Southern Bookman

Oscar Wilde's Wife Rediscovered

Didn't watch "Hemingway and Gellhorn" after all, after Mike Hale's pan in The New York Times convinced me that the HBO movie would be cliched and loaded with bad Hemingway dialogue. Sometime when I want to spend two and a half hours reliving the Hemingway myth, I'll probably watch it on On Demand.

In these days of shrinking print products and signs of cultural decline, small advances are worth celebrating. The London Review of Books has mysteriously shown up at the Barnes & Noble bookstand, and I spent several enjoyable hours on Memorial Day quaffing Guinness Stouts and reading the LBR, particularly Colm Toibin's educational and entertaining review of a new biography of Oscar Wilde's wife, Constance, and an annotated edition of Wilde's "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Sad to say, before reading the review, I was unaware of Wilde's wife, or the two sons that he fathered with her.

As with so many other previously little known women married to famous men, Constance appears an interesting woman, with an admirable, long-tested loyalty to Wilde. "Feminist" critics and historians continue to illuminate the lives of women who played signicant roles in their men's lives of greatness or notoriety. Not only are these women like Constance Wilde or Clover Adams, whose accomplishments don't match those of their husbands but whose lives are worth examining. They also include those such as Gellhorn, whose more substantial achievements were long underappreciated.

I hope the LBR remains for sale at the Barnes & Noble. A few months ago, the Times Literary Supplement made a similar appearance, then disappeared. When I asked a B&N employee, he claimed the TLS hadn't sold enough copies to remain. I hope the LBR makes the cut; the copy I bought recently was the last one, so perhaps it's selling.

Hemingway and Gellhorn Hit the Small Screen

I'm looking forward to the HBO film "Hemingway and Gellhorn," to be broadcast Monday night. The movie will look at the relationship of Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, herself a renowned journalist and novelist. From what I've read, it appears as if the movie will be fairly true to life.

Clive Owen plays Hemingway and Nicole Kidman Gellhorn. The two writers' affair and subsequent marriage played out during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when the much younger Gellhorn was reaching her prime and Hemingway had already done much of his best work, although years of stories and novels would follow.

Hemingway, one of the characters in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," looks to have continued appeal 50 years after his death. No doubt a movie is in the works about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, especially with the latest film version of "The Great Gatsby" imminent.

Farewell, Paul Fussell

After reading Paul Fussell's obituary in The New York Times, I found on a dusty bookshelf at home Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory." Fussell's study of the English literature that emerged from World War I began my abiding interest in the global bloodbath from 1914 to 1918 that wrecked European civilization and, as Fussell registered, brought forth a new ironic consciousness.

Beginning with Fussell's book, I've deeply studied what was called the "war to end all wars." One of my favorite books is an anthology of poetry and fiction from all countries embroiled in the war; the disillusion and ironic style Fussell analyzes in English writing was universal. The combination of the writers' high culture and the squalor of the trenches has always given me a deep tragic sense.

His examination of disillusion of writers such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves (I'd previously read "Goodbye to All That") arrived during the crashing wave of Vietnam-era books, articles and movies. The anti-war and anti-establishment anger had been numbed by the advent of disco -- preceding Fussell's death were those of Robin Gibb and Donna Summer -- and Fussell's book achieved surprising popularity. The World War I era he evoked mirrored the contemporary post Watergate, post-Vietnam epoch. Fussell's book did for the great war's literature what Edmund Wilson's "Patriotic Gore" did for the writings from the American Civil War.

I read other books by Fussell, his biography of Samuel Johnson, his study of the meter and form of English poetry, and his harrowing memoir of his World War II service as a young infantry soldier in Europe. He wrote with the classic elegance of English writers like Johnson, William Hazlitt and Walter Pater while maintaining a modern accessibility. In later life, he blasted U.S. culture with devastating, if heavy-handed, accuracy, an American version of British curmudgeons like Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis. A telling sign of the triumph of mass popular tastes over the classic values Fussell championed was that Summer's obituary, unlike Fussell's, made the Times front page.

If much of Fussell's rants at the debased mass culture will likely fade, his "Great War and Modern Memory" will be one of the books read for generations.

Atlanta Theater Feels the Cold

As a lapsed Atlanta drama critic, I have theater envy reading the rave reviews and glowing articles about "The Iceman Cometh" revival at Chicago's Goodman Theater. Yes, Atlanta's Alliance won a regional Tony a couple of years ago, but Atlanta's premier theater is off-course seeking to develop Broadway-kitsch musical monstrosities such as the recent disaster, "Ghost Brothers of Darkland County."

The Goodman's "Iceman," with the possibly miscast Nathan Lane in the role of Hickey, is the kind of innovative revival that Atlanta audiences rarely if ever get to see. A couple of years ago, the Alliance did put on a good performance of "August: Osage County," and Georgia Shakespeare and the New American Shakespeare Tavern from time to time leave the Bard's work to do a revival, such as the outstanding "Glass Menagerie" a few years ago at the Tavern.

With the demise of Marietta's Theater on the Square and recent financial troubles at other venues, Atlanta theater has declined. The Alliance's announced new season doesnt hold much of interest for me. Chicago's "Iceman Cometh" shows the chill in Atlanta theater.

Frank Deford's sportwriting life

I listened with pleasure to Bob Edwards interviewing Frank Deford about Deford's recent memoir "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter." Edwards and Deford, two old pros of the media game, blended perfectly.

That I had read the book added to my enjoyment of the interview on satellite radio. Deford, despite a surprising fondness for worn-out cliches, has the gift of readibility. His stories about his early days at Sports Illustrated and about the athletes he's met went down like fine champagne. Today's ESPN generation might not remember some of the players Deford writes about -- Elgin Baylor, even Bill Bradley -- and could learn that today's hyper sports environment didn't spring up from nowhere.

Referring back to those cliches, and interjectiions such as "Heavens to Betsy," the book does show signs of careless writing and today's lower editing standards. For example, Deford makes a big point of how his name is frequently misspelled DeFord, but then it's misspelled that way throughout the book. I read the memoir in e-book form on my Nook, which made me wonder if ebooks are taken from unedited versions. I've felt with other ebooks that the editing standards for them are even lower than those for printed books. Deford's sentences can have a breathless, run-on quality, as if dictated off the top of his head.

I also wondered about his assertion that he was the first national writer to do an article on Bill Bradley when Bradley was at Princeton, Deford's alma mater. John McPhee's book "A Sense of Where You Are" is my first memory of Bradley. Perhaps Deford wrote his Sports Illustrated profile of Bradley before McPhee wrote his book, excepted in the New Yorker, as I recall. Deford might be right that he was the first one to write about Bradley, but I'd be curious to know for sure.

Deford amusingly writes about his stint as editor of the National, the great failed experiment of a national sports daily. Several of my colleagues at the AJC left to follow the National dream, including the late Van McKenzie, whom Deford warmly remembers.

Listening to Deford and Edwards chat and laugh together like a veteran vaudeville team, I realized that Deford overcomes the drawbacks with his generous, magnanimous spirit. He's a throwback to the days when sports were not taken so seriously and possessed a mythic, magical quality. Today's sports-talk yakkers, stats junkies and overpaid, entitled athletes have taken away a lot of the fun. Deford sounds, and reads, like a man whos's had fun.

John Sutherland Uncovers History of English Novel

John Sutherland's "Lives of the Novelists" is entertaining and educational. Sutherland displays knowledge of American and English novelists famed and obscure from the 17th century through today. So far, I've made it to the end of the 19th century, with more than 1,000 pages to go. The book's witty capsule bios find value in the little-known writers and deflate the reputations of some of the better known ones, such as Dickens. Overall, the portraits offer an in-depth history of English literature and publishing.

One of Sutherland's strengths, a chatty, informal style, turns into a weakness. The writing is marred by all too frequent dangling phrases, some unintentionally and painfully comic. A learned professor such as Sutherland should not be so susceptible to such sloppy writing. Such constructions, alas, are increasingly common in books, magazines and newspapers.

Despite the tangled sentences, Sutherland is an amusing and learned guide. Apparently, he's read deeply in the novelists he covers, an amazing feat. Reading "Lives of the Poets" is like munching snacks, but the nutritional value is more like sliced carrots than potato chips.

A Vivid Portrait of Joseph Heller

Tracy Daughtery's biography of "Catch 22" author Joseph Heller makes a strong case that Heller was more than a one-book writer. As with his life of Donald Barthelme, Daughtery gives a fresh, revitalizing look at a writer with a declining reputation.

Daughtery, the subject of a Southern Bookman interview, upholds the greatness of Heller's "Catch 22," one of the essential 1960s novels. But Daughtery shows that Heller continued to have a productive writing career, producing significant books including "Something Happened," which I remember as a major work. Heller's later novels don't match his first two books, but Daughtery proves that Heller was much more than the general view of him as a dilettante who got lucky with one book.

A fine novelist, Daughtery with his Heller portrait offers a worthy companion to his Barthelme biography. Daughtery shows that both writers deserve continued attention.

Robert Caro, dinosaur rock star

Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume of Caro's massive Lyndon Johnson biography, is receiving the kind of attention that books usually don't receive any more. The 78-year-old Caro, who has been working for decades on the biography, has been profiled in the New York Times magazine and Esquire, and the book has been reviewed universally, including Bill Clinton's rave on the front page of the Times Book Review.

Ironically in this era when movies for adolescents generally receive this burst of attention, articles on Caro emphasize his old-fashioned techniques. He works in an office in New York City, writing first in longhand, then on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. Shunning the computer and the Internet, he keeps cross-referenced paper files, kept in metal cabinets, in the once familiar manila folders. He's also drawn attention for his obsessive accumulation of details and the long delays in publication of each volume that has appeared so far. Times columnist Joe Nocera recently ridiculed Caro for this need to account for every minuscule piece of Johnson's life. He also disdained Caro's continued delays in finishing the project. At 78, Caro  has not yet examined the bulk of Johnson's presidency.

While Nocera's hit job smacked of an envious middleweight swinging wildly at a heavyweight, Nocera scored some hits. Caro's compulsive acculumulation of facts, ancient techniques and relentless editing and rewriting can seem pathological. Yet, in reading Nocera's piece, I wanted to defend Caro as one of the last, if not the final, upholders of an ancient tradition of scholarship and writing.

I'd recently read Natalie Dykstra's fine biography of Clover Adams, the tragic wife of pioneering American historian Henry Adams. Dykstra shows Henry Adams as very similar to Caro in his constant uncovering of details and stretching projects into mulitiple volumes. I wanted to tell Nocera that Caro deserves honor and acclaim for searching for the truth no matter what it takes.

Still, Adams finished his massive history of the United States under the Jefferson and Madison Administrations much faster than Caro has done with his work. And, the descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams later published his "Education of Henry Adams" and "Mount St. Michel and Chartres."

As as reader, I bailed out of the Johnson project after Caro's first two volumes. His look at Johnson's years as the master of the U.S. Senate bogged down in legislative minutia. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the "Passage of Power," Caro's  account of the Kennedy assassination, which captivated me. I'll probably make an effort to read the entire book, which begins with Johnson's effort to gain the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, examines his lost years as Kennedy's vice president and ends with Johnson's leadership in passing landmark civil rights legislation.  The look at Kennedy's presidency from Johnson's viewpoint promises to give a fresh account of "Camelot."

By the way, the title "The Passage of Power," strikes me as odd. This has a passive tone, as if the power passed to Johnson in some magical, mysterious way. It almost sounds as if it were a normal passage of power, as happens when an incumbent ends his two terms, or loses an election. The title's bland construction denies the historical reality that Johnson gained power because of the assassination.

Edith Pearlman, master of the short story

Edith Pearlman, a Brookline, Mass. writer whom I recently discovered, writes exquisite short stories that deserve broad acclaim.

Exceeding my expectations, Pearlman's collection "How to Fall" stunned me with its depth of characterization and plot, narrative brilliance and language. As each story presented new riches, I had that rare realization of discovery, that I was encountering a short story master.

In a recent interview, Pearlman said that she's happy with the short story form and feels that many novels would be better if shorter. Her stories, though, possess the range of great novels.

A  number of her stories in "How to Fall" share a theme, giving them the unity of a novel. Several of them take place in the fictional Boston suburb of Goldophin, a liberal enclave of community activists, food lovers, recyclers and good-cause contributors. The stories create a vivid and believable fictional place, as memorable as Faulkner's Mississippi, Joyce's Dublin, Roth's Newark and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

 The book opens with the the collection's title piece, which brilliantly evokes the era of early TV comedies. Later comes another set of stories located in Israel, which again give a breathtaking sense of place and character.

 Just when I thought Pearlman couldn't reach any higher, she did do with an interlocking series of stories set at the end of World War II, first in London and then in Poland. The stories are about those who help Jewish refugees from war-ravaged Europe build new lives.  Her picture of wartime London, then the camp for Jewish "displaced persons." is unforgettable, heart-piercing and inspiring. The main character in the stories, a woman who grows personally and professionally and becomes director of the camp, is one of the most memorable in American fiction.

The Pulitzer Prize committee failed to choose a fiction winner this year. Pearlman's most recent collection, "Binocular Vision," a selected-stories collection, won the National Book Award. The Pulitzer commissars were grossly negligent in overlooking Pearlman's work.