FIVE AUTHORS IN SEARCH OF A REVIEWER

Lucian Freud self portrait

Book festivals are strange beasts, aren’t they? Authors in the words of the blessed Cole Porter who ‘should know better words’ are sort of reduced to being interview fodder struggling with a surfeit of surface sound bites. Their strength, and occasional genius, is for what they commit to paper (or digital screen) rather than oratory which is quite a different game. So it was with a tiny bit of trepidation that I ‘tuned into’ the offering at Jewish Book Week, this year naturally delivered online via Kings Place technology in London. The fare was, from what I’ve seen so far, interesting without being arresting; but to be fair, it is very difficult to shine on Zoom or its equivalents.

Confession time; I haven’t read the mighty two-volume biography, ‘The Lives of Lucian Freud’. Its author William Feaver had the good fortune to know the great artist as a friend and confidante. He told us that Lucian would call him most days but he (William) was never given Freud’s number. I immediately wanted to know more about that – what kind of friendship allows a one-way dialing code?

We did learn quite a lot about Freud the man though both Feaver and his interlocuter Marina Vaizey were keen to tell us that he was a genius whose legacy would outlive us all. The fact that Freud buttered up women who agreed to pose for him only to sort of dump them once the portrait was complete, was dismissed with a ‘well they were given a sort of immortality’ so what do they have to complain about? Feaver told us about Freud’s Berlin sensibilities, never extinguished by him being a migrant (‘never a refugee’) to Britain in the late 1930s. We heard that Freud loved to gamble his money away as a kind of cathartic restart to his life. We received glimpses of his friendship with Francis Bacon and the Soho set. We learned that Freud loved horses and was wont to invite ennobled toffs to his dinner parties. What we didn’t get was much about the work itself.

Writer Martin Gayford painted by Lucian Freud

All this, to me at least, added up to less than the sum of the parts of this influential painter. It is of course grossly unfair to judge a book by its 60 minute cover online but somehow the talk didn’t bring the Bohemian genius alive. I suspect though that Feaver’s two-volume life is going to be the definitive bio of Lucian Freud for many years to come and that it is only fair, if you are a devotee of the master, that you buy it and read it.

Richard Ovenden

My second dip into JBW was with Richard Ovenden, the director of the Bodleian Library. His book ‘Knowledge Under Attack’ sounds fascinating; 3000 years of the powerful destroying books. As a top librarian (not often you read this epithet) Ovenden is well placed to call not just for the preservation of libraries and archives, but to actually care and nurture them. He began his one-hour session with a powerful anecdote about the burning of books by the Nazis on 10 May 1933. Students and schoolboys piled up the ‘dangerous’ books onto a great pyre in the heart of Berlin. It was all, said Ovenden, about erasing what Goebbels said were ‘un-German’ ideas. Realising that this destruction took place within the living memory of some, it turned him to thinking about the history of such destructive acts and why the powerful do often want to expunge the writings of those much greater than themselves.

I was really keen to find out more about the contents of his book, but the questioner insisted on getting him on the threats (real he says) to the vast knowledge base currently in the slippery hands of the tech giants who have little interest in the preservation of knowledge. This certainly is a big topic but I wanted something more from the book. Neither Google nor Facebook has so far destroyed the online meta-pedia though the rate of attrition of websites is startlingly high. How much valuable learning has disappeared offline? This is perhaps a good subject for another book but here I wanted to know more about tablet burning in old Babylon or medieval bonfires of ‘blasphemous’ writings.

Ovenden did end his urbane session with a plea for the printed word: it has, he said, lasted remarkably well in the pandemic and there is nothing like ‘losing yourself in the printed book, delightfully designed and on quality paper’. That alone made me go and order his book before some tyrant decides to burn that too.

E. J. White’s new Book

I really enjoyed the session with US writer, E.J. White. Her subject was Noo Yoike English (my interpretation of that tasty accent) and was highly entertaining (notwithstanding a rather detached deadpan style from the interviewer). Her book ‘You Talkin’ To Me’ surveys the shifts, sometimes subtle, in the accents of that great city which in her views are unique within the USA for the sheer variety of cadences and vowel modulations. Though we didn’t learn too much about her book, we were entertained with the variety of amusing plosives and glottals from an author who combines sturdy scholarly learning as a linguistics academic with a rather brilliant line in imitation. It all of course comes down to social class but that too shifts over time. Thus, we were told, President Teddy Roosevelt spoke with a decidedly Brooklyn accent which in his day was thought higher class. White gave us a fascinating whistle stop of the development of US accents including the fact that RP there is essentially now Mid Western. The influences on US accents are, she says, are as wide as the shining seas: Hollywood and the constant waves of new immigrants especially to the Big Apple’s districts. But if you want to hear how people will speak in the future, listen to a city’s young women. They are torchbearers for the next generation. If White’s book is accompanied by a CD or online link to her aural display of New York accents, I am ordering it today.

Elif Shafak

It was good to see Mark Lawson and author Elif Shafak actually share a stage rather than a couple of screens. They were at Kings Place to discuss Shafak’s new book, the promisingly titled ‘How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division’. Ms Shafak had some moving and powerful things to say about the loss of democracy around the world (not least in her homeland of Turkey where she as ‘dangerous’ writer is not welcome). She deliberated with great passion on the need to accept diversity in all its forms and to listen to views that might not chime with ours. Divisions, she says, are so easily sown by demagogues on the make - it’s an old trick but a powerful one to carve up society into friends and enemies. Lawson was in conversational mode - something he does very well and Shafak was clearly at ease in this highly literate exchange.

Shafak’s new book, a rare work of non fiction for her, is disarmingly slim (and retails for under a fiver). To be honest I didn’t hear any practical ways to stay sane other than broad brushstrokes about accepting difference, being more aware of climate change etc. She blames Brexit for the polarisation of our domestic conversation and a distinctly brutalising trend towards the ‘other’.

While i found Shafak and Lawson totally engaging, I was at a bit of a loss to understand what if anything was being newly minted here. From the one hour session it felt more like a catalogue of doom than an antidote to insanity. Shafak’s little book is bound to be stylishly written and utterly heartfelt. How to stay sane in our divided and virus-sick world? After this hour, I am a sadder but no wiser man.

Elif Shafak talked to Mark Lawson

David Baddiel could not be accused of failing to reference his book. His discussion of the best-selling essay ‘Jews Don’t Count’ was constantly punctuated with ‘well in the book’ or ‘yes, I say that in the book..’ That is totally fair enough as this is what book festivals should be about - promoting books. His wit is never far from the surface even when talking about antisemitism and how the progressive left have a blind spot where anti-Jewish racism is concerned. It is another book I haven’t yet read but intend to do so. This fitting subject for this festival brought the Saturday events to a lively and always engaging close.

David Baddiel