Bunkering With Books

Diaries And Memoirs

BY CONNIE CRONLEY

What is it about other people’s stories that we love so much?

Are we a species drawn like magnets to other people? Do we hope to learn from another’s life adventures? Is it raw entertainment that has us gazing in amazement at somebody’s good fortune or bad luck?

Or are we just snoopy? Maybe yes to all of that.

He knew everybody and went everywhere, especially to plays, films, and tributes of other actors. I soon realized I needed to read the 455page book with my tablet or phone nearby to look up the names and titles referenced. I wonder if he would have written a narrative to turn the entries into a real book.

Mary McCarthy, the viperess Carolyn Blackwood, and poor, buffeted Robert Lowell who died in a taxi on the way to former wife Hardwick’s apartment while fleeing current wife Blackwood.

The book is full of mad, suicidal poets and brilliant intellectuals who wrote incestuously about one another in “The New York Review of Books.”

The New York street coordinates are important as Pinckney carefully documents the street location of everything, especially the gay sex clubs.

“Madly,

Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries”

I am a fan of the late English actor Alan Rickman who died too soon at age 69 in 2016. Maybe by reading “Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries” I could hold on to him a little longer and get a backstage glimpse into his work. The title of the book alludes to the award-winning 1990 film “Truly, Madly, Deeply” starring Rickman and Juliet Stevenson, written and directed by Anthony Minghella. They all won awards and rightly so. Sadly, the only DVD I can find won’t play on U.S. machines.

The book is odd. Literally, it consists of excerpts from his diaries from 1993 to 2016, chockablock with lunches and parties with friends identified by first names and initials.

But oh, the names he drops, not archly but because they are friends: “Dec 25, 2006. Tash & Liam’s party. Indian food and charades with Meryl Streep, Bette Midler…Mia Farrow, Stanley Tucci and his wife Katie, Aidan Quinn and Elizabeth [Bracco, his wife], Allan Corduner.”

People in the industry snapped up the book when it came out to see what he said about them. Very little and rarely critically. When he met Emma Thompson, he noted that she was “easy, warm, and lovable.” Although he was a famous villain (the Harry Potter films and “The Sheriff of Nottingham”) and although he acknowledged that he could be difficult on set (most often when the director was unprepared), he loved the business of acting and the people in it. He loved them truly and deeply.

“Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan”

I was equally fascinated and lost in Darryl Pinckney’s “Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan.” Over and over, I was reminded that I am not (a) a poet, (b) an intellectual, or (c) a New Yorker.

I got the book not to know more about novelist Pinckney but because I wanted to read about Elizabeth Hardwick, his professor, mentor, and friend. Other writers make dramatic appearances: Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Susan Sontag,

It’s deliciously gossipy. “Kathleen Spivack read a poem about playing Ping-Pong with Bishop. It was a sestina and Elizabeth wondered if Spivack’s choice of the word ‘arthritis’ didn’t strain her lines.” He remembers plenty of personal observations about Bishop. “She liked to talk about the Bible. For her, Scripture matched Freud when it came to abundance of case studies.” And it is perfectly set in time: “That was the summer before Sylvia Plath committed suicide.”

The memoir is not in a standard format. It skips and dances over time and incidents. The author has a maddening, coy tendency to put whole sentences, even paragraphs, in parenthesis. Say it or don’t say it.

There is no index, which is annoying. All in all, the book is like looking at a box of pretty buttons.

To submit a Noteworthy event, contact Paula Brown at pbrown@LIFEseniorservices.org or (918) 664-9000, ext. 1207.