T H I S W E E K
No. 6361
February 28 2025
the-tls.co.uk
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T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T
Zoe Guttenplan New York state of mind | D. J. Taylor, Colin Kidd The History Man at fif ty
Nat Segnit Becoming a hermit | Orlando Whitfield Gilbert & George in Moscow
Journalist, assassin The many lives of Joan Didion, by Emma Garland
Joan Didion, 1972 © Henry Clarke/ Condé Nast via Gett y Images
In this issue
Graham Greene argued that “there is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer”. Joan Didion thought likewise: “writers are always selling some- body out”. By way of illustration, Didion, a leading light of the literary New Journalism, related that witnessing a five-year-old in California tripping on acid “was gold”, and that “you live for moments like that when you’re doing a piece”. Once famous as the cultural assassin of the 1960s hippie dream, Didion in later life acquired a cult following for her grief memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Her accounts of the deaths of her husband and professional partner, John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana – and of coming to terms with old age – inspired many imitators, though few have written with her skill and reportorial detachment. They earned her the sobriquet of “Saint Joan”. One story illustrates the power of her magical thinking: Didion cannot part with her husband’s shoes because he will need them when he comes back.
Emma Garland reviews three books about the writer, one by Cory Leadbeater, Didion’s assistant, another by her nephew by marriage, Griffin Dunne, the third a gossipy account of her literary rivalry with Eve Babitz. The books describe aspects of Didion’s protean life, but don’t pretend to give the full picture. In The Friday Afternoon Club, Dunne writes “of a familial unravelling” amid the glamour of Hollywood. His story of the murder of his sister, Dominique, and the trial of her killer describes the “incredibly cold” part played by Didion and her husband. The book “is a portrait of fame as a destructive force – one from which Joan was far from exempt”. No Saint Joan here.
Didion honed her prose writing for Vogue. Gay Talese, another avatar of New Journalism, worked for the New York Times and Esquire magazine. Zoe Guttenplan reviews A Town Without Time, a collection of his best writing, including his profile,“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and passages from Honor Thy Father, with its “immersive view of the paranoia and tedium of mafia life”. Sounds like The Sopranos.
Fift y years ago, Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical campus novel The History Man suggested, in D. J. Taylor’s words, that the “freedoms of the Age of Aquarius are simply exploitation by default”. Who was the real-life model for the novel’s antihero, the sociologist Howard Kirk? Colin Kidd speculates that Bradbury may have used his friend Bryan Wilson, a conservative All Souls Fellow, “as a photographic negative”. Wilson felt he had been sold out.
MARTIN IVENS
Editor
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2
3 BIOGRAPHY
5 JOURNALISM
6 LETTERS TO THE
EDITOR
EMMA GARLAND
ZOE GUTTENPLAN
The Uptown Local – Joy, death, and Joan Didion Cory Leadbeater. The Friday Afternoon Club – A family memoir Griffin Dunne. Didion & Babitz Lili Anolik
A Town Without Time – Gay Talese’s New York Gay Talese. New York Sketches E. B. White
Slavery reparations, Roger Penrose, Writing in Palestine, etc
7 MEMOIR
8 POETRY
8 POEM
ORLANDO WHITFIELD Gilbert & George and the Communists James Birch
MATILDA SYKES CYNTHIA L. HAVEN
New and Selected Poems – 1962–2012 Charles Simic Poet in the New World – Poems, 1946–1953 Czesław Miłosz; Translated and edited by Robert Hass and David Frick
TARN MACARTHUR
Climbing to Seefin Passage Tomb on Summer Solstice
10 RE-READING
12 LITERATURE
14 ARTS
17 FICTION
19 BIOGRAPHY
20 HISTORY
22 TRAVEL
24 IN BRIEF
D. J. TAYLOR COLIN KIDD
ROSEMARY ASHTON
MARY HITCHMAN
GUY DAMMANN MURIEL ZAGHA
DAVID ANNAND SUZI FEAY ALICE JOLLY
HUW NESBITT
CORINNA TREITEL BRYAN CHEYETTE
GUY STAGG NAT SEGNIT
26 NATURAL HISTORY HELEN BYNUM
TOM SIMPSON
27 AFTERTHOUGHTS
28 NB
REGINA RINI
M. C.
Limits of liberalism – The History Man at fifty A tease that went sour – Which academic inspired The History Man?
Imagining Otherwise – How readers help to write nineteenthcentury novels Debra Gettelman
Oracles, Omens and Answers (Weston Library, Oxford). Divination, Oracles and Omens Edited by Michelle Aroney and David Zeitlyn Festen Mark-Anthony Turnage (Royal Opera House, London) I’m Still Here (Various cinemas)
Season George Harrison. Greatest of All Time Alex Allison. Anfield Road Chris Shepherd Theory & Practice Michelle de Kretser Dark Like Under Alice Chadwick
J.-K. Huysmans Ruth Antosh
The Question of Unworthy Life – Eugenics and Germany’s twentieth century Dagmar Herzog No Road Leading Back – An improbable escape from the Nazis and the tangled way we tell the story of the Holocaust Chris Heath
Holy Places – How pilgrimage changed the world Kathryn Hurlock Learning from Silence Pico Iyer
Monsieur Teste Paul Valéry; Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Ask Me Again Clare Sestanovich. How to Talk About Love – An ancient guide for modern lovers Plato; Translated with commentary by Armand D’Angour La novela olvidada en la casa del ingeniero Soledad Puértolas. The Lost Music of the Holocaust Francesco Lotoro; Translated by Katherine Gregor Flame, Ash, Feather – A dozen eggs from Lockerbie Catherine Swire. Pepysian Perceptions of the Cape 1798–1828 – Selections from the Western Cape Diaries of Samuel Eusebius Hudson Edward Hudson, editor
Living on Earth – Life, consciousness and the making of the natural world Peter Godfrey-Smith In Praise of Floods – The untamed river and the life it brings James C. Scott
Cog in the machine – The government worker’s moral dilemma
Two new Blue Plaques, News from the little magazines, An award for creative writing
Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk)
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TLS
FEBRUARY 28, 2025
