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GERALD BRENAN

THE INTERIOR CASTLE

In his 92 years, Brenan (1894-1987), an English writer who lived mostly Spain, produced poetry, novels, essays, reviews, histories of Spain and its literature, memoirs, and myriad letters revealing how famous he was in Spain and among his friends. These latter included Gathorne-Hardy (The Old School Tie, 1978, etc.), who now offers a monumental biography about trivial events in the life of, when all's said and done, a marginal writer. Gathorne-Hardy seems obsessed with two major themes here— money and sex—although there appears to have been little of either in Brenan's life. Claiming poverty, Brenan lived the carefree existence of an expatriate writer; sexually, he was inclined toward voyeurism. His passion for Dora Carrington, which tangentially connected him to the Bloomsbury group, was inhibited by her marriage to Ralph Partridge. Brenan married his wife, Gamel, after she extricated herself from a mÇnage Ö trois and adopted the writer's daughter by a 15-year-old Spanish peasant. Brenan spent his later years with Lynda Nicholson (50 years his junior) and, eventually, with her Swedish lover. With all this romantically oriented detail, Gathorne-Hardy seems more intent on setting the sexual record straight than on explaining why Brenan or the women in his life matter to anyone except the Spanish, who—in a ludicrous misunderstanding that had them believing that the writer, then 91, was the prisoner of Andalusian kidnappers—rescued him from an English nursing home and honored him with a pension, shelter, and care in Spain until his death. Gathorne-Hardy compares Brenan to Toqueville, Byron, Coleridge, even Boswell. But while Brenan seems a decent enough man, with a literary aura (he met Bertrand Russell, the Woolfs, the Powyses, the Pritchetts, even Hemingway), he was no Byron—and, in any case, he explained what needs knowing about his life in his own memoirs, pointedly titled A Life of One's Own (1962). (Photographs)

Pub Date: April 26, 1993

ISBN: 0-393-03464-X

Page Count: 672

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

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

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