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T H I S W E E K No. 6361 February 28 2025 the-tls.co.uk UK £4.50 | USA $8.99 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 Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement @the.tls @TheTLS To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS, go to timesbookshop.co.uk 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) Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk TLS FEBRUARY 28, 2025
page 3
B I O G R A P H Y Playing it as it lays Three new books complicate Joan Didion’s image as the ‘archpriestess of cool’ I M A G E S I S / G E T T Y H A R R P A U L ; I R E W P R E S S B E E / Z U M A J O N E S / S A C R A M E N T O . A I C H A E L M © EMMA GARLAND THE UPTOWN LOCAL Joy, death, and Joan Didion CORY LEADBEATER 224pp. Fleet. £22. THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON CLUB A family memoir GRIFFIN DUNNE 400pp. Grove Press. £20. DIDION & BABITZ LILI ANOLIK 352pp. Atlantic. £20. Every thing about Joan Didion i s cool. Her writing is aloof, her glamour minimal, the Coca-Cola she drank every morning for breakfast chilled. If she was stuck on a manuscript, she would put it in the freezer “to settle”. Her reputation as a disaffected yet discerning documentarian has been nailed on since Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), the essay collection that made her name. Since her death in 2021 it has been elevated into a kind of holiness. Saint Joan: the most prominent wallflower in American literary history. A myth that powerful is hard to sustain and even harder to unmake, though these books make game attempts. Cory Leadbeater’s The Uptown Local: Joy, death, and Joan Didion leans most closely into the legend, which is unsurprising considering that he was her live-in personal assistant during the last nine years of her life. It’s a memoir that lays bare the author’s own demons – a graduate student at Columbia University struggling with his writing, struggling with depression, struggling to distance himself from his dysfunctional youth in New Jersey – while offering an account of his unique access to Didion. The pair were connected by the British poet James Fenton, one of Leadbeater’s tutors at Columbia, who emailed him cryptically with a job offer, of sorts – a “well-known writer” friend needed help with “all kinds of things”. Without knowing who or what, Leadbeater agreed to start the following week. The first anecdote of his relationship with Didion describes them listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s “There’s a Small Hotel” and FEBRUARY 28, 2025 discussing Didion’s favourite hotels – the Royal Hawaiian, the Beverly Wilshire. Leadbeater is wearing a blue hat and, without saying a word, she takes it off his head, puts it on hers and wears it for the rest of the afternoon. It’s in these moments that The Uptown Local is most successful: with Didion, ever the observer, in the rare position of being observed. It’s a sentimental book by nature, with Leadbeater acting as Didion’s caretaker during her final years, and Didion acting as the tether to a world that frequently left Leadbeater spiralling. It basks too long in the shadow of her influence, in places. In one passage he remembers leaving the daily alarms for Joan on his phone long after her death. They go off at inopportune moments, during meetings or while he’s looking after his baby daughter. “The alarm rolls: ‘JDD Dinner’, my phone says, shaking, and my daughter begins to cry, and, ‘I love you, Joan’, I say to no one.” Any fan of Didion’s style will find this a little mawkish. Leadbeater, however, also identifies hi s own problem with “Didion the myth”. He struggles with the fact that people commonly see just one version of her – “the genius waif leaning against her Stingray”, “the political journalist and assassin”, “the vulnerable woman perpetually in bed with a headache”. In reality, he says, her virtue was that “she was all of those things, all at once”. Despite her fixed station as the “archpriestess of cool”, as Daphne Merkin put it, it’s true that Didion’s image can prompt different responses. Those who see the detached “political journalist and assassin” first might treat her fiction as an afterthought, though it reveals her more passionate side, focusing on relationships – marriage (Run River, 1963), infidelity and psychological collapse (Play It as It Lays, 1970), p e r s ona l a nd po l i t i c a l c o r r up t i on (A B o o k o f Common Prayer, 1977) – and the pressures of social expectations on women in particular. Those who see her physical frailty and her portrait of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) first often find it hard to reconcile with her merciless drive. We see some of that in another book, which comes from a relative of Didion’s through marriage. Griffin Dunne was born into a dynasty. His father was the Vanity Fair reporter Dominick Dunne, his mother the Mexican-American heiress Ellen “Lenny” Beatriz Griffin and his uncle and aunt – “America’s bestknown writing couple” – John Gregory Dunne and Didion. Griffin became an actor (An American Werewolf in London, 1981), producer (After Hours, 1985) TLS Joan Didion, 2003; and Eve Babitz, 1997 and director (Practical Magic, 1998) in his own right, though he has largely avoided the spotlight – he seems always to have been in the background of a scene rather than its subject, which is probably why he has the choicest stories. The Friday Afternoon Club: A family memoir is an account of his upbringing as a Hollywood insider, written with the wry and pitiless distance of an outsider. Part coming-of-age saga, part tragedy, it makes its way from star-studded anecdotes – he was child-minded by Elizabeth Montgomery, saved from drowning by Sean Connery, felt up at a dinner party by Tennessee Williams – to the gross miscarriage of justice surrounding the murder of his sister in 1982. Dominique Dunne was at the start of a promising career as an actor (her breakthrough was in Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, 1982) when she was strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, John Sweeney, at the age of twenty-two. The case was highly publicized, in part because of her connections, but also because Sweeney was sentenced to just six years for manslaughter (the maximum he could have received), of which he served two and a half. The sentence was so mild that even the judge overseeing the case denounced the jury, saying it was “a case, pure and simple, of murder. Murder with malice”. This gave rise to national conversations about domestic violence and the judicial system’s bias towards wealthy defendants, and is significant in this context because the experience casts John Gregory Dunne and Didion in an unflattering light. They frequented the celebrity hotspot Ma Maison, where Sweeney had worked as a sous-chef, and continued to do so after the murder. They were friends of the owner, Patrick Terrail, who lawyered up to protect Sweeney, then sent them a bouquet of orchids with a card that read: “My heart breaks for you”. Dominick Dunne, already hurt that the press were referring to Dominique first and foremost as John and Joan’s niece, saw the card and was furious. The rift deepened when John and Joan took their daughter, Quintana, to Paris for the duration of Sweeney’s trial because they didn’t want her called as a witness. Griffin Dunne is far from a casual spectator of his own life, but he does not use the book to throw stones. The Friday Afternoon Club is stoic and laced with a charismatic humour, even at its darkest (“At some point everyone in my family had become, each in our own way, totally insane”). It is neither a salacious true-crime account nor an airing of dirty laundry, but rather a candid account of a familial unravelling that could have happened to anyone, made distinct by its proximity to Hollywood. Every diversion is littered with the detritus of fame: celebrity pool parties, beat-up Chryslers, a note written on a sheet of LSD from Timothy Leary’s personal stash. “Everybody in my family is a storyteller”, Griffin writes. “Whether they’re in the business or not, they know how to weave a yarn.” Above all, this book is a portrait of stardom as a destructive force – one from which Didion was not exempt. In his biography Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne (2017), Robert Hofler recalls the day after Sweeney’s attack on Dominique, when Joan and John arrived at the Dunnes’ house to offer support. With Dominique in a critical condition, the family had two phone lines on the go – one to make outgoing calls, another kept open in case of calls from the hospital or police. After asking if there was anything she could do, Joan went into the master bedroom and placed a call on the outgoing line to her editor in New York. Apparently Dominick walked in to find the galleys of her forthcoming book, Salvador, scattered over the bedspread. The scene is recounted in Lili Anolik’s propulsive dual biography Didion & Babitz, which unpacks the relationship between Didion and Eve Babitz as peers, rivals and, perhaps, soul mates. Interestingly, Anolik doesn’t quote the full section from Hofler’s book, which adds that Dominick told variations of the story to friends. In the following paragraph, Griffin’s brother, Alex, tells it differently: “Alas, there was only one line in the house, so no one else could call 3

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T H I S W E E K

No. 6361

February 28 2025

the-tls.co.uk

UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

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

Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement

@the.tls @TheTLS

To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS,

go to timesbookshop.co.uk

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)

Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com

The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk

TLS

FEBRUARY 28, 2025

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