Since man does not live by decline-of-the-west angst alone, here are a few recommendations of diverting reads to take your mind off eh quotidian scene and its garish dysfunction. There’s only so much “How Democracies Die” and “Fascism” you can bear, after all.
I often fall back for amusement on jolly old England whose literature really is jolly. From Chaucer till today, the comic muse is ever present. Alan Bennett, most famous for such bittersweet plays as “The Madness of King George,” “The History Boys,” and “People,” keeps a diary that is excerpted annually in the Times Literary Supplement.
The last 20 years or so are collected in “Keeping On, Keeping On,” along wth other occasional writing. It’s unfailingly human, amusing, touching, acerbic. His persona is of an aging. decent, shy, kindly, exasperated man vexed by life. In these pages, by such atrocities as the neglect of institutions such as the Public Health Service, historic buildings that are allowed to decay, and libraries that helped a butcher’s son make his way to Oxford.
He also chronicles his aging, the funerals he attends, the trips he takes, and the strolls in his native Yorkshire countryside. With rue his heart is often laden, but his wit is intact and sharp. I like this book so much I’m working my way through an earlier volume of diaries from the 1980s and ‘90s, “Writing Home.” Just as charming.
Bill Bryson, an Iowan who married an English girl, has spent years living there and is the author of many amusing books on his travels, his house, Shakespeare, grammar, and whatever else strikes his fancy. In “The Road to Little Dribbling,” the now 60ish Bryson goes for a ramble around Great Britain that mirrors one described twenty years earlier, in “Notes from a Small Island.”
He takes the reader to many off-the-beaten-path places that you immediately want to visit, but also writes with delightful, curmudgeonly pique about surly shopkeepers, officious National Trust docents, unhelpful ferrymen, and other impediments to the intrepid traveler.
He indulges in some heartfelt rants about issues that are similar, if more boisterously expressed, to those that annoy Bennett— littering, the decline of British rail travel, schemes to make a pound by ruining the landscape he admires, and the assaults on tradition by short-sighted and careless custodians of his adopted country’s national treasures. All while making you laugh out loud every few pages.
“Golden Hill” is an historical novel by Francis Spufford set in New York City in 1746 where a young man, Richard Smith, arrives from England and enacts the innocent abroad themes of American writers in reverse. The author, a London professor, admits he took the comic novels of 18th century writers like Fielding as an inspiration.
The New York our hero finds if filled with flinty-eyed Dutch and American merchants, political chicanery by various competing factions, the vices of a bustling port with its sailors and stevedores, and the toilsome misery of slaves and indentured servants.
Only after numerous twists and turns, love won, love lost, friendship, betrayal, duels, imprisonment, do we discover what secret mission brought Smith to the colonies in the first place.
One more book from the British Isles is “Greeks Bearing Gifts” by the Scottish author Philip Kerr. It’s the latest in his saga of Bernie Gunther who began as a Berlin homicide detective in Weimar Germany.The coming to power of the Nazis exposed him to one tricky situation after another as he tried to stay alive while maintaining his integrity.
The first three books about pre-war Gunther are wonderfully evocative and collected in “Berlin Noir.” The more recent books have treated Gunther’s wartime troubles and his attempts to navigate a postwar world where he is living under an assumed name and can no longer return to his home, now in East Germany. This episode finds him using his investigative skills as an insurance fraud gumshoe, but the past is never far away.
Finally, my favorite actress of the Golden Age of Hollywood is Barbara Stanwyck, and I finally got around to a voluminous life by Victorian Wilson that appeared in 2013. It was lavishly praised at the time, but at $40 and 850 pages, I balked.
When I was recently found it available used for $6, I bit. It was well worth the wait, though now I am impatient for more. This is just the first volume, following Stanwyck only so far as 1940 with much of her most memorable work still ahead — “The Lady Eve,” “Meet John Doe,” “Ball of Fire,” “Double Indemnity,” and many more.
You might suppose that almost a thousand pages to cover half of a film star’s life would be cuckoo overkill, but this is not just the definitive life of Stanwyck (nee Ruby Stevens) but a deep dive into the mean streets of her orphaned start in Brooklyn, her scuffling beginnings in dance halls and soon on Broadway in the Roaring 20s, and a chronicle of Los Angles and Hollywood from 1930 onward.
Stanwyck arrived there at about the same time as sound and traversed the entire period. Along the way, you meet the writers, directors, moguls, costars, agents, publicists and bit players that surrounded her. We even learn that it was the great theatrical impresario David Belasco who chose her stage name for Ruby.
It’s a big book because it’s a sweeping saga of an era. I can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who loves the movies of the 1930s and 1940s as my mother did. She passed the passion on to me.
However, her favorite actresses of the era were Joan Blondell, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, rather than Stanwyck. That never made sense to me until this book caused the penny to drop. Mom’s favorite Hollywood heartthrob of that period was Robert Taylor. She may never have forgiven Stanwyck for marrying him and forcing her to settle for my father.