Clive Davis

NOTEBOOK

"He said, 'Let's go for an automobile ride, and I'll show you Toronto,' " Leonard Bernstein recalls. "So, well, what is there to see? It was cold, and it was getting dark, and I had sort of seen it the day before. So we went out, Glenn in his usual three coats and two hats, and I don't know how many pairs of gloves. We got into his car, which was a black sedan. He turned the heat up to maximum, and the radio volume up to maximum, and he got a station that was playing pop tunes, and Petula Clark was singing, and I said, 'Do you really want to hear this?' It was so hot in that car, I can't tell you, and the music was so loud, and there was nothing to see - it was growing dark - but we drove around for maybe half an hour, having a conversation by shouting over this radio full blast, and that was our tour of Toronto."

Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations.

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Chambers  was sounding precariously like a liberal. So be it. He had wearied of ideological battles. "I have scarcely an interest in invective tags." His prevailing interest was simply to "grope for reality".

Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers.

EASY READING

Erica Wagner ponders the way mobile phones have changed the face of literature:

Think of all the stories that hinge on the simple fact that X has no idea where Y is and no way of finding out. Take the "Odyssey". With cellphones, it becomes an epic version of "Honey, I’m on the train; is there anything you need from the store?" Reception’s a bit dodgy between Scylla and Charybdis, I bet, and things might get noisy sometimes ("Sorry! That’s just the Sirens!"), but you’d have your hero home before tea and save everyone a passel of trouble.

NOTEBOOK

Aldous informed us that female rabbits can now be impregnated from the ova of other female rabbits, but they can only produce females. In the same way, a future manless age  of matriarchs might be created; a lesbian tyranny. Salka and Aldous began picturing the Hollywood of the future - Warner Sisters, Lousia B. Mayer, United Artistes, Twentieth Century Vixen, etc.

Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, 6 February 1940.

NOTEBOOK

Toward evening we came into downtown Los Angeles - perhaps the ugliest city on earth. It was a Saturday night, and the streets were swarming with drunks. We saw three sailors  carrying a girl into a house, as though they were going to eat her alive. From the hotel, we telephoned Chris Wood. "How wonderful," he said, "to hear an effeminate British voice!"

Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, 17 May 1939.

NOTEBOOK

The trickling, calm commerce of a provincial town was proceeding, bit being added to bit and item to item, until at the week's end a series of apparent nothings had swollen into the livelihood of near half a score of people. And nobody perceived how interesting it was, this interchange of activities, this ebb and flow of money, this sluggish rise and fall of reputations and fortunes, stretching out of one century into another and towards a third!

Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger.

NOTEBOOK

Except in the vague and satisfying abstract, except in matters of "prestige", the British cared little about their Empire, and knew still less. A poll in 1947 revealed that three-quarters of the population did not know the difference between a Dominion and a colony, that half could not name a single British possession, and that 3 per cent thought the United States was still a British colony.

Jan Morris, Farewell the Trumpets.

NOTEBOOK

But with Chekhov you do not seem to be reading stories at all. There is no obvious cleverness in them and you might think that anyone could write them, but for the fact that nobody does.

Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook.

NOTEBOOK

Tadene had told her they were both slaves. But that was impossible.  Even Tadene was mistaken there. She did not know why the Massas were taking them on this horrible journey across this huge lake of salt. They must have some dreadful purpose. But she and Tadene could not be slaves. She had seen the slaves in her father's house. Slaves were strangers who you sometimes bought to help if there was too much land for the people to till. She and Tadene were not strangers. They were the people.

John Hearne, The Sure Salvation.

BOOKS YOU CAN ALMOST EAT

Another entry in the Wall Street Journal's five-best lists. This time Tunku Varadarajan chooses the ultimate combinations of fiction and food. Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea takes first place. It's good to see The Wind in the Willows makes an appearance as well.