Just finished reading Heritage, a novel by Anthony West, the son of Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. An autobiographical novel, it seems to me though that there is more than enough cover for the real-life story that is its foundation. I enjoyed reading it and thought it was very good writing, with, contrary to most critical opinion, enough love given to each of the parent figures, though the mother character gets the worst of it.
Having read just about everything that Mom wrote, starting for aforementioned reasons with her magnum opus, Black Lamb Grey Falcon, I put off reading Anthony's book for years in order to avoid having my love for Rebecca destroyed. From her photographs, I knew that she was "My Type", which is to say beautiful and brilliant.
Rebecca was apoplectic upon reading the manuscript of Heritage and threatened to sue if it was published. (It was and she did.) She continued to harp at him about it for the rest of their lives.That's not the picture I wanted to have of my Rebecca, of course. So, in Googling around, I discovered a novel of hers I hadn't read, Sunflower, a book one reviewer said is her most autobiographical, (even though the main character is "stupid", according to herself), kind of a ditz; in more modern parlance. So I had to read it and have just started; more to come, as they say in the trade......*
I sympathized with the Anthony character in his very transparent autobiographical novel. I see resentment concerning what had to be covert incest, at least, in the mother-son relationship. No reason that I can see to doubt that it was felt and reacted upon and ground up in ego, ego ideal and superego machinations by the two of them. Also, of course, it helps explain the overly ego-idealized picture of H.G. Wells.(I know I'm not discovering the wheel here..) So for Anthony it was too hard to idealize Mom and too easy to idealize Dad.
* * * *
*Now it's a month later and I've just finished reading Sunflower. I had a hard time putting it down, once I started. We go inside of the mind of a beautiful woman who is very conscious of her beauty and the effect that it has on her audience, (she's a famous stage actress). Why she made Sunflower someone who thought herself stupid is probably connected to her criticism of H.G., who she felt sniped at her intelligence. (He is Sunflower's lover, the Essington character in this book.)
His sniping is often directed at what he feels is her fatal weakness; that as she ages and looses her looks she won't have enough talent to fall back on. She wants to have faith in herself, sees promise in her work; works hard to get better parts; struggles with her work like any good artist. And yet he gives her no quarter. He's a prick.
Rebecca was apoplectic upon reading the manuscript of Heritage and threatened to sue if it was published. (It was and she did.) She continued to harp at him about it for the rest of their lives.That's not the picture I wanted to have of my Rebecca, of course. So, in Googling around, I discovered a novel of hers I hadn't read, Sunflower, a book one reviewer said is her most autobiographical, (even though the main character is "stupid", according to herself), kind of a ditz; in more modern parlance. So I had to read it and have just started; more to come, as they say in the trade......*
I sympathized with the Anthony character in his very transparent autobiographical novel. I see resentment concerning what had to be covert incest, at least, in the mother-son relationship. No reason that I can see to doubt that it was felt and reacted upon and ground up in ego, ego ideal and superego machinations by the two of them. Also, of course, it helps explain the overly ego-idealized picture of H.G. Wells.(I know I'm not discovering the wheel here..) So for Anthony it was too hard to idealize Mom and too easy to idealize Dad.
* * * *
*Now it's a month later and I've just finished reading Sunflower. I had a hard time putting it down, once I started. We go inside of the mind of a beautiful woman who is very conscious of her beauty and the effect that it has on her audience, (she's a famous stage actress). Why she made Sunflower someone who thought herself stupid is probably connected to her criticism of H.G., who she felt sniped at her intelligence. (He is Sunflower's lover, the Essington character in this book.)
His sniping is often directed at what he feels is her fatal weakness; that as she ages and looses her looks she won't have enough talent to fall back on. She wants to have faith in herself, sees promise in her work; works hard to get better parts; struggles with her work like any good artist. And yet he gives her no quarter. He's a prick.
Now, having grown up with two artist parents; including a beautiful mother who was an artist and a model who felt she wasn't taken seriously enough, Sunflower's plight strikes a chord. I tend to give women their due as artists; poets,
painters, novelists.* That even though I grew up in an environment where
testicles seemed to be a part of what made artists great. Well, that was
stupid then and stupid still, and not everybody paid attention to it.
In her long essay The Strange Necessity, she had some sharp criticisms as well as a heaping spoonful of praise for James Joyce's Molly Bloom. In fact she loves and hates Ulysses and Joyce himself. (That she hated Henry Miller is a more visceral and black and white reaction.)
*About my own identification with women I suppose that comes directly from my access to the thinking of my mother, a woman artist who thought a great deal about creativity as a process, and was a fan of such as Stanislavsky and Nicolaides. I suppose I'll have more to say about this...and...Oh yes! Mirror Neurons...!
I'm slowly listening to a talk on U-Tube by Ingo Swann about ESP sensitivities, and about three quarters of the way into this talk he waves a copy of the N.Y.Times which has in it an article, (2006, I think June), about Mirror Neurons, which, he says, are connected to mind reading. Good ole Ingo.
*About my own identification with women I suppose that comes directly from my access to the thinking of my mother, a woman artist who thought a great deal about creativity as a process, and was a fan of such as Stanislavsky and Nicolaides. I suppose I'll have more to say about this...and...Oh yes! Mirror Neurons...!
I'm slowly listening to a talk on U-Tube by Ingo Swann about ESP sensitivities, and about three quarters of the way into this talk he waves a copy of the N.Y.Times which has in it an article, (2006, I think June), about Mirror Neurons, which, he says, are connected to mind reading. Good ole Ingo.
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