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Seedy Equations

Adam Mars-Jones: Dealing with James Purdy, 18 May 2023

James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer 
by Michael Snyder.
Oxford, 444 pp., £27, January, 978 0 19 760972 9
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... Room (1956).’ But Purdy’s method is anything but confrontational, using elderly Alma Mason as the point of view. Alma’s nephew Cliff may or may not have been living a secret life – the emphasis falls on her attempts to discover the man she thought she knew. She encounters coded messages and speaking silences: ‘It was exactly in the little ...

I gotta use words

Mark Ford: Eliot speaks in tongues, 11 August 2016

The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected & Uncollected Poems 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 1311 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23870 5
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The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume II: Practical Cats & Further Verses 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 667 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23371 7
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... 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond literature, between that phrase and the recording of a payment made to ...

Seeing Stars

Alan Bennett: Film actors, 3 January 2002

... to have seen him behind the counter. Then he’d joined the Rep before becoming a star. James Mason was another local boy who had made good, though from what beginnings I wasn’t sure: maybe he’d worked in a gents’ outfitters too.‘Making good’ meant getting out, as you would have to do if you were going to be a film star, but which applied to ...
... that’s been exploited, in America, at one level by comedians like Lenny Bruce and Jackie Mason, and at quite another level, by Jewish novelists. American fiction’s most single-minded portrait of the goy is in The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. The goy is Frank Alpine, the down-and-out thief who robs the failing grocery store of the Jew, Bober, later ...

Ardour

J.P. Stern, 3 November 1983

The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rainer Maria Rilke 
by J.F. Hendry.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, July 1983, 0 85635 369 8
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Rilke: sein Leben, seine Welt, sein Werk 
by Wolfgang Leppmann.
Scherz Verlag, 483 pp., £11, May 1981, 3 502 18407 0
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Rainer Maria Rilke: Leben und Werk im Bild 
edited by Ingeborg Schnack.
Insel Verlag, 270 pp., £2.55, May 1977, 3 458 01735 6
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... The various critical studies in which it has been set out, from Romano Guardini to Eudo Mason, Erich Heller, Jacob Steiner and Ulrich Fülleborn, differ widely in the aspects of the poetry they discuss and in their evaluations, yet they show a good deal of agreement in their overall interpretation. Ignoring all these studies, Leppmann refuses to ...

Unwritten Masterpiece

Barbara Everett: Dryden’s ‘Hamlet’, 4 January 2001

... does not include the 29th Ode of the Third Book of Horace (‘Happy the Man’) chosen by H.A. Mason to write on as an example of the poet-translator at his most genuinely inspired. Critics do and should differ, where an art is alive to them. But there may be something exceptional in Dryden’s case. He is plainly the most uneven of all our major ...

Outcasts and Desperados

Adam Shatz: Richard Wright’s Double Vision, 7 October 2021

The Man Who Lived Underground 
by Richard Wright.
Library of America, 250 pp., £19.99, April 2021, 978 1 59853 676 8
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... terror rather than a caustic commentary on the pervasiveness of racism on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.More​ was suppressed too. Wright’s publishers rejected the novel he at the time considered his most important, written between Native Son and Black Boy. An abridged version of The Man Who Lived Underground appeared in the posthumous ...

This Singing Thing

Malin Hay: On Barbra Streisand, 12 September 2024

My Name Is Barbra 
by Barbra Streisand.
Century, 992 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 5291 3689 0
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... at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her she ...

Gaelic Gloom

Colm Tóibín: Brian Moore, 10 August 2000

Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist 
by Denis Sampson.
Marino, 344 pp., IR£20, October 1998, 1 86023 078 4
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... many of Moore’s other novels. As he worked on the novel Moore wrote to the Irish Jesuit, Michael Paul Gallagher: ‘I find myself sympathetic to both sides of this argument (the Ecumenical and the Traditional) and so perhaps the story will work out.’ The drama is between the Abbot’s own worldly authority and the monks’ aggressive faith, between his ...

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding: Food Insecurity, 13 May 2010

... and processing houses of Britain.Supermarket strategists have had their eye on local for a while. Paul Kelly, in charge of ‘external affairs and corporate responsibility’ for Asda, told me of a distribution hub in Cumbria that was pouring local produce into one of his stores in Kendal (30 tubs of English Lakes ice cream are sold for every one of Ben ...

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