John Malkovich as the Le Baron du Charlus and Vincent Perez as Morel (Time Regained,1999)
Friends and readers,
For the last day I thought I would tell of Jim’s books, his favorites and those (insofar as I can tell) that influenced him as a boy, had an impact on his memory and outlook and that he kept reading.
As a boy, Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows (above all, as he’d quote from it,” there’s nothing better than messing about in boats,” or words to this effect; one summer afternoon in London we went to Alan Bennett’s play from it). Surtee’s Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities (I have a 19th century copy with illustrations), P.G. Wodehouse (yes, he was amused when a teenage boy and called the set we have gay male books). He’d graduated to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by his 5th or 6th form– I bought him a beautiful 5 volume set as my first present to him shortly after we married.
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As a man: he loved poetry Empson, Graves, Larkin, Auden, e.e. cummings; Basil Bunting (he’d quote snatches of poems from these writers), Cavafy, Anthony Hecht, Clive James. Individual authors he never tired of and had a lot of their books, Bernard Shaw, the plays and theater criticism, Oscar Wilde, all of Proust (he had gotten up to the fifth book, starting in French but switching to English; his favorite movie was Time Regained), Anthony Powell (how much he would have enjoyed Perry Anderson’s long review in praise of Powell in the latest LRB, comparing him to Proust), and some 18th century favorites like Samuel Johnson.
Bernard Shaw
Very fat tomes of history early medieval, archeaology books (JHawkes), philosophical books on war. He would insist he didn’t like the novel that much and preferred novels of the French school, books like the one where there is no “e” (The Void; I remember him reading Life: A User’s Manual, from “l’OULIPO” writers.
Signature Theater production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (Sondheim was Jim’s favorite composer of musicals — I bought him the 2 songbooks 2 Christmases in a row, Finishing the Hat, Look I made Hat)
Favorite movies: by Eric Rohmer and Bergman
In the early 1970s Jim and I went to the Thalia to see Bergman’s Magic Flute — I cried for joy and pain – he loved opera too
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A thrush in the syringa sings
Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar thingsDeath thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk’s beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things
fear, hunger, lust.O gay thrush! — Bunting (who said he would not travel outside Manhattan until he had thoroughly done Central Park and after decades he was no where near … , a favored poem from a book I bought for Jim for another Christmas )
Ellen remembering on his behalf
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Camille de Fleurville: It seems that I share lots of your husband’s tastes in literature… A lovely blog, Ellen.
Me: There are two there I wouldn’t care for (Wodehouse just irritates me, and I doubt I’d find Jorrocks funny — though this is the Pickwick Papers sort of thing), maybe some of the fat tomes of history would defeat me, but everything else there I like very much. I shared his tastes. A student in one of my classes once wrote a paper about Wind in the Willows as his favorite book from childhood: he said the book is paradisal. He would read aloud to me from what he was reading. He also liked Virginia Woolf very much and our library of her books began with his buying them; he’d read all Leonard’s autobiographical volumes and his one novel.
Camille De Fleurville: I tried Jorrocks and he mostly defeated me. I do not dislike Wodehouse who sent me into roaring laughter when I first read some Jeeves novels – and I enjoy watching the rather old TV adaptations with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. I read the whole sequence of the Dance this winter and thought how close it was to Proust. And Proust is a favourite of mine. I grew up with The Wind in the Willow, was flabbergasted by Wilde’s preciosity (his opening pages of Dorian Grey) and Shaw’s irony. Later came Gibbon and Cavafy. As to the French novel without the letter “e”, it is “La Disparition” by George Perec who founded “l’OULIPO”, a literary movement which comprises still quite a few members. This not a very good article but better than nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo – And how I agree about Rohmer and Bergmann!
Me: I’ve not seen that Fry and Laurie series; I have read it is very funny. Laurie is capable of many kinds of characters — Night Manager he was ferociously cruel. I have listened to all Dance to the Music of Time read aloud (on audiocasettes), and managed to read the first and half of the second novel of In Search of Lost Time in French, and then gave over. We would go to plays by Shaw whenever we were somewhere where one was playing so I’ve seen quite a number; ditto Oscar Wilde. Jim liked Shaw’s reviews very much. He also liked one one-man virtuoso kind of soliloquy of a play using Wilde’s words for 2 and 1/2 hours. I have Cavafy’s poetry (which he would read aloud from) and a volume of letters (with E.M.Forster if I’m not mistaken). Yes of the “l’OULIPO” movement, we have mostly Perec. While I’ve dipped into The Void (it is great fun when a famous piece of prose is re-engineered either in French or English to have no “e’s”), Life: A User’s Manual is a genuinely readable novel (which you can read in different orders as you probably know) and I’ve read more of that.
Spurling’s biography of Powell has led to some essays and reviews of his writing recently. There was a hatchet job on Powell in the NYRB but also a (very long) superb article comparing Proust and Powell (the argument is they are also very different) in the LRB by Perry Anderson, 19 July 2018, and it is open to the public online. As I read it, I thought to myself how Jim would have liked this one; he would read Perry Anderson through Anderson can go on and on … https://www.lrb.co.uk/…/different-speeds-same-furies
Camille: The Void is La Disparition, and Life: A User’s Manual is La Vie: Mode d’Emploi – both favourites of mine. As all books by Perec. Thank you for the link with the LRB article.
Pat Honaker: I got the wind in the willows for my kids when they were young
Me: It’s one I didn’t read when I was young, but I did see the play with Jim. It was a favorite book for Alan Bennett too.
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