Lions and Shadows - Christopher Isherwood

 Isherwood's autobiography from 1938, written after his return to England from Nazi Germany and alongside his Berlin trilogy that ultimately became Cabaret, comes with a warning:

Because this book is about the problems of a would-be writer, it is also about conduct.   The style is the man.   Because it is about conduct, I have had to dramatize it, or you would not get farther than the first page.   Read it as a novel.   I have used a novelist's licence in describing my incidents and drawing my characters: 'Chalmers,' 'Linsley,' 'Cheuret' and 'Weston' are all caricatures: that is why - quite a part from the fear of hurt feelings - I have given them, and nearly everybody else, fictitious names.

This is slightly and deliberately misleading.   There is very little that seems to be either dramatic or dramatized.   The real identities of most renamed participants are obvious to those in the know (which large numbers would have been in 1938, when the era of the Auden Gang was coming to an end).   'Weston' is Auden, 'Chalmers' is Edward Upward, and 'Stephen Savage', who literally bursts in during the last chapter, is Stephen Spender.   Isherwood uses fake names because these are his friends and might not remain so.   Cecil Day Lewis, for example, a pivotal member of the Auden Gang, is not here at all, nor Louis MacNeice.   Given that Auden was the hub around which the group revolved - everybody except Upward was a separate friend of Auden and met the others only through him - his long journey to China with Isherwood in January 1938, and removal to America, again with Isherwood, a year later, was always going to cause resentment.

Christopher remains Christopher Isherwood.   The books he talks about writing are real books.  The fantasy he made with Upward at Cambridge ('Mortmere') is real.   The extracts of writing by Upward and Auden are all real.   The book ends with the publication of Isherwood's first novel, All the Conspirators, in May 1928 and his departure for Berlin, where Auden was spending the year, in March 1929.

The area in which Isherwood holds back information is the personal.   How well off his family was, far richer than any other member of the Auden circle, is never made clear.   The family itself is rarely mentioned - the loss of his soldier father in the War is not here, even though the theme is Christopher finding and facing 'The Test' which the previous generation of men faced in the War to End All Wars.   The big unmentionable, though, is Isherwood's homosexuality.   Obviously this was illegal in Britain at the time and, in fairness, he finally came to terms with it in Weimar Germany.   It is therefore a subject dealt with in his books about his life in Germany, in the mighty A Single Man (1964) and in the eventual successor to Lions and Shadows, Christopher and His Kind (1976).   Perhaps, then, discounting the role his sexuality must have played in his friendships with these lightly-disguised literary men is the fictional element.

In summary, a fascinating experiment and an enthralling read.

Sunset Swing - Ray Celestin

 Sunset Swing is the closing number of his City Blues Quartet.   It's Christmas 1967.   Ida Young has recently retired, selling her PI business in LA.   Kerry Gaudet, a USAAF nurse, facially scarred by napalm, has flown in from Vietnam to find her missing brother.   Nick Licata, boss of the LA Mob, calls in fixer Dante Sanfelippo to find his missing son.   Louis Armstrong flies in to perform on Steve Allen's Christmas special.

Armstrong and Ida are friends from way back in New Orleans.   Dante and Ida have worked together before.   Ida has retired and Dante is about to, hoping to exchange his wholesale booze business for a vineyard in the Valley, deeds to be signed on December 26 - coincidentally the day Licata Jnr is due to answer bail, otherwise his father is out half a million bucks.   Kerry, of course, only has a few days leave.   So the clock is running from the outset, always a bonus in any thriller.

Meanwhile the Night Slayer is prowling the city.   He might have killed a young woman called Audrey.   Dante doesn't think so, given that she was Riccardo Licata's secretary.   Ida has no interest - until the cops find her name and former office number in Audrey's handwriting.   Slowly, gradually, the threads are drawn together to unpick a massive conspiracy, government agency against government agency, and a horrible truth becomes apparent.   The CIA are using Faron, the legendary killer Ida almost caught in postwar New York in The Mobster's Lament (see review below) twenty years earlier.  Faron is a serial killer but he is not the Night Slayer.   The feds are using him to track down and kill the handful of losers who might be the Night Slayer.   Kerry Guadet's brother Stevie is one of them.

It's complex, maybe slightly far-fetched, though much of conspiracy angle is fact-based; but Ray Celestin has the writing skills to pull it off.   Sunset Swing reads like a breeze (like the Santa Ana which is fanning LA wildfires in the novel), pacy, punchy, noir when its needs to be, and yet always compassionate.   Dante builds a touching relationship with a stray dog he has picked up along the way, Ida with Kerry; and Ida's longtime friendship with Satch has always been a welcome distraction.   Celestin even gives us a musical motif - a tune I don't know by Chet Baker - which ends with a beautiful Christmas twist right before the shooting starts.

The Quartet has plenty of through-lines but unlike so many epics you don't need to read them in order.  I didn't.   Each novel stands alone, has its own themes and developments.   Jump in with the first one you come across - and enjoy.

Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia - Paul Willetts

 Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) was a gifted but prodigal writer across most genres who could never keep hold of a pound note and who drank himself to an early death in the postwar pubs of northern Soho or, the catchier version, Fitzrovia.   He was close to Dylan Thomas when they worked together for a documentary film company in the later years of WW2.   He knew and drank with Nina Hamnett (see my review of her Laughing Torso), collaborated on a movie script with my favourite forgotten British sci-fi writer Charles Eric Maine, and is remembered chiefly for his posthumously published Memoirs of the Forties (also reviewed here), which is the key text for any student of British arts in the Twentieth Century. 

This, by Paul Willetts, is the only full-length biography.   The research is impressive - the cover is very good - the editing is not.   Whilst it is clear that JML led a peripatetic life and tried to hide his whereabouts from his legion of creditors, there is far too much made of his ever-changing address and, in the final chapters, when either Willetts or his editors were running out of vigilance, it is way too often accompanied by terms like 'about November' which is a nonsensical phrase, easily improved.   As it is, it hits like a cracked church bell striking midnight - over and over and over in the final chapters.   I would also suggest there are insufficient examples of our hero's writing to justify the claims made for his talent (which I agree with, by the way, having read his Memoirs more than once).

So, could have been better, but nevertheless Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia is worth having and well worth reading.   A genuine window into a vanished world.

W H Auden - Richard Hoggart

 I find Longman's Writers and their Work series absolutely invaluable: authoritative criticism given in brief, with an overall assessment built up from focused scrutiny of the major works.   Richard Hoggart is just about as authoritative as they come: tutor, lecturer and professor at Hull, Leicester and Birmingham, three cities very important to me.   His first book was a study of Auden in 1951 and that led to this distillation and update of his thinking in 1957 (though he revised it a further three times).   

I have hitherto found Auden off-putting, but my own researches have shown how significant he was considered when his first volume came out in 1931.   He founded a movement which was not really a movement, more a circle with him at the centre, some key like-minded friends who were not necessarily friends of each other, and a whole bunch of imitators.   Auden changed, understandably, after he moved to America immediately before the war, and the subsequent work is not my particular interest at the moment.   Nevertheless Hoggart's account of it had me gripped.

The Templar, the Queen and her Lover - Michael Jecks

 Blimey, turns out it's twelve and a half years since I read Jecks and his Sir Baldwin series.  The last one I read, in the earliest days of this blog, King's Gold, post-dates this one, which is set in 1325, primarily in France, where Sir Baldwin and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock, are part of Queen Isabella's security as she tries to negotiate a treaty with her brother, King Charles IV.

The stumbling block is that Charles and Isabella have not been on the best of terms since Isabella told her father Philip IV that the wives of Charles and another brother were promiscuous adulteresses, carrying on their debauches in the infamous Tour de Nesle.   Both wives were put away.   Charles's wife Blanche is still alive in 1325, a prisoner in the squalid Chateau Galliard, the marriage long since annulled.   Charles is about to marry for the third time, a child bride who is also his first cousin.

Isabella has been likewise sidelined in England, because her husband has replaced Piers Gaveston with a new and more demanding lover, Hugh le Despenser.   Despenser wants the mission to France to fail and Isabella to be discredited.   Edward II's former friend and general, Roger Mortimer, is living in Parisian exile.   He is actually not yet the Queen's lover.

As a former Templar, Baldwin himself is in danger in France, Philip IV being the king who destroyed the Temple and burned the leading Templars.   Baldwin wasn't in France at the time but still has a price on his head.   Meanwhile people in the retinue are dying: Enguerrand, Comte de Foix, is killed after an argument with Baldwin; his squire, Robert de Chatillon, is attacked and later murdered; an old soldier associated with Foix and Robert is killed in the first attack.   Before any of this, the garrison at Chateau Galliard, the prison-keepers of the woman who would have been queen, has been wiped out, Blanche herself having disappeared.  The garrison, moreover, comprised men hired by Robert de Chatillon on the orders of Comte Enguerrand.

The mystery is tantalizing and complex.   The book, however, is too long and its structure too fractured.   It would have been better to focus only on what Baldwin and Simon know, experience, or discover.  It was enjoyable enough but, being so splintered, lacked grip.