Book Review - That Woman by Anne Sebba

This was a book that I'd wanted to read for a while, a biography of one of the most notorious women of the 20th century: Wallis Simpson.  When I thought about it, what did I really know about Mrs Simpson?  Only that she was the twice divorced woman Edward VIII couldn't live without and gave up his throne to marry.  For that matter, what did I know about the King apart from that he was known as "David" to his friends and family? 

Sebba does a good job at filling in the gaps in my knowledge of both lives.  David is an insecure womaniser,  a man of obsessions, a spoilt brat to whom only his parents ever said "no".  His world revolved around him and his pleasures; while his parents world revolved around "doing your duty" and "putting the country first".  He spent the 1920's deeply in love with one married woman, Freda Dudley Ward, before dropping her for another, Thelma, Lady Furness.

Wallis grew up as the poor relation of a wealthy family and Sebba demonstrates that the insecurity that caused never left her.  She marries early, selling herself in marriage to a man she barely knows but one who offers glamour and some level of financial security.  Win Spencer was a pilot, in the US's fledgeling Naval Air Service.  He was also a cad and a drunkard, who set about boosting his own ego but undermining his wife's.  The marriage fails and Wallis goes looking for a new man upon which to hang her dreams, eventually meeting and marrying Ernest Simpson.  The rest of her story is fairly well known and is the focus for the majority of the book.

This is a book that is well written and well researched.  Where Sebba loses me is her argument that Wallis' flirtatiousness and childlessness was driven by a totally unfounded claim - that Wallis suffered from a Disorder of Sexual Development ("DSD"), possibly pseudo-hermaphroditism, where the sufferer is genetically male but grows up female because her body is insensitive to androgen  By advancing this argument, Sebba totally ignores the social mores of the time and the subsequent effects on all Wallis's girlfriends.  Wallis belonged to a class in which, during the early 20th century,  the only way to obtain security/wealth/position was to marry well. Having a career and creating your own financial independence was out of the question. Forget about marrying for love - those girls were bought up to consider a man's fortune and his prospects before they considered his personality.  It is, therefore, no surprise to discover that few of her contemporaries/friends had successful first marriages. 

How did you win and keep your man?  You had to impress upon him that he was the most important person in your world, strong, handsome, the focus of all your attention.  If you ever watch a flirt in action, that is what they do.  They bewitch you with their charm by making you feel wonderful.  As the poor relation in an upper-class world, Wallis had to master the art of flirtation because all she had to offer was herself.  The flip side was that flirting gave her a sense of worth; as long as men fancied her, she had value.  The only time in her life that Wallis felt fulfilled by things she did - as opposed to the attention she was paid - was during World War 2, when she volunteered for the Red Cross in France.

What about her childlessness?  Sebba contends that birth control was unreliable so there must have been something physically wrong with Wallis.  Rather than DSD, it is statistically more probable that either Win Spencer or one of her subsequent lovers gave her chlamydia or gonorrhoea, diseases which cause physical damage to the fallopian tubes and lead to abdominal adhesions, which may explain her later gastric problems as well as her inability to conceive.  In addition, by the mid-1920's, Wallis would have been able to obtain reliable birth control in the form of a diaphragm either from one of Marie Stopes' clinics or from a sympathetic gynaecologist.

Sebba's final argument in support of DSD, that Wallis is rather masculine in appearance ignores something she argues later:  that both Wallis and David suffered from anorexia nervosa.  Through most of her adult life, Wallis kept her weight below 7.5 stone (100lb).  If a woman has insufficient body weight, her ovaries will cease to function, causing infertility.  Additionally, how can your body lay down "womanly" fatty deposits (i.e. to soften the face) when there is no fat to spare?

I wish that, rather than waste her time finding arguments to support her flimsy theory of DSD, Sebba had spent the time and word count focussing on Wallis's life after the War.  Compared to the inter-war years, this period is glossed over completely.  I doubt that it is less well documented.

On the whole, I give this book 7 out of 10.

- Pam

Stepping back in time

Tonight, my mind is on events of nearly 70 years ago. For most of the last two hours, I have been a lifetime away, focused on the day to day events of the first year of the Second World War. In reality I'm in the middle of North Lincolnshire, staying at my regular hotel, on my monthly visit to Site, but it doesn't feel that way.

I have been attempting to finish Simon Garfield's excellent collection of diaries from the Second World War, We Are at War. I know I've written about it before, but I have to comment again about the power of the writing. The diarists are so eloquent as they chronicle their personal War: the privations; the sky-rocketing food prices; the crippling taxes; their fears over being bombed and the possible invasion. The War was hard on the civilian population, particularly those who were struggling to begin with. Once again, I find myself marvelling at how people survived and how they "made do".

I was so completely absorbed tonight that it took an effort to refocus my mind on my life, on the present day, on the waiter who brought my drink and the waitress who cleared the plates away. I'm looking forward to reading the other two books in this series: Private Battles, covering 1941 to 1945, and Our Hidden Lives, covering the post-War period 1946 to 1948.

- Pam


(If you're curious as to why this book wasn't finished months ago, the answer is simple: I don't get much reading time at home. It's too noisy or there are other things demanding my attention. I tend to do most of my reading when I'm travelling for work.)

Book Review: We Are At War

This is just a quick post before bed-time. I'm at Site for the week; for once, I don't have any colleagues staying in the hotel with me. This means I got a chance to read over dinner. The book I'm reading at the moment: We Are At War, a collection of five diaries from the Mass Observation Project collected and edited by Simon Garfield.

(If you've never heard of Mass Observation, it was/is a social history project started in 1937 which aimed to record everyday life in Britain for future generations. The majority of participants answered surveys; a few submitted diaries.)

The book opens in 1939, just prior to the start of the Second World War and covers a little over a year in the lives of its diarists:-

• Pam Ashford - lives in Glasgow with her mother. Strong sense of fairness and common sense. Works in a shipping company and worries about her contacts in occupied Europe.
• Christopher Tomlin - lives in Preston on the North-West coast of England. Runs his own business selling stationery. When the war commences he is the financial support for his parents. He worries about dwindling sales, the massive hikes in taxes pushing up prices, how to pay the bills.
• Eileen Potter - works as a social worker in London. Responsible for evacuating children and mothers during the early stages of the war. Later, she is involved in planning for housing evacuees.
• Tilly Rice - mother of three. Lives in Surrey near where I used to work. Has nightmares about being bombed.
  
• Maggie Joy Blunt - writer. Very "chattering classes". Hospitable - seems to run an open house for her friends and family. Lives on the outskirts of London near Windsor. Comments on the political events of the day as well as everyday life and the war. Knitter.

The diary entries are woven to paint a canvas of the privations and fears they lived through. Their writing is compelling. I keep wanting to read their next entry and then the next and not wanting to stop. They speak openly and honestly about their lives, how they cope, the struggle to maintain normality. They chronicle the minutiae: Maggie Joy Blunt describes her embarrassment at living in her kitchen, laundry drying by the fire, knitting and the cat on her lap when a neighbour comes to call (characteristically, she brazens it out with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude).

I'm fascinated by World War 2 and life on the Home Front. This is one of those books that, on every page, leaves you wondering: how would I have coped? What would I have done in their circumstances? They are just ordinary people, like you and me, and yet they live bravely through some frightening and extra-ordinary times.

This book gets 10 out of 10.

- Pam

The Yarn Harlot's story about packing extra yarn for her daughter made me laugh yesterday when I finally got to read it. When I travel, my first and most panicky thoughts are "What will I read?" (you don't want to run out of book half way through a trip) and "What knitting shall I pack?".

In fact, yesterday morning it took me twice as long to decide what knitting to take - do I start a new sock? Or just take the Must Have Cardigan? - than it did to work out which clothes I'd be wearing for my two day business trip. In the end, I packed the Must Have Cardigan. Don't know why I was so worried - it's not as if anyone will allow me to actually knit at the airport or on the plane! Could someone PLEASE tell the European airlines/airports that the EU changed the rules TWO YEARS AGO and declared knitting a safe activity!

The book was easier. I decided that on Tuesday. I'm currently reading the story of the Grameen Bank after hearing it's founder, Mohammed Yunnis, interviewed on the radio. It is an eye opener! I'll write a review of it after I finish.

- Pam

Book review: The Lost, by Daniel Mendelsohn

I stumbled across The Lost when I was at a loose end in Schiphol airport; it was just before Christmas, I was waiting for my flight home from a visit to the Dutch office and I'd run out of books to read. The bookshop had a table full of English-language books and the cover caught my eye:


Something made me pick it up. I don't normally read Holocaust literature. I've read a The Diary of Anne Frank and a couple of autobiographies but, on the whole, my World War 2 reading is driven by an interest in the Home Front - that is where the experience of my family lies (and in the POW camps of the Japanese, but I digress). I may be Jewish but I'm also sixth generation Australian and if we had family murdered by the Nazis, the connection was so distant that nobody knew who they were. On my father's side, we don't even know which shtetl they left behind.

How do I summarise The Lost to give you a flavour of the story? It is simplistic to say that The Lost is the story of Daniel Mendelsohn's search for information on what happened to his maternal great-uncle Schmiel Jaeger, his aunt Ester and their four daughters who were murdered by the Nazis. There is so much more to this book than that. Perhaps the best thing I can do is direct you to Andrew Mendelsohn's website where he details the photos they took on their first trip to Bolechow, the town from where their mother's family had emigrated to America. Schmiel had made the journey to New York and then changed his mind, returning to Bolechow to build his life there.

In deciding to find out what happened to this branch of his family, Daniel Mendelsohn had set himself a difficult task: within his family, there had always been a wall of silence about pre-war Schmiel, as if the memories were too painful and the survivors felt guilt at not being able to do more to get Schmiel's family out of Poland. Then, of course, the Holocaust had eliminated so many of the people who had known the Jaegers and time was taking it's toll on the rest. Daniel set out to interview as many survivors as possible, giving the reader their stories as well as their recollections of the Jaegers. He also fleshes out the actions of the Nazis, turning historian to provide the reader with information on how they decimated the Jewish population of Eastern Poland, in the "Aktions" and the casual daily brutalities they inflicted.

One by one, Daniel identifies how the Jaegers died. But that isn't the only thing he wants to know, part of his quest is to get the answer to the more difficult question: "What were they like?", to learn about their personalities and to give voices to the faces in the family pictures. When it comes to Ester, he never gets a satisfactory answer.

This is a writer's book, beautifully written and a pleasure to read. One minute, you are in the room with Daniel and his interviewees; the next, you have stepped with them into the past as their histories are told. It was compelling and very hard to put down. It is also a multi-layered, multi-faceted book since Daniel uses Talmudic commentaries to illustrate family interactions and the nature of memory, although I found myself skipping those in order to get back to the main narrative.

I'd give this book a rating of 10 out of 10. Read it. It will change your life.

- Pam

Book Review - Julie & Julia, My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

The second book I read whilst I was hiding from the world last weekend was Julie & Julia, My Year of Cooking Dangerously, by Julie Powell.

I first read about this book in a book review in the Sunday Times at least a year ago. The reviewer seemed over-awed that a blog on the Internet could be turned into a book and become a best seller. It took me about 10 minutes on Saturday to work out why - this book is compulsive reading. The quote on the cover, "Bridget Jones meets The French Chef" says it all. The only thing missing is Bridget's daily tally of calories, cigarettes and booze. Julie Powell is funny and chatty. She seems like someone you'd like to have as your friend.

To summarise the premise of the book and her blog, in a fit of depression/madness Julie accepts her husband's challenge to cook every recipe in Julia Child's, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and to blog about it. The blog is still up on the Internet, here. Although Julie has moved on and now blogs elsewhere.

The book is different to the blog - it both elaborates on some episodes and compresses others. Frankly, I'd recommend buying the book, reading it, and then reading the blog. You'd be missing out otherwise.

I'd give the book an 8.5 out of 10.

- Pam

A Review - "Nigella Lawson, a biography" by Gilly Smith

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across this book listed on Amazon. (I think my original search started with "I wonder if Nigella has published anything new".) I was intrigued. I'd never heard of it, though, so wondered if it was just a tabloid hatchet job. Did I want to feed the bank balance of a tabloid nasty? Curiosity warred with my ethics. My LBYM side kicked in and I bought a damaged copy (bent cover) from an Amazon subsidiary for £1.36 plus p&p (total cost £4.11).

Long before she became famous as a TV cook, Nigella Lawson was one of my favourite writers. When I first came to London, she wrote a column for the Evening Standard. I vividly remember buying an early edition of the paper at Faringdon Station so that I could read her column on my way home from work. It was the only reason to buy that paper, there is no real news in the Evening Standard.

One column sticks in my mind, possibly the first of hers I ever read: a rant about how unfair it is that a man can walk home late at night from an evening out with friends without getting hassled, but a good looking woman (her) cannot. She vividly described catcalls yelled from cars and drunken remarks shouted at her as she walked passed a pub on her way home. All written in beautiful, chatty prose as if she was sitting on your couch sharing a bottle of wine.

From that one column, she won a fan for life. I didn't stalk her writing around the British press, but whenever I saw her byline, I tried to read whatever she had to say. When her first cookbook, How to Eat, came out I couldn't put it down until I'd read it cover to cover. It is one of the dozen or so cookbooks that actually live in my kitchen (unlike the rest of the ~100 which live in the study upstairs). It is one of my main references: need to roast a turkey? Check Nigella for the cooking times. Chocolate cake? Use Nigella's recipe.

You know how older people always say they can remember where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated? Well, I remember where I was when I learned that Nigella's first husband, John Diamond died. I was on a plane, flying to Geneva for a skiing holiday. John was also a writer and his column in The Times was another of my regular reads.

Anyway, whilst all of this explains why I wanted to read this book, none of it reviews the actual book. So, onward....

In 250 pages, Gilly Smith attempts to capture the essence of Nigella's life and in my opinion, fails. Yes, you read an outline of Nigella's life, from her withdrawn childhood to her marriage to Charles Saatchi, and it is stuffed full of quotes liberated from articles written by Nigella or interviews conducted with her, but when Smith tries to analyse her - she fails.

Smith employs some of the conventional cliches in her attempt to understand Nigella and fails to understand that the cliches she has chosen do not apply. For instance, Nigella is Jewish so Smith's thought process must have been "lets throw in some Yiddish-isms and display what a sensitive author I am". There are several sections of the book where Smith is obviously showing off some new-found vocabulary in an attempt to look like a member of the in crowd. Problem: Nigella's family have been in Britain for about 200 years and are very assimilated - Yiddish is as alien to them as Swahili. Time and again, Smith tries to labour the "Jewish point" without reading her own words; Nigella is a non-practising Jew brought up in a non-observant household, who never even celebrated the festivals until after John was dying and requested a Seder (passover feast). She didn't set foot inside a synagogue until she was in her thirties. So you can't analyse this woman in the context of her family's religious/cultural heritage - because the one Smith is using isn't Nigella's.

The other theme that gets laboured is one of privilege and wealth. Sure, Nigella's mother was an heiress and her father a journalist turned politician. They had some well connected friends. However, there was no money left to squander on Nigella's generation. Nigella had to work her way through university waiting tables and, until she married Saatchi, needed a job to survive. She didn't get into Oxford by flashing the cash, either - you only get into Oxford by cold hard graft, which she did at a state-owned grammar school.

Another thing that annoys me: Nigella started out publishing before working on the literary section of the Sunday Times. We are told that she is extremely well read (and, I know there are literary references in the cookbooks), however there isn't one quote from one book review. What does she read? What type of fiction does she enjoy? Tell me!!! Apart from cookbooks, there is no mention of Nigella reading any type of book in the last 15 years. And this is the woman who spent her childhood buried in books.

I guess, when I read a biography or autobiography I want to know what the subject is like. I want to know what motivates them; what their hobbies are; how they relax; whether I have anything in common with them. The ultimate test: if they came to dinner, what would we talk about around the table? Smith fails to supply answers to those questions.

The quality of Smith's writing is uneven, particularly when it is juxtaposed with quotes taken from other sources. Even without the annoying Yiddishisms, etc, when Smith writes with her own voice it jars. She must have conducted hundreds of interviews and she uses them well, but the last two or three chapters are less about Nigella's life and more about Smith's opinion of her success and future as a food writer. They don't work.

To sum up, on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give this book a 5.5. Buy it second hand.

- Pam

PS: If you want to check out Nigella's website, it's here: http://www.nigella.com/