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SELECTED LETTERS OF RAYMOND CHANDLER

Name: SELECTED LETTERS OF RAYMOND CHANDLER
Author: Frank MacShane
ISBN: 0231050801

edited by Frank MacShane ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1981

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Chandler may not be, as biographer MacShane claims, "one of the greatest letter writers of his time"—and, with minimal annotations, this collection doesn't have the narrative thrust that some letter-assemblages do. But, for sheer opinionated vitality on books, writers, and the business of literature, Chandler's exuberant correspondence undeniably goes right to the head of the class. Not surprisingly, there are pages and pages here on the mystery novel: diatribes against the English detection novel in general ("a psychological fraud"), Sayer's Gaudy Night ("sycophantic drivel") and Christie's And Then There Were None ("bunk") in particular; qualified paeans to Hammett ("if you can show me twenty books written. . . 20 years back that have as much guts and life now, I'll eat them between slices of Edmund Wilson's head"); comments on the young Ross Macdonald's "pretentiousness"; high praise for Erie Stanley Gardner when writing to the author, the faint kind when writing elsewhere—along with disgust for Gardner's dainty lechery. ("The result has all the naughty charm. . . of an elderly pervert surprised while masturbating in a public toilet.") And there's plenty of Chandler on Chandler: self-deprecating, dissatisfied, yet also arrogant—especially in a fascinating letter (not mailed) to Alfred Hitchcock, who wanted more Hitch and less Chandler in the Strangers on a Train screenplay. Less expected, however, are Chandler's classically-schooled, anti-intellectual attacks on the whole range of the arts: James Cain ("Everything he touches smells like a billygoat"); Hemingway (who "got to be pretty damn tiresome. . . with his eternal sleeping bag"); Memoirs of Hecate County ("without passion, like a phallus made of dough"); O'Neill's "second or third-rate talent"; A Streetcar Named Desire ("Zero in art"); Elizabeth Bowen's "entirely unreadable" latest book; etc.—with, as Chandler himself signs a 1954 letter, "malice towards all," but also with genuine vigor and curiosity. And, in letters to (or about) publishers Alfred Knopf and Hamish Hamilton, there's the entire world of the writer's nitty-gritty: agents, paperback sales, the slick magazines vs. the pulps, book clubs, translations, subsidiary rights, money, money, money. Only in the last latters—about wife Cissie's decline and his own mental collapse—does anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic Chandler become a sympathetic figure. But, like him or not, agree with him or not, this was a book-man heart and soul—and these zestful, often quite elegant letters will take their place wherever tough, un-hyped talk of the literary life remains a passion.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1981

ISBN: 0231050801

Page Count: 532

Publisher: Columbia Univ.

Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1981

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RAYMOND CHANDLER PAPERS
edited by Tom Hiney & Frank MacShane

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.