Birthdays
1831
C. S. Calverley - English writer
"Read not Milton, for he is dry."
1892
Dame Rebecca West - English writer
"It was in dealing with the early feminist that the Government acquired the tact and skillfulness with which it is now handling Ireland."
1905
Anthony Powell - English writer
"Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features—the wine was a farce, and the food a tragedy."
Quotes of Dame Rebecca West
ReplyDelete"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
"There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that sometimes one needs help with moving the piano."
"Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and their audience."
"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."
"All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing."
"If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell."
"Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever."
"I am a fanatical admirer of A. L. Barker. If you cannot read her it is your fault. You should ask your vet to put you down if you do not admire The Middling or An Occasion for Embarrassment."
"[Nabokov has a] habit of constructing his novels on the same pattern as the mandrill, with the parts devoted to sexual activities far too extensive and highly coloured."
"A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps."
"Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either."
"Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow."
"It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion."
"Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology."
"In these pages your imaginations, your desires, your passions are given life; Thoughts take shape that turn into dreams and our aspirations all start with a dream. Reading is where those dreams really can come true over and over again."
"It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of a skunk."
"If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: "It seemed a good idea at the time.""
Cultural references
ReplyDeleteVirginia Woolf named Rebecca West as the "arrant feminist" who offends men by saying they are snobs in chapter two of A Room of One's Own: "[W]hy was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?"
Bill Moyers's interview "A Visit With Dame Rebecca West," recorded in her London home when she was 89, was aired by PBS in July 1981. In a review of the interview, John O'Connor wrote that "Dame Rebecca emerges as a formidable presence. When she finds something or somebody disagreeable, the adjective suddenly becomes withering."
West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier, was turned into a major motion picture in 1982, directed by Alan Bridges, starring Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie. More recently, an adaptation of The Return of the Soldier for the stage by Kelly Younger titled Once a Marine took West's theme of shell-shock-induced amnesia and applied it to a soldier returning from the war in Iraq with PTSD.
There have been two plays about Rebecca West produced since 2004. That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers, by Carl Rollyson, Helen Macleod, and Anne Bobby, is a one-woman monologue in which an actress playing Rebecca West recounts her life through some of her most famous articles, letters, and books. Tosca's Kiss, a 2006 play by Kenneth Jupp, retells West's experience covering the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker.
Robert D. Kaplan's influential book Balkan Ghosts (1994) is an homage to West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), which he calls "this century's greatest travel book"
A 1990s female Canadian rock group headed by Alison Outhit called itself "Rebecca West."
In February 2006, BBC broadcast a radio version of West's novel The Fountain Overflows, dramatized by Robin Brook, in six 55-minute installments.
The English author Anthony Dymoke Powell was born on 21 December 1905. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he met several other young writers and artists including Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, John Betjeman, Graham Greene and Osbert Lancaster. Prior to World War II he worked in publishing and as a film-script writer, before becoming a full-time novelist and literary critic.
ReplyDeletePowell is probably best known for his twelve-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time (usually just referred to as Dance). He wrote a seven other novels and a biography of the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey. In addition Powell (pronounced Po-ell, by the way) was also a prolific literary critic and book reviewer for a number of periodicals including the Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, Punch and the Spectator. He also published four volumes of memoirs, three volumes of diaries and three volumes (one posthumously) of his selected literary criticism.
Powell was in addition an accomplished genealogist, publishing almost 40 papers on Welsh genealogy, and was in later years a Vice-President of the Society of Genealogists. He was made a CBE in 1956 and a Companion of Honour in 1988. Powell was married (in 1934) to the author Lady Violet Pakenham; they had two sons. He died peacefully on 28 March 2000 at his Somerset home.