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Kay Demarest’s War

Penelope Fitzgerald, 17 September 1987

The Other Garden 
by Francis Wyndham.
Cape, 106 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 224 02475 2
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The Engine of Owl-Light 
by Sebastian Barry.
Carcanet, 390 pp., £10.95, July 1987, 0 85635 704 9
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A Singular Attraction 
by Ita Daly.
Cape, 144 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 224 02438 8
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Cold Spring Harbor 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 182 pp., £10.95, July 1987, 0 413 14420 8
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The Changeling 
by Catharine Arnold.
Hodder, 223 pp., £9.95, July 1987, 0 340 40542 2
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... as much and forgive as much as Yates, or Salinger (whom he particularly admires), or Updike, or John Cheever, must be a tiring business. In Yates’s Builders there is a writer, Bob Prentice, who knows that too much sensitivity is a mistake, and upsets the readers. Prentice, however, is an unsuccessful writer. Yates, an expert in painful details and ...

Realty Meltdown

Geoff Dyer, 24 August 1995

Independence Day 
by Richard Ford.
Harvill, 451 pp., £14.99, July 1995, 1 86046 020 8
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... or Frankly. If anything of Hemingway survives into this phase of Ford’s writing it is what John Cheever (himself an influence) claimed you could sniff in all of Hemingway’s work: the smell of loneliness. Ford had always been a writer with a message, in the sense that there was always a mood, a resolution, his fiction was drawn towards; he wanted ...
... Small, Good Thing’. I think that they did a good job too. KB: A few weeks ago I saw the film of John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’. RC: Isn’t that just a wonderful film? I saw it when it first came out, and I talked to John Cheever about it. We were teaching together in Iowa. He claimed he just took the money ...

Four in a Bed

Wendy Doniger, 8 February 1996

Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life 
by Marjorie Garber.
Hamish Hamilton, 608 pp., £25, January 1996, 9780241134481
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... And this romantic triangle is really a triangle, not the V that so often represents it (John loves Mary and Mary loves Bob), leaving one side open. The Freudians closed the triangle with the hypothesis of closet homosexuality: Bob loves John (or, better, John loves Bob), and ...

Tang and Tone

Stephen Fender: The Federal Writer’s Project’s American epic, 18 March 2004

Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project 
by Jerrold Hirsch.
North Carolina, 293 pp., £16.50, November 2003, 0 8078 5489 1
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... Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale ...

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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... is closer to Henry James than to Genet.Snyder makes no reference to Purdy’s close contemporary John Horne Burns, whose 1947 novel, The Gallery, had negotiated a sure-footed path through the competing claims of directness and prudence (it became a bestseller). The gallery is the Galleria Umberto 1 in Naples, a monumental shopping arcade, at least ...

Sex with Satan

Deborah Friedell, 21 October 2021

Crossroads 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 592 pp., £20, October, 978 0 00 830889 6
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... of American magazines and the man on the omnibus had ‘some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever’. In Crossroads, a man ‘in the vitamin business’, Franzen’s idea of a regular Joe, buys ‘the recent Mailer, the recent Updike’. Free from the ‘total electronic distraction of our time’, Franzen’s people keep their minds on ...

They don’t say that about Idi Amin

Andrew O’Hagan: Bellow Whinges, 6 January 2011

Saul Bellow: Letters 
edited by Benjamin Taylor.
Viking, 571 pp., $35, November 2010, 978 0 670 02221 2
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... awestruck by the philosopher Owen Barfield, and had a quite saintly manner of carefulness with John Berryman, but, these things apart, the volume is quite fogged over with Bellow’s notion that replying to letters was nothing if not a complete and utter waste of time. To Ralph Ellison: ‘I’ve never enjoyed writing letters. Vasiliki says that ...

Retro-Selfies

Iain Sinclair: Ferlinghetti, 17 December 2015

I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–97 
edited by Bill Morgan.
City Lights, 284 pp., £11.83, July 2015, 978 0 87286 678 2
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Writing across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010 
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson.
Liveright, 464 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 1 63149 001 9
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... the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... That she was toeing the Party line didn’t occur to me, though it did to my companion, John Scaife, another budding conscript, who was much more scathing on the subject and cynical about the tears. 2 February. Ten days or so ago I did an interview for the Today programme in connection with the revival of The History Boys now playing at ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... to what other writers were doing about the war. In 1943, after reading a story about the army by John Cheever in the New Yorker, he wrote to Mackie: ‘The trouble with writing a story about the army is this: people expect something to happen in a story (Cheever supplied things, lots of things); but the whole point of ...

Baudelairean

Mary Hawthorne: The Luck of Walker Evans, 5 February 2004

Walker Evans 
by James Mellow.
Perseus, 654 pp., £15.99, February 2002, 1 903985 13 7
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... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound ...

Trapped with an Incubus

Clair Wills: Shirley Hazzard, 21 September 2023

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life 
by Brigitta Olubas.
Virago, 564 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 349 01286 5
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... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...

Diary

Robert Irwin: The Best Thing since Sex, 2 December 1993

... should resist this kind of creeping socialisation. A Belgian musician and designer of automata, John Joseph Merlin, first skated on an early version of roller blades while playing the violin in 1760. But if roller-skating has a long history, it has only a short literature. Unlike cricket, it does not command literary partisans of the calibre of Harold ...

Overflow

Frank Kermode: John Updike, 21 January 1999

Beck at Bay: A Quasi-Novel 
by John Updike.
Hamish Hamilton, 241 pp., £16.99, January 1999, 0 241 14027 7
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... That John Updike has a Trollopian fidelity to his characters is evident from the four books of the Rabbit series; this new book is the third of a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure ...

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