Fred Astaire Part I

I can’t dance.. never been any good at it, but I love to watch dance in the old musicals.  And Fred Astaire is the best.  The joke was that at first one of his screen tests reported that he “Can’t sing, can’t act, balding, can dance a little”.  But while he didn’t have a wonderful singing voice, he could sing.. He could act too... And in later life, took a number of dramatic roles.

Fred was born in Omaha Nebraska as Frederick Austerlitz…  His mother was American but his father was from a Jewish family in Austria who had converted to Roman Catholicism. His father had moved to America to make a living and got a job in Omaha in a Brewing company.  However his mother was an ambitious lady who hope that she could escape provincial life vie the talents of her children.  Her daughter Adele was a talented child dancer.  Fred didn’t want to learn to dance, but he learned various musical instruments.  In 1905, when he was only 6 his father Fritz lost his job, and his mother decided to move them to New York to try and start a stage career. Fred was a natural dancer and had watched his sister, and on their move to New York, the 2 children took lessons in stagecraft, dancing and so on… 

Fritz was a smart businessman with a talent for promotion and Adele and Fred made a great start in Vaudeville as a dance act.  They worked together for a few years but Adele was rather taller than her brother and they began to look incongruous. 

They took a break from showbusiness for a couple of years.  They learned tap which was a new thing and ballroom dancing... and they had shortened their name to the snappier “Astaire”…

In 1912, Fred became an Episcopalian…. 

Within a couple of years, he was the dominant partner in the act, chasing up songs and music to dance to and by then he had developed the passion for perfection that drove him to be so great an artist. In 1917, the Astaires had a show on Broadway, a revue called Over the Top.  They followed up by several other Broadway shows.  Adele was a sparkling comic and a good dancer but her brother was beginning to overshadow her.

In the 1920s, they went to London, where they performed in shows such as Jerome Kern's The Bunch and Judy (1922), George and Ira Gershwin's Lady, Be Good (1924), and Funny Face (1927) and The Band Wagon.  Fred became friends with the Gershwin, and with Noel Coward….

Their act was admired in London and New York, and Fred was seen as the brilliant performer that he had become.

 In the later 1920s, Adele fell in love with Lord Charles Cavendish, a younger son of the Duke of Devonshire and they moved to a house in Ireland for a time.  Adele was happy to retire from the stage, which was traumatic for Fred... who was passionately devoted to his work. He worried about losing his partner, and whether he would be able to go on dancing without her…

John Denver singer short bio

John Denver was one of the biggest artistes of the 1970s, immensely successful and a prolific writer.  He was well loved, with an endearing look… and a gentle innocent style of performing… Critics often mocked him but he was greatly loved by the public….

He was born in 1943 to an Air Force family with the name of Henry John Deutschendorf junior.   His father was a colonel in the Air force and was also called Henry John Deutschendorf.    He was born in Roswell, New Mexico, and due to his father’s profession, the family moved around a lot.  He was a sensitive child, and so did not find it easy to be continually moving to new areas and schools.   His father was strict and did not find it easy to show affection nor to understand his son... and John felt out of place.  He disliked Fort Worth, Texas, where his father was based for a time... and was uneasy with the segregated culture of the southern states of America in the 1950s… He left home in his teens to try and start a musical career but was forced to return home.  Then in 1963 he abandoned his college career to pursue his passion for music.   He moved to Los Angeles where there was a thriving folk music scene and began to play under the name John Denver... as his birth name was too long.  He chose the name Denver because he loved Colorado…  He sang with the Mitchell Trio and began to have some success as the 60s progressed.  Folk music was very popular among the young in the years of rebellion against materialism and conservative values...

In 1969 he wrote a song called “Babe I hate to Go” which became his big hit “Leaving on a Jet plane”.   The Folk Group Peter Paul and Mary, recorded it and it was massively popular… 

In the 1970s John was immensely popular and had hits with Thank God I’m a Country Boy, the beautiful  "Annie’s song"which he wrote for his wife, and Rocky Mountain High and his most famous Anthem to country living “Take Me home Country Roads” .  He won Country music awards but some country musicians felt that he wasn’t really a country artist... He was more folk and pop and a little too soft and sentimental. 

He was a good hearted person who devoted himself to charity work, and to causes like preserving the Environment.  He loved country life and settled in the mountains  in Colorado where he maintained his home for the rest of his life.  He loved golf, but his passion for was for flying.  His father had been an Air force officer and Denver learned to fly and loved doing it.   He became politically active, supporting the Democratic Party and giving money and attention to good causes especially solving world hunger.  In the 1980s the mood of the US was more conservative and Denver was somewhat hostile to Ronald Reagan as president.   He was angry at the money spent on weapons when the world had hungry people... and he was against nuclear energy…He was interested In space flight and trained as an astronaut…
Some felt he was rather naive but his commitment to his various charities was sincere and energetic… 

However his private life had its problems.  He had married Annie Martell with whom he had 2 adopted children.  The marriage however broke up in 1982.  Denver had drug and drink addictions and the couple could not handle the strains of his massive success.

In the late 1980s he married an Australian actress but the marriage, which produced a daughter, was very short lived and ended in a bitter divorce. By the 1990s his drinking problems were affecting his life.  His medical certification to fly was revoked in 1996 due to his failing to maintain sobriety…

However in 1997, he was practising landing and taking off, on an airfield in California...  There was no sign of his drinking... at the time –but he seems to have had trouble with his fuel tank.  He was advised that the fuel was running low but he failed to refuel and the plane began to nose downwards and he lost control.  It crashed into the sea in Monterey Bay and he was killed… He was only 53.

. 

 

Charlie Rich, Silver Fox

Charlie was born in 1932 in Colt, Arkansas.  He is a well known singer and musician, covering country, rockabilly, jazz blues and gospel….

His family were cotton farmers, and were members of a church, where they sang.  He began to play saxophone, as a boy. He went to Arkansas State College, on a football scholarship but then transferred to another Arkansas university on a music scholarship.  However he did not stay long at college, leaving to join the Air Force in 1953.   He had married in 1952, and during his time in the Air force he kept up with his music.  In 1956, he left the military and he and his wife took a 500 acre farm near Memphis.

He went on playing jazz and blues, and beginning to write his own music... and tried to get a contract with Sam Phillips, who owned Sun Records which had been the starting ground for Elvis and Johnny Cash.

 In 1958 he began to work as a session musician for Phillips, playing with Johnny Cash and many others.   However his own singles were not that successful and after a few years, he left Sun, which did not pay that well and moved to another company…  he changed record companies several times in the 1960s but considered himself to be more of a jazz pianist than anything else…

However he swung over to the “Nashville sound” which was smooth, soft “genteel” country music which had become more popular from the late 50s onwards...  It was moving country music away from the rough, raw honky tonk style of earlier years. By the early 1970s Charlie was a popular “Nashville Sound” artist, a talented piano player who had huge hits with the pop style Behind Closed Doors and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the world”…He had more hits, but he was drinking heavily and appeared at the CMA Awards Ceremony in 1975, visibly under the weather.  He set fire to the nomination paper and  caused some annoyance.  His popularity began to decline. 

In the 1980s he lived quietly, rarely performing, though he was in a couple of films… and later on he produced another album which was more jazz influenced, in 1992. He was still not working all that much…

In 1995 he and his wife were travelling on a holiday road trip when he became ill.  He was treated with antibiotics and stopped for the night to rest... but died in his sleep at a motel... of a pulmonary embolism…

His career was not as successful as it could have been but he was a popular singer, known as the “Silver Fox” because of his silvery hair and smooth performance…

Kenneth Grahame Short post

Kenneth Grahame was born in Scotland in 1859.  His mother died when he was small and his father was an alcoholic, so he and his siblings were moved to England, to live with their grandparents. He spent a lot of time in a big old house near a river in Berkshire, which gave him the inspiration for Wind in the Willows.  He went to a school in Oxford and was a bright pupil but his family were not that well off due to his father’s drinking. (His father had been a lawyer).

 He was not able to go to Oxford University, due to a shortage of money.. but he was placed in a job in the Bank of England. He worked his way up to a high position in the Bank, and did some writing in his spare time.  However he was a rather odd man and somewhat reclusive.  He left the Bank with a small pension..

He does not seem to have ever wished to marry but then in 1899 he married Elspeth Thomson... an eccentric young woman who shared his interest in art and literature.  However it seems that she pressured him into marriage and left to himself he would have been happier single.

The couple wrote to each other in very smothering  “baby talk” which seems to signify an odd relationship.  They had one child Alistair, whom they called “Mouse” and he suffered from health problems for much of his life.  He was also a difficult rather spoiled child and when he went to University, he didn’t do well there and tragically, he committed suicide…by lying down on a railway line.

Grahame had told stories to the young Alistair about life on the river – which became the basis for Wind in the Willows.  Mr Toad with his arrogant bumptious personality was probably inspired by Alistair as a child, as he was naughty and difficult…

Grahame’s life was rather sad, but his major book was a great success

Children's writers

I enjoy reading many children’s classics – and have noticed that so many of them were written in Late Victorian or Edwardian England, by writers who often seemed to be somewhat eccentric.

In bygone days, children were looked on as young adults, and were expected, once infancy was past, to learn how to be an adult and to conform to adult behavior as much as they possibly could.  Working class children who had no schooling were put to work at a very early age.   Upper and middle class children were educated but were prepared for adult life at a very young age...

But by later Victorian times, there was an increased “softness” about childhood.  Children were less harshly treated though they were still firmly and strictly disciplined by modern standards.   Writers and thinkers were more sentimental about children, seeing them as innocent and charming and novelists and poets began to write about the world of childhood as a special time of fun and innocence.  Middle and upper class parents still did not spend a lot of time with their offspring, who were reared by nannies and governesses and sent off to school… but still parents were a little more inclined to want to enjoy their children’s company... and books about children’s adventures were popular….

Some of the Edwardian writers included E Nesbit, who was a feminist and socialist.. Her most famous novel was The Railway Children.  Another was Kenneth Grahame.  He did not write many novels but his best known work is “The Wind in the Willows” which has elements of “children having fun, without adults around and messing about in boats”.. the sort of works that were later published by Enid Blyton.

I hope to write some short bios of these writers

Have his Carcase Part III Spoilers

Mrs Weldon continues to mourn Paul and insists that he must have been murdered by Bolsheviks... because he was Russian and claimed to be from an aristocratic family who had fallen into poverty when he had to leave Russia during the Revolution.

  Harriet has become friendly with her, and learns that she is very well to do, and that she had intended on marriage to make a will leaving most of her property to her new husband, while not leaving so much to her son Henry.   However she has not made a Will as yet and Harriet realises that if Mrs Weldon were to die suddenly, her son would inherit all his mothers’ money...He has financial problems.   It looks as though Weldon had a motive for murder, but Wimsey and Harriet both think that he is a stupid man who would not be able to work out such a complex plan…involving coded letters from abroad etc. Another suspect is turned up during the investigation, a travelling hairdresser called Bright who has been moving around the country looking for temporary jobs… and who claims that he spoke to Paul on his travels….

There are difficulties of settling the time when Alexis was murdered, even when the body turns up…Harriet remembers that when she found the body the blood was liquid, so it is likely that he died only a short time before she found him... But she didn’t see anyone on the beach at the time.  The case seems insoluble and investigating it has put a strain on Harriet’s friendship with Wimsey.  

She likes him but has so far been unable to get over her feeling that she does not want to marry a man she is beholden to… She and Wimsey have rowed during the investigation, but not to breaking point.  Mrs Weldon is still determined to pursue the case, but then becomes friendly with another of the dancing partners at the hotel, a Frenchman called Antoine.  Peter and Harriet like Antoine and feel sorry for him… but feel that as a man with little money, it is possible that he might become tempted to allow Mrs Weldon to suggest marriage to him, as she had done to Paul.  They realise that if this were to happen, if Antoine were to become Mrs Weldon’s new husband... that would provide a motive for Henry Weldon to try to kill his mother or her new admirer.  So although they are getting fed up with the case they want to solve it….

Bunter Peter’s valet and assistant has been trailing  Bright, and discovers that he  is actually a businessman called Morecambe who is living in London… and he’s not a travelling hairdresser at all.  He claims that he is writing a play for his wife, a former actress, and was looking for material… but he is arrested on suspicion of murder .  The policeman who has been working on the case with Wimsey is very dubious as to whether they can make the case stick…

Then Wimsey and Harriet tell him that there is a reason why the young man’s blood was liquid at the time that Harriet found his body.. He has Haemophilia.   Paul a naïve and foolish young man had believed that he was a member of the Russian Imperial family and that he had a claim to the throne... and it was this that led him to meet with the murderers on the beach... to discuss claiming his birthright.  However since his blood would not clot normally, there was no way of being clear as to the time of death.

The novel ends rather abruptly with Wimsey and Harriet deciding to leave the case to the police, and leaving Wilvercombe.  It is not made clear what happens to Henry Weldon, or his partners in crime, Mr and Mrs Morecambe. In another book, Harriet refers to the case and it seems as if they were all convicted, but it is left as a rather dangling and confusing ending... We never learn what happens to Mrs Weldon who has rather been patronised by Harriet throughout the novel…

It has a very convoluted plot which I find almost impossible to follow, with long rather boring scenes about code making and breaking…but it has its good moments and is important in the development of the relationship between Peter and Harriet…

Have His Carcase Part II Spoilers

Harriet stays In Wilvercombe to help the police with their enquiries.  She learns that the dead man (whose body has been washed off by the tides) is Paul Alexis, a professional dancing partner who works at one of the big hotels.  To her amazement, she meets an older woman, Mrs Weldon, who turns out to be engaged to Paul. She is in her late 50s and he was only 22.  At first the case looks like suicide.  Peter Wimsey arrives in Wilvercombe and he and Harriet work together. 

The mystery is a very complicated one and rather melodramatic, which is one reason I don’t think it is one of Sayers’ best.   

They learn that Mrs Weldon was a lonely widow with one son, and had fallen in love with Paul, and they had become engaged.  However Henry Weldon, Mrs Weldon’s son who is a rather crude and stupid individual,  was not happy at the idea of his mother making a fool of herself by marrying a man 30 years her junior who was penniless.   Harriet tries to befriend Mrs Weldon, though she thinks of her as foolish and wrong minded in her desire to find a man to love, rather than making a life for herself.

But Harriet herself because of her past is also considered a suspect when it begins to look like Paul Alexis might have been murdered.   She and Wimsey argue and their friendship comes under strain, because she feels that she has to be grateful to him all the time.

The plot thickens, when Harriet and Peter learn that Alexis had a girlfriend, a silly girl called Leila, and she reveals that he was fond of reading “Ruritanian romances” and that he got letters in code, sent from abroad. 

Eventually, it begins to look like Alexis was lured to his death by one of these letters but other evidence seems to point to Henry Weldon being involved.

Have His Carcase By Dorothy L Sayers Part I

Have His Carcase is one of the Sayers Peter Wimsey novels... It’s not my favourite of her works, but it provides us with a view of the developing romance between Harriet Vane and Peter.

He had saved Harriet from being hanged for murder of her former lover...and had gone on trying to persuade her that he was in love with her and is eager to marry her.  Harriet, an independent woman who wrote detective novels is bruised by her unhappy relationship with Philip Boys her ex-lover.  She does not want another relationship and tries to avoid Peter.

At the start of the novel, Harriet, who has resumed her writing career , has gone away on a walking holiday on the South west coast.  She is busy with writing a mystery story... and enjoying her vacation.  However, the book does show a certain bitterness towards men, on the part of “independent women”.    Harriet does a lot of musing about the roles of men and women, while she’s walking.  She is glad that she is able to earn a good living by herself and not be dependent on a man or marriage.  She tells herself that she does not want to depend on anyone ever again…  She notes that men tend to like a woman to be dependent and “womanly” and don’t usually like career women.  However they don’t like the reality of a woman being very dependent on them emotionally or practically and they begin to resent it, when the woman is past her first youth.

Harriet has been walking by the seaside near to a resort called Wilvercombe, and when she stops for lunch, she notIces someone lying on a rock.  When she goes to warn him that the tide is coming in, to her horror, she finds that he is dead.  His throat has been cut.  She decides to go for help, to notify the police but is worried that the tide will wash away the body before she can do so.  She takes photographs of the corpse and then sets off to find the nearest town and talk to the police.

Harriet walks about trying to find a policeman in the rural area, meeting with fellow hikers on the way…. eventually she is able to report the death – and has to stay in Wilvercombe, until the police find the body.  She calls up the press, reasoning that a story that she, as a detective fiction writer, has been involved in a real life mystery will be good publicity for her new book….

.

Vince Gill

Vince Gill was born in 1957 and has been a successful country artiste for many years.  He was born in Oklahoma… his father was a lawyer who played in a small country band…He encouraged his son to learn how to play country and bluegrass instruments… and to go in for a musical career.

After leaving high school, in the mid-1970s Vince moved to Kentucky where he joined a bluegrass band.  He worked with Ricky Skaggs and later became a member of the band that backed Rodney Crowell, son in law to Johnny Cash. During the 1980s he had record deals but was only a moderate success, though he was a talented musician and had a good tenor voice.   In the 1990s he began to have more success and became a member of the Grand Old Opry.

He had married a singer Janis Oliver, in 1980, and they had a daughter... But their marriage ended in divorce in 1997.  He remarried in March 2000 to Christian singer, Amy Grant and they have one daughter.  He is an ardent golfer in his spare time....
I saw Vince  on the Grand Old Opry a few years ago, and he was  a charming funny and talented performer....

Beds and Blue Jeans by Nadine Sutton...

Beds and Blue Jeans is set in present day America.  It is about a love affair between a young couple who drift into living together and having a baby, and how they make things work.. a realistic love story...

http://www.amazon.com/Beds-Blue-Jeans-everyday-mayhem-ebook/dp/B01370SMFO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1443265304&sr=8-2&keywords=nadine+sutton

Makem and Clancy

Tommy Makem had married an American woman and settled in Dover New Hampshire...  He left the Clancy brothers in the late 1960s for a solo career but a few years later he did a gig with Liam Clancy, the youngest of the brothers and they formed a partnership…  They had a good chemistry on stage and worked together for many years.  Their concerts were full of jokes and a few nonsense songs but also traditional folk songs…

Liam - like Tommy had been born to a struggling family, who were far from well off.  He too worked in clerical jobs as a young man.  He was the youngest son of  a large family and was born in Carrick on Suir, County Tipperary.. He was initially called by the English version of his name, William.  However he was strongly nationalistic and chose to be called Liam… later on.  

He worked in Dublin in an office job, and struggled with ill health as he was not well off enough to go for medical help. He did not realise what was wrong with him but later found he had an ulcer...  While working, Liam  tried to continue his education part time.  He wanted to be an actor, and was involved in Amateur drama and took art classes. 

He had met Diane Guggenheim, the American heiress, when she was travelling in Ireland, collecting folk songs.. 

 She was the one who was in love with him... She was an older woman who was divorced and pursued him, while he was unsure about his feelings for her.   But he decided to try his luck in the US and moved to America to be with her…He was a naive young man at the time....

 He and his brothers and Tommy Makem tried to get a start in stage acting and lived in Greenwich Village, which was a haven for young people from small towns in the US and also young Irish people who had been reared in narrow puritanical cultures.  Liam enjoyed drinking and also loved the free Bohemian culture which was very unlike the sexually repressed narrowly Catholic atmosphere of 1950s Ireland.  He had several relationships with women.  

Later on, he had financial problems and relocated for some years to Canada…

The Clancy brothers and Makem had split ups but they continued to perform together on and off for the rest of their lives.  Makem and Clancy were sometimes accused of “stage Irishness”….. but their work popularized and revitalized Irish traditional and folk music and made it fun…Tommy died in 2007 and Liam, who lived in Ireland, died in 2009.

Tommy Makem folk musician Part I

I love country music, which developed in America from a mixture of the folk music of England, Scotland Wales and Ireland.  And one of my favorite folk musicians is the group Tommy Makem and the Clancy brothers.

They began to sing in the USA in the late 50s and early 60s, when there was a folk music revival.

Tommy was born in 1932, in Keady, in Northern Ireland...  His father was a fiddler and he learned to sing in church choirs but did not learn to read music.  However his mother Sarah Makem was a collector of Irish traditional music.    Due to this, he met with rich Americans including the heiress Diane Guggenheim, who were interested in collecting and reviving folk music in America and who travelled in Europe meeting with folk singers...

Tommy left school at 14 and went to work as a clerk, but in 1955, he decided like many Irish people to move to the US as times were hard in Ireland. 

He went to New Hampshire and got a job but hurt his hand in a press and then decided to try his luck in New York, as an actor.   He met up with the Clancy brothers who came from Southern Ireland and who dreamed of becoming actors also.  They were never all that successful as actor but they began to sing in bars and then in 1961 got a record deal with Columbia records.  They performed at the Newport Folk Festival and mingled with newcomers to the folk scene like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. As the 1960s progressed and folk music became more popular, Tommy with the Clancy brothers performed at Carnegie Hall and in the White house for John F Kennedy... and on the Ed Sullivan Show.   They also worked in Ireland and in Canada.

Billy Ray Cyrus

Billy Ray Cyrus is a country singer and actor, who is also the father of the actress Miley Cyrus.   He was born in 1961 In Kentucky, and his father Ron was a former steelworker who was involved in politics.  Billy’s family were into gospel music, and he dropped out of Georgetown College, to start his career as a musician.   In the 1980s he struggled to get a break in the music business, but finally by 1990 he got a record contract and was opening for Reba McEntire.  His first album was released in 1992, and was sympathetic to the military, called “Some Gave All”.  But his major hit was “Achy Breaky Heart” a lively dance song which popularised line dancing… 

He began to get small acting parts, in shows like the Nanny, the Love Boat and others and was in a stage version of Annie Get your Gun...

He was married during the 1980s to Cindy Smith, who was his co-writer on some songs but their marriage ended in divorce.  He had 2 children in the early 1990s from relationships with 2 different women.  He married Letitica “Tish” Finley, who was an actress and the mother of his daughter Miley…  They had two more children Braison and Noah and he adopted Tish’s other children.

They lived for some time near Nashville Tennessee but moved to California when Miley became the star of Hannah Montana, a children’s show in which her father also acted. He has had a brilliantly successful career….with TV appearances and numerous successful albums...and directed a  rather sentimental but charming TV movie set in the South called "Christmas in Canaann...."

Charlie Daniels RIP

Charlie died this week, having had a long and fulfilling life and career.  RIP Charlie. 

EM Forster Part II

Forster visited India in 1914, also he went to Egypt with his friend Lowes Dickinson.  His liberal beliefs made him highly critical of the Empire and the British who ruled India.  There were liberals (Liberal Imperialists) who were critical of the Empire but believed that it could be a force for good, and that Britain should work towards  preparing their colonies for independence and democracy.   Forster was deeply sympathetic towards the Indian people.

When War came in 1914 he worked for the Red Cross as he was a pacifist. He spent much of the war as a searcher for missing servicemen in Egypt- and he finally in 1917, began to have a sex life.  He became involved with a wounded soldier.  He referred to it as “Losing his R” a euphemism for respectability.   He began to be a little more open about his feelings, but mainly to friends who were gay… of whom he had many.  Later on, he met a young policeman called Bob Buckingham, who became his lover… Buckingham married and had children but he and his wife May were close friends with Forster all of his life.

After his war years, he lived with his mother in Surrey, still, until she died in 1945. He had written most of his novels by the time of the war, but he wrote stories and journalism and book reviews.  He was involved with many liberal causes, such as anti-censorship, prison reform etc., though not party political ones.

In the 20s he paid another visit to India, working as a private secretary to one of the princes.  His second visit inspired him to write his last Novel, Passage to India.  It involved the clash of cultures, when a young Englishwoman, Adela Quested visits India with her fiancé’s mother, Mrs Moore.  She wants to “meet Indians” but her fiancé Ronny who is a colonial administrator is not.  He is rude and arrogant towards Indians.  She begins to wonder if they have a future together. 

Mrs Moore forms a friendship with Aziz, a young doctor, and Adela meets hm.. He has become good friends with Fielding, the Principal of a government college.

Mrs Moore and Adela go with Aziz on an expedition to the Marabar Caves, she becomes convinced that Aziz has tried to molest her.  The case goes to trial , and the British colony is horrified by the idea that a white girl might be touched by an Indian man.  However the case collapses when Adela withdraws her testimony.  It’s never made clear whether she was molested by someone else…or if she just imagined it.. But it creates an even greater divide between the Indians and British and Adela is disliked then by both factions.   She leaves India, and goes home and Mrs Moore who has left earlier, dies on the journey.  Aziz is bitter, and breaks off his friendship with Fielding.  He goes to work in Hindu Ruled state and refuses to associate with white people.   Later, Fielding comes back to India, with his wife, Mrs Moore’s daughter Stella - and he and Aziz meet again….  But the two of them wonder if an Englishman and an Indian can be friends.

EM Forster Part I

Forster is not one of my favourite novelists but I’ve read most of his works and been interested in him.  He is one of the best known English novelists of the 20^th century, but although he lived to be very old, he did not write that many novels and gave up novel writing after his best known work, Passage to India.   He was born in 1879 in London, the child of an architect.  His family were solidly middle class and he was descended from the Thornton family, who were members of the “Clapham sect” a social reform group within the Church of England.  They were liberally minded, but devoutly religious and were involved in the abolition of slavery.

Morgan inherited their seriousness and social conscience.   His great Aunt Marianne Thornton was part of this reformist group and she left him £8000 which was enough to give him a comfortable private income, so that he did not have to work or find a profession.

His father died when he was a baby, and he and his mother then moved out of London to a house in the country just outside Stevenage.  He loved the house and the countryside, and it became the model for Howards End, the large farm house in his novel of the same name.   He went to school in Tonbridge and then went on to Cambridge.. where he was very happy and had found his milieu.   He was part of the “Apostles” a literary and philosophical discussion group.  He had the liberal principles of his Thornton ancestors, but was not religious.  Many of his Cambridge friends went on to form the Bloomsbury Group of Avante garde writers and artists.

Forster was gay, but he grew up in a very repressive middle class household and came to manhood in the 1890s, just after the Oscar Wilde scandal.  It was more than ever difficult to be a homosexual at that time. 

He was at Cambridge from 1897 to 1901, and realised his sexual feelings were not heterosexual. He fell in love with a young Indian man whom he was tutoring in Latin, who later became the inspiration for his novel A Passage to India, about the friendship between an Englishman and a young Indian doctor, Aziz.   

He travelled in Europe with his mother after graduating and he began to write novels and essays.. But he did not feel able to put his repressed desires into actual life.  He realised that he was never likely to marry and as a result he was especially close to his friends, since he would never have his own family.

He and his mother lived in Surrey and he wrote his first novels.. and was involved in promoting liberal causes.  He opposed censorship and when the War broke out in 1914 he became a  conscientious objector.

His first novel was “Where Angels Fear to Tread”, a story of a young English widow, Lilia, who goes on holiday to Italy and falls in love with a young man there.  Her family are horrified and send out Philip, her brother in law, to try and stop the marriage.  He finds Italy more charming than he expected and he fails to persuade her.  Lilia marries her Italian, Gino, and has a baby by him, but dies.  Her relatives are scandalised and feel that they must rescue the baby from his irresponsible Italian father and bring him up as an English gentleman. Caroline, Lilia’s friend also feels that the child must be rescued.

Philip, with his sister Harriet is sent off again.. to take the baby.  

He knows that the family don’t care about the child personally, and are too cool and repressed to love him.. And when he meets Gino, he realises that although he is feckless, he loves his son.

The theme of the novel is of Italian emotionalism as opposed to the repressive cold British nature.  Philip knows that Gino is not a very admirable character but he is capable of love and feeling.   However,  Harriet who hates Italy, sticks to the family’s plan and decides to  kidnap the baby.. But as they escape, the child is killed in a carriage accident. Gino and Philip bond, and Harriet has  a mental collapse after the plan has gone wrong and resulted in tragedy. Philip is drawn to Caroline, but she tells him that she is in love with Gino. 

This novel has a similar theme to that of his last work Passage to India.. The repression and coldness of the English middle class, and the freedom and emotional openness of other cultures such as the Italian or Indian.  However it also shows the problems of some of Forster’s writing.  He was not very good at conveying sexual passion and was apt to throw in a lot of melodrama into his work which sometimes did not fit well with his Jane Austenish framework.    Philip ends up with an unfulfilled life, and Caroline’s sudden falling in love with Gino is unconvincing….

It’s been said that one reason he stopped writing was because he knew he could not convey heterosexual passion, but it wasn’t possible for him to write freely of homosexual love

Rough Music by Nadine Sutton

this is a  “band” story set in the US, in the late 1970s.   This isn’t a romantic love story and does not have a happy ending. It’s more of a work story, about music and the life of an up and coming band.  I’ve based it on what I’ve read about country singers in the days when touring was a constant part of their lives.  It was hard work and took its toll on the marriages of many singers.   But I love the music of the 1960s and 70’s.  I love country pop, people like Glen Campbell... and I also love the Williamses… especially Hank Junior.  I enjoy Lynrd Skynrd.  So my story is all about that sort of life…   

The band is headed by 2 singers who are good friends, but who have difficult marriages and romantic problems  due to their profession and the constant touring.  And they are devoted to their music and worry about the compromises they have to make, to get ahead in the music world...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Music-Nadine-Sutton-ebook/dp/B01AEQS0G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452977780&sr=8-1&keywords=nadine+sutton