W.H. Auden, a Biography by Humphrey Carpenter

A solid, weighty biography of the acclaimed poet, offering due consideration to his background, achievements, and preferred sexual positions.

No, really. Auden himself said that was an important thing to know about any homosexual. So we get the details, as well as a number of other anecdotes, analyses, quotations, and lists of friendships and rent boys. Plus explanations of the many in-jokes to be found in his plays. I’d had no idea he started out as an enfant terrible, since I first encountered his work in the last year or so of his life. But in the 1930s he was. He was also didactic, mortally untidy, and constantly seeking something to believe in. He smoked heavily, popped benzedrine at breakfast as regularly as vitamins, and drank amounts of liquor that would have killed someone with a normal metabolism. Perhaps that’s why he aged so early and so devastatingly.

Tall, pale, and clumsy, Auden was physically ungainly, but his mind was nimble and his heart essentially kind (beneath a veneer of intellectual arrogance). His homosexuality did not seem to blight his life; after his mid-life conversion to Christianity, he believed it was a sin but accepted that he was a sinner and apparently never attempted to stop himself.

It’s a good biography. Really. Carpenter apparently didn’t bother to read Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, which Auden read in ms. and described as a masterpiece.

Perhaps the issue is in me, but I found the first half riveting (so much so that I had the new Terry Pratchett actually in my hands and didn’t even open it), whereas the last bit seemed almost perfunctory. Or perhaps I just can’t bear the dwindling of this vital man into a lonely, drunken caricature of himself bellowing the same old opinions and anecdotes at the dons of Christ Church.

In the end, the poems last. The essays last. Individuals remember his great kindnesses. That keen, categorical mind survives on paper. Let the man fade into his work.

Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career by George Plimpton

Any book assembled from snatches of interviews, transcribed and arranged by the editor, had better be accurate in its transcriptions. I was therefore spooked as well as appalled to see the caption for the first photograph of Truman Capote, the frontispiece to Chapter 1. The caption quotes To Kill a Mockingbird, specifically Harper Lee’s description of Dill, the character modeled on the young Truman: “His hair was snow white and stuck to his head like….”

Like what? To Kill a Mockingbird says duck-fluff. But here in cold print, George Plimpton’s book says dandruff.

Like Auden, Truman Capote was an enfant terrible who became in many ways more terrible as he grew older. He had several handicaps, in addition to being a literary prodigy: he was very short (5’3″), he had a high-pitched voice, and he was gay. Furthermore, his mother and her new husband spent their time gadding about New York, leaving Truman with relatives. Some were loving. Some were less tolerant of the fey child.

The observations of various family members about him, presented with no editorial comment, make the wretchedness of his youth sufficiently clear. God help any artist, let alone a gay one, born into such a family. It’s no wonder he dreamed of somewhere different, a glamorous world like the one where his mother spent her time. (And where she ultimately committed suicide.)

He had several important same-gender relationships, which get some coverage here. One was with a married man who had four children — a liaison many people disapproved of, on account of wrecking the marriage. Yet Capote helped raise the daughter of his lover, and her account of the incident is loving, honest, and in many ways positive. Her parents had been wretched together — no surprise, if dad’s a closeted gay man. And Capote treated her with unstinting kindness.

He published some short stories, a few novellas, some reportage for the New Yorker, and the monumental In Cold Blood. He was a disciplined writer — at least early in his career. He became a favorite of high society, although he never seemed able or willing to make the distinctions between old money, new money, and the merely famous. He pursued them all. He became something like a pet to a number of rich women.

And then he published an excerpt from his mysterious magnum opus, Answered Prayers, a roman à clef, in which he repeated half a dozen items of gossip about high-society people he knew.

The freezeout was instant and almost unanimous. Capote spent the rest of his life in emotional exile, and he went downhill fast. Drugs, alcohol, all the usual self-destructive substances. The account of his death given by his friend Joanne Carson (ex-wife of Johnny) is utterly lovely, but I am more inclined to believe what she told the police — that he died alone. He left a key to an unidentified safe-deposit box, where the full manuscript of Answered Prayers is supposed to be stored. All that has been found is a few chapters. The safe-deposit box has never been located.

The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman

Raymond Chandler was a man of mixed loyalties. Although he was born in Chicago, he was raised and educated in Britain after the age of 7. He worked as a civil servant and a reporter in England, then returned to the US where he ultimately made quite a success as an accountant, until he was fired for alcoholism in his early 40s. Only then did he devote himself to writing. He began an affair with the magnetic Cissy, a beautiful married woman 18 years his senior, and supported her for three years before he married her. But he continued to live with his domineering Irish mother until her death when he was 34. Only then did he marry Cissy.

This book documents not only their relationship, but also the author’s search for clues to their relationship. The technique can work well in good hands, and there is plenty to search for in tracing their many addresses. (They moved almost annually.) But Freeman is repetitive and not especially reflective. However, she builds a convincing case for Chandler as a kind of knight in shining armor, with a strong psychological need to rescue damsels in distress. Frankly, reading about their sometimes obsessive relationship, I got the sense that he needed to be held in a kind of abjection to a woman.

Cissy’s long illness and death took its toll, and so did Chandler’s alcoholism. He was lost without her. He left his estate in a dreadful muddle because of it. And of course his health was wrecked by alcohol.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

This fascinating history traces the 1853 cholera epidemic in London. The author provides plenty of social and medical context, includes analyses of how the best intentions (coupled with ignorance) resulted in thousands of deaths, and profiles the men who worked to discover how the disease was transmitted and where the source was. The book is full of gastrointestinal horrors, people living in filth and poverty, and entire families dying within days. It is considerably less depressing to read than the three biographies of writers.

So, what books are you reading? Anything you recommend?