Day: February 9, 2014

Careless People

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Now it might not a be a huge secret I’m not the most literary person. Sure I read oodles of books, have planned vacation days around trips to bookstores and was just on the phone with the Most Evil Sibling Ever (Andy) last night planning a trip to the Friends of the Ferguson Library Book Store for Wednesday (hooray for flex holidays!) but just because you read books doesn’t make you literary. You’ll never find me singing the praises of the literary canon far and wide. Actually you’re more likely to find me proclaiming how Melville should have just made out with Nathaniel Hawthorne more than how much I enjoyed Moby Dick and Billy Budd (loathe both books so very much).

So imagine my surprise when I’m cruising by the New Biography section at the Berlin-Peck Memorial Library and snap up a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald. And not just any book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, but one about The Great Gatsby, a novel that is right up there in Gwen Loathes It list right next to Moby Dick, the complete works of Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway. If you love love love F. Scott Fitzgerald and think I’m a savage, it’s totally okay to stop reading now. Before you shriek too much, remember I have actually read The Great Gatsby (a horrid school experience against my will) and have of my own free will read several books about the Fitzgeralds. They’re my Kardashians, a train wreck of people who I know more about than I ever intended too. I mean, you can’t read about the Murphys or Dorothy Parker without encountering Scott and Zelda. And the best of these books? Explore the society the Fitzgeralds interacted with right down to the bootleggers and publishers and the rest.

Don’t check me for pod marks. The book in question is Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, an interesting exploration of both one of my most loathed books and a unsolved murder from the 1920s that has intrigued me since I was a wee thing. True crime has always been in my wheelhouse and when you combine true crime with a greater look at society I’m in. With all my reading it never fully occurred to me a crime as well known (it was consider one of the crimes of it’s decade) as the Hall-Mills Murder would have influenced the fiction of it’s time. (For people who never heard of the Hall-Mills Murder, in 1922 the Reverend Hall and his married mistress Mrs Mills were found dead in a lane under a tree with love letters scattered around them.) Let alone a book many people (not me) consider one of the best books ever written.

But that is the basic premise of Careless People, the Hall-Mills Murders influenced and impacted F. Scott Fitzgerald as he plotted and planned his greatest novel. And Sarah Churchwell’s carefully researched details (right down to things from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s scrapbook that dispute certain details you come to expect when you read enough about Scott and Zelda) give you an excellent picture of what life was like as the Fitzgeralds partied and Scott tried to write and the horrifically inept handling of the Hall-Mills murder case.

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, doesn’t solve the Hall-Mills Murder (sadly we are more likely to solve the Jack the Ripper murders than who killed Reverend Hall and Mrs Mills due to the bungling police work) but it does do something even my most dedicated professors could never do, made me understand and think about The Great Gatsby beyond something I was being forced to read to pass a class to get that degree. Any decent writer can make Scott and Zelda come alive on the page just due to the force of their personalities but it takes a talented and thoughtful author to make me care about Fitzgerald’s works.

Will Careless People make me snatch up Mr Kindle and buy The Great Gatsby right this second? Will I be tracking down a Norton Critical Edition to get the full Gatsby experience like I did after reading Dreiser’s Sister Carrie for the first time? Never in a million years. But is Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby a book I would read again? Certainly.

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck Steel-True

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Ever since I was old enough to check out books from the adult part of the library, I’ve read towering stacks of movie star biographies. Some are as told you autobiographies that for all they reveal about the star might as well be turned into those book crafts I see on Buzzfeed every so often. You might as well read their Wikipedia page. Other movie star biographies are either so poorly written either to paint their subject as a saint or sinner of all sinners that well, you read them to the end but feel like you’ve just eaten a box of Twinkies for dinner and hate yourself for reading the darn book. (I’m looking at you Forever Young : The Life, Loves, and Enduring Faith of a Hollywood Legend ; The Authorized Biography of Loretta Young.)

And is Victoria Wilson’s A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940. Stunning, brilliant, epic and don’t drop this bad boy on your foot come to mind. It’s almost 1000 pages including notes and indexes. We are talking Tom Clancy/Stephen King doorstop size. And it’s just the first volume of a full scale biography. And let’s not forget Miss Barbara Stanwyck worked all the time. Work was like books, essential as breathing. Trust me, if you’re looking for a quick read that has S-E-X and scandal on every single page? Please put down A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 (gently because once again trust me, you don’t want to drop this and break a toe) and scamper off to find a Hollywood Babylon book.

It’s not easy to write a biography on a movie star like Barbara Stanwyck. The easy path for the Stanwyck biographer is to use the studo stories about the tough orphan from the streets and maybe her alleged loved of ladies angle. Luckily, Victoria Wilson does not go the easy route even though she could given her subject. Barbara Stanwyck is not your Marilyn Monroe or Joan Crawford with oceans of press stories and scandals to wade through. She was also not the most open or accessible person. I always got the feeling that if someone like Shelley Winters would open up with a drop of a hat in line at Dunkin Donuts while you waited for your Vanilla Bean Coolattas at the pickup counter and tell you everything you ever wanted to know right down to did they dress left or dress right. But Barbara Stanwyck would be a total clam even if you knew her for years and years. Maybe she might crack open a little bit if you caught her at the right time but you’d be better off buying a Powerball ticket during a $400+ million jackpot week.

And that feeling doesn’t seem to be far off because the Barbara Stanwyck Victoria Wilson uncovers is a woman who keeps to herself. The little girl born Ruby Stevens came from a good family on a downward slide and by the time she was a school aged had no proper home. The very young Ruby was placed with various families and her older siblings, a corner of a room here and there with magical times her favorite sister would swoop in and show her the theatrical world. Given all this turmoil and struggles to support herself once she was a teenager, is this any wonder the young Ruby developed a hard shell. And seriously, how could I not love an person who educated themselves and read so much bookstores would send them things automatically? A person who could read a book every night no matter how long she spent on set or toiling at her ranch.

One of the things you take away from A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 is the iron control that propelled Barbara Stanwyck. Curse her for the way she could drop a friend so completely the hurt can still be felt on the page decades later. Curse her for not leaving Frank Fay sooner. Curse her for not being the mother her son Dion needed. But praise her for the willpower and control she exhibited. A woman who could force herself to work after being crushed by a horse? A woman who filmed some of her best early parts strapped and taped up, her face never betraying the extent of how battered her body was? An actress who cared more about the craft than what gown was being whipped up for her.

Barbara Stanwyck wasn’t perfect or a superwoman but she had layers and levels beyond the usual movie star of her times. That is a lady I want to read more about. And Victoria Wilson can not write the next volumes quick enough to satisfy me.

 

 

 

 

On Tour

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

The Noel Streatfeild kick? Still going strong…once this review is done? Off to e-Bay to see if any of her Susan Scarlet romances are available for a decent price! First, let’s take a look at volume two of Noel Streatfeild’s semi-autobiographical series, On Tour: An Autobiographical Novel of the 20’s.

Published in the UK as Away From the Vicarage, On Tour: An Autobiographical Novel of the 20’s shows us Victoria Strangeway as an adult. World War I has ended. It’s been a very rough time but the vicarage has survived. Victoria, Isobel and Louise have returned from their war work, younger brother Dick has been wounded but will be headed to university soon. The vicar is still a walking saint and Mrs Strangeway? She still can’t manage her household for beans even though the vicar has inherited property from his late parents. And there’s a new Strangeway, littlest sister (totally a surprise baby) Theodora. Who knew the vicar and Mrs Strangeway were still…well…you know…Theodora is charming, clever and wonderful and thanks to the age gap between her and the others, is almost an only child. Louise has dropped a bombshell, she’s getting married and moving abroad with her new husband. Is there a place for Victoria in all this change?

Turns out the answer is NO. So Victoria summons her courage and goes to train as an actress. Because of the general family reaction (actress=scarlet woman) Victoria decides to take the name Victoria Sonning. Her theatrical training is hard and she has little money but Victoria is determined to live life as much as possible and shake off the vicarage shackles. A reader used to Streatfeild’s children’s novels might get a little shock when you realize that Victoria is pretty much prostituting herself to get money and clothes from her suitors. She never goes the full nine yards but you get the feeling she’s come awful close a few times. And is it that much different from Louise marrying so young? But sisters are doing what they have (and who they have) to do to escape the confines of the vicarage. Their parents aren’t horrible people but vicarage life is confining and narrow for the eldest Strangeway children.

Victoria manages to survive her stage school and then plunges into the world of a professional actress. She gets work and travels all over but you get the feeling that her stage work doesn’t truly fulfill her. And she certainly doesn’t care for the narrow and grimy life in theatrical digs and the constant moving around. Africa is enchanting but being thought of a Jezebel and a man-eater thanks to a some less than brilliant behavior and two male members of the theater company dying casts a cloud and stain on her acting career. People will always remember the scandal over how good her performances are.

On Tour is such a sadder book than A Vicarage Family. The younger Victoria had a fire and a zest that not even the wartime death of her beloved cousin John could quench. The older Victoria? The rough patches in life really send her skidding. The spark that got her to pursue a theatrical career vs life as an unpaid curate/domestic slave to her parents dims the farther she gets from school. Her longing for a home and love leaps off the page and when she realizes her so called love isn’t truly “in love” it’s a cut that almost destroys her more than the scandals that plague her acting career.

The other issue that makes On Tour a much different experience than A Vicarage Family is how closed off Victoria is. In A Vicarage Family you feel all the injustices and joys of Victoria’s life. She crackles and blazes and jumps off the page. You understand exactly why Annie is drawn to her and defends her. Maybe it’s because of the upheavals of the war or the changes in society but On Tour Victoria holds back and only gives us glimpses into her life. Was Noel Streatfeild ashamed of her life and feelings then? What was so awful that she makes Victoria a pale shadow of the girl that intrigued us so? Is it because S-E-X rears it’s head?

You can almost feel the squirming when Streatfeild writes about the appearance of Theodora. Yes, Noel/Victoria was a product of a very Victorian upbringing (Her sister Louise had no clue why she was getting sick every morning only weeks after being married. Just how much if any talk did Mrs Strangeway have with her daughters?) You might be tempted to think what keeps Victoria from actually jumping into bed with her suitors during her training isn’t the consequences (Theodora/the village girls illegitimate babies) but the actual act of sex itself. She is certainly repelled by Louise’s husband Him. Maybe it’s this disgust of sex that keeps her with her “we shall have a white farmhouse” suitor for so long because it seems crystal clear to me that this suitor might be happier with Dick Strangeway than Miss Victoria Sonning. Then again I could just be having one of my Gwen’s Crazy Literary Theories. Because I find Victoria Strangeway an interesting character I want to read more about no matter who or what she loves.

Even with it’s issues, On Tour is a must read. Even if many things are white-washed it still gives an interesting look at leaving a very moral and upright world for one with looser boundaries. And it makes you want to track down more of Streatfeild’s adult works. And exploring an author’s full writings is never a bad thing.