Tag: memoirs

Review 2486: A Chelsea Concerto

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A Chelsea Concerto is Frances Faviell’s memoir of the Blitz. Although I have now read several memoirs and novels set during this time, this one is remarkable for its integration of war news and its detailed descriptions of air attacks and their results. Faviell lived in Chelsea during the Blitz—an area that was very hard hit—and the book ends with a massive bombing of the area.

The book begins before the official war, with Faviell getting involved with working with Belgian refugees because of her ability to speak several languages. It continues to follow events of the war and the Blitz. It’s so detailed as to indicate that Faviell must have notes or diaries to refer to, as the memoir was not published until 1959. The descriptions of damage caused by the bombings is very vivid.

Unfortunately, Faviell often assumes knowledge on the part of readers that they may not have, either because it was common knowledge at the time or that it was so familiar to her that she didn’t think it needed explaining. This problem includes unexplained abbreviations, people identified only by name with little context, and at the end of the book, a mysterious reference to some event three years after the events of the memoir.

Also, there are lots of people mentioned in the book but characterization of only a few of them. This led me sometimes to be confused about who they were.

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Review 2455: Spam Tomorrow

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Spam Tomorrow is Verily Anderson’s memoir. Although it briefly hits other times of her life, it concentrates on the war years and ends shortly after D-Day.

The book begins with Anderson’s marriage to Donald, an event not encouraged by her parents because of his lack of wealth and an age difference that is unstated but I figure has to be at least 20 years.

At the beginning of the war, Verily, having already been warned off Donald , volunteers as an ambulance driver. At first, the drivers mostly just wait around to be dispatched, and later, she is erratic in her actual attendance at this job, getting very sick and later going off when she feels like it. She keeps running into Donald, though, who is found unfit for the military because of physical reasons and instead is working for the Ministry of Information. Finally, they decide to marry.

Most of the book has to do with the struggles—sometimes serious ones but related in a lighthearted manner—of living in London during the Blitz, of a difficult pregnancy, of motherhood, and of problems trying to find a suitable home to raise children when you’re not well off and being bombed.

Again, although sometimes concerned with serious problems, like Verily’s difficult first childbirth and subsequent illness, the memoir is related in a lighthearted manner and is often amusing. It provides yet another angle on British life during the war.

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Review 2299: The Salt Path

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The Salt Path is Raynor Winn’s memoir of walking with her husband the 600+-mile Salt Path from Wales around the tip of Cornwall and back to Devon. This may not sound extraordinary or appealing to everyone, but the circumstances that initiated the walk were difficult.

It must have been the worst few days of their lives to date. For years, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth had been fighting a lawsuit that, through no fault of their own, threatened their home and livelihood. They went to court having found a document that proved they owed nothing, but because they didn’t follow the proper procedures, they were not allowed to admit it as evidence. They lost the farm they built up from nothing and were homeless.

As if that weren’t enough, a few days later some pain Moth had in his arm for years was diagnosed as a terminal illness that would result in the degeneration of his muscles and end with him choking to death.

The Winn’s reaction to these circumstances was unusual. With a very small income and almost no ready cash, they decided to walk the Salt Path. And although Raynor wanted to walk it the easy way, from the southeast westward, because the best guidebook went the other way, they went that way.

This book is compulsively readable, as the couple deal with grief, bad weather, physical problems, lack of food and water, poor equipment, difficulty finding camp sites, and general bad treatment of the homeless. It is vividly written and although I tripped over some misplaced modifiers, impels you along with them on their journey.

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Review 2226: Dust Tracks on a Road

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Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s lively memoir, which I read for my Classics Club list.

Hurston was raised in what was essentially in the wilderness at the time in Eatonville, Florida, the first town in the country, she alleges, founded and run by Black people. She was an energetic and imaginative child, and though her family was poor, she seemed to have an idyllic childhood (if you don’t count being whipped, and she didn’t) until her mother died when she was nine. (Other accounts say four, but she says nine.) Not long thereafter, her father remarried and her stepmother soon ran her and her older brother out of the house. (If, when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I had realized she was writing about the founding of Eatonville, I think I would have paid more attention to the information about the town.)

I found it interesting that Hurston had a series of visions as a child and that all of them came true. The first was her mother’s death, the second years of wandering from home to home. Having to go to work at an early age cut into her schooling, but such was her determination to get it that after trying to earn enough at various jobs, she finally just returned to high school, ending up with degrees in anthropology and ethnography from Howard and Barnard Universities.

Hurston relates her life in a lively way with lots of anecdotes, folk stories, and even songs and poetry. Although many of the recollections of her earlier life are very particular, the closer the memoir gets to when she was writing it, the more general it becomes, so we don’t find out much after her first ethnographic studies and novels are completed. Instead, Hurston finishes with a series of discursions on her opinions, which I found less interesting than the story of her childhood and young adulthood.

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Review 2030: Down Below

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Leonora Carrington was a Surrealist artist who for years had an affair with the much-older Max Ernst. During World War II, Ernst kept being imprisoned as an enemy alien in France, and the resultant tribulations broke Carrington’s mental health. As she and some friends traveled to Spain to escape the German invasion, she became disassociated from reality. Down Below is her recollection of her state of mind and thoughts during her break from reality.

Reading this very short work is an odd experience, as Carrington’s delusions seem as surrealistic as any artwork. It also feels elliptical, reticent about the events that brought on her insanity and really about anything personal except her state of mind. It would have been almost impossible to understand without the background provided in the Introduction to my NYRB edition.

It’s pretty crazy. Unfortunately, this breakdown made her a heroine of Surrealism, which must have been personally difficult for her.

Just as a coincidence, shortly after I read this book, I read Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio, about Varian Fry, the man who helped many writers and artists, including Ernst, I think, escape the Nazis. Review coming in a few months.

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Review 1392: A Very Private Eye

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I am not much for reading letters and diaries, because I like story telling, even in nonfiction, rather than glimpses of a life. So, A Very Private Eye, a collection of Barbara Pym’s diary entries and letters, was probably not the best choice for me. Still, a good friend gave me the book, so I decided to read it.

The book was both worse and better than I expected. It begins with Pym’s diary entries as she starts Oxford. In no time, she has embroiled herself with Henry Harvey, who treats her shamefully. Unfortunately, instead of telling him to bugger off like he deserves, she records her heart-rendings, which continue for years.

Next comes a series of letters to Harvey and his wife, and to other friends. I found the letters to the Harveys excruciating. She gives herself the identity of the spinster, Miss Pym, and writes about herself in the third person in a false, jokey tone with constant reminders of her single status. Very obvious. I would think the wife would have been wary.

I was just about to give up on her at around 100 pages in, when the book gets into the war and becomes much more interesting. Similarly, it gets more interesting as she ages, although she refers to a lot of people whose role in her life is not explained. (That would have been helpful, although each section begins with an explanatory introduction by the editors.)

She went through about ten years when no one would publish her books because they were no longer thought to be marketable. Then two prominent literary figures independently listed her as one of Britain’s most underrated authors. Her next books were published, and she was eventually shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I felt it was sad that this happened for her just a few years before she died.

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Review 1383: Educated

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Educated is Tara Westover’s memoir about being raised by a bipolar, survivalist fundamentalist Mormon father and his subservient wife in the depths of rural Idaho. Westover and her younger siblings were home-schooled after her father’s paranoia led him to withdraw his children from school. This home schooling was something I have feared for many home-schooled children when their education is not supervised. Their mother began by trying to have school each day, but their father insisted on dragging the kids out to his junkyard to work. Finally, their mother settled for teaching them to read, and the only educated children in the family became so by their own efforts.

Westover’s father did not observe any work safety practices in the junkyard. Since he didn’t believe in medical care except for his wife’s herbal remedies, some accidents resulted in severe injuries for his children and himself.

Aside from Westover’s difficulties in getting a formal education, this book is more about the toll it took for her to go against her family’s teachings enough to do it—a woman’s place being in the home. Even more so, it is about her struggle with her own view of herself, especially after her sister asks her to support her when she tells the family that her brother Shawn is abusive. Westover must figure out who she is in the absence of her family. She must re-examine her own past to learn the lessons about her family—that her mother put her subservience to her father before the safety of their children; that their father would rather disown one child than face the reality of another’s abusive nature, and that some of her siblings will turn against her, too; even that most of her father’s ideas are actually not true.

This is an amazing and enthralling book. Westover’s journey from a college student who never heard of the Holocaust to a doctorate in history and a commensurate growth in self-awareness is inspiring.

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Review 1342: The Garden of the Gods

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Cover for Garden of the GodsThe Garden of the Gods is a fitting conclusion to Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy. In the book, we meet a few more eccentric characters and are treated to funny events and lush descriptions of the island of Corfu.

The centerpiece of this book is a visit to Corfu by the King of Greece. This event brings about a multitude of opportunities for incompetently executed patriotic displays.

One of the most entrancing new characters is Jeejee, a visitor from India whom Mrs. Durrell takes for royalty because of his first name, Prince. (That is, Larry sends her a letter saying that Prince Jeejee is arriving for a visit.) He is a charming person who entertains us with his attempts at levitation.

Cover for the Corfu TrilogyThe final chapters of the book deal with a typically over-the-top party that the Durrells throw for Jeejee’s birthday. All goes well until Margo’s cabaret, in which the various characters entertain the other guests with acts that include an interminable saucy sea chanty by Captain Creech and an escape act by Mr. Kralefsky and Theodore that goes badly wrong.

The trilogy is funny and entertaining. Although the first book is the source of the original Masterpiece series, the newer series is suggested by characters and events in the last two books. I think most people would enjoy these memoirs.

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