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The Pink Hotel

Wayne Koestenbaum, 3 April 1997

The Last Thing He Wanted 
by Joan Didion.
Flamingo, 227 pp., £15.99, January 1997, 0 00 224080 7
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... prose has its own duties to perform and will not pay close attention to the heroine. The prose’s task is stupefaction; this stupor may mirror the emotional state of the protagonist, but that is only a coincidence. The prose mimics catatonia because fugue states are the foundation of any prose that wishes to be contemporary. Maurice Blanchot’s novels might ...

Pisseurs

Susannah Clapp, 2 June 1988

A Far Cry from Kensington 
by Muriel Spark.
Constable, 189 pp., £9.95, March 1988, 0 09 468290 9
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... the world about her difficulties. These friends have explained that when Muriel Spark thought T.S. Eliot was breaking into her flat to take bits of food from her cupboard, she thought this because she was ill, not because she was demonically possessed. They have claimed some credit for her conversion, and have praised her for the ‘attractions of her ...

Diary

David Craig: In Florence, 26 November 1998

... trees up there, or bonny fruits or flying fish or rains that will cleanse and replenish. T.S. Eliot remarked once that Puritan mythology was ‘thin’ and Milton’s heaven and hell were like ‘insufficiently furnished apartments filled with heavy conversation’. Did he really know of a mythological heaven in which the conversation was fascinating? In ...

Poland’s Poet

Alan Sheridan, 17 December 1981

Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition 
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Catherine Leach.
Sidgwick, 300 pp., £8.95, July 1981, 0 283 98782 0
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The Issa Valley 
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Louis Iribarne.
Sidgwick, 288 pp., £6.95, July 1981, 0 283 98762 6
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... a potato field, desperately clutching a university library copy of The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot, ‘in the Faber & Faber edition’), ‘a raid on the ...

A Journey through Ruins

Patrick Wright, 18 September 1986

The Infant and the Pearl 
by Douglas Oliver.
Ferry Press, 28 pp., £2, December 1985
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... perhaps the odd Martian) can gain admission. I’ll shelve it at some distance from T.S. Eliot. Indeed, my copy will end up nearer to Jürgen Habermas, who first diagnosed this modern crisis of tradition – that it should be made more and more vitally necessary by the very same developments that erode it – in the early Seventies. In Oliver’s ...

Hallo Dad

Christopher Ricks, 2 October 1980

Mr Nicholas Sir Henry and Sons Daymare 
by Thomas Hinde.
Macmillan, 271 pp., £6.95, August 1980, 0 333 29539 0
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... the customary respect that would upper-case your father. If it matters whether a poem by T.S. Eliot says ‘Jew’ or ‘jew’ although the poem cannot say them differently, it could matter exactly how a son is presented as addressing his father even if, or especially if, the distinction would be smoulderingly meant to elude a father’s ears. In Mr ...

Men in Love

Paul Delany, 3 September 1987

Women in Love 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen.
Cambridge, 633 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 521 23565 0
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The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Vol. IV, 1921-24 
edited by Warren Roberts, James Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
Cambridge, 627 pp., £35, May 1987, 0 521 23113 2
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... he was writing it. Unfortunately, the new Cambridge edition is almost useless as an aid for this task. This edition gives the text of the first American edition, published in November 1920, now corrected from manuscript; to this it adds variants from the British editions of June 1921 onwards. These variants first arose because Martin Secker wanted the novel ...

Pwaise the wabbit

Claudia Johnson, 1 August 1996

Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings 
by Hugh Kenner.
California, 114 pp., £12, September 1994, 0 520 08797 6
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... whose toughness they mirror. With dozens of books on subjects as various as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, geodesic domes and computer poetry to his credit, Hugh Kenner, one of the moving forces behind the California series, is the éminence grise of American Modernism. It is not hard to imagine why he likes cartoons in general and Chuck Jones in ...

Haley’s Comet

Paul Driver, 6 February 1997

The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Weidenfeld, 431 pp., £25, September 1996, 0 297 81720 5
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... freedom from ‘fixed points’, gave to many members of the intelligentsia, among them T.S. Eliot, was repeated seven years later with the advent of daytime broadcasting on the Third’s wavelength. The Music Programme was steadily expanded, until in 1965 it occupied the whole of each weekday before Network Three’s successor, Study Session, came ...

Making Do and Mending

Rosemary Hill: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Letters, 25 September 2008

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald 
edited by Terence Dooley.
Fourth Estate, 532 pp., £25, August 2008, 978 0 00 713640 7
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... are missing from the index. How Fitzgerald came to know Stevie Smith and when it was that T.S. Eliot told her that the staircase from the Poetry Bookshop featured in ‘Ash Wednesday’ are among the questions that hang in the air. Neither Fitzgerald’s date of birth nor that of her children is given, and whether the religious faith that meant so much to ...

Trauma Style

Joanna Kavenna: Joyce Carol Oates, 19 February 2004

The Tattooed Girl 
by Joyce Carol Oates.
Fourth Estate, 307 pp., £16.99, January 2004, 0 00 717077 7
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... Bellow signals a protagonist’s status by listing his contacts (‘Conrad Aiken praised him, T.S. Eliot took favourable notice of his poems, and even Yvor Winters had a good word to say for him’ – Humboldt’s Gift); Roth often writes as a fictionalised version of himself, an internationally recognised writer approached by characters who want him to write ...

Urban Messthetics

John Mullan: Black and Asian writers in London, 18 November 2004

London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City 
by Sukhdev Sandhu.
Harper Perennial, 498 pp., £9.99, November 2004, 0 00 653214 4
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... Indian and Sri Lankan contributors are pictured with their white, establishment collaborators T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and William Empson. It’s no wonder that Portland Place seemed the world’s omphalos. Sandhu also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great ...

A Terrible Bad Cold

John Sutherland, 27 September 1990

Dickens 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 1195 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 1 85619 000 5
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... complications ensue. The third interlude imagines a conversation between Chatterton, Wilde, T.S. Eliot and Dickens – all Ackroydian subjects (‘William Blake will be joining us shortly,’ Chatterton says). The fifth interlude recounts a face-to-face meeting between Dickens and Ackroyd (‘Some of my best friends are biographers,’ Dickens says. It’s ...

In the Wilderness

W.J.T. Mitchell, 8 April 1993

Culture and Imperialism 
by Edward Said.
Chatto, 444 pp., £20, February 1993, 0 7011 3808 4
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... in modern Europe – Culture and Imperialism takes on an even more difficult and subtle task with the imperial arts. If it is relatively clear how historians, social scientists, demographers, anthropologists and colonial administrators deployed their ‘sciences’ to dominate subject peoples, it is considerably less clear how Jane Austen’s ...

Out of the closet

Tom Paulin, 29 October 1987

Emily Dickinson 
by Helen McNeil.
Virago, 208 pp., £3.50, April 1986, 0 86068 619 1
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Emily Dickinson: Looking to Canaan 
by John Robinson.
Faber, 191 pp., £3.95, August 1986, 0 571 13943 4
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Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar 
by Christanne Miller.
Harvard, 212 pp., £15.95, July 1987, 0 674 25035 4
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Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story 
by Jerome Loving.
Cambridge, 128 pp., £20, April 1987, 0 521 32781 4
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... American culture. She searched for role models among famous women writers of her day – George Eliot, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet as Christanne Miller points out, Dickinson didn’t actively support the political campaign for women’s rights ‘or, apparently, sympathise with women generally’. It is in the radical new language of the ...

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