RaveLondon Review of Books (UK)This novel, a thoughtful and deeply acquainted biographical study, explores the stuff out of which Mann’s great novels and stories grew. Sometimes the material is merely anecdotal—Heinrich Mann’s luggage goes missing and Thomas realises he can use that detail in a story—but what really matters in Tóibín’s account of the life is the way that Mann’s creativity grew from a colossal act of repression ... Tóibín is not the first person to advance an interpretation of Mann as a virtuoso of life in the closet, and he generously lists in an appendix the numerous works of scholarship he has consulted. But the theme has an especially lively pertinence for him as an author in his own right, for his fiction is characteristically fascinated by secrets acknowledged or unacknowledged or somewhere in-between, often though not always sexual ... The most memorable episodes in Tóibín’s book portray Mann in moments of erotically charged proximity to a boy or a man, the intensity of which depends on the agonised certainty that nothing at all will come of it ... Tóibín has never been a flashy stylist, and though it is slightly tough to characterise his manner, as Terry Eagleton once did, as an ‘austere, monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself and redolent of nothing else’, he certainly has chosen to specialise in the virtues of plainness. This novel seems to me to take that disposition a step further: the pitch of the narrative feels deliberately remote, at times almost like a translation or a paraphrase, as though to imply the presence of an immensely greater psychological intricacy that has eluded the words on the page. I take this as a sort of homage to the spirit of secrecy which animates Mann himself, and I think the effect, which is very artful, grows on you.
Frances Wilson
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)... vivid and unusual ... Avoiding the obligation to say something about everything, Wilson brings to her chosen episodes something of the imaginative density of the realist novel, which is all to the good. But this virtue is complicated by her decision to incorporate her three stages into a symbolic pattern that leads Lawrence from England’s Hell, through the Purgatory of Florence, to the paradisal heights of Taos ... Wilson, a splendidly unsentimental commentator, is interested in the creativity of the uglier emotions ... By invoking the idea of so providential and strongly predetermined a narrative Wilson manages to convey very successfully, by contrast, the haplessness of Lawrence’s itinerant life: she is good throughout on his inability to stay still ... So this is a highly organised life about a life that was anything but organised, a mismatch which I think Wilson recognises for she finds a similar contradictoriness in Lawrence himself ... Wilson illustrates in affectionate detail how Lawrence the man could be extremely provocative, and his greatest prose is really the continuation of that character trait, as much in his brilliantly errant style as in the perilous ‘metaphysic’ underwriting it.
Jonathan Bate
PositiveLiterary Review (UK)... a colourfully written celebration...of Wordsworth’s ‘radical alternative religion of nature’. It does not pretend to offer any discoveries ... The...writing has a consciously old-fashioned quality, I think, not at all unattractive but rather like the sort of thing members of the Wordsworth Society used to say to one another in the later part of the 19th century ... Wordsworth’s contribution to environmental thinking was no doubt profound, and Bate’s reverence is heartfelt, but you do get glimpses of different aspects to his genius ... Bate observes on several occasions that Wordsworth’s poetry is often filled with elegiac feeling, and in his depiction of childhood experience he is moved no less by emotions of abandonment, isolation and loss.
Mark Doty
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Mark Doty has written a warm and intelligent account of Whitman, interweaving his personal responses to the poetry with autobiographical episodes, the lives and deaths of partners and friends and pets, and even, possibly, a spooky encounter with young Walt himself, who, at an intense moment, gazes through the features of a lover \'with the visionary dazzle of starlight in his eyes\' ... Is Doty Whitmanian? His poems are a highly engaging mixture of the quotidian and the numinous: they are discursive, even essayistic, anecdotal in a nicely contrived throwaway manner which sets off perfectly their discoveries of loveliness amid the ordinary ... there are certainly Whitmanian resonances to be found in his work ... But the hesitancies in that don’t feel very Whitmanian. They are part of what makes the thing precious, implying an experience too exquisite to be pinned down, and Doty’s best poems are often like that, reports back from a life of tasteful self-scrutiny, and much more purposefully exquisite than Whitman ever is. Whitman loved Italian opera in all its lush and vulgar extravagance; Doty’s preferred form is the still life ... However private the springs of his imagination, Whitman, in his idiosyncratic way, saw himself fulfilling a civic duty, but Doty would never dream of adopting heroic nationalism as a poetic mode, and indeed he expresses regret in What is the Grass about Whitman’s committed \'project as American bard\'. But engage with the American bard he must, as perhaps all American poets must in one way or another, in much the same way that no English poet of the eighteenth century could really get going without grappling with Milton. \'He defines for us the project of poetry, its possibilities, its parameters,\' as C. K. Williams writes, on behalf of American poets in general. \'It’s not necessary to refer to him: he’s there.\'
