The Trip to Echo Springs
I've been reading Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, which I picked up on the promise of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and it does indeed give some quality Fitzgerald and Hemingway - though more Hemingway than Fitzgerald; and also some really quality stuff about Tennessee Williams. I really must see one of his plays one day.
(Yesterday my mother and I went to see the musical Big Fish at my old high school - my mother made the high school musical costumes for years after I graduated, so this pilgrimage is not quite as pathetic as it sounds - which reminded me how much I enjoy the theater; I really should try to go more often.)
Anyway, it's quite an interesting book, full of biographical anecdotes and literary commentary that makes me yearn to read the books and stories Laing talks about, even when I know that they're probably not what I would enjoy. The only Fitzgerald novel I really like is The Great Gatsby, and the others that I've read have blurred together in my head - I rather think they're all variations on Fitzgerald's autobiography anyway - but damned if The Trip to Echo Springs doesn't make me want to give Tender is the Night a try.
The only fly in the ointment is Laing has interpolated quite a bit of travelogue into her narrative. It's not that I object to travelogue as such; if Sarah Vowell or Bill Bryson wrote about a cross-country overnight train trip to New Orleans, I'd love to read it. They have a gift for finding intriguing travel companions, and skipping over the boring minutia of travel with fun facts about presidential assassinations or shark attacks or what have you.
Laing has never met a bit of boring travel minutia she didn't feel compelled to include. It's boring, bafflingly boring, because when she's not writing interminable meditations about the wheels of the train clacking away beneath her, she's writes with searching thoughtfulness about her chosen writers and their lives and their psychological problems.
And boy, do these guys have problems: not only are they all alcoholics, but Hemingway and Fitzgerald are depressed as hell, Tennessee Williams is constantly felled by panic attacks, John Cheever has forgotten the better part of a decade because he drinks so damn much, and Raymond Chandler is Sir Not Appearing In This Book despite the promises of the jacket copy, but I'm sure he has problems too.
Laing also has the irritating habit of hinting coyly that she might just possibly be interested in these writers because she shares some of their problems, without ever quite committing herself to that fact. If she's not interested in exploring it - and she's certainly under no obligation to subject her personal problems to publication - then she ought to have left it out entirely. Nibbling around the edges of it just wastes space that could be better spent on, say, Hemingway's habit of calling women he's attracted to "Daughter."
(Let us all pause briefly to contemplate the fact that Hemingway was a deeply strange man.)
I'm coming to the conclusion that the travelogue material is padding to cover up the fact that Laing didn't quite want to do the research necessary for a full-length nonfiction book. I've started skimming over any paragraph where the word "I" makes a significant appearance.
(Yesterday my mother and I went to see the musical Big Fish at my old high school - my mother made the high school musical costumes for years after I graduated, so this pilgrimage is not quite as pathetic as it sounds - which reminded me how much I enjoy the theater; I really should try to go more often.)
Anyway, it's quite an interesting book, full of biographical anecdotes and literary commentary that makes me yearn to read the books and stories Laing talks about, even when I know that they're probably not what I would enjoy. The only Fitzgerald novel I really like is The Great Gatsby, and the others that I've read have blurred together in my head - I rather think they're all variations on Fitzgerald's autobiography anyway - but damned if The Trip to Echo Springs doesn't make me want to give Tender is the Night a try.
The only fly in the ointment is Laing has interpolated quite a bit of travelogue into her narrative. It's not that I object to travelogue as such; if Sarah Vowell or Bill Bryson wrote about a cross-country overnight train trip to New Orleans, I'd love to read it. They have a gift for finding intriguing travel companions, and skipping over the boring minutia of travel with fun facts about presidential assassinations or shark attacks or what have you.
Laing has never met a bit of boring travel minutia she didn't feel compelled to include. It's boring, bafflingly boring, because when she's not writing interminable meditations about the wheels of the train clacking away beneath her, she's writes with searching thoughtfulness about her chosen writers and their lives and their psychological problems.
And boy, do these guys have problems: not only are they all alcoholics, but Hemingway and Fitzgerald are depressed as hell, Tennessee Williams is constantly felled by panic attacks, John Cheever has forgotten the better part of a decade because he drinks so damn much, and Raymond Chandler is Sir Not Appearing In This Book despite the promises of the jacket copy, but I'm sure he has problems too.
Laing also has the irritating habit of hinting coyly that she might just possibly be interested in these writers because she shares some of their problems, without ever quite committing herself to that fact. If she's not interested in exploring it - and she's certainly under no obligation to subject her personal problems to publication - then she ought to have left it out entirely. Nibbling around the edges of it just wastes space that could be better spent on, say, Hemingway's habit of calling women he's attracted to "Daughter."
(Let us all pause briefly to contemplate the fact that Hemingway was a deeply strange man.)
I'm coming to the conclusion that the travelogue material is padding to cover up the fact that Laing didn't quite want to do the research necessary for a full-length nonfiction book. I've started skimming over any paragraph where the word "I" makes a significant appearance.