My review of Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Let me first say that this literary masterpiece deserved every last ounce of global acclaim that it won - so special that no film adaptation has come anywhere near to the book. This is the perfect novel, in form, in cadence, in concept. Pure magic.

That said, this glittering tome is my least favourite, plot-wise, of Jean's novels. Maybe because it is a standalone, with little in common with any of her other, less appraised works.

She herself saw the irony that this atypical epic, published in her dotage, from handwritten scrawl, was what it took to deem her a literary luminary. Of all the plaudits and her prestigious literary award, she said only, in pure Jean Rhys form: 'It came too late.' Only her old cult following could appreciate this understatement. For too many long decades she had been unfairly underestimated and shunned by highbrow critics and readership masses alike.

Rhys had lived in obscurity for decades after her previous work, Good Morning, Midnight, was published in 1939, with publishers presuming her dead. Wide Sargasso Sea, her astonishing and unanticipated comeback, became her most successful novel, winning her the 1967 WH Smith Literary Award, and seeing her later appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). 

A prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, this is the backstory of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her Caribbean youth to her unhappy marriage to an unnamed English gentleman (implied as Jane Eyre's 'Mr. Rochester'). The story elaborates on how her captor-husband came to move Antoinette to England, rename her Bertha, falsely declare her insane and lock her away in his attic, where she then actually descends into madness.

Rhys uses multiple narrative voices (Antoinette's, Rochester's, and Grace Poole's), masterfully merging this plot with that of Jane Eyre. For the most part, however, protagonist Antoinette relates her life story from colonial childhood, to arranged marriage, to her attic room confines under servant Grace Poole's watch in [Rochester mansion] Thornfield Hall.

The novel begins circa 1834 after the Abolition Act ended slavery in the British Empire. Part One, set in Jamaica's Coulibri, is narrated by Antoinette who reflects, fragmentally, on her childhood, her mother's mental instability and her mentally impaired brother's tragic death.

Part Two alternates between perspectives of Antoinette and her unnamed English husband during their honeymoon in Dominica's Granbois. Antoinette's childhood nurse, Christophine, travels with the newlyweds as servant. We witness the advent of Antoinette's mental downfall after her husband receives a malicious blackmailing letter from one Daniel, an acquisitive native, demanding hush money and claiming to be Antoinette's distant illegitimate brother. For good measure, Daniel also alleges Antoinette carries a hereditary half-madness.

Loyal Christophine, resenting the groom's semi-belief in Daniel's crazed claims, aggravates matters with her open hostility. Perplexed and frustrated, Antoinette's new husband, feeling alienated in this foreign land, eventually lashes out, becoming openly unfaithful to his bride. Our heroine's swelling paranoia and despair at her failing marriage unbalance her already frail emotional state.

Part Three, the novel's shortest section, is from the perspective of Antoinette, now renamed Bertha. She is confined in the attic of Thornfield Hall which she calls the 'Great House'. We follow her relationship with servant-guard Grace Poole, as Antoinette's captor-husband hides her from the world. Promising to see her more, he pursues relationships with other women (eventually with his new young governess, Jane Eyre). In a final act of despair, Antoinette/Bertha decides to take her own life.

Her magnum opus, this is not your typical Jean Rhys, not that younger, wilder Jean her select following knew and loved, but it has nevertheless been justifiably hailed as one of the most important works of English literature ever penned.

Anyone who reads would be a fool to pass on this one.

My review of Letters 1931-1966, by Jean Rhys, Francis Wyndham (Editor), Diana Melly (Editor)

Letters 1931-1966

by Jean Rhys, Francis Wyndham (Editor), Diana Melly (Editor) 

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I was bought this as a birthday gift by someone who knew my fanaticism for Jean Rhys. This intimate glimpse into the personal comments of my all-time favourite writer had me mesmerised from start to finish.

The letters include those from 1931, when she was recently estranged from her first husband French-Dutch journalist-songwriter (and spy) Jean Lenglet. Jean was still enjoying the acclaim of her first three books, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927) Postures/Quartet (1929) and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931).

Like a fly on Jean's various walls, we watch her bumpy life unravel until the 1966 death of her of her third and final husband, solicitor Max Hamer, who had spent much of their marriage jailed for fraud. Jean was now a frail old woman reduced to a life of obscurity, alone in her ramshackle West Country home. Publicly long forgotten and presumed dead, her books were mostly out of print. 

She was, however, on the brink of major rediscovery with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she had spent years drafting and perfecting. Unlike any of her earlier works, this final tome was a fictional perspective of the 'madwoman in the attic' from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It would win Jean the prestigious 1967 WH Smith Literary Award, of which she famously said: 'It has come too late'.

Like all Jean's penned words published or not, this is like sitting all alone with her, listening to a voice that speaks only the pure, haunting truth.

A remarkable, intimate journey through her life that validates and authenticates the integrity of everything she had published and explains so much more about her than we, as diehard fans, could have known.

The most beautiful birthday gift I was ever given. Truly. It will never be allowed out of my house.

As an afterthought, it's interesting that those reviewers who don't "get" the Jean Rhys letters tend to be American, whereas those who do appear to be British.

My review of Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart by John Guy

Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart 

by John Guy

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

An essential element of any historical biographer's task is to put colour into the cheeks of their subject, which Professor Guy effects with aplomb in this meticulously penned tome. This queen, who has for centuries polarised commentariats, is a personal favourite, this being the twenty-something book of her I've relished. Each biographer depicts her as predominantly innocent or guilty. This one is firmly on Mary's side and puts his case supremely.

The details that divide on the Queen of Scots are those absent from posterity, those which perhaps Mary's royal son James I & VI helped erase from record, or which Mary's accusers collectively disposed of to save their own reputations with the passage of time. Much has been powerfully theorised on the potential forgery of her incriminating 'casket letters' with as much effectively arguing their authenticity.

We'll never know for sure, without some revelation becoming unearthed. Such are the tantalising dynamics of the relationship between this and her cousin queen and executioner Elizabeth I, of whom similarly divided thought tribes have evolved for similar reasons. Both queens have benefited and suffered from each other's propagandists.

In the face of excellent wider reception, this author has by some been unfairly accused of being as enamoured with Mary Stuart as her contemporary devotees were, his detractors complaining of his bias in her favour. Yet septuagenarian Professor Guy, who read history at Cambridge before teaching there, is a veteran historian of the highest order. He is as entitled, perhaps more so than his armchair critics, to an informed opinion.

It never fails to baffle me, reading critiques from those a half or quarter Guy's age, qualifying their pickiness citing not a single academic endowment of their own – I'm not talking critiques of his style but of his capacity to know his material – just how ferociously opinionated today's readers still find themselves on this dividing monarch. The bare facts still trigger kneejerk moral reactions to her legendary deeds.

I agree with John Guy on the reality of Mary of Scots' personally redeeming qualities. Without a religious agenda to my name and having equal fondness for her archrival, Elizabeth, I too have always kept an open mind on Mary's broader innocence and have consistently concluded that, like so many martyrs of her age put to death for treason, she cannot have been entirely guilty of everything charged against her. Such was the politico-judicial machine's modus operandi and still is. Evidence is, and always was to some degree, controlled, manipulated and confected by those in power over any such accused.

Nor can any rational apologist concede Mary's total innocence (anyone so unjustly imprisoned for so long would have plotted towards their liberty on whatever ethical ground presented itself). The truth, as always, must lie somewhere in the centre. I once more concluded, nevertheless, that here was an extremely likeable woman. One I still find intriguing enough to keep reading on as more gets written with the sophistry of modern research. One I remain unable to side either with or against. It's a stimulating position.

Highly recommend this book, especially to the unbigoted.

My review of Mary Queen of Scots, by Antonia Fraser

Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Nobel Laureate Lady Antonia Fraser's rare combination of formidable historical knowledge and exquisite penmanship makes this book a supreme standalone piece.

For this, her first major publication, she was awarded the 1969 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The 40th anniversary edition was published in 2009, two years before she was elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Few of Lady Fraser's other historical biographies have come close, in my opinion, to this now definitive work on one of history's most unique and fascinating queens. The religiously martyred Mary, Queen of Scots, has for centuries also been politically demonised. Accordingly, Fraser enumerates in her 'Author's Note' that this book aims:

(1) To test the truth or falsehood of the many legends surrounding the subject; and 

(2) To set Queen Mary in the context of the age in which she lived.

Fraser has endured considerable criticism from more recent biographers of Mary Stuart, her own portrait being largely sympathetic in stressing Mary's key virtues. Yet this grandmother of eighteen, widow of Harold Pinter and daughter of the 7th Earl and Countess of Longford, is is no doubt above such flippant critique from what must seem to her like amateur upstarts.

Anyone interested in history and monarchy will adore this. I drooled like the cat that's got the cream, stretching it out into slow, bite sized sittings. It was too superb to devour hurriedly.

Astonishingly high-quality reading which educates and entertains, leaving the reader begging for more. Can't be topped by anything in its class.

My review of Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, by Simon Louvish

Mae West: It Ain't No Sin

by Simon Louvish

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I loved reading about this skilful, acutely intelligent performer who haunts my foggy formative years' recall. I still visualise her swagger, hear her distinct drawl in scratchy, early '30s movies that TV showed late at night, like 'She Done Him Wrong,' 'I'm No Angel' 'Bell of the Nineties' and 'Klondike Annie'.

What we learn from this book is that Mary Jane 'Mae' West, born 1893, turned her hand to many things including scriptwriting and jazz singing. She did some astonishingly risqué work long before there were any movies, or talkies anyway. Learning her stagecraft treading the boards, she wrote prolifically, including some fiction and much that was banned.

She produced some extraordinarily daring comedic material, loaded with double entendres outrageous even by today's standards. This was long, long before the age of political correctness, way before anything like the Hayes Production Code was even thought of. She subsequently became a pioneer in fighting censorship.

Her celluloid glory days need no elaboration here.

By the '50s she was such a legend she was blithely turning down roles like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. By the early '70s she was appearing in gender-bending things like Gore Vidal's 'Myra Breckinridge' with Raquel Welch. How long can any mortal keep going so, really? But she kept at it.

By the late '70s, making 'Sextette', she needed her lines fed to her through a tiny speaker hidden inside her wigs. She reportedly seemed disoriented and forgetful, having difficulty following direction. Failing eyesight made navigating around the set difficult for her. The camera crew started shooting her from the waist up (one official account is that this was to hide an out-of-shot production assistant crawling on the floor, guiding her around the set, but another I've read is that she had sandbags strategically placed for her feet to feel and guide her as she shuffled her way about the set floor).

I didn't mind Simon Louvish's academic style of documentation here, which accorded fine balance between the unavoidably outlandish subject material and the sensibly erudite final draft.

Fascinating and well-crafted biography about a greatly underestimated gal, the remarkable woman behind the legend of Diamond Lil.

My review of Bess of Hardwick by Mary S. Lovell

Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth, 1527-1608

by Mary S. Lovell

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I relished this important biography of a fascinating woman. Among other things, Bess was maternal grandmother to the girl considered possible successor to Elizabeth I, Lady Arbella Stuart. This in itself strengthened Bess's intricately woven ties to royalty.

She was also for a long time the main keeper and confidante of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots, hand-picked by Queen Elizabeth herself, so highly respected and trusted was Bess. For anyone fascinated by that legendary Scots martyr queen, as I have always been, this biography makes for essential reading. That said, Bess's story is a standalone by any measure.

Here was an extraordinary woman, especially for her time, but really against any historical backdrop. Transcending her somewhat humble beginnings, Bess married four times and rose to become an independent woman of means, materially on a par with Queen Elizabeth in wealth and power, an astonishing climb. This was the wealthiest non-royal lady in all England, keeper of rival monarchs, royal secrets and mistress of her own unique dynasty.

A formidable woman by all accounts, Bess created and left some of England's most splendiferous architecture including Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall ('... more glass than wall').

She earned respect for having retained her earthiness while becoming a breathtaking example of a new aristocracy, all the way demonstrating remarkable business acumen that many a man envied.

The story of this funny, po-faced termagant with her jewelled but work-worn finger ever on the ledger book, is an absolute must read, not to be excluded by any keen reader of Elizabethan history.

My review of Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, by Flora Fraser

Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III

by Flora Fraser

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I was intensely immersed in Flora Fraser's impressive, high calibre tome. Historical royal biography is an addictive genre that leaves its readers ever hungry for something to top their favourites. This is a difficult call on authors. There are only limited options without repeating what others before have done brilliantly.

This author's notary mother, Lady Antonia Fraser, is an impossible act to follow. Think of most talented daughters living in their famous mothers' shadows and this syndrome becomes clear.

Being any such diva's daughter may have that advantageous head start insofar as many already know who you are and will finance your enterprise if only from curiosity. But there are accompanying soaring expectations, ones few mortals could realistically live up to.

Any established readership like Lady Antonia's is so loyal it can be wincingly unforgiving in its natural comparisons. That brilliant mother has already covered the most popular subjects and periods, leaving only the duller choices for her daughter to embark upon.

Flora Fraser has proven herself a chip off the old block to this first-time reader. Her characterisations are sublime, her detail meticulous, her research suitably mindboggling - I'd have expected nothing less and would have been greatly disappointed with less.

While this is admittedly not the most interesting period to me, the book covers a fascinating royal court. The civility and humanness of Mad King George III's cultured female offspring is striking. We like these women. They are deserving of such coverage. I came away better informed, further educated and entertained, if little more enthralled by the Hanoverians generally.

Perhaps only Lady Fraser's daughter could have achieved what has been pulled off here. A fine piece of work on a challenging group of subjects to document interestingly. As with her mother, I will read more of her, regardless which subjects.

My review of I'll Cry Tomorrow by Lillian Roth, Gerold Frank, Mike Connolly

I'll Cry Tomorrow

by Lillian Roth, Gerold Frank, Mike Connolly

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Riveting 1954 memoir of 1920s & '30s star of stage, screen and radio, Lillian Roth.

Her horrific journey through alcoholism, making for confronting reading at times, was an unprecedented international sensation. Courageously penned, this became a global best seller of its era, in seven languages.

She was widely praised for passing on the message of recovery to millions in an era when alcoholism was seldom discussed in polite society. She was also harshly criticised by certain overly zealous self-appointed Twelve Step fellowship spokespeople wary of celebrities making themselves 'recovery' icons (some who disclosed their fellowship membership were accused of damaging 'the program's' reputation when they publicly relapsed).

Recovery controversies aside, this was, and remains, a brilliant standalone book, not at all the sort of tacky celeb tell-all that would evolve in subsequent years.

At six, as Educational Pictures' trademark, Lillian was painted as a living statue holding a lamp of knowledge, and her painter molested her, which she describes in chilling detail as the defining event that would forever haunt her.

Lillian's signature song was "When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along)". That's about the best-known legacy many of today's generations may have of her. And this hair-raising book.

Actresses considered to play Lillian in the 1955 film adaptation included June Allyson, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Jane Wyman, Jean Simmons, Jane Russell and Piper Laurie. It was Susan Hayward who won the role and was nominated for an Academy Award for her gritty portrayal. That movie became the fourth-highest money maker of 1956.

Still an awesome read more than 50 years after its publication, this candid memoir gave me cold shivers, goose pimples and left me wanting to read more and more when I'd finished the last page.

My review of Marilyn: The Last Take, by Peter Harry Brown

Marilyn: The Last Take

Peter Harry Brown

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Regardless of its seeming irrelevance in the fifty-year blizzard of Marilyn biographies, I was unable to put down this curled and yellowed artifice, lent to me by a diehard fan, complete with pressed and mummified cockroach legs. So many Marilyn pieces are unreadable pulp non-fiction. This one earned its place in that handful of standout efforts.

Easy flowing, unpretentious yet thoroughly slick, the quality of workmanship held me throughout. Whilst lacking the glitzy hallmarks of more iconic, full-life biographies, this steers clear of popular Monroe mythology, sticking solidly to documented facts concerning only that contentious period imminent to her death. 

So much was ado in 1962, as Marilyn, 20th Century Fox's most bankable star of the 1950s, commenced that studio's ill-fated Something's Got to Give, an updated remake of screwball comedy My Favorite Wife (1940). We read how, for months, she was insidiously undermined, goaded on-set, bullied by proxy, misrepresented by studio and media alike, defamed to the point of despair (and that was only her work life, without even starting on her personal life). 

This vicious campaign of intimidation was spearheaded by ageing, drug-addled, acid-tongued director George Cuckor, aided by his buddies higher up the studio ladder. What's more, the film's already insultingly flimsy budget was being further siphoned away to cover that farcically expensive Burton-Taylor debacle, Cleopatra, which the ailing studio hoped would save it.

The effects of Cuckor's malicious vendetta on this, Marilyn's final movie, were compounded by a throng of Hollywood gossip columnists led by notorious Hedda Hopper and her archrival Louella Parsons. Fox's publicists also played a perversely pivotal role in wrecking her morale, as did the White House fraternity and its undercover henchmen, shielding the cracking image of a president at a critical time in his leadership.

In production reports and press releases, Monroe's genuine health issues were passed off as the temperamental play-ups of an unreliable diva. An underlying will to be rid of her simmered from office to office, coast to coast, awaiting some opportune moment. This involved studio heads and backers on one side and more sinister, undercover forces on the other, moving to prevent her affairs with President John F Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Bobby, becoming publicly confirmed (or, better still, to end them).

Before Something's Got to Give's shooting commenced, Monroe had notified producer Henry Weinstein that she had been asked by the White House to sing at President Kennedy's Madison Square Garden birthday honours on May 19, 1962. Weinstein had granted her permission, believing it would not hinder production. JFK had even personally assured her he would pull any necessary strings to prevent her Madison Square Garden appearance causing any contractual conflict with Fox.

Yet soon after the event her romantic and professional tide turned. Kennedy suddenly disowned her, and Marilyn was publicly fired, amidst widely publicized plans to replace her with Lee Remick who was fitted into Monroe's costumes and photographed with Cuckor. This was to backfire, with her fans up in arms and her select remaining handful of powerful industry allies resolute about saving her. 

Similarly, co-star Dean Martin, with final approval of his leading lady, loyally refused to continue without Monroe. After an extended stalemate and a personally engineered campaign aimed at her furious fans, Marilyn was reinstated under new terms and conditions with public popularity on her side. 

Her detractors became more peeved than ever. She had, infuriatingly, triumphed once more, in yet another battle of Hollywood egos. 

Awaiting resumption of the troublesome shoot, she had never been healthier or happier. 

In the damage control wake of her 'Happy birthday, Mr. President' appearance, amidst the prelude to an important by-election, Monroe was callously cut-off and ostracized by both Kennedy brothers and their phalange of bureaucrats and relatives. Politically vulnerable and under the supervision of political spin doctors and their ruthless father, each Kennedy brother changed his direct telephone number and refused to take her calls, offering Marilyn no explanation or farewell, resulting in the easily derailed star, with her lifelong abandonment issues, feeling used and discarded. 

Yet now, no longer a forgotten orphan, or an impoverished starlet, but a legend at the peak of her stardom, she had the guidance, support and encouragement of therapists, minions and mentors, along with her money and fame.

Heartbroken yet more determined than ever before to fight back at life and re-empower herself, she planned a press conference to end all press conferences - one that would have blown the lid off the Kennedy administration and embarrassed its tentacular web of connections which, unsurprisingly, extended to entertainment kingpins, studio heads and financiers.

Having correctly assumed her house was being bugged, many of her calls pertaining to this messy strategy were made from roadside pay phones. But written notes on her planned press conference were kept at hand, along with intimately detailed diaries pertaining to the Kennedy affairs.    

The rest, as we know, is history. She was suddenly found dead, tagged with the 'accidental suicide' label in a bungled post-mortem case that never concluded but saw scandalous levels of sensitive information swept under carpets and left there for decades. Her house, the scene of unidentified comers-and-goers in the still of that fatal night, was cleared before investigation teams even arrived at her death scene, those highly sensitive press conference plans vanishing along with her revealing diaries. As if working in with all this, publicity machines covered up as much as they could by elaborating on her mental health problems and self-medication habits, emphasising the likelihood of suicide.   

Monroe's autopsy, conducted August 5 by deputy coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, was pointedly clouded by the inexplicable disappearance of key liver and kidney tissue samples that would have proved she could never have self-administered the quantity of drugs that killed her.

For years, classified government files on her demise were kept tightly locked away, as were endless reels of Something's Got to Give footage showing she was never in better form, far from how the studio and its Washington connections would have had the world believe she had been in her final fourteen weeks on earth.

This book is no cheap conspiracy yarn, but a well-documented account of Marilyn Monroe's final months. A comprehensive lowdown on the contributing parties standing to benefit from the melee of cover-ups surrounding her premature and unresolved end.  

Despite my sneezes with each crumbling page, it was well worth the tissues. An excellent read.

My review of Princess Margaret: A Biography by Theo Aronson

Princess Margaret: A Biography

by Theo Aronson

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Princess Margaret was, when I was growing up, the royal rebel people cheered on. As much a '60s icon as The Beatles or the miniskirt, she was always up to some exotic mischief, usually in some scorching Caribbean place and more often than not with the wrong man. My parents' generation (Margaret's slightly elder peers), and their own parents, had a soft spot for this princess whose personal dreams never came true. 'Poor Maggie,' was a common catch cry whenever she made tabloid headlines with yet another scandal.

Theo Aronson tells another side of the public's ideas on her – how she earned widespread disapproval and media condemnation, not to mention much high Establishment tut-tutting. This the author qualifies with anecdotes which are entertaining, if not as thoroughly sourced as this reader would have liked (a good proportion of these could have been plucked from the air just to amuse).

That much of the content is, conversely, very well documented, leaves the reader sceptical over quotes by so many unnamed people, e.g. 'family friend', 'guest at the event', 'high ranking official', etc. Of course, this also adds to the sense of intrigue we have come to expect from juicy royal biographies, yet this glaring feature places parts of the work more into the gutter press bundle than the authorised, legitimate one. Indeed, certain passages degenerate to gossip level, cheapening the overall effect.

That said, this is, for the most part, an entertaining and well written piece, even with workmanship notably weaker in some parts than others. Like his subject, Aronson is often a split case – sycophantic in many of his praises of Margaret, whilst vitriolic in some of his judgements and criticisms. This extremist swinging to and fro, between kindness and harshness, whilst matching perfectly the woman of whom he writes, lends the work a hyperbolic quality. The author seems in parts to defend his contentious subject to the hilt, whilst in others viciously slapping her beautiful face (curious, given that the princess was still alive at the time of this book's publication to read it). Even so, I was compelled to read on.

Here was arguably the last grand royal princess, cavorting around with the louche arts and pop communities, often a maverick at odds with her status, often hysterically funny and theatrical, yet equally often a diva of the most pompous, imperious kind imaginable. There was simply no predicting which of these polar-opposite split characters she would be. As if she had a deeply set identity crisis. Just as there is never any predicting which route this author will take when relaying some episode – will it be compassionate or condemnatory? This shifting objectivity and judgement I found disconcerting yet interesting.

Like Diana who followed, this princess gave the monarchy that much needed humane element by being an openly flawed and self-contradictory figure we all related to at some level. She was brave, tragic, spoilt, vulnerable, mercurial, dutiful, extravagant, haughty, cynical, catty ... yet when it boiled down to it bore the capacity to be infinitely kinder, more personally loyal and more down to earth than many royals we read of – it all depended on who you asked, and which occasion it related to.

I enjoyed this lightweight read. Though it could surely doubtful ever be considered the definitive work of its kind on this princess, I highly recommend it to the diehard royal biography buff.

My review of Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

Good Morning, Midnight

by 

Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars 

Jean Rhys's 1939 Kafkaesque tragi-farce is an all powerful and evocative trip into a Paris of times past and the existentialist internal world of a tortured woman heading for disaster.

Middle-aged English woman Sasha Jensen has returned to Paris after a long absence. Her trip down Memory Lane is enabled by money lent by a kind friend. Close to broke, Sasha is haunted by a past loveless marriage and her baby's death.

Adrift in the city she feels connected to despite its painful memories, she bases herself in a dingy hotel room, waking and emerging mostly after dark, hence the title Good Morning, Midnight - taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Sasha wanders streets and bars reminiscing. She drinks, takes pills, obsesses over her hair, clothes and creeping age, all the time ruminating scornfully over society.

This is the maturing Jean Rhys at her cynical best. Published on the eve of WWII's outbreak, when readers craved more uplifting, optimistic fiction, this was her last before vanishing into literary obscurity for decades, with people assuming her dead.

In its time it was thought too dark, too depressing, too sordid. More than a few found its storyline repellent. She was, however, a writer aeons ahead of her time, with a supreme talent for resonating with our innermost primal emotions.

My first ever reading of this was my chance introduction to Rhys, who would become my all time literary favourite. An eerie experience, it was like reading my own thoughts, penned decades before I was born ... just for me to read someday long after the author's death.

My affinity with Jean Rhys was instant and unshakeable. She was an underrated literary genius whose eventual great acclaim came far too late, when she was too old and frail to enjoy it. If only she could have been more prolific in her prime!

Good Morning, Midnight changed the way I read fiction forever and remains my favourite Jean Rhys novel. I still return regularly to it and quote liberally from its superlative narrative.

Prose at times like poetry, nihilistic yet astoundingly beautiful, everyone should read this timeless treasure.

My review of Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh by Alexander Walker

Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh

by Alexander Walker

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

It was on reflection of what would have been Vivien Leigh's hundred and tenth year, 2023, that I revisited Alexander Walker's biography, one I had previously relished, but which had triggered disappointment in some. I've said before: if it's a movieography you want, click on Wikipedia or the Internet Movie Database. There isn't much to see. Leigh didn't make a long list of films comparable to other legends of her standing. This serious actress was at heart a great theatre performer, like her husband Sir Laurence Olivier who, likewise, made some celluloid epics but less than you might think.

So obviously this is no beginners' handbook on Vivien Leigh's movies. It's hardly news that she won two Best Actress Academy Awards for her performances as 'Southern belles': Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had played on stage in London's West End in 1949. Unsurprisingly, she also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway version of Tovarich (1963).

This biography is about the person more than her films. Like many extraordinary talents, Leigh lived with bipolar disorder, no easy thing for any sufferer to work with let alone a star of stage and screen with those impossibly demanding schedules. This affected her twenty-year marriage to Sir Laurence Olivier so much that it ended in heartbreak, Olivier taking up with now great Joan Plowright who became the Lady Olivier we know today.

This multi-award nominee and winner of Oscars, New York Film Critics, Golden Globes and Tonies struggled with major health issues beside her mental ones. Her life and career were marred by those episodes. Recurrent bouts of tuberculosis, first diagnosed in the mid-1940s, claimed her life at 53. Understandably, she had earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, her career suffering periods of inactivity.

She was born in India, daughter of an English army officer in the Indian Cavalry. The family returned to their native England, Vivien later attending London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She cut short her studies to get engaged to a man who disapproved of theatre work. She had therefore already been married, had a daughter and separated before she resumed her career, doing numerous quality but low-profile acting jobs for several years as she honed her stagecraft.

Then along came Olivier, her great love, and in turn came her brilliant career. Olivier really was her life more than anything, hence this biography's pronounced emphasis on her private life. She was utterly devastated by her divorce and never recovered.

The reader wonders whether it might have been some small consolation to Vivien being posthumously ranked 16th greatest female movie star of all time, in 1999, by the American Film Institute.

A more tragic private figure than any she publicly portrayed, here was a soul we feel for yet celebrate as we work our way through her life, care of this ever-reliable biographer of screen goddesses. I could not help wondering, on my second reading, whether a hundred-and-one-year-old Ms. Leigh might have eventually driven out her demons and made peace with her life, time healing all things and wisdom a natural product of years passing. She would surely have become one mightily wise dame. But as with all the great tragediennes, her life was cut short in her prime, which was perhaps her ultimate preference. She was, after all, quoted by US journalist Radie Harris as confiding that she 'would rather have lived a short life with Larry [Olivier] than face a long one without him'. Once more, I finished this book hoping this great star and tortured soul is at peace, if not for having kept her great love in life, then in the compensatory assurance of how treasured she will always be by her fans.

My review of Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne by David Starkey

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne

by 

David Starkey

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars 

There's something to be said of the feministic slant common among Elizabeth's female biographers which make this sometimes-princess, sometimes-not a sympathetic young character. Just being Anne Boleyn's daughter would have been problematic for any individual regardless of character and circumstances. We recognise that these female biographers have done their job when we're compelled to empathise with the young Elizabeth. Such personal connection allows us special access into her psyche.

I was unsurprised to find this often-unforgiving exploration less empathic than bluntly incisive. I was able to factor in that Starkey was famously tagged misogynistic by historian Lucy Worsley in a heated moment of sensitive scholarly debate. Even his famous sobriquet as the 'rudest man in Britain' I knew was partly just the result of an old television debate panel beat-up.

I took into account that reviews of Starkey's own more recent TV documentaries unfairly drew on this aspect of him, calling him 'pompous' and 'acerbic'. David Sarky was one nickname.

I could therefore put aside Starkey's overt dismissal of other historians' ideas here. His provocative, self-opinionated manner is partly a contrivance, I knew.

This is a great historian of our time, a master of his genre, no mere popular history writer. To enjoy his quality, we must compromise by accepting his style. The effort is worth it.

Elizabeth's early years are undoubtedly what forged much of her persona. These are finely scrutinised without sentiment or bias. Starkey's erudite points are masterfully fleshed out, eloquently phrased and expertly documented.

Elizabeth's formative years of being pampered royal heiress then shunned royal bastard are satisfyingly cited as one trigger of her later infamous episodic neurosis.

Her much-debated time spent in Queen Catherine Parr's house is examined at length. So is the overwhelming probability of her being systematically seduced by her stepfather, the scheming Thomas Seymour, Baron Sudeley, who lost his head for his treasonous shenanigans. This well covered ground, consistent with general consensus, shines the obligatory light into Elizabeth's later famous reluctance towards open romance.

Her confusing return to royal favour under brother Edward offers context as plots thicken around replacing her and half-sister Mary with Lady Jane Grey, the nine days queen who then lost her head on the block under the more rightfully placed Queen Mary I.

Elizabeth's subsequent persecution as heir again, under childless Mary, is well explained, with the effect of Elizabeth growing shrewder, a defining feature she would put to great use once on her throne.

Her potential involvement in Protestant plots to dethrone Catholic Mary is perhaps contentiously asserted, with Starkey gratuitously cherry picking to back up his conjecture. We are left with little doubt that she was at least privy to more than she owned up to being involved in, all of which she naturally denied to save her own neck.

A superbly written study, by a talented academic, of perhaps England's most popular queen. Notwithstanding its conspicuous departure from kinder, more feministic angles, this important book deserves its place on our shelves.

My review of Elizabeth I by Alison Plowden

Elizabeth I

by 

Alison Plowden

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars         

I just re-read this, as background revision, while watching the 2022 drama series 'Becoming Elizabeth'.

Alison Plowden is a queen of this genre. Her writing is addictive. Her research is meticulous, her detail mindboggling, her immortalised subject re-humanised. Elizabeth's life was fascinating regardless whose account you read - and I've read dozens - but this is among the better ones.

With her mother, Anne Boleyn, executed when Elizabeth was two, and her parents' marriage annulled, she was declared illegitimate. At twenty-five this dogged survivor succeeded her half-sister 'Bloody Mary', who had imprisoned Elizabeth for almost a year on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels.

Tagged the 'Virgin Queen', Elizabeth considered herself married to England, never settling on a groom when any choice of foreign prince could have worked politically against her favour. Her true great love, Robert Dudley 'the Gypsy', was beneath her in rank, of famously treasonous stock and of dubious public renown after the mysterious death of his wife Amy.

More moderate a ruler than her father and half-siblings, one of her mottoes was 'video et taceo' ('I see, and say nothing'). Her Religious Settlement evolved into today's Church of England. Her eponymous age saw English drama flourish, led by Shakespeare and Marlowe, with seamen like Francis Drake knighted as heroes.

Her forty-four year reign, for many years politically shaky after she was branded a heretic by the pope, eventually brought England stability, helping forge its sense of national identity.

Renowned by detractors as short-tempered and indecisive, Elizabeth was also famously charming and no flibbertigibbet. On the contrary, she was a wily mistress of prevarication. Blessed with the 'common touch' she was hugely popular with her subjects, nicknamed 'Good Queen Bess' and 'Gloriana'.

The Spanish Armada's failure associated her with one of English history's greatest military victories. Her Tilbury speech to the troops, delivered wearing a silver breastplate over a white velvet dress, is legendary.

The reader of Alison Plowden's Elizabeth I is left feeling entertained, informed and satisfied.

A great addition for the more widely read Elizabeth I buff, a sound starting point for novices of this the subject and genre. Can't imagine anyone being disappointed by this book about England's all time favourite monarch.

My review of The Left Bank, and Other Stories by Jean Rhys

The Left Bank, and Other Stories

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

A must for all Jean Rhys aficionados. This was her first ever published writing, which came about by chance and desperation. Those who read her posthumously published unfinished autobiography Smile Please will know that the story behind these Left Bank stories is a great one:

In 1924 Ella Lenglet nee Williams (later Jean Rhys) was alone, destitute and starving in a run down Paris hotel room. Her husband of five years, French-Dutch journalist and songwriter (and spy) Jean Lenglet, was in a French jail for what she described as 'currency irregularities'.

After visiting him one day, she took articles he had written to a newspaper contact to try and sell, so she could eat. The newspaper contact sent her on to someone else who asked her to go away and translate them, which, being multilingual, she successfully did. That contact finally declined her husband's translated articles but liked her translation style and so, as a final thought, asked her whether she, Ella, had ever penned anything herself.

Perplexed but desperate, she showed the person some samples of her diary, which including a few rough sketches of life in the Paris she inhabited.

So impressive were these that the rapidly thinning Ella was sent on to another contact, eventually coming face to face with English writer and publisher Ford Maddox Ford.

He was instantly impressed and took her under his wing, mentoring her and inviting her to move in with him and his common-law wife, Australian artist Stella Bowen. Under Ford's tutelage her stories were developed into The Left Bank, and Other Stories and published in his Transatlantic Review.

It was with this release of her first published fiction that Ford persuaded her to use nom de plume Jean Rhys.

Ford published a generous introductory foreword, praising her 'singular instinct for form,' for which she became so loved by her readers many decades on. 'Coming from the West Indies,' Ford explained here, 'with a terrifying insight and ... passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World.'

Such was the advent of Jean Rhys' unlikely writing career.

It was also during this period, while living with Ford & Stella, that Jean's turbulent affair with Ford took place under Stella's nose, resulting in the breakup of Jean's marriage to her jailed husband - all to be later fictionalised into what would become the first Jean Rhys novel, Quartet (1928). But that cathartic act of vengeance is another story.

So, these Stories From The Left Bank have quite a tale of their own.

These preliminary short stories that made young Ella Williams history and launched newly invented Jean Rhys are filled with her personal hallmarks: her vivid characterisations, her evocative, filmic scenes, her succinct, incisive take on life through the eyes of the downtrodden, of the outsider looking in.

Breathtaking. Not to be passed over by any of her readers.

(NB A selection of these are also included in Jean's Tigers Are Better Looking anthology).

My review of The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford

The Pursuit of Love

by Nancy Mitford

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

For some years this modern classic was on my 'to read' list, while I was more interested to read about the author. Nancy Mitford, eldest of the famed Mitford sisters, debutante, socialite, committed Francophile and mistress of tease, had a sting in her tail, camouflaged by her droll funniness.

Many have theorised over this, her breakthrough novel of 1945, after her four previous novels had met with little or no critical acclaim. Mitford aficionados have long weighed up what Nancy said about this book's relationship to her infamous family, with what her sisters said and with what endless Mitford biographers have observed or opined.  

That some of the sisters insisted Nancy invented much of their family legend has become misreported over time: Nancy was writing fiction! 

Where this much documented accusation of 'Oh you've made it up, darling' gets distorted is in the sisters' later response to Jessica Mitford's memoir Hons and Rebels, which Nancy and others said 'borrowed' some of Nancy's fictional detail from The Pursuit of Love for the sake of spinning a good yarn.

So, Nancy firmly altered the real Mitford family structure in fictionalising her kin for this novel - presumably in part to avoid libel suites, such was the infamy already surrounding some of the real-life sisters: 

Three of these six sisters were so politically radicalised that one (Diana Mitford Mosley) spent the war years in prison after leaving first husband Bryan Guinness for British fascist movement leader Sir Oswald Mosley (himself in the habit of suing for defamation). Another sister (Jessica Mitford) eloped with the Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Communist nephew Esmond Romilly initially to fight with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, never returning to live in England. A third (Unity Mitford) shot herself in the head after ingratiating herself with Adolph Hitler in the prelude to WWII. 

Mainstream media, including national press and Pathé newsreel, had a field day with them.

By the time Nancy penned this fifth novel, these three sisters' notoriety was set in stone. It's fair to say she used that notoriety in proclaiming The Pursuit of Love as loosely based on her early family life - everyone wanted the juice on this bunch!

But much of the Mitford sisters' real-life controversy was omitted from this novel or juggled around, the resemblances everyone looked for mostly missing. 

Nancy includes fictional Radlett sister Linda leaving husband Tony and going to France with new Communist beau Christian (not a Prime Minister's nephew) to help refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (as did Nancy herself with husband Peter Rodd). 

She has fictional sister 'Jassy' forever stashing her pocket money in a 'Running Away Account' (true for real life sister Jessica Mitford, but this was about as close as it got to the much publicised real life family shenanigans).

So, the novel's similarities to Nancy's kin did not much concern her more infamous three sisters, who had brought the Mitfords into the public eye. What she drew from and elaborated on were things like her parents' eccentricities, quirky household pastimes, the trademark camp Mitfordian lingo, their bizarre pets, and the setting itself, fictionalised as 'Alconleigh' but based on real life Asthall Manor.

This she does deliciously, as agreed by just about everyone on the novel's release. We are there, in Alconliegh, immersed in the bustle of a large minor aristocratic family closely resembling the Mitfords, feeling their love and their growing pains. 

The two heroines, older than the other kids, are eager to escape into adulthood, which will only eventuate by marriage. Hence the title The Pursuit of Love, suggested by Nancy's lifelong friend, sparring partner and sometime literary mentor Evelyn Waugh.   

Once the informed reader accepts this fictionalisation of the Mitfords into the differently structured Radletts, desists digging for disguised public characters and scandals, we are left with the novel itself, as charming as consensus has always deemed. 

However, Nancy Mitford, ever hailed for her wit and humour, was the first to admit she was no serious literary force, at least at this point in her career, her craft developing substantially later. 

There was therefore some anticlimax as I turned the pages, caused by the hype and consequent expectation. Charming and comic as the novel is, it is surprisingly featherweight and not so well penned in patches. 

For example, as primarily autodidactic she had not learned to punctuate, Evelyn Waugh still telling her years later of a manuscript she ran by him: 'The punctuation is pitiable, but it never becomes unintelligible so I just shouldn't try. It is clearly not your subject' (quote from The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh). 

Despite such minor issues I intermittently howled laughing at her characters and dialogue, glowing fuzzily at her heartwarming descriptions of interwar genteel country life.

More recent biographers have said that this was her first 'happy' novel, as in not being meant as a stab at some of her more irritating relatives (definitely so in her preceding four novels). 

The explanation for this was that Nancy, for the first time in her life, was head over heels in love, with the man she would so remain all her life if somewhat unrequitedly, French politician Gaston Palewski. He appears as protagonist Linda's third love interest Fabrice de Sauveterre, a wealthy French duke. 

Nancy even dedicated the novel to Palewski, so much had he loved hearing the tales of her youth. His encouragement and her adoration of him were her incentive to write 'less bitterly'. 

It was with this emotional release, after previously enduring a difficult marriage and before that a fruitless engagement to a gay fiancé, that Nancy wrote minus the stifled anger of her previous works. 

Not quite all 'shrieks' and 'teases', the story does have tragic overtones, providing lightness and darkness, saving it from becoming another of her earlier barbed satirical farces.

Such was its success that Nancy wrote two sequels, Love in a Cold Climate (1949) and Don't Tell Alfred (1960). 

Like many such modern classics, The Pursuit of Love and its immediate sequel Love in a Cold Climate became highly popular screen adaptions, arguably more entertaining than the novels.

As I'll always be a Nancy Mitford fan it's irrelevant how consistently I liked or disliked this one defining piece. The bits I loved outweigh any minor disappointments and I will, without a doubt, read it again.

My review of The Old Wives' Tale, by Arnold Bennett

The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

First published in 1908, this is considered one of Bennett's finest works. His breathtaking detail and description is something to behold.

The story begins around 1840 in the Stafforshire pottery town of Burslem, where young sisters Constance and Sophia Baines work in their parents' draper's shop. They are initially close but contrastingly different girls, Sophie the younger considered incorrigible by the more proper Constance. As they grow up the girls drift, mentally and geographically, apart. Later also set partly in Paris, the tale tracks each sister, separately, into the full bloom of adulthood, the prime of maturity and the frailty of their dotage. It concludes in 1905.

The book divides into four parts. The first, 'Mrs Baines', introduces the two sisters and those around them, in their bedridden father's combined shop-cum-house overlooking the town square. With their father ill, the sisters' primary parent is their mother. By the end of this section, rebellious Sophia has eloped with a travelling salesman, while obedient Constance has married her parent's shop employee, Mr Povey.

The second part, 'Constance', follows sensible Constance through to her grey-haired retirement, when she reunites with her long-lost runaway sister. Her unremarkable life is defined not by adventure or outstanding accomplishments, but by deeply personal events, such as her husband's death, her growing worries over her son's life decisions and social behaviour.

The third part, 'Sophia', follows passionate young Sophia after her elopement. Deserted in Paris by her husband, she survives the odds, becoming a successful pensione proprietor.

The fourth part, 'What Life Is', sees the two sisters reunite. Worldly old Sophia finally returns to her Burslem childhood home, which plain old Constance has never left.

It's mindboggling that one man could have created so much intricate detail in these wonderful Victorian characters. How on earth did he achieve this?

In his initial published introduction, Bennett mentioned his debt to Guy de Maupassant's Une Vie (that same introduction originally included a nod to W. K. [Lucy] Clifford's Aunt Anne, but her mention is intermittently omitted from various subsequent editions and is permanently absent by the 1983 edition). Bennett's inspiration for the actual story was triggered by a chance encounter in a Paris restaurant, as he recounts:

'...an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless.

I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: "This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as she." Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque — far from it! — but there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. And the fact that the change from the young girl to the stout ageing woman is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unperceived by her, only intensifies the pathos.'

Perfect in every way, I have never read anything in this category that surpasses this in literary quality or storytelling. Why this is not more famously celebrated I can't imagine. No major updated screen adaption has eventuated since the 1921 film The Old Wives' Tale starring Fay Compton, Florence Turner and Henry Victor, other than the 1988 BBC TV series Sophia and Constance starring Alfred Burke, Lynsey Beauchamp and Katy Behean.

I adore this oft overlooked great classic. Everyone should read it at least once in their life.

My review of Women I've Undressed: A Memoir, by Orry-Kelly

Women I've Undressed: A Memoir

by Orry-Kelly

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Orry-Kelly was a name synonymous, in old Hollywood, with Oscar winning costumes and career-long close working affiliations with icons like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck, Ava Gardner, Kay Francis, Dolores del Río, Ann Sheridan and Merle Oberon. 

A plucky gay kid from the New South Wales township of Kiama, he was born in 1897 and sent to Sydney at seventeen to study banking. Defying his parents' plan for a respectable career, he instead became a small-time stage actor. 

Using the great city Down Under as a springboard to the wider world, he landed in New York earning a crust however he could: painting scenery, wheeling and dealing, blocking handmade ties, getting nowhere on stage but sharing crumby rooms and friendships with other struggling performers, some to become legends, others fading into obscurity. 

Here he established friendships with upcoming or newly established Broadway headliners like Fanny Brice, George Burns and Mae West. He also took under his wing the nay too talented but fast-learning young Englishman Archie Leach, later carved into legend as heart throb Cary Grant. 

Having almost inadvertently landed on his feet as a costumier, with zero training or qualifications, he grabbed an offer in Hollywood in 1932 and stayed, we assume abandoning his own ambition of performing, knowing a good thing when he was onto it. 

He was Warner Bros' chief costume designer until 1944, later designing for Universal, RKO, 20th Century Fox, and MGM. He also spent a stint in the US Army Air Corps in WWII before being discharged with alcohol issues.

Kelly's stylistic instinct defied the lure of glitter and sequins we associate with Hollywood's golden age, instead going firmly with understated elegance, gaining him the unswerving loyalty of great leading ladies who knew a good thing when they wore it on screen. 

With "networking" a phrase long yet to be coined, Kelly's "who-you-know" personal survival technique resulted in close lifelong bonds with the likes of Ethel Barrymore and their ilk. We sense him sniffing out the influential and using a blend of sycophancy and crafty haggling to forge vital allegiances.

His movies included classics like 42nd Street, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Arsenic and Old Lace, Harvey, Oklahoma!, Auntie Mame, and Some Like It Hot. 

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, with several hundred movies under his belt, power dynamics had reversed, and he became an authority to be reckoned with, famously dressing down Marilyn Monroe after one of her on-set flare ups. 

A chronic alcoholic, he died of liver cancer in 1964, aged 65, and was interred in the Hollywood Hills. His pallbearers included Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, Billy Wilder and George Cukor and his eulogy was read by Jack L. Warner

His unpublished memoir was found by a relative, in a pillowslip, where it had stayed until half a century after his death, when Gillian Armstrong's TV documentary on him, Women He's Undressed, triggered its erstwhile unlikely unveiling. 

Some argue the piece had never been published because of his open sexuality being too taboo at the time of its penning, with others insisting his priceless anecdotes would have insulted too many esteemed Hollywood insiders. 

I sense that a more accurate explanation is its unfinished condition. Yes, he had reached the end of his tale in this raw draught he left us, but the work is far from crafted to the finished state such a perfectionist would have required. He indeed opens with a thinly veiled disclaimer along the lines of 'people say I talk in circles', admitting, towards the end, of also having hired a ghost writer to rework it, but having thrown away that product, which he believed entirely erased his personality.

Whatever the reason, I find it inconceivable he would have wanted this to be the draft we all read, hence it being hidden away for so long. A character as determined as he would have seen it published in his lifetime had he thought it ready for print. Whilst his flighty personality remains indelibly intact here, this glowing authenticity is the price of his narrative being, for the most part, an impenetrable and irritating rant, skipping back and forth like the proverbial twittering budgerigar. This tipsy dinner-party type rambling, with its apparent petty score-settling, I despaired of. 

Though it took every ounce of patience not to throw the hefty item across the room, I persevered, purely to devour each last golden anecdote. For although an award-winning designer does not a great writer make, here is a fidgety but irresistible raconteur whose priceless content far outweighs his tacky, exasperating style.

The superb photographic content is sadly misplaced, inset among a brash and flippant page design I despised, with its nauseatingly coloured chapter graphics quite at odds with the understated style of Kelly's famous costumes (though perfectly as one with his brassy, undisciplined dialogue). The cumbersome dimensions of the 432-page, 7.7 x 1.7 x 9.4-inch hardback is like trying to hold up an oversized stone house brick to the bedside lamp. I recommend the Kindle or audio editions for all but professional weightlifters. 

Not a person I could bear to sit long with, Kelly's stories nevertheless deserve such preservation, despite their raffish form. I only wish more editing had been utilised for such an important book, to neaten things up and inject readability; but then considering it was published in 2015, so many decades after the narrator's demise, one must appreciate the impossibility of consultation with him over such matters.

For Australians interested in their national history there are fascinating and extensive passages on early twentieth century Sydney, including the brothels and backstreets of Darlinghurst. 

Imperative reading for those drawn to behind-the-scenes Hollywood, here is a time capsule of inestimable value for any showbiz historian. Just conjure up every last ounce of patience for the precariously skittish and roundabout manner of storytelling.

Highly recommended if you live well with the longwinded chaos of the otherwise supremely talented.