Book Notes 17.05.07
Facing White relased by the Trinity College Oscar Wilde Centre; William Donaldson, a cautionary tale; Scientific discovery, fact and fiction
Pale fire
Trinity College has been running a creative-writing programme from the Oscar Wilde Centre since 1997. June sees the publication of Facing White, a tremendously impressive anthology of pieces produced by the most recent group of graduates, which demonstrates that this country's unmatched tradition of producing original writers continues today. Many of the contributors have not appeared in print before, but the performances featured are entirely assured, rich in emotion and powerful imagery. The short fiction, by Rebecca Thomas, Laura Barnicoat, Orla Ní Chuilleanain, Elske Rahill, Victoria Sprow, Simon Doyle, Janelle Andrew, Gina Moxley, Jamie Walsh, Ainin Ni Bhroin, Ross Skelton and Bethany Morrison, and poetry, by Colette Connor and Kathryn Peters, share the themes of memory, race and relations. Book Notes predicts that we shall hear of these names again.
A cautionary tale
Book Notes is not alone in loving stories about rogues, as the critical success of Terence Blacker's biography of William Donaldson has proven. While studying at Oxford, a series of catastrophies left William sole heir to a huge shipping fortune. He had only ever aspired to be a great ballet critic but was drawn first into publishing poetry and then into the theatre. For a time, he knew wealth and fame better than few men ever have, but a succession of bloated flops ruined him. The inheritance of a second massive fortune propelled Donaldson back to the stage. He produced a bewildering assortment of abysmally inept shows and even failed to interest the British public in an American minstrel called Bob Dylan. In the 1960s, Donaldson was infamous for hosting parties so decadent they would have shamed any rake of the Restoration.
It could not last and it didn't. After being sued for blasphemy and banned from hiring actors by Equity, Donaldson, then shacked up with Carly ‘You're So Vain' Simon, found his insane empire toppling and, ignoring a quarter of a century's worth of unopened tax bills, fled to Ibiza. There, he invested the last of his funds in a glass-bottomed boat, a venture which promptly sank. Only an invitation to become restaurant critic for the Tatler saved him. Willie then turned to writing books, which made him a third fortune, which inevitably was squandered as he consorted with journalists, art forgers,comedians and gangsters. Asked late in life what vocation he followed, he replied, “A ponce.” You Cannot Live As I Have Lived And Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of William Donaldson is out now.
A world of discovery
Scientific genius is given both a fictional and factual treatment this month. Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann follows real-life 19th-century thinkers Alexander Von Humbolt and Carl Friedrich Gauss who were obsessed with charting the surface of the Earth. While Humbolt voyages to the Americas, Gauss determines to prove Euclid wrong. Encounters with Thomas Jefferson, mysterious natives, Napoleon and electric eels take place before their paths finally cross in this meticulously imagined novel.
Book Notes's June paperback selection is The Devil's Doctor by historian Philip Ball. Ball believes that science had its beginnings in alchemy, the pursuit of knowledge through the study of arcane and mystical texts. In evidence, he points to Philip Theophrastus Von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus. Denounced for centuries as a drunken heretic, this Swiss humanist sought the philosopher's stone, eternal life and a means of turning common matter into gold. He also made speculations that anticipated modern physics, medicine and psychology back in the 1500s. Now that's magic.