There is only one literary news story in town at the moment: The Salt Path and its downfall.
We were going to make this a Salt-Path-free zone; there are only so many times readers should have to read about Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth. They were the subjects of an investigation, carried out by the Observer, regarding Winn’s memoir of 2018 – a best-seller that begat a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, released earlier this year. Winn is countering allegations that she defrauded an employer of £64,000 (rather than losing her home thanks to a bad business deal), and that Moth had not been diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, a neurological condition. Penguin Michael Joseph has delayed publication of Winn’s new book, On Winter Hill, which was due to be released in October, and the case continues, as it were, in public.
Yet all of this makes us wonder, more generally, how many memoirs receive close scrutiny from their publishers, but also whether such confessions can ever really be prevented from veering into fiction. The Penguin claim is that it did “all necessary due diligence” when it came to The Salt Path. We look forward to hearing what that due diligence looked like.
We mentioned the closure of Raritan (June 6). At the time we had not seen the late spring issue of that widely admired quarterly (volume XLIV, number 4.2). We are grateful to have been sent a copy since then. It offers poetry by John Kinsella and Jana Prikryl, and prose by Stefan Collini (“The Quest for ‘the Classic’”) and Robert Darnton (“Furet v. Soboul: How an ‘academic’ question exploded”). The most striking title, however, belongs to Victoria Nelson’s essay, “Sensible, or, Why I Like Georgette Heyer (More than Jane Austen)”.
We admire the chutzpah of publishing such a piece in an Austen anniversary year. While others are rushing to the cinema to see the French film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (reviewed in the TLS, July 4), Ms Nelson is enjoying the “superior storytelling skills” and “deep archival research” of Heyer’s romances, not to mention their “good humor (as distinct from wit) and kindness and generosity (as distinct from judgment)”. This is a key point for the lover of Regency Buck, Cotillion and The Grand Sophy: “I’ll always revere Georgette Heyer for reinventing Austen minus the social cruelty”.
As we read on, we could feel the critical “yes, but” response bubbling up (when it came to Nelson’s interpretation of Austen rather than of Heyer). But that’s all part of the fun. Books are good to argue with, and so, once more, is Raritan.
Some readers will have spotted a book reviewed in last week’s TLS called Zero at the Bone. Christian Wiman took the title for his “fifty entries against despair” from one of the few poems by Emily Dickinson to be published in her lifetime. “The Snake”, which appeared in the Springfield Republican in 1866, ends by summing up a fear of that “narrow Fellow in the Grass”: unlike “Several of Nature’s People”, he can never be met
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone –
It is not original to us to observe that this ending makes a good beginning – in the sense of its being used as the title for a book.
See also, for example, Mary Willis Walker’s mystery novel Zero at the Bone (1991) or Lucy Robertson’s poetry collection Zero at the Bone (1970). Erec Toso’s Zero at the Bone (2007), meanwhile, cleaves closely to Dickinson: it tells the story of “rewriting life after a snakebite” (specifically, a rattlesnake that gave the author a nearly deadly transport of something other than cordiality).
There appear to have been two Zero at the Bones in 2009: a poetry collection by Stacie Cassarino and John Heidenry’s tale of “the playboy, the prostitute, and the murder of Bobby Greenlease”. Isn’t that enough? Apparently not. If anybody knows of a Zero at the Bone earlier than Elizabeth Ferrars’s crime novel of 1967 – or of a more widely nabbed line of Dickinson’s, indeed – we wait uneasily to hear about it.
Michael McMillan is an artist with a “healthy interest in Dada”, in the words of Dan Nadel’s introduction to Terminal Exposure (New York Review Books, £36). That much is clearly demonstrated by this collection of his “comics, sculpture, and risky behavior”.
Born in Pasadena in 1933, McMillan moved to San Francisco and worked in “various engineering offices” while practising his art and remaining “loyal to a parallel reality”. Terminal Exposure brings together decades of work that would be difficult (or impossible) to track down as it appeared in its original form – in underground comics, that is, such as Weirdo, Young Lust and the single issue of his own Terminal Comics.
There is plenty of whimsical, colourful imagery in Terminal Exposure drawn from that “parallel reality” in McMillan’s head, which in turn draws from the props cupboard of mid-century American life, American movies and American comics. A series called “ZZZZZ” shows what suavely absurd stories can be told in a dozen panels without words. Pictured above, however, is a story told in two panels. The first is accompanied by a caption of five simple lines:
I am calmly browsing
Yes I am calm
Until this moment
Here she comes
A book vacuum cleaner
Embarrassment, of course, ensues:
Now I am not calm
She is about to suck up
The book I passed on
The book that I now need
Requires a vigorous effort
Literary anniversaries. A couple of readers have ingeniously pointed us in the direction of what one describes as those “prolific pulpmeisters”, Edgar Wallace (born on April 1, 1875) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875). We are now halfway between the birth of the British creator of King Kong and the American creator of Tarzan – to name two of their rather more enduring achievements.
Which of the two pulpmeisters is more widely read now? We suspect it is Burroughs (who lived a lot longer than the other Edgar, but apparently had only taken up writing seriously in his thirties). And for the newcomer – where to start? Surely only the aficionado who has read both authors’ collected works right through – from Wallace’s Sanders of the River and The Four Just Men to Burroughs’s Martian series, Venusian series and hair-raising westerns such as The Bandit of Hell’s Bend – could answer that one?
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