was still under the spell of Diaghlev’s Ballets Russe and so was Picasso, particularly taken with the ballerinas, one of whom, Olga Khokhlova, would become his wife.  Picasso’s preoccupation with creating images from the world of ballet for a decade or so reflects his very considerable debt to Degas.  Just compare his “Two Dancers, 1919” with Degas’ “Three Ballet Dancers,” or Picasso’s “Three Ballet Dancers” (1919) with the latter and the verdict stands:  Picasso’s artistic debt to Degas was considerable.

Degas; “Resting on the Bed,” c. 1876–77

Gallery Six, “Brothel Scenes:  The Artist as Voyeur,” is the most fascinating room in the Clark’s exhibition, not simply because of its erotic – perhaps pornographic for some – aura but moreso for the problem it presents in determining – ultimately – the relationship between Degas and Picasso.  The works displayed in this gallery may well cause a re-evaluation of conclusions reached based on seeing what’s offered in the previous five.  Between 1958 and 1960 Picasso bought nine provocative works by Degas for his own collection, a series of monotypes depicting scenes in a brothel.  From all account, Degas was a straight-laced gentleman; it has been speculated than an early sexual adventure in which he may have aggressively raped a young woman caused trauma sufficient to render him permanently impotent.  Whatever the case, he led a circumspect, chaste life and in that regard he could not have been more different from the priapic Picasso.

Picasso;Prostitute with a Bracelet and Degas…, 1971

In 1971 Picasso began a series of variations on Degas’ monotypes and as the selection on offer indicates, ultimately determining the relationship between the two artists becomes highly problematic.  Exactly what are these variations?  Critique, homage, satire?  Certainly it was a project that consumed Picasso’s prodigious energies; he worked on this series nearly up until his death in April 1973:  speed, spontaneity, and incompleteness characterize the work.  It is almost as if Picasso worked feverishly to finally articulate his relationship to Degas.  Perhaps those fortunate enough to get to Williamstown to see “Picasso Looks at Degas” will find the answer.

This is not your blockbuster, let’s get the bodies into the museum summer show; rather, it is a thought-provoking, intellectually engaging experience in contemplation, consideration, and connection.

“Picasso Looks at Degas” is a magnificent exhibition carefully planned and designed to allow viewers to move from gallery to gallery with growing comprehension and appreciation for an argument-in-process.  The exhibition lays out a focused, defined, limited, and convincing argument for the influence of the older artist on the younger, yes; but beyond that, it makes a larger argument about the mysterious, synergistic, sometimes ambiguous, not always comfortable, relationship between two acknowledged masters.  The amplitude of evidence leaves the viewer – appropriately – not only with new knowledge of two great European painters but with questions to frame consideration of connections between other artists, specifically, perhaps, the unexplored relationship between Pissarro and Picasso as well as that between Monet and Picasso (the latter seems a natural, given the Clark’s Monet holdings, in  another ten years).  Meanwhile, get to the Clark.  It is the only American venue for “Picasso Looks at Degas.”  In the autumn it moves to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona.

Now, in the summer of 2010, two twentieth-century pontiffs of the Roman Catholic Church are being considered for sainthood.  Their lives and works are being studied thoroughly as they make their way through a rigorous investigative process.  Perhaps no more unlikely pair could be imagined:  Eugenio Pacelli, who reigned as Pope Pius XII from 1939 to 1958; and his successor, Angelo Roncalli, who reigned as Pope John XXIII from 1958 to 1963.  Pacelli – tall, pale, thin, ascetic, aristocratic with dark, piercing eyes, elegant carriage, and a fondness for pomp and pageantry; Roncalli – short, ruddy, rotund, from peasant stock, informal with little patience for any more ceremony than the essential.  Though both served in the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, Pacelli spent no time in traditional pastoral work while Roncalli would spend considerable time in that endeavor, rising to become Patriarch of Venice before his election to the throne of St Peter.

The cause of John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council that attempted to awaken a somnolent medieval church, advances smoothly and no one expects he’ll be denied sainthood.  The cause of Pacelli, however, is another matter.

Eugenio Pacelli spent his whole career in the diplomatic corps.  Carefully groomed for diplomatic service – certainly talented at it, with an elegant, engaging manner, shrewd powers of observation and negotiation, and command of many languages – and favored by Pope Benedict XV and Pope Pius XI, Pacelli’s star rose until it outshone nearly all others.  He became the most important Roman Catholic prelate in Germany, prior to his appointment as Vatican Secretary of State in 1930.

Why, then, problems with the cause for his sainthood?   Well, perhaps, it can be blamed on two writers, one German, the other British:  Rolf Hochhuth and John Cornwell, who, more than any others, are complicit in besmirching the name and reputation of Pius XII.  In 1963 Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy, premiered in Germany; in 1964, in translation, it was produced in Britain and the United States.  Hochhuth’s Pius is an elegant, aristocratic, imperial pontiff, roundly condemned for doing nothing in the face of Hitler’s rabid attempts at genocide.  Cornwell, a British historian, took after Pius in his Hitler’s Pope (1999); the title says it all.  Though Cornwell maintains that he undertook his research hoping to revise, if not reverse, the negative judgment of Pius, he came rather to endorse it:  he argues that Pacelli played a strategic role in facilitating Hitler’s rise to power – and that as Pope, his indifference to Hitler’s “Final Solution” makes him an accomplice to genocide.

Both texts are less than trustworthy.  Hochhuth’s play distorts the smattering of historical material it uses and ignores testimony from a number of Jews – available even then – about Pius’s substantial efforts on behalf the Jewish people. Indeed, Hochhuth’s approach to historical fact seems rather creative:  in his next play Soldiers, Necrology on Geneva (1967), his allegation that Churchill had been responsible for the death of the Polish Prime Minister resulted in a libel suit, with verdict delivered against him.  Cornwell’s book did make use of Vatican and Jesuit archives never before opened to a layman; but critics took him to task for sensationalism and intemperance as well as speculation.

And now we have Hubert Wolf’s Pope and Devil, published in German in 2008, available in translation by Kenneth Kronenberg (Belknap Press of  Harvard University, 2010).  Wolf, Professor of Church History at the University of Munster, seems to have had no agenda other than to refocus attention on Pius and his times through the filter of new data.

During Pacelli’s time in Germany (1917-1929), the political power structure shifted as the Weimar Republic faded and the Third Reich came into power.  Examining the only-recently-opened archives containing materials for the years leading up to 1939, Prof. Wolf documents the bitter conflicts that raged among factions within the Holy See.  Though influential bishops and cardinals sparred and took different sides, all were united in fear of new movements – liberalism, communism, fascism, National Socialism – sweeping Europe.  Disagreement focused on how to deal with these threats to the faith and the Church – appease, accommodate, or attack?

Wolf makes it clear that Pacelli was not part of the anti-Semitic faction within the Vatican; though traces of anti-Semitism occasionally crop up in his private writing, he was not sympathetic to Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jewish people.  With the assent and encouragement of Pius XI, Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State (1930-1939), negotiated a concordat with the Third Reich in 1933, clearly believing that it would protect the Church and the faithful from Hitler’s rampage.  Virtually forced to accept terms within one week, Pacelli assented, telling a British diplomat that he felt a pistol had been held to his head.  Furthermore, Pacelli explicitly stated that the Concordat did not constitute approval of Hitler or his policies.  Critics have leveled two other charges at Pacelli, one concerning his role in dissolving the Catholic Centre Party, the other concerning his later failure to proscribe Hitler’s Mein Kampf .  Wolf asserts that both actions were motivated by a desire to protect Roman Catholics, not by approval of Hitler’s policies.

Wolf’s extensive research illuminates Pacelli’s instrumental role in writing a refutation of Nazi racism for Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, a document vigorously asserting that National Socialism and Catholicism were irreconcilable.  Shortly after it was proclaimed from pulpits throughout Germany, the Nazis resumed persecution of the Church and Pacelli learned the lesson:  public denunciation brought only suffering and slaughter to Catholics.

Wolf makes several other points about Pius XII.  Trained as a diplomat, he thought and acted as a diplomat throughout his career, seeking reconciliation and accommodation.  Unfortunately, that could sometimes be interpreted as weakness, worse as cooperation or approval.  Of supreme importance to him as a Roman Catholic was his faith and the Church which embodied it.  It is manifestly unfair to expect that he would have acted to endanger those who shared his belief, and over whom he was given charge, during one of history’s most violent periods.  And perhaps, like so many others, perceiving that “atheistic communism” was the greatest threat to the Church, he sought not to validate National Socialism but to mitigate, if not eliminate, its impact upon the church, leaving greater energy for the fight against communism.  And particularly so during the early years of his pontificate, Pius felt it unwise to issue publication condemnation of the Nazis for fear of reprisals against his flock.

Certainly, the fate of Roman Catholics in Holland had a chilling effect not unlike that of the 1937 reprisals on Pius:  on 26 July 1942 the Dutch bishops denounced the Nazi deportation of Jews.  Immediately, the Nazis expanded their campaign of deportation, terror and murder to include baptized Jews among the ranks of those rounded up.  Among those taken were Edith Stein, a Jewish convert who had become a Carmelite nun, and her sister:  arrested on 2 August, they, along with hundreds of others, were gassed at Auschwitz on 9 August.

The historical record shows that Pius quietly and earnestly did a great deal:  many Jewish people were saved from slaughter because of his efforts and a number of famous and not-so-famous Jews came to his defense, including Golda Meir, Albert Einstein, Rabbi David Dalin, and Pinchas Lapide, who, in his Three Popes and the Jews, documented examples of papal initiatives indicating that Pius’s efforts directly contributed to saving more than 700,000 Jewish lives.

Prof. Wolf’s exhaustive archival research, and his objective, detailed, and documented presentation of his research as well as his refusal to trade in conjecture and speculation, or accept received opinion, make Pope and Devil essential reading for anyone interested in getting at the truth of some of the twentieth century’s most troubled times.  Certainly, Wolf’s scholarly project does not exonerate Pius – nor does it airbrush the portrait of the Pontiff.  But it does make it impossible to condemn Pius out of hand or to denounce him as “Hitler’s Pope” or demonise him.  It will certainly demand that his detractors re-evaluate his actions during the first part of his pontificate, those dark days when the National Socialism of Germany was the scourge of the earth.

Portrait of William Somerset Maugham

26 May 1934

Bon vivant, raconteur, dandy, and wit, William Somerset Maugham ( 1874- 1965), was probably the most prolific, certainly the most financially successful English writer of the twentieth century. Creator of the spy story in his Ashenden stories and chronicler of sojourns abroad in his travel essays, novelist of character and manners, Maugham dined out on his stories for years, always a sought-after guest for weekend house parties and formal dinners. Here are some of the remarks that earned him his place at table.

1.

A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn’t want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

2.

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.

3.

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother.

Somerset Maugham at Amazon.com

4.

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve a continuation of the species.

5.

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

6.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

7.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.

8.

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.

9.

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

10.

It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.

Somerset Maugham at Amazon.com

11.

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

12.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

13.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

14.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

15.

Tolerance is another word for indifference.

16.

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably. . .have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.