Tag: Non-Fiction

Enchantment- Katherine May (2023)

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Katherine May has been having a hard time of it.  She feels exhausted, cannot concentrate on reading and is finding it hard to remember what used to bring her joy.  Recognise these feelings?  It’s burn-out, largely caused by the constant need to be aware during lockdowns which meant our fight or flight responses went all over the place and after much reflection Katherine May thinks she might have the answer.  It’s enchantment, in the sense of awe and wonder, a re-engagement with the natural world and a recollection of those things we, as individuals, once held special.

The author came to prominence with her 2020 best-seller “Wintering:  The Power Of Rest And Retreat In Difficult Times” which, like this book, is of the non-fiction genre now described as “hybrid memoir”.  I haven’t read that but I certainly felt I was in need of a little enchantment and was intrigued when I first heard about this book.  I think it might have thought it was going to be more along the self-help lines than it is, we get the author’s responses to “enchantment”, she tends to steer clear on advising us on how we can incorporate it into our lives.

It does seem reading this that the author was actually pretty well-centred and understood the magic of the natural world, it was just through lockdown she lost her way a bit.  It wasn’t, for example, possible for her to engage with her group of female sea swimmers, missing both the social aspects and the myriad of positive boosts that sea swimming brings to the initiated.  The author takes a very elemental approach looking at Earth (take off your shoes- I did this quite a bit during lockdown as a way of centring myself amidst the madness of the world), Water, Fire and Air, with a nod to Aether in the Epilogue.  She provides interesting perspectives and I do get where she is coming from but I think I needed a bit more support from her burnt-out self to pull it all together for my burnt-out self.  I also realised when reading this that I’m not that particularly burnt-out anymore but I think this book would have had great power coming out of lockdown although I do acknowledge that it took so long to get any real sense of normality back that this free approach to living and the environment was just not possible then.

What we need to do is commit “to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, t0 actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect.” Spending time sharing how the author achieves this was very involving and she is very strong at crystalizing the special moments in some captivating writing but perhaps for me, personally, the sense of transformation and inspiration I was hoping for was not quite there.

Enchantment was published in 2023 by Faber and Faber.

The Flame Of Resistance – Damien Lewis (2022)

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Damien Lewis is the celebrated author, documentary film-maker and historian who is most famous for writing a number of best-selling non-fiction books (as well as a couple of fictional thrillers) about the SAS.  I haven’t read any of his books prior to this and it was his subject matter here which got me interested- the extraordinary performer Josephine Baker.  This book is titled “Agent Josephine” in the US and I wonder why the UK has gone with this less satisfactory title- I hope it wasn’t a commercial decision in case it put off what is probably a large male readership for this author’s work.  In both editions the same subtitle adds a little more information – “American Beauty. French Hero. British Spy.”

Josephine Baker (1906-75) is a twentieth century great.  Born in St. Louis, Missouri where her talent for performing helped her escape a life of poverty.  Her career limited by racism she moved to France where she became a sensation, her vibrancy, often risqué costumes, dancing and singing talent as well as her beauty led to her becoming one of the most famous and most photographed women in 1920s/30s Europe.  Her love for her adopted homeland and its acceptance of her was compromised by the rise of the Nazis and the fall of France.

After World War II Josephine was awarded, amongst other acknowledgements, the Legion D’Honneur, France’s highest service medal.  In succeeding years it has gradually been publicly recognised that hers was a vital role in supporting the Allies through Secret Service work.  On researching her life the author has uncovered just how important this work was, how long she managed to escape enemy attention and how team, partnered and solo missions had a significant impact on events of the war years.

Before war broke out her pilot’s licence saw her flying in aid and support and when Paris fell she refused to perform in Nazi occupied France but demand for her unique brand of morale boosting celebrity elsewhere enabled her to smuggle intelligence, information and documents within the trappings of costumes, music scores etc.  In the early years she was often accompanied by her menagerie of adored animals which added more chaos to her travels and actually helped her to carry out intelligence undertakings in plain sight.

Damien Lewis does well to bring the story alive of this extraordinary woman and her colleagues but even so, the secret nature of this work suggests that perhaps there is much more that she achieved which will never be uncovered.  His focus is very much on her war work and I think I do need to read a general biography to flesh out her many other achievements and to provide a greater context for these activities.  Recognition of just how unique this woman was, as a performer, as a member of the Resistance and as a British spy has begun to build up slowly over the decades.  In 2021 she became the 6th woman and 4th person of colour accepted for interment in the crypt of the Pantheon, alongside French greats such as Marie Curie, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo.  I’m not convinced that she has gained the level of recognition her achievements demanded in her homeland and in the UK but hopefully this book will shine a light on this woman whose glamorous depiction of celebrity masked sheer bravery, determination and adherence to her beliefs.  Hers is a tale of extraordinary missions, invisible ink, microdots, secreted documents alongside her desire for peace and uncompromising insistence on equality.  This is a trail-blazer whose story demands to be known.

The Flame Of Resistance was published in the UK in 2022 by Quercus.

In Perfect Harmony – Singalong Pop In 70s Britain – Will Hodgkinson (2022)

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Here’s a book from my “What I Should Have Read in 2022” list.  Its focus is 1970’s pop music.  Looking back from our 21st Century position when we think of the 1970’s we probably give greater importance to punk, glam rock and disco which certainly made a lasting impression in terms of visual style but did not last that long as a market force.  The music with the most longevity throughout the decade can be classed as singalong pop.

Will Hodgkinson studies an era where the first number one of 1971 was Clive Dunn’s “Grandad” and rounding things off so helpfully 10 years later was St. Winifred’s School Choir and “There’s No-One Quite Like Grandma”.  So did nothing change during the 1970s?  Still celebrating grandparents!  Why did singalong pop exert such mass appeal for the whole of the decade.  The author explores this and basically it is because Britain was so grim during this time that we needed pop music to lift the spirits!

Perhaps the inspiration for much of this came from an American song from the late 1960s, “Sugar Sugar”.  This was marketed as being by a cartoon group, recorded by anonymous session singers and was disposable bubblegum music at its finest and importantly, was a massive worldwide hit.  For a time, the song became more important than the artists.  The UK responded to this by session musicians recording singles and then considering the formation of a group to perform afterwards – take a bow Edison Lighthouse, Brotherhood Of Man, Bay City Rollers, the whole range of singles put out by Jonathan King, or 10CC in embryonic form.  One session singer Tony Burrows famously appeared in three (some say four) different acts on the same episode of “Top Of The Pops”.

And then came glam- stomping, singalong music geared towards and enjoyed by a younger audience- led by Marc Bolan, whose innovative influence on British pop has now been somewhat lost followed swiftly by Slade, Wizzard, Suzi Quatro, Mud, Sweet et al, with an even younger audience being feted by Messrs Osmond, Cassidy and Jackson.  Will Hodgkinson explores and analyses all this with interviews, contemporary views and what was going on at the time.  A sudden powercut plunging British homes into darkness could be enlivened by a family singsong of “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.”

This is a phenomenon mainly but not exclusively British and also had something to do with huge audiences for TV light entertainment shows, TV advertising jingles and theme tunes and pop music as a regular feature of children’s TV  but mainly a country that ricocheted between Heath, Wilson and then Callaghan as Prime Ministers in a time of strikes, inflation, high unemployment needed something to feel cheered up by.

Given all that can we expect a New Seekers, Boney M, Tony Orlando and Dawn revival in 2023?!! Just nobody mention Gary Glitter….

In Perfect Harmony was published by Nine Eight Books in 2022.

Fire Island – Jack Parlett (2022)

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In the nineteenth century it provided poetic inspiration for Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde reputedly visited.  In the 1930s it became the summer home for a trio of artists who some describe as “The Fire Island School Of Painting.”  Literary and artistic giants saw it as an escape to write or to party- Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Noel Coward stayed here.  American poet Frank O’Hara was killed on the beach here.  Patricia Highsmith got drunk here.  David Hockney looked pale here, Derek Jarman made a short film, James Baldwin came to write (and felt out of place).  Perhaps the first example of gay pornography to filter into the mainstream was filmed here in 1971.  It developed into a symbol of hedonism where the landscape and fantastic views felt slightly at odds with the loud disco music from tea dances and cruising.  The Village People sang about it offering us a “funky weekend” as long as we “don’t go in the bushes.” Edmund White and Andrew Holleran used it as a setting to enrich their fiction.  AIDS decimated it, for a while it became a ghostly memorial with ashes of those taken sprinkled into the sea.  It became a film location in that first-wave of AIDS related films like “Parting Glances” (1986) and “Longtime Companion”(1989)- important movies which proved so difficult to watch.  It became once again part of the well-heeled gay circuit with accusations of elitism and poor inclusiveness and it has recently been the location in the available on Disney+ in the UK bright and brash gay rom-com “Fire Island” (2022).  I’ve always been fascinated by the contradictions of this place – Utopia for some, Hell for others.

This thin strip of land some 32 miles in length off the Long Island coast is perhaps the second most recognised gay location after The Stonewall Inn.  Its cultural and literary significance has lasted for decades and alongside the thousands that adored it there are detractors with very valid objections as well as confusingly detractors who also adored it- this is the enigma of Fire Island.

And the person who has decided to record this cultural and literary history in this new publication from Granta is a 30 year old British man.  This is a good idea, it gives a fresh perspective on an area bogged down in its own history and inconsistencies.  Jack Parlett visited first whilst researching the poet Frank O’ Hara who wrote, partied and died here.  Parlett experienced the same feelings of alienation and belonging which has affected so many of its visitors over the years and in this work subtitled “Love, loss and liberation in an American Paradise” he incorporates memoir to explain why.

From the relaxed development of Cherry Grove with its communal mix of renters including families and lesbians and gay men to the growth of the more hedonistic, wealthy white gay male dominated area of The Pines (together with its cruising area The Meat Rack) Parlett effectively tracks developments and their significance in gay history and sensibilities.  There’s a potent mix of the literary and academic, the political and the positives and contradictions of this location.  It’s imbued with a nostalgia for past times – I found myself thinking I would have liked to have visited at that point in time, oh and at that point in time….which makes it an intoxicating subject for a historical examination.

I loved the idea of this book, I loved the British perspective which added another layer and Jack Parlett has handled his material well.  I might have liked visual representations for some of his references but a few seconds on Google will find things and no doubt saved the publishers from forking out for reproduction rights.

Fire Island was published in 2022 by Granta in the UK.

A Little Devil in America – Hanif Abdurraqib (2021)

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Ohio resident Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and music critic and is both critically acclaimed and a good commercial proposition in his homeland.  This non-fiction work is something we’ve been seeing a fair bit of recently- a mash-up of memoir and analysis.  At times it feels like a collection of essays but I don’t think it is.  Linking the pieces together is the theme of the black performer in America and coming from that is the significance of dance.  Saying it like this, however, is very much simplifying matters.  Abdurraqib, being a poet sees things in terms of metaphor and the notion of dance and performance is used to touch on many aspects of the American experience, and especially the African-American experience.

Also, being a poet Abdurraqib does not see things the way many of us do, he has the ability to zoom in on a detail and expand out from that.  It’s often a moment in a life he finds fascinating and what it tells us about that particular life and the environment in which it was lived and that in itself is intriguing.  In terms of the performers examined there is a very good range and I find much of his writing illuminating.  With Aretha Franklin, he examines her funeral, and what the “sending home” of the ritual says of a life and then moves backwards to the filmed version of her live gospel recording “Amazing Grace”- the biggest selling gospel live album of all time.  With Whitney Houston he focuses on the response of the black audience and how that changed.  There’s a lively section about the antagonism between two demonstrative performers, Joe Tex and James Brown.  The issue of “blackface” is dealt with through William Lane known as Master Juba who Charles Dickens saw perform and how casual racism caused a latter day TV tribute by Ben Vereen to this black minstrel who performed in blackface to become meaningless because his performance was cut inappropriately. 

People who have not fitted in to what was expected of them are examined including Sammy Davis Jnr, Michael Jackson and the always amazing to read about Josephine Baker.

This is where this book is the strongest for me, a white British reader, I can see the common threads and follow the arguments.  When the author veers away from this central theme I miss the tightness of the structure although I am still impressed by the writing.

And the writing is impassioned, creative, energetic and very often enthralling.  Culturally, very few will get all the references initially because of the broad timescale Abdurraqib employs in this work.  If this looseness of structure and digressive style which I have mentioned before (most recently in “Gay Bar” by Jeremy Atherton Lin) is going to become commonplace I’m just going to have to get used to it because to ignore it would mean missing out on impressive, quality writing.

A Little Devil in America was published in the UK by Allen Lane on 30th March 2021.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.