lil lit'rary spasm

Well. I finally got a copy of Robert Lidell's book about Barbara Pym (A Mind at Ease), but it seems incredibly...tame. Pointless, kinda. YET another analysis of the bad boys and clergymen, no personal dish at all, at least at first glance. It's funny, the way people love to tear her books apart psychologically. Not sure they can stand it, and I am obsessed enough to have attended at least one conference, so I don't really know what I'm saying, except that that stuff couldn't bore me more. It's all right there. Nothing to take apart.

Lidell was friends with Pym at Oxford, a critic who lived the ex-pat life in Athens and was good friends with Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor the writer. He wrote a book about them too that I haven't read, now I'm kinda wondering about that one. (In that weird lil sparky convergence way, of course I got Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont from Netflix and the Lidell book in the mail the same day, partly the reason for the overflow into bloggitude here). I've never been able to get wholesale into Taylor, partly because the first book of hers I ever read was Wreath of Roses which is so disturbing as to have made me run hard in the other direction. Even the cover freaks me out now to look at it. (Apparently Elizabeth Jane Howard--K. Amis's 2nd wife--refused to write Taylor's biography because she said not enough had happened in her life. !! If indeed that's the whole deal, probably more complicated. But still....gah!. Everybody's life is complicated when you look at it.) And Compton-Burnett...I love, and have several books of, but my mind is so lazy and needing of path markers that I have to work hard to let my synapses be mauled by -- even 1/2-understand -- her brilliant, totally weird prose. Same thing with Ronald Firbank. I think my brain's a little too flat-footed.

I wonder if it's more or less so, two months out of the journalistic grind. My brain, I mean. If it's squishy and malleable, more willing to wander down funky paths (I also hate sci fi--this is related), or I'm just more low-functioning and E!-saturated. All I know is the Lidell book seems pretty boring, and reactionarily so, given that it came out after Pym's journals were published and it was clear that she was a real, living person with passions and love, and he had a front row seat for some of it. Almost like the farcical intro that Anne Tyler wrote to her books full of reductive assumptions (at least as I remember it) about Pym's life and character.

Which I guess is a theme to this entry, although I didn't start out with it in mind. First rule about life: you have NO IDEA what's going inside someone's else's life, someone else's head. As Dorothy Sayers said, with the mildest of folks, sometimes something will go off "like a depth charge," and you are left wondering and collecting floating debris. About the merit of dashing about collecting debris (i.e., writing biography), I can't say. But still.

Think that's enough UK writers for one overloaded entry. I feel better though.