Edmund White

[frequent]

A new memoir by the American novelist Edmund White, the specialist in same-sex attraction novels, has been published and is reviewed in the latest Spectator. It's called The unpunished vice. Don't get too excited, the subtitle is A life of reading. White is an interesting person in so many ways. Like quite a few other American writers and artists he spent some years living in Paris. I suppose that having struggled with one foreign language all their life (English), learning another one (French) doesn't seem so daunting to those Americans

White reveals that one of the two books he re-reads every year is "Nothing by Henry Green, a dandy novelist who appeals for his ‘cattiness, strategic artifice and stylish doubletalk’". A review of Nothing concludes "As the plot advances through discussions filled with misdirections and omissions, Green demonstrates that there is nothing like the spoken word to conceal one’s true intentions". Sounds like a writer after my own heart

[snotface]

That's an enjoyable, fun review. Somewhere else I saw a mild but no doubt irritating putdown of it as 'written as if to fulfil a contractual obligation'. Actually the last book of his I read, My Lives, aroused a similar suspicion in me. There's no doubting his credentials as a writer, though. He happens to be a big fan of Rechy's City of Night, as am I. It's not surprising, given that they both tend to write autobiographically and are as hard, if not harder, on themselves than on others.

[frequent]

Have you ever read Anthony Powell's Dance series, snotface? It's one of my favourites, and I found apposite VS Pritchett's description of Powell quoted in The Grauniad: "a Proust Englished by Wodehouse". Needless to say I've identified a former Moderator as the Kenneth Widmerpool of the Forum

[snotface]

I got through the first one and a half volumes and then - unusually for me - abandoned it (usually I feel obliged to finish whatever I'm reading, even if I'm not particularly enjoying it, as if medals are awarded for literary persistence). The characters just never became real to me and, fatally, I couldn't care what happened to them. And then so many volumes stretched ahead, still to be read... No doubt the fault was mine - plenty of people share your love of the series. At the moment the first volume of Proust is sitting on my bookshelf, tapping its feet, waiting to be read. I'm still plucking up courage. I tried years ago but gave up after what I considered about the most dire first 50 pages in all literature (you know, all that sickly stuff about whether his darling mama was going to come upstairs to kiss him goodnight). But so many writers I admire praise Proust that I feel obliged to have another go; it can only get better... And of course now we have Edmund White (see how I steer this post back to relevance) saying that he reads Proust every year.

[frequent]

I got through the first one and a half volumes and then - unusually for me - abandoned it (usually I feel obliged to finish whatever I'm reading, even if I'm not particularly enjoying it, as if medals are awarded for literary persistence). The characters just never became real to me and, fatally, I couldn't care what happened to them. And then so many volumes stretched ahead, still to be read... No doubt the fault was mine - plenty of people share your love of the series.

For me the first couple of - for want of a better word - mentors I had as a young man were both lovers of Powell's work, so I suppose in the beginning I persevered for their sake. But after the first three or four books it did grow on me, to the extent that Dance is now a firm favourite. Maybe if you watch the Channel 4 adaptation - available for streaming on their web site - that might help? Proust is someone I just can't take up at all