Furious Love by Sam Kashner and Nancy Shoenberger

And finally, no interview could be complete until it touched on Le Scandale. "Well, I must say that everyone seems to have quieted down," Richard said. "Good lord, the reputations we had! I mean, I was a bestial wife-stealer, and Elizabeth was a scheming home-breaker...We've been through a lot of fire together, Elizabeth and I. You'd think we were out to destroy Western Civilization or something."

-Furious Love

Where to start with Furious Love? I'm finding that it's hard to review a book about the epic romance between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton because it's just so, well, big*. Both Taylor and Burton were brilliant and complicated--when they came together, their relationship marked the beginning of celebrity culture as we know it today (much to their own dismay). After all, Federico Fellini coined the term paparazzi after watching the press swarm the pair while they were filming Cleopatra. Today the tabloid culture loves to build up a celebrity couple of the moment and document the (oft-imagined) highs and lows of their relationship, but Brangelina can't hold a candle to the phenomenon that was Lizandick**.

Although I love classic movies, I've only seen a handful of films starring Taylor and/or Burton. I had a vague idea that their relationship had been dramatic, but until reading Furious Love I had no idea how turbulent it actually was. They were quite the match. Elizabeth had virtually grown up in the spotlight, making her screen debut at the age of 10. When she encountered Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra--actually their second meeting--she was already on her fourth marriage. Richard, the son of a coal miner, was considered the next great stage actor; although married, he was also well known as an inveterate womanizer. Sparks flew.

They lived a life of extravagance that is hard for most of us to imagine: they made millions of dollars and spent it accordingly (jewels were a particular passion of Elizabeth's), drank to excess, and jetted around the world with a coterie of family, pets, and hangers-on. Despite this, the couple come off as surprisingly sympathetic in Furious Love. Elizabeth shows an endearing adoration for the ordinary life, and it's hard not to admire her moxie. Richard comes across as an often tragic character: talented beyond measure, but ultimately consumed by his demons. Kashner and Shoenberger had access to his journals--the entries they've included, particularly those in which he tries to understand his own worst behavior, are often heartbreaking.

Furious Love is absorbing from the start--I read 100 pages within a day of picking it up. I would definitely enjoy reading more Hollywood biographies with a similar tone, as it was juicy without seeming lowbrow. It's also clear that I need to bone up on the Taylor/Burton filmography, which I hope to get started on soon.

Up next: Daisy Hay's Young Romantics, a nonfiction book about the circle that included Keats, Shelley, and Byron.

* Though I allow that it would be much more difficult to write the book itself.

**Turns out celebrity portmanteaus are nothing new either. 

Keats by Andrew Motion

'The fire is at its last click,' [Keats writes], '- I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet.' He then adds, 'Could I see the same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began "To be or not to be" - such thing[s] become interesting from a distance of time or place.'

-Keats

As I mentioned in my review of Bright Star, I'm no lifelong fan of John Keats. Prior to this year, I think I could have only summoned up two pieces of information about him: 1) British 2) Odes. Far from exhaustive, I'm sure you'll agree.

Bright Star left me curious, though, and so I've spent over a month (off and on) in Keats's company, thanks to Andrew Motion's comprehensive biography. I'm now stuffed to the gills with Keats knowledge. I know the names of his family members and friends and I know the titles of his works - and snippets of some of them*. I know about his love of Shakespeare and his love of claret. I could give you a rough but pretty accurate account of his life and death. Most of this information will fade from my memory in due time, of course, but right now I'm enjoying my temporary expertise.

I feel confident that I should have been a rebel Angel had the opportunity been mine.

Motion does an excellent job of presenting a huge amount of information and analysis in a pretty clear manner**, but unsurprisingly it's Keats's words that really stick with the reader. As I read, I jotted down page numbers on my bookmark, keeping track of particularly lively or interesting passages. We are fortunate that Keats wrote reams of letters, and Motion is skilled in using them to give a real sense of Keats as a person: passionate, flawed, and gifted. Motion mentions a story in which Keats "had recently come across a butcher's boy tormenting a kitten in the street, and had fought and beaten him." Not how I would have imagined him, and I like him the more for it.

Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in a Letter you must write immediately and do all you can to console me in it - make it as rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me - write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been.

Bright Star focused on the relationship between Keats and Fanny Brawne, but since he only knew her in the last few years of his life, Fanny doesn't make a proper appearance until several hundred pages into Keats. Their tragic love story was one of the things that most motivated me to read this biography (in addition to my desire to end my appalling ignorance about Keats in general), so I did find some of the earlier chapters to be a bit drier. Keats more than makes up for it once he's met Fanny. He fights tooth and nail against being sucked up in love, having so often mocked the swooning couples around him. Look at the passage above again for a pretty good example of his feelings - loving her, yet resentful at the power love had over him. He'd struggle with it for the rest of his life.

'Where is Keats now?' Shelley asked. 'I am anxiously expecting him in Italy where I shall take care to bestow every possible attention on him. I consider his a most valuable life & am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both to his body & his soul, to keep the one warm & to teach the other Greek and Spanish. I am aware indeed in part that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure.'

The problem with a biography, of course, is that by the time you've reached the end of the book you've often grown quite attached to its subject. Even knowing that Keats's death was inevitable - that even if he had lived a long and happy life, he still would have been long dead - I found the account of his final months in Rome to be so bleak. He was lucky to have a devoted friend - Joseph Severn, who was eventually buried beside him - but he was in agony for so long, and he was so far from all he knew and the one he loved best.

I was on the train the other day carrying Keats, and a woman remarked upon it. We had a brief conversation as she disembarked. "What a tragedy," she said. And it was. There's nothing to be done for it now, of course. We can't go back and buy his books so that he wouldn't be penniless, to alert him to the money he was entitled to that was tied up in Chancery, to tell his doctors that bleeding him is only counterproductive. We can only read his work, and love it, and perhaps be inspired by it. He thought his name would quickly fade from history. Perhaps we can take some small consolation in knowing that he would have been proud to learn that his poetry has endured over the course of so many years.

Up next: Something lighter was called for, clearly. I'm trying out G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades.

*One of my new favorites is "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." I thought, of course, of The Beldam from Neil Gaiman's Coraline (the film, at least, as I still need to read the book). It's always exciting to make connections, thus I particularly liked the stanza that reads:

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'

There was so much history in that story that I wasn't at all aware of - Gaiman's pale ghost children didn't come out of nowhere.

**There are a heckuva lot of people to keep track of, though. There's also a certain amount of assumed knowledge - I wouldn't have known of Thomas Chatterton if I hadn't looked him up after reading his name in Underground London. Chatterton comes up a lot in Keats, and he's never given an introduction. I suppose people who read dense biographies of poets generally have more background knowledge in poetry than I do.

In Medias Res: Keats

So, I've finished My Booky Wook, but I'm not focused enough right now to gather my thoughts. Instead, I thought I'd offer this passage from Andrew Motion's biography of Keats, which I've just started.

It was a world fraught with violence. In the factories and the fields, where the conditions of everyday life were routinely shaped by appalling levels of suffering, the danger of rioting was a constant threat. There was a distinctly 'Sturm und Drang quality' about political life too. 'Think of the Earl of Chatham,' one recent historian has urged, 'collapsing in the House of Lords as he made his last manic and incoherent speech against war with America in 1778, or of Edmund Burke flinging a dagger into the floor of the House of Commons in December 1792 as a symbol of his departure from the Foxite Whigs, and of Charles James Fox bursting into tears as a result.' Think too of the Prime Minister Perceval, assassinated in the House of Commons in 1811, or of the startling statistic that nineteen Members of Parliament committed suicide between 1790 and 1820, and that a further twenty lapsed into insanity, as did their king.

Some people think history is dull. I can't imagine they've read the preceding paragraph.

Flannery by Brad Gooch

The first official gathering of the entering freshman class, in September 1942, was a formal tea at the Old Executive Mansion, the residence of President Wells. Once home to Confederate Governor Joseph E. Brown, as well as to General Sherman during his March to the Sea, the Palladian high Greek Revival governor's mansion, with its soaring fifty-foot rotunda and gilded dome, was located on the same block as the Cline Mansion. Mary Flannery could spy its massive rose-colored masonry walls from her bedroom window, just beyond the backyard where, according to Betty Boyd Love, she still "kept ducks." Yet her family had to force her to walk around the block to the social event. "Flannery did not want to go but was pressured into it," remembers their classmate Harriet Thorp Hendricks. "She donned the required long dress - but wore her tennis shoes." When asked why she was sitting alone in a corner, she replied, "Well, I'm anti-social."

-Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.

-Wise Blood

What can I say about Flannery O'Connor? She's one of my very favorite authors, to start. Her dark, surprisingly funny stories won my heart in college. (The line I quoted above from Wise Blood, which has stuck in my head for years, would have been enough to do the trick.) I love the Southern Gothic atmosphere, the religious fervor, the misfits. All the same, a few pages into this biography by Brad Gooch, I was unsure as to whether or not I would continue. I'm at home right now, surrounded by a bevy of unread books, and as much as I like O'Connor's stories, I wasn't sure if her life had been interesting enough to support a biography.* I decided to push through for a chapter or so, and I'm glad I did.

Going into this book, I didn't know much about the particulars of O'Connor's life. I knew she'd lived at least part of her life in Savannah (somewhere I have a photo of myself outside of her home there) and that she died young from a degenerative illness. Other than that, the picture was pretty blank.

Although her life was not packed with drama, O'Connor herself was enough of a character to keep the reader absorbed. She grew up living a charmed life in Savannah, marred only when her father was diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that would later kill both him and his daughter. Her early work was considered weird but promising, and she managed to parlay her college writing and cartooning into a place at graduate school at the University of Iowa. From there, she worked patiently and persistently, spending six years developing Wise Blood, her first novel. It was not a huge success, and critical reception was mixed. She kept going.

Even when lupus began to ravage her health, she kept going, her barbed wit always intact. I felt like Gooch rendered this all quite vividly. My picture of O'Connor is certainly much clearer than it was before I read the book. In addition, Gooch does a nice job of showing where incidents from her life were worked into her stories - I reread "Revelation" last night and enjoyed recognizing the influences that Gooch had pointed out. Plus "Revelation" is just flat-out great.

If, by chance, you haven't read any O'Connor: Wise Blood is as good a place to start as any. She didn't write that much, so you're on pretty solid footing no matter what you choose. Also she had the best titles ever, no? (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge). Incidentally, at least two of those titles have religious origins - I was aware of the amount of religion in O'Connor's works but never, oddly enough, realized how religious she actually was (Answer: plenty religious). Gooch treats O'Connor's religious and social views pretty evenhandedly, though I think these aspects of her character are what could make her, as a person, less relatable to a modern reader. (Otherwise, I could see myself hanging out on the front porch with her, eating vanilla wafers and watching her peacocks.)

Up next: I haven't picked up anything yet, but I'm thinking American Gods by Neil Gaiman. That may change, though. Choices - exciting!

*Compare, example, with those recent biographies of John Cheever and Patricia Highsmith, both of which I want to read.