Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Glynn Young

“Winston and the Windsors” by Andrew Morton

By Leave a Comment

In late October, we were back at the St. Louis County Library. We had previously attended the talk by mystery writer Elizabeth George; this time it was the British writer, Andrew Morton.

Morton became an almost-household name in Britain in the 1990s when he wrote not just “a” book but “the” book about Princess Diana – the one she agreed to do. Diana: Her True Story nearly toppled the British monarchy – or at least Diana’s revelations seriously damaged the institution. 

Morton has since written books about Monica Lewinsky, Madonna, David and Victoria Beckham, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, and William and Catherine when they were still the duke and duchess of Cambridge. You might say he’s an A-List celebrity biographer.

But his more recent attention has turned from contemporary celebrities to those who are more historical. And that’s what we were there to hear him talk about –Winston and the Windsors: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty. 

This is a biographical work, but it’s not a biography of Winston Churchill, and it’s not a biography of the Windsor family. Instead, it’s the story of the relationship between Churchill and the royals. No one individual had more influence on the Windsors that Churchill did, with his career bookended by Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II and four kings in between.

From early on, Churchill was seen as something of a loose cannon, but as least from Edward VI onward, the royals recognized that no one was more faithful to the idea of the British monarchy than Churchill. 

Edward VI liked him, even as Churchill could sometimes infuriate him/ George V started out frosty and remote, disdaining Churchill until he began to understand the man better. Edward VII, who gave up his throne, had hoped Churchill might have found a way for him to marry Wallis Simpson and keep the throne, but it never was accepted by the British establishment. (According to Morton during his talk, the royal family initially welcomes Walliss because the kept the Prince of Wales’s drinking under control.)

Considerable space in the book is devoted to what had to be the most important relationship Churchill had with the royals – that of George VI, unexpectedly thrust onto the throne by his brother’s abdication and the one who, with Churchill at his side, led Britain through the very dark days of World War II. Their friendship started off rather cool – George VI and his wife Elizabeth knew how close Churchill had been to Edward VII. But his steadfastness and devotion to the monarchy won them over.

Andrew Morton

It was that eventual closeness that led Churchill to adopt an almost fatherly role with Elizabeth II, when she became queen at 25 on the death of her father. And it was Churchill who traveled to Scotland to tell Elizabeth’s mother than she had to get over her grief and return to London: Elizabeth and the royal family needed her. That was likely the catalyst for her to become affectionately known as the “Queen Mum.” (An interesting side note: Morton says that Churchill played the decisive role in quashing the plan to rename the family “Mountbatten” upon Elizabeth’s succession to the throne.)

Winston and the Windsors is a well-done story of an important relationship that lasted, with all its ups and downs, for some 60 years. It’s fully grounded in historical records; Morton says he spent considerable time in the Churchill Archive at Cambridge University, the archives at Windsor Castle, and the archives at Blenheim Palace, where Churchill was born. That effort shows. So does Morton’s ability to take well-plowed ground and tell a story that’s fresh and fascinating.

Top photograph: Buckingham Palace.

“White Week and Other Stories” by Wojciech Chmielewski

By 2 Comments

The Polish writer Wojciech Chmielewski isn’t exactly a household name in America, and for a very good reason. Up to now, none of his writing has been published in English. Wiseblood Books has changed that with the publication of White Week and Other Stories, translated by Katarzyna Bylow. 

Chmielewski is best known in Poland for his short stories, which have won awards in his home country. But he’s also an essayist, literary critic, and playwright for Polich Radio Theatre. This collection of stories, many previously published in Polish literary journals and anthologies. Re largely about Warsaw, a Warsaw that is there and the city that used to be. (Much of the city was destroyed during World War II and then rebuilt under communist rule.)

The stories are, in a word, haunting. The opening story is about the area near Grzybowski Square, with its church on one side and construction underway nearby. We see scenes of a marketplace, a boy selling strawberries (“Polish strawberries…all freesh”), an alleyway full of peonies, a group of drunken men arguing, a young woman waiting for someone, and the empty park with its playground. The story contains no named characters or dialogue; the character is the urban landscape itself. Slowly the reader comes to understand that this area was once part of the Warsaw Ghetto, which tens of thousands of Jews were confined before deportation to Auschwitz.

And so the stories go. Chmielewski will return to this theme of the Warsaw Ghetto, but along the way we’ll experience a religious procession (with a man dreaming about snakes), a woman working on her new novel (with some of the characters becoming parts of other stories), a man with an unfaithful wife who finds solace in eating dog food, a village that exists beneath the sand of a beach area, a man who pays a visit and seems to enjoy reading in a madhouse, conversations in a restaurant during a rainstorm, a saint awake in the dark, a young man in love with a girl whose face experiences allergic reactions, the title story about remembering a religious confirmation celebration, and others.

Like that opening story of the visible landscape not seeming to remember the history, all of the stories have that sense of “missing the context.” We’re there, but we don’t understand. We undertake our daily life, but we’re ignorant of what these streets and buildings have seen, what’s come before us, what has shaped this landscape just as it’s shaping us. 

Yes, haunting is the operative word for these stories.

Top photograph: A scene of Old Town Warsaw by Victor Malyushev via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Single Dads in Non-Fiction and Fiction 

By 1 Comment

It was only coincidental. I read Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood: A Memoir (2015) and the next in my reading pile was Unconditional: A Novel by Stephen Kogon. Both books, one non-fiction and the other fiction, told the stories of young men suddenly finding themselves single fathers.

Luzzi is a professor of Italian and teaches at Bard College in New York. In 2007, just as his lecture class was about to begin, he noticed a security guard come into the room. The message was awful; Luzzi’s wife Katherine had been in an automobile accident and was seriously injured. Katherine was also eight-and-half months pregnant. The baby, a little girl, was delivered and survived.  Katherine didn’t.

And thus began a journey of grief, the loss of his wife, navigating funeral and death arrangements, caring for a newborn, and eventually dealing with lawsuits filed against Katherine’s estate and countersuits filed against the other driver. And that on top of trying to resume a “normal” life, as if life could ever be normal after that.

Luzzi turned to the poet Dante and his Divine Comedy. Like Virgil serves as Dante’s guide in the great poem, Dante served as Luzzi’s guide. He tells a moving, heartbreaking story, a man overwhelmed by loss and grief and with the responsibility of a child. If there is a hero in this story, Luzzi might be the first to admit it was his Italian mother, who essentially moves in to care for her granddaughter.

In addition to The Divine Comedy: A Biography, Luzzi has also published Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (2008), A Cinema of Poetry: The Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (2014), My Two Italies (2014), In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (2015), and Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (2022). He received his Ph.D. degree from Yale University, and he teaches literature, film, and Italian Studies. He is also the founder of the Virtual Book Club, which focuses on the world’s great books and storytelling.

Writer and filmmaker Stephen Kogon has previously published a young adult novel and two children’s stories, and Unconditional is his first aimed at adult reader. It tells the story of Matthew Russell, a 35-year-old bachelor who is a photographer for the Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix. He’s attending the retirement part of his best friend (and football team member) Kenny when he receives the telephone call that changes his life. 

The Albuquerque police explain that Matthew’s estranged brother Paul and Paul’s girlfriend have been killed in an automobile crash. Apparent suicides, they’ve left behind a premature baby girl who’s in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit. The only note they left behind read “Please take care of the baby.”

And Matthew is the only person capable of doing that. Overwhelmed with loss, not to mention having to manage his brother’s death and funeral, he has to decide what to do with Allie, his new niece. What he decides is that he will take care of her, even if it means radically changing his life.

It’s a moving tory, sometimes borderline sentimental, but that’s of little account when you become engrossed with the story. Matthew surrenders his life to fatherhood, and that includes changing jobs and putting aside his relationship with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Monica. 

Kogon previously published Max Mooth, Cyber Sleuth and the Case of the Zombie Virus and two children’s stories, Squiglet the Ryming Piglet and Squiglet the Piglet Goes on a Nature Hike. His first film, Dance Baby Dance, was released in 2018. He’s also written screenplays, comedy sketches, and comic strips. 

Related:

Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi.

Top photograph by Illia Panasenko via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Meeting the Author of “Matisse at War”

By Leave a Comment

On Nov. 4, I had just finished reading Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France by Christopher Gorham when I received an email from the St. Louis Art Museum. In partnership with the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival, the art museum would be hosting a lecture by Gorham on Thursday, Nov. 6. 

I loved the book. When news of its publication first happened, I pre-ordered the book. I suspected – correctly, as it turned out – that a book about art, World War II, Nazis, Vichy France, and Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Last year, we had seen an exhibition at the art museum on Matisse and the Sea, and many of the paintings would have been completed in the period leading up to the war.

I didn’t need convincing. I bought my ticket for the lecture.

Christopher C. Gorham

I arrived at the art museum early, to walk through Sculpture Hall to get a quick view of the five massive paintings featured in the new Anselm Kiefer exhibition on Becoming the Sea. (Obviously, the art museum, like the rest of us. is fascinated by the sea.) I was finally making my way down the hall’s big stairs when I realized that Christopher Gorham was walking right in front of me, accompanied by an art museum staffer. No, I didn’t interrupt them to introduce myself. 

I had an excellent seat in the theater, equivalent to orchestra center at the symphony or a play. The audience had about 150 people. After introductory remarks by representatives of the art museum and the Jewish Book Festival, Gorham spoke for about 45 minutes.

For 45 minutes, he told the story in the book and of the book. If you hadn’t read it, you wouldn’t realize that he was giving an oral summary of the entire book, and his talk was just as fascinating as the book itself. He added a few details, like elaborating on the Degenerate Art Show organized by the Nazis which toured Germany in 1937 and 1938, and which included a few of Matisse’s paintings. There was much about Matisse’s art that the Germans and the Vichy French hated.

Allied invasion of Nice and Provence, 1944

Gorham also tracked several of Matisse’s famous scissor “cut-outs” with both events in his personal life and developments in the war. His famous “The Wolf” (or “Le Loup”) was completed about the time his ex-wife Amelie and his daughter Marguerite were arrested by the Gestapo for involvement in the Resistance. He also described the “second D-Day” in France, when the Allies bombed and invaded Nice and Provence. Increasing danger from the war prompted Matisse to move to a country house about 10 miles from Nice. Nice itself was bombed, with 500 people dying in the raid.

He pointed out the just passed Monday, Nov. 3, was the 71st anniversary of Matisse’s death.

After the lecture and a question-and-answer period, Gorham signed copies of the book just outside the main gift shop next door to the theater. I’d brought my copy with me but didn’t intend to get his autograph. As I was leaving, the signing was just getting underway, and only one person was in line. I thought, “Well, why not?” and joined the line, which quickly filled up after me.

I told Gorham how much I’d enjoyed the book. We chatted for a minute or so, and then I mentioned I’d had no idea how important Pierre Matisse had been to the art scene in New York City until I read the book.

Pierre Matisse, about 1942

“Pierre essentially started modern art in New York,” Gorham said. “And much of it had to do with the artists who’d fled Europe for safety in the United States. Otherwise, they would have been killed outright or sent to a death camp. Instead, they created an art movement in America, and Pierre Matisse was at the center of it.”

Pierre did more than simply organize exhibitions of these artists’ works. He found apartments for them, often paying their rent. He paid them stipends so they could feed themselves and their families and still paint. He helped them establish their names and reputations. 

Matisse’s daughter Marguerite put herself in personal danger. She carried coded messages, including one to Brittany in the spring of 1944 that provide information to the Resistance about the coming D-Day invasion. That was when she was arrested by the Gestapo. She was imprisoned, tortured, and then deported by train to a camp in Germany. Miraculously, she survived the war.

Gorham’s lecture was every bit as fascinating as the book. I loved the book (my review posted today at Faith, Fiction, Friends), and I’m glad I made time to attend the lecture. The author expanded my understanding of both the book and its subject. And I learned a little about the history of modern art in America. 

Forgetting All the Illustrations I Studied for a Non-Illustrated Book

By Leave a Comment

My historical novel Brookhaven has no illustrations. I spent an estimated third of my research time hunting for them.

The novel is set in two different time periods – the Civil War and immediately after, and then 50 years later, in 1915. From the beginning of the first draft, I quickly learned that I had to see both periods. I had to see what people wore, what they ate, how they traveled, what their homes were like, what their streets and communities were like, and more. 

From early on, I had to spend far more time looking than reading, and vastly more time looking than writing. Thos 50 years were some of the momentous in American history – rapid industrialization during the war and after, wagons and carriages giving way to automobiles, the advent of flight, the rapid spread of newspapers supported by wire services like Associated Press, rapid changes in the position of women in society, and mechanized agriculture becoming the rule rather than the exception.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.

Illustration: Men’s golfing fashions in 1915.

“A Słowy Dying Cause” by Elizabeth George

By Leave a Comment

It helped to have heard Elizabeth George speak in early October at the St. Louis County Library. She was doing a promotional tour for her new novel, and among many other things, she noted that Inspector Thomas Lynley would show up late in the story.

And Inspector Lynley does indeed show up rather late for story billed as “A Lynley Novel.” A Slowly Dying Cause, the twenty-first in the Inspector Lynley series, doesn’t even mention him until about page 120, and he and his detective sergeant, Barbara Havers, don’t really start assuming a significant role until about the middle of the book. 

The novel is 640 pages. The reader is well past the halfway point before Lynley learns there’s even a murder. Havers’ mother has died, and Lynley drags his DS with him when he has to go to Cornwall to attend to a leaking roof at the family estate. Lynley is an earl, even if he work for the Mtropolitan Police in London. He steps into the investigation almost accidentally, but once he’s there, no one doubts who’s really in charge.

It’s the local police who investigate the murder of a tin and pewter workshop named Michael Lobb. Potential suspects abound – the dead man’s ex-wife, whom he divorced to marry a woman abrely older than his own children; his children, both of whom need money; his brother, who owns 40 percent of the business and property it sits on; the young wife herself; the hired help, a man and his adult son; the hired man’s two daughters (one of whom is a former lover of Lynley in London); and the wife’s brother, who happened to be visiting from South Africa and opposed his sister’s marriage from the start.

Elizabeth George

The story is not a straight narrative. It includes the account of the murder investigation, interspersed by the story told by the dead man himself. Add to that the story of Lynley’s estate and its needed repairs. George writes mystery novels, yes, but she also writes novels that just happen to have a mystery as one of the story lines. 

I was 200 pages from the end when I realized exactly who the murderer would turn out to be, and more to the point, what the murderer’s motive was. Yet George is nothing if not an enthralling, compelling author; even when I knew (or guessed, correctly, as it turned out), I kept reading to see how it would all tie together. And George pulls it off. A Slowly Dying Cause is more of a novel than a mystery novel.

In addition to the Lynley novels, George writes a young adult series, set on the island in Washington State where she lives. She’s received numerous awards and recognitions for the Lynley novels, which have been adapted for television not once but twice, with the new Lynley series having started this year. 

Related:

Just One Evil Act by Elizabeth George.

An Evening with Elizabeth George.

Top photograph: Cornwall coast with tin mining tower by Danilo D’Agostino via Unsplash. Used with permission.