Two gay lives and a famous death

Nothing online can compare to browsing in a real, live bookshop. I do that in Daunt Books on Cheapside most Wednesdays before or after a weekly appointment, and the spontaneous not-looking-for-anything-in-particular has been much assisted by the selection of novels under different countries (Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the Sicilian bit of the Italy section tend to be favourites). There soon turned out to be a connection in that many of the authors I view in the light of personal discoveries have been published are being published under the New York Review of Books imprint: grown-up Erich Kästner (Going to the Dogs), the disingenuous Curzio Malaparte (Kaputt and The Skin) - and now the equally slippery, dualistic Sanford Friedman.

Friedman's essence is there throughout in the presumably not much adapted protagonist of Totempole, what we might describe as a divided consciousness which shares something in common with Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. It's best summed up by Friedman's long-term lover the poet and translator Richard Howard in his introduction to a posthumously-published masterpiece:

Perhaps the only explanatory gloss that the reader of Conversations with Beethoven should be aware of is the entirely contradictory (and therefore dreadful) amalgam of compassion and contempt for humanity that inspired it. This double entendre might be unrecognizable unless one saw and suffered from it in early and intimate circumstances, as I had occasion to during the many years I lived with the ultimately astonishing novelist Sanford Friedman. 

Astonishing indeed: quite apart from the fact that a candid novel about the tortuous path to gay self-acceptance could be reasonably well-received in the mid-1960s, I don't think I've ever read such a ruthless description of the role sexuality plays in infancy, childhood, adolescence and maturity as that in Totempole. I was reminded of Malaparte, not just in the animal names Friedman gives to each of the slices of life; and of myself at times, thankfully not straightforwardly in the unbearable psychological torment the confused 10 year old Stephen Wolfe inflicts on a boy weaker than himself, but I was certainly complicit in the bullying of a friend to deflect that bullying from myself, albeit when I was in my early teens, the worst years at school.

On the other hand there seems to be a wish-fulfilment in the more idealistic sequences which I'd be very surprised to find had an exact parallel in Friedman's own life; otherwise, only a ruthless examination of the wavering between atavistic instinct and a nobler ideal, reconciled to a degree in the last and longest section, dealing with Friedman/Wolfe's time serving in the Korean War, where the keynote is love and not death.

In the light of Howard's remarks, the portrait of a difficult genius during his last eight months in Conversations with Beethoven may contain an element of autobiography, or at least of identification, too. This premise is brilliant. The use of Ferdinand Hiller's text as epigraph summarises it neatly:

It is known that conversations with Beethoven had in part to be written; he spoke, but those with whom he spoke had to write down their questions and answers. For this purpose thick booklets of normal quarto writing paper and pencils were always close to hand.

I'm told that some of these survive, but I have to presume that Friedman made the ones in the book up, otherwise it wouldn't exactly be a novel. But its construction is brilliant: as the words of others leave us to imagine the deaf Beethoven's mostly irascible responses - with a few exceptions when he actually writes things down - his relationships unfold with hangers-on, concerned friends, those who care more about his art than his health, above all the main respondent, his sometimes (but not entirely) feckless nephew Karl. I don't think I'm spoiling the 'plot' when I say that the powerful, disturbing misogyny that's been built up dissolves in a climactic deathbed confrontation with Karl's mother. You'll know if you want to read this book from the outline of its approach I've just given; I think you should.

Patrick Gale's A Place Called Winter is more to be read for sheer entertainment and a good epic story well told, with 'fit for screenplay' written all over it. Boldly, the author imagined a reason why his great-grandfather Harry Cane should have made a clean break with his wife and child in England and gone to build a new life in Canada. Not long ago, families would have been appalled and disgusted at such a conjecture - I still see any inference of gay relationships in the lives, say, of the great composers, being met with cries of 'infamy' and 'vile slur' - but hopefully that time is past.

At any rate there's little but sympathy for the protagonist and we always root for him as we do not for Friedman's Stephen. I suppose I was a bit frustrated at first that we got no parallel inklings of his sexual orientation until the point where he begins his first gay relationship, as if it were a surprise to Harry; even if that kind of love dared not speak its name, the instincts would have been the same. I also thought it was bit coy about the sex, bearing in mind the core readership of Richard and Judy's Book Club (though I don't think Gale dumbs down at all). But the changes of scene are vivid, the characters good and bad strongly drawn, and a respect for the time of the action fitting. Here's just a sliver of dialogue between Harry and Petra, his pioneer beloved's sister:

She tapped her glass with her fingernails, shy of meeting his eye. 'Is it...is it emotional or simply a physical need the two of you are answering?'

'When I'm with Paul?'

She nodded, glancing up and away.

'I suppose, in a different world,' he began carefully, 'if everyone felt differently, it would be both. When a thing has always been forbidden and must live in darkness and silence, it's hard to know how it might be, if allowed to thrive.'

'I wonder,' she said, 'if everything were allowed, how many men would discover they were like you? I sometimes think most men dislike women intensely or resent them or something, and only marry them because that is what is expected, and because of children. And because no other option presents itself.'

'Oh, but I like women very much.'

'Oh. Good. Only not...?'

'Not quite as much. No.' 

By way of afterthought, I've found the gay love-story aspect of the five-part thriller on BBC Two, London Spy, very touching and real (as always when the words of Auden/Kallman's Anne Trulove come to mind: 'if love be love, it will not alter'). It's beautifully and broodingly filmed, with great cameos from many of the UK's best actors, and an often poetic script, and best of all is Ben Whishaw - the perfect Dionysus in the Almeida's Bakkhai -  as an incorruptible romantic who, having known the flipside, recognises love when he sees it. There's still one episode to go, so I shouldn't say too much, but we had a bit of a let-down this Monday with the supposed revelation of what the MI6 man may have been murdered for, and it was a bit laughable, even in the mouth of Adrian Lester. Well, we'll see how it all ends.

7/12  Postscript to that last comment following the final episode (and no spoiler, promise): not well, if we're talking about a satisfying denouement. Not even the totally convincing way Whishaw kept up the incorruptibility could carry it for me. Disbelief could not be suspended: there were incredulous groans of 'what?' from both of us here. Such a disappointment.

More on Captain George

Exactly a year ago, on Armistice Day 2014, I shared what I'd only recently found out about my paternal grandfather, Captain George Nice. As I wrote then, my father never brought so much as a picture of his dad when he married my mother, so my cousin's box of photos and medals revealed Cap'n George's face to me for the first time, as well as his Croix de Guerre and a mysteriously sourced iron cross.

Two people have been in touch as a result. One was medal collector Barney Mattingly, who has written several interesting articles on the Fifth Dragoon Guards.

Though I should, of course, have gone and looked at my grandfather's records in the National Archives, Barney's information was helpful to clarify that Captain George entered the "Great War" on 16 September 1914, served in France throughout - until 11 November 1918 - and served with his regiment, first the Seventh and later the Fifth Dragoon Guards, until 12 August 1921. He went to Palestine, as I knew already, and was a trainer in horsemanship, seen here in baggy white trousers in Colchester in 1919.

This is one of several more photos I'd never have seen had it not been for a surprise contact, Helen Barrull, director of the Jairo Barrull Flamenco Company, whose step-grandmother Brenda Elva Tomkins had died, leaving a legacy to a sister who unfortunately died just before her. Helen had been amazingly diligent in tracking down all known relatives - Brenda had 11 aunts and uncles on the Tomkins side, and 10 on the Nice side. My cousins have been elusive to find, but the legal process is underway.

Whether it yields anything or not legacy-wise is, so to speak, immaterial contained to the revelations with which Helen furnished me. And it probably won't, since my grandfather turned out to be first a King, and only a Nice when he took up his stepfather's name on joining the army some time in the late 1890s or early 1900s. His half-brothers and sisters assumed he was a full sibling.

He was born in Lexden, Colchester, in 1882, the illegitimate son of 18-year-old Esther King, a housemaid - so presumably his paternal name will never be known: could it have been a master or another servant? Impossible to say. Esther married George Nice in 1886. While serving in South Africa, her son tracked down his maternal grandfather in an internment camp during the Boer War; the man later died in a Salvation Army Hospital out there.

While my father was alive he never mentioned a brother, George, who died of tuberculosis as a young man. Now Helen had discovered the death certificate of another sibling, Phyllis, who was only eight months old when she died in Abbassia, India - not long before my father's birth in Secunderabad in 1912. Here's another extraordinary picture furnished by Helen of my grandmother Elizabeth, nee Wass, daughter of a mariner, holding my auntie Edith.

Other than that there's not much more to add so far, except one more picture of my grandad putting another dragoon through his horse-paces while in Egypt.

As I wrote a year ago, the mind runs riot when confronted with unexpected fragments of a family jigsaw. So I can well understand how Patrick Gale, a gripping story-teller, made a gay romance out of his great-grandfather's unexplained exile to the Canadian prairies in A Place Called Winter. I'm two-thirds of the way through, and while it may not have the deepest psychological depth, it certainly constructs a world.

Later: two pertinent photo footnotes. First, this amazing image of 650 officers and enlisted men from the cavalry in 1910 - could then Second Lieutenant George Nice be among them? - forming a horse's head.

With hindsight, it could be seen as a prescient memorial to all the horses who were killed in the First World War (of a million, 65,000 came back, and another figure suggests eight million horses were lost on all sides). I hope the source, the valuable educational side Hungry for History, approves me appropriation under the circumstances.

And as a sign that life goes on, here's a NASA satelllite image of India, the land where my father was born a child of Empire in 1912, all lit up for Diwali on the night of what we know as Armistice Day.

Books - for cooks?

Probably not, in the case of our flamboyant friend and artist and Lord High just about Everything Else Jonny’s samizdat ramble. Given a style which is very much the man as he holds forth, Cook au Vin deserves to be hailed as the Tristram Shandy of its ilk. And it really should be read from cover to cover (the illustration above is by his pal David Hockney, perhaps not one of his best...). From his fastness in the foothills of the Alpes maritimes above Nice, the Broon has compiled recipes of sorts with a little help from friends with mysterious names such as ‘The Saintly’, J-J and Chinkers (one of the few to be properly introduced to us). So beguiling are the digressions that I was almost disappointed when we finally reached ‘Appetizers and Aperitifs’.

I needn’t have worried. The footnotes and the Chinese-box off-pistes continue. Musing on the order of wine serving, JB floats back to Edinburgh in the 1980s – which is where I met him – and a Queen’s Hall recital by Roger Woodward; he’d written the notes in chronological order for a programme of three Chopin sonatas, only to find that Woodward had decided to play them 3-2-1. But before we get to discover the reason, there’s a note on why artists’ Green Rooms are so called, and after it another on Woodward carving a duck ‘like a swashbuckler from a Chopin Polonaise’. Here's a snap I took of the author at a splendid Edinburgh Gesamtkunstwerk event to launch his roadmovies exhibition and book (J sang Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, amongst other musical plums).

The food? Well, you’d probably eat it. We have, on various excursions to Duranus - that's me looking bleary and unwashed below with my morning coffee after a night on the floor of JB's record room - though I remember the gaggle of weird guests rather than the flavours (how could I forget Belinda and Belinda, who were writing a book called Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll: A Year in Provence? ‘It’s in real time’, they told us, ‘and you’ll be in it’. Given our failure to click, it’s probably a mercy that said publication does not appear to have reached the light of day).

At least the advice on ingredients is probably sound. Thereafter they are mashed into what JB calls ‘gunk’ spread on bread or else pickled in various kinds of alcohol (James Hamilton Paterson’s semi-dud Cooking with Fernet Branca springs to mind – does Jonny know this book?) OK, so the worst is definitely tongue in cheek, the ‘gunk’ for pan-fried foie gras wittily titled ‘Sauce tirée des boîtes’ – the boxes in question containing fish fingers and cornflakes, preferably mixed with retsina. This priceless volume, complete with plenty of JB's artworks like the one below and reproduced bottom-of-wineglass stains, is printed to order by Brown Paper Editions. Apply to villaparasol@aol.com or (less preferably) buy a copy from Amazon.

A step up the evolutionary ladder is the beautifully produced three-tone Goodbye Cockroach Pie from London friends Rosanna Kelly and Casilda Grigg, celebrating the launch of Rosanna's Inky Paws Press. It stems from a 1986 discussion around the same Dundas Street (Edinburgh) kitchen table I had only recently deserted for London after graduation.  Rosanna and law student Gail Halliburton mooted the idea of a cookbook especially aimed at students. They gleaned many vintage recipes from friends, but the idea hung fire until this year when the concoctions were refreshed and punctuated with jolly illustrations.

Very well, so this Carabosse is in mild dudgeon not to have been asked for his perfect student recipe. Needless to say I no longer cook it, but it became a staple in the Dundas Street kitchen: a fish curry consisting of smoked mackerel (!), cooking apples, desiccated coconut, onions and the usual powders. Decidedly an improvement on the meat loaf cooked with a lump of lard in it by flatmates Mary and Helly, or the Spaghetti Carbonara of Simon without the carbonara. I blush to think of the pride with which I served up to visiting mother and stepfather gammon and pineapple. Happy days, as the delightful co-winner (hurrah, a woman!) of Masterchef: The Professionals would put it.

This has not been the best of years for reading, but the finest is probably what I’ve now reached: Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Sonechka – A Novella and Stories. The shorter form seems to suit this author best: she is so keen to give us her many heroines’ backstories that a longer novel like Medea and Her Sisters can get overloaded by multiple strands. But what compelling histories these are, usually tales of fortitude in the face of adverse Russian circumstances and – unfashionably – of happiness descending in time from banal or manipulative situations.

Within a couple of pages bookwormish Sonechka, her big breasts her only physical asset, is courted by an equally unlikely artist and soon can’t believe the joy to be found in the mundane. Zurich magics up a love story between a Russian girl looking for a westerner and a westerner looking for a one-night stand. The outcome of The Queen of Spades, its nonagenarian matriarch tyrannizing her daughter and granddaughter much as the Countess tyrannises Lisa in Pushkin’s short story, is less happy, but emancipation is so close at hand. I so want to read more by Ulitskaya, but currently only The Funeral Party is translated into English, and my Russian probably wouldn’t be up to Imago, which Vladimir Jurowski selected as one of his 2011 summer reading books for The ArtsDesk.

Before Ulitskaya, I’d had something of a Patrick Gale binge, with a slight sense of diminishing returns as I worked my way back from the most recent to the earlier novels. Gale excels in his polyphony of family voices and sense of place, especially Cornwall in the two I enjoyed the most, A Perfectly Good Man and Notes from an Exhibition. No doubt if he’d tackled the subject matter of The Facts of Life today, he’d have cut and shuffled voices and times more flexibly than he did back in 1995. The jackets and the Richard and Judy commendation do tend to put these books at  lower than their real value. For once, here’s a novelist who incorporates music and – as far as I can tell – art with real understanding, who usually has a sympathetic gay character or two but doesn’t necessarily make us see the world entirely from their point of view. I know I’d like him as a person, and there are plenty more novels for cosy company when I wish.

Otherwise, I don’t know why I was so compelled by the sometimes dodgy preaching of Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part Two of which I’ve also read since the Vaughan Williams stint, and I’m not sure whether I was in the right mood when I read Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, but the Boleyn saga didn’t seem to me quite as singular as Wolf Hall. Music book of the year – not that I’ve read many – is Anthony Phillips’s superb translation and footnoting of the Prokofiev Diaries, Volume Three. But further comment on that had better wait until after the BBC Music Magazine review appears. Other reading highlights of the year here and here.