It’s time for summer reading, and I plead guilty to loving Frank Langella’s Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them.  The book is an enjoyable romp through the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and through an astonishing number of sexual encounters.  Langella is candid and gossipy.  In addition to being a fine actor, he is a gifted writer, a sharp-eyed observer and interpreter of the human comedy.  His celebrated subjects, even those he does not like, are never less than real people for whom we can feel sympathy, admiration, or distaste.  And while his sexual appetites are nothing if not varied he is both discreet and generous, and sometimes hilarious, in his recollections.

Mr. Langella grew up in Bayonne, NJ, in an Italian-American household that he felt “imprisoned” him, and he fled at the first opportunity.  He seldom mentions his family, and never with affection.  He does, however,  note that when as a struggling young actor, he was accepted into Elia Kazan’s training class in New York, his father agreed to aid him with $100 a week, big money in 1962.

All the people Mr. Langella writes about are dead, with the exception of the very rich Bunny Mellon, whose daughter, Eliza Lloyd, was his friend and fellow-actor.  As a young man he began to spend many pleasant days at the Mellon homes on Cape Cod, in Virginia, and on Antigua.  One of Mrs. Mellon’s best friends was Jackie Kennedy, and between them the women apparently gave Langella an education in how not be an Italian-American from Bayonne–presumably freeing him from that “prison.”    Mrs. Mellon, whom Langella greatly admires, was a gentle tutor who helped him to be comfortable in the rarified atmosphere inhabited by the very rich.  One of the more telling scenes in the book has Mr. Langella coming upon Bunny and Jackie playing like schoolgirls with a basket of precious gems–rings, bracelets, necklaces, and a tiara or two–that Ari Onassis had sent to Mrs. Kennedy when he was wooing her.

Among the people Mr. Langella liked are Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Burke, Elsa Lanchester, Deborah Kerr, and Delores Del Rio, all his senior by many years and all portrayed with sympathy and admiration.   He apparently kept Ms. Hayworth and Ms. Taylor company through many lonely evenings,  the former sad and pleading, the latter bossy and entertaining.  How intimately he held them is irrelevant; what matters is the poignancy with which he remembers them.

Most of us will never have the words “iconic” or “celebrated” splashed before our names, which is a good thing because then we might become objects of Mr. Langella’s ire.   He admits to his own bouts of grandiosity over the years, but he harpoons a few inflated  egos when he feels the condition is permanent.  Charlton Heston was more clueless than arrogant or mean.  Having played Moses, El Cid, and  Michelangelo, as well as larger-than-life roles in Ben Hur and Khartoum, Heston simply assumed that he was the center of the universe.  Rex  Harrison was a cold and haughty man, five-times married, and so homophobic that he rejected any roles that would, according to the author, “give off a hint of his being light in the loafers.”  Mr. Langella  felt that Anthony Quinn would take his self-importance to the grave: “a big bully . . . or an imperious mob boss looking to get his ring and his ass kissed unto death.”  He also writes, with barely concealed amusement, that Quinn had “two Oscars up his sleeve and clearly one in his pants, having fathered at least a dozen children.”

One of the pleasures of this book is Mr. Langella’s ability to convey the romance of the acting life, of the bonds as well as jealousies shared by all who inhabit it.  He gives life to the “divine monsters” and “angry babies” who strut across stage and screen, enriching us with the magic of their performances.  He also serves up excellent dish on a variety of famous names, both in and out of the theatrical world: William Styron, Tip O’Neill, Laurence Olivier, Paul Mellon, Stella Adler, and Brooke Astor are among the sixty-six individuals whose humanity (or lack thereof) Mr. Langella takes some pains to portray.  He is exceedingly generous in his critiques of fellow-actors such as Alan Bates, Raul Julia, Robert Mitchum, George C. Scott, and Ida Lupino; and, to use his words, he puts “a fork in the eye” of those he considers phonies.

Mr. Langella has traveled a long way from Bayonne, where presumably he first learned about forks in the eye.  The theater really was his Harvard,  and he was a brilliant student.  His book, much more substantial than the usual show-business memoir, will  entertain you but it will also give you a view of who and what is behind the magic curtain, of what popular culture was and what is has become.  Having grown up a mile or two from Mr. Langella, only a year or two ahead of him, I have one quibble with the book.  On the first page he writes that he fled his “small house” in Bayonne, NJ,  for Journal Square, in Newark, to catch the bus for  New York City. Mr. Langella, everybody knows that Journal Square is in Jersey City.

I suppose we must all ask ourselves in reading history, what distinguishes the historian’s task from that of the novelist, the historical novelist in particular. The simple question, “Is it true?” leads inevitably into philosophical waters. In a note at the end of her new novel, Bring Up the Bodies, Hillary Mantel makes the reader  a proposal: “I try to show how a few crucial weeks might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view. I am not claiming authority for my position.”  She offers us, amid all the speculation and debate surrounding the death of Anne Boleyn, a possible version of the events. This in turn seems to be a thumbnail definition of genre: historical fiction is an act of imagination that accommodates some, not all, of the facts. The work cannot be but a twenty first century production, yet the author proposes a sixteenth century perspective. Our faith in imagination is that we can recover the past, in a way intelligible to us while not in violation of the past. To accept the proposal, to agree to the author’s version, is to understand the motives and reactions of character in our own terms, and yet extend our vision to include those “social imaginaries” no longer possible for us today – the status of the anointed king, for instance.  Mantel inhabits the consciousness of Thomas Cromwell, yet manages in the book’s shifting perspectives – the free indirect style that alternates with the almost coercive “we” as narrative stance – to give us insight into those who act and respond around him.

I finished the novel while I was away from home, and searching for something else to read on the return journey, I borrowed Don DeLillo’s Libra. The author could have attached the same note of explanation and proposal to his work. If the records related to the execution of Anne Boleyn are both puzzling and uncertain, certainly those related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy are infinitely more so. DeLillo give us a sense of the impossibility of doing justice to the historical record in the person of Nicholas Branch, commissioned by the CIA to compile a “true” history of the events. Branch inhabits a room awash in paper and as he writes, the “Curator” adds more testimony to his already over-burdened room. Branch admits, ”The case will haunt him to the end. Of course they’ve know it all along. That’s why they built this room for him, the room of growing old, the room of history and of dreams.” If Hilary Mantel defines the genre of historical fiction, DeLillo offers us a version of the author of such fiction. A definitive account  of the matter is a ghost of hope that bedevils the dream of truth.

Happily DeLillo and Mantel are successful in seeing their stories to an end. Both writers, in their works so different in time, make the textures of their imagined worlds work – through dialogue, shifts of place, and through the discontinuities, the gaps where dots of cause and effect are not connected in a resolution – that assurance is more the purview of detective fiction. There is something like the fog of history as there is the fog of war. But more to the fore is the examination of character – motive and goal. Cromwell is ruthless, determined to eliminate his enemies, just as he is aware of the precarious nature of the favor granted him by the King. So we begin to understand Lee Harvey Oswald, the libra of the title, a man on a balance who can swing either way, with the weight of forces that though opposed appear oddly similar.

In the hands of these two masters, historical fiction does us the great good service of exposing conspiracy theories for what they are, possible version of what happened. The “truth” beyond the facts appears elusive and in that very political uncertainty we, ordinary citizens, are called to judge and act. The past in Cromwell’s and Oswald’s case is not a place where they do things differently, but rather a “now,” a present peopled with those who act and feel in ways very familiar.

In honor of Bloomsday, here are three of my favorite paragraphs from “Nausicaa,” one of my favorite episodes:

THE SUMMER EVENING HAD BEGUN TO FOLD THE WORLD IN ITS mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.

…

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Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams are two novels about the West, though they are very different kinds of novels about two very different kinds of Wests. Read the rest of this entry »

There are so many intriguing aspects to Peter Cameron’s latest novel, Coral Glynn, that I have no reservations in recommending it enthusiastically. Yet, my immediate response upon finishing it was to attempt to explain the strange sense of distance, estrangement even, that his characterization provoked. This period, 1950s “English domestic drama” (so the book’s cover blurb) evoked the same effect as might a black-and-white film from about that time (say the 1945 Brief Encounter): a strong sense of atmosphere, of striking angled portraits, of outmoded styles.

Opacity in characterization, access denied the reader to the motives or goals of the characters in a novel, challenges its realism. Convention has us on intimate terms with the protagonist or adversary, sometimes through inner monologue or through the simple, “she thought . . .” We often expect the narrator, third or first person, to reveal the mental flow of thought that will provide cause and effect understanding as to what comes next in the sequence of the plot. When dialogue predominates in the story telling and exposition is limited, when characters act in unexpected or bizarre ways, when information about characters is suppressed for later revelation, then the distance between the reader and the characters in the fiction increases.

Something like this, I think, occurs in Cameron’s novel: yet, rereading it, I came across many occasions in which we are given access to various characters’ thoughts. Somehow even those revelations seem insufficient to illuminate motives. So I find myself puzzling still over his studied effects and their ultimate meaning.

The book follows the title character’s life over the course of a few years. Coral, a nurse who attends the house-bound sick, arrives at the home of Mrs. Hart, a wealthy invalid, who after one month of Coral’s nursing, dies. Her son, Major Clement Hart, a wounded war veteran asks Coral, on very brief acquaintance, to marry. She accepts, but their life together is aborted from its start – Coral’s unlikely involvement in a murder causes her, with her husband’s urging, to flee. This sequence of the plot is particularly opaque – what prompts the Major’s avowal of love to Coral? What motives underlie her acceptance of the offer of marriage? Why does she acquiesce to his urging to run? We have only tentative suggestions – dissatisfaction with the fasteners of a wedding dress, a fleeting attraction to the florist who is to prepare wedding flowers, the Major’s latent homosexuality. The interactions of characters are like those of billiard balls – contact and recoil, with odd spins and angled bumps off obstacles and boundaries.

There is more than a game enacted in Coral’s accidental search for commitment which she finds in a chance encounter with a landlady’s son. What odd promptings of the heart lead the Major to give up his wife and marry a former friend’s spouse? At the novel’s dark heart, there is a holly thicket, the scene of a child’s accidental hanging, of Coral’s solitary walks, and Clement’s final acceptance of his fate. The novel ends in Green Sap Wood, where Clement retraces Coral’s earlier walks where the unsettling hanging occurred. We have a locus of hidden violence linking the fates of the protagonists, who are somehow connected by this strange fatal drama of child’s play gone wrong. Cameron’s vision has us oddly groping for understanding, Coral’s refrain is “I am so muddled, so muddled.” She acts in ways that surprise us, sometimes happily, with the notion that noises off suggest some darker, worrisome cause.

The plot works itself out in such a way, that only the reader can be aware of the near misses, the parallels and the intersections that link thematically the journeys of the principals. This dramatic irony lifts the reader above precarious contingencies of the couple’s unhappiness. So lifted we look down on a world we cannot quite understand and are tempted to consign to that country where things are done differently.

A prose poem, a lyrical appreciation of the shape-dissolving powers of darkness and London fog, begins the final chapter of William Boyd’s new novel, Waiting for Sunrise. If the title suggests that there is hope in the dawn to follow the book’s end, the conclusion assures us that such hope is false. Lysander Rief, the protagonist, is a creature of shadows, of confusing shapes, of dissolving characters; he leaves us and himself, it seems, without illumination.

Waiting for Sunrise is a thriller, a mystery, a war time spy drama, and an investigation of personality. William Boyd is a novelist whom I admire, almost unreservedly, but this work, despite its fluency and suspense, leaves a sense of incompletion – as if the writer abandoned a far deeper exploration of character and identity in the complexities of plot. The lyricism of the final chapter suggests thematic irresolution – the conclusion does not equal the sum of the novel’s parts.

The story takes us first to Vienna in 1913. Lysander, a professional actor and son of an even greater theatrical figure, seeks help from an English follower of Freud. The treatment dubbed “parallelism” offers a patient a way to rewrite his psychic history through the agency of the therapist and mild hypnosis. The raw data of experience can be recast through the imagination to displace the chain of events that underlie the neurosis. “Nothing is but thinking makes it so,” we might add with Hamlet.

Apparently cured of his sexual dysfunction (an enigmatic sculptor Hettie provides the proof), Lysander is caught suddenly in a criminal case involving rape (of Hettie) and with the help of British consular officials makes his escape from prison and returns to Britain. This begins Lysander’s induction into military life and Army intelligence: he is forced to pay his debt to his rescuers by service to his country at war. Actor, spy, investigator, suspect – Lysander leads a life that demands he interpret the data of his experience along parallel lines. There are multiple ways to project a person’s character and motives, especially when the focus is treason and a life of deception.

Boyd is so experienced and confident a novelist that he can use effectively the familiar ploy of the journal (“Autobiographical Investigations”) -Lysander’s diary written for his psychiatrist. The narration shifts between the first person in the journal and the third person. We have intimacy and distance: parallel versions from different perspectives of the same experience – a trope that becomes a predominant theme throughout the novel. Imaginative reworking of memory (rather like the act of writing novels) allows us to thrive psychologically. Plain fact in the lens of the imagination is the focus of consciousness, and that imaginative focus creates what we perceive or distrust as real. Lysander’s investigations allow him to pose variant readings of his colleagues (Who is the traitor?) and his family. All of this is set against his working-life interest in impersonation as a professional actor.

The convolutions of plot (some of the strands are never quite tucked into the narrative weave), the suspense of revelation, the mechanisms of resolution, are never wholly clear. We are kept at some remove from understanding Lysander’s analyses and conclusions. Even the means of his rescue comes apparently as unsuspected to him as it does to us.

In the conclusion Boyd seems to have both his confection and the satisfaction of eating it: in the third person voice he exiles Lysander (the name of the great Greek general and strategist) to a life of shadows devoid of human warmth, the very problem he had sought help to overcome at the novel’s inception.

The novel, as engrossing as it is, leaves me wondering if the dark conclusion is a theme inadequately developed: that at the end, Lysander’s account of his life is more displacement than a confrontation of the self. Parallelism becomes escape from the true responsibilities of action.  Neurosis is the suspicion and pretense that the life of an actor, professional or spy, entails. Boyd is a master at providing “a calculated trap for meditation” and can use so common a vehicle as the spy thriller to provide the snare.