Every Good Boy Does Fine

Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons
Jeremy Denk
Random House (March 22, 2022), 370 pages
Kindle edition $12.99, Amazon hardcover $18.79

All of a sudden I am reading (or listening to) books about classical music. Recently I listened to the audiobook version of Declassified by Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch. This week I finished the Kindle edition of Jeremy Denk’s Every Good Boy Does Fine. You might look at these books as mirror images of each other. Warsaw-Fan Rauch is female, a violinist, and straight. Denk is male, a pianist, and of ambiguous sexual orientation. Warsaw-Fan Rauch gave up her career in music while Denk still teaches and performs. Both books interweave autobiographical material with interludes of musical instruction.

While Warsaw-Fan Rauch’s book is more of a memoir, Denk’s book is an autobiography. He recounts his life from childhood to getting his PhD. He describes his childhood on the East Coast and how that was uprooted when his father opted for a more stable and less stressful job as head of Information Technology at the University of New Mexico in Las Cruces. This was fortunate for Denk in that as a youngster he was able to get piano instruction, something he began before moving west, from the professor of piano at the university, even though he did not normally work with kids Denk’s age. Denk’s parents, though, were not keen on listening to him practice and put the piano in the opposite end of the house from where they spent most of their time.

Denk writes about his life in New Mexico and the challenges he faced there. His mother had a serious drinking problem which complicated his attempts to practice the piano. As a reader I was wondering how long his mother would last, but she eventually got sober and lived to see her son perform in major recitals during his college years.

The author was not only talented musically, but academically. He graduated from high school early and arrived at Oberlin College at age sixteen, where he declared a double major in music and chemistry. From there he headed to Indiana University (IU), where there was a teacher with whom he wanted to work, and then on to Julliard for his PhD (though he had begun doctoral work at IU).

Denk describes his teachers who were terribly demanding and very finicky about how he played certain passages. Frustratingly, he sometimes received what seemed to be contradictory instruction from different instructors. He is candid about his somewhat awkward social skills, and although he had relationships with two different women, he hints at an occasional attraction to men, and directly recounts the attraction of a couple of men to him. About his junior year he writes, “Somewhere in there I lost my virginity,” although he does not provide the gender of the person with whom that happened. Denk is also honest about his alcohol consumption, admitting to arriving for important events where he was to play while hung over.

The title of the book refers to putting words to the letters on the musical scale. Denk, in his own telling of it, despite a lot of irresponsible behavior, in the end does in fact do fine.

I Came All This Way to Meet You

I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home
Jami Attenberg
Ecco (January 11, 2022), 253 pages
Kindle edition $14.99, Amazon paperback $17.99

I am always ready to read about writers, and if it is a memoir so much the better. I knew I had done the right thing in buying I Came All This Way to Meet You when early on I read, “I fully understand what the words do for me: when I write, it’s a place I can go to feel safe. It has always worked that way for me, ever since I was a child. The safety of a sentence.” That resonated.

Jami Attenberg reflects on her life as a writer and she is honest about her struggles. She describes a book tour for an early novel in which she drove around the country in her own car, knowing that her bank account would be empty when the tour was over. And the tour did little for her book sales. She writes about doing commercial writing to pay the bills and subletting her New York apartment while she went to live in Seattle for no good reason.

In fact, Attenberg writes a lot about her living situation. She describes living with friends while pursuing her craft. She recollects living in a Manhattan apartment when she had a high-paying, high-power corporate job, and giving that up for a Brooklyn apartment in a building where other tenants like herself were trying to escape the New York rat race, but where the landlord was not keen on making repairs. Ultimately, she was able to buy a home in New Orleans where she could have guests rather than be the guest.

Attenberg tells us how her original publisher dropped her because of dismal sales, but she found another publisher where an editor saw the potential in her work. She was able to make book tours on the publisher’s dime, including trips to Europe. But anxiety over flying and other stresses brought their own issues. She found herself consuming drugs, both prescription and illegal, and abusing alcohol.

The author is also honest about her health and her love life. She tells us more than we need to know about her uterus which betrayed her, the pain and discomfort she suffered, and the freeing hysterectomy that she put off far too long. Attenberg writes about her attempt to make a relationship work, about the disputes and arguments, and how she second guessed herself, wondering if doing something different here or there might have made things different.

We also learn a lot about her father, who spent his life in sales. During the lockdown in 2020 Attenberg was living in New Orleans and her parents in Florida. She took the opportunity to do a phone interview with her father and obtain some of the detail she had not known about his long career. Her father’s philosophy was that selling is selling and if you can sell one thing you can sell anything else. I found this section rather tedious and uninteresting, but it was simply an interlude in a book that otherwise fully engaged me.

Attenberg brings it home when she writes:

Whenever my life turns into any kind of cliché, I am furious. Not me, I want to scream. Not me, I am special and unusual. But none of us are special and unusual. Our stories are all the same. It is just how you tell them that makes them worth hearing again.

She’s right, as painful as that is to acknowledge. I admire Attenberg for sharing the truth about who she is and how she sees herself.

Young Bloomsbury

Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England
Nino Strachey
Atria Books (December 6, 2022), 303 pages
Kindle edition $14.99, Amazon hardcover $29.00

As a Star Trek fan I am tempted to call this book Bloomsbury: The Next Generation. I believe author Nino Strachey was wise not to choose that title.

Plenty has been written about the original Bloomsbury group that centered around Virginia and Leonard Woolf, but Young Bloomsbury covers material less well documented. In addition to the Woolfs, the original group included the author Lytton Strachey and his longtime companion the artist Dora Carrington. Also part of that group was Ralph Partridge. The three of them formed a consensual household. Lytton preferred young men, but valued Carrington’s companionship. (Dora went by her more gender-neutral last name.) Ralph preferred women, and the two eventually married for convenience. The three presided at Lytton’s country estate that was frequented by younger visitors.

One of the regular visitors to Strachey’s estate was the sculptor Stephen Tomlin. Although he and Lytton were regular lovers, Tomlin (“Tommy”) fell for Julia Strachey, Lytton’s niece. They eventually married, but the relationship was a stormy one. Ultimately, they lived separate lives, although they never divorced, something that was rare in the Bloomsbury group. John Strachey, Lytton’s younger cousin, was one of the few to do so. He was also one of the few members of that circle to engage in politics, although Leonard Woolf wrote pieces for the Labour party.

Another of Lytton’s lovers and a regular visitor to the compound was the novelist and music critic Eddy Sackville-West. In fact, most of the men in the Young Bloomsbury group were gay. It was a dangerous time for these young men as homosexuality in England was illegal, and one could be arrested for cosmetics or attire that might simply suggest such an orientation. But for these men Lytton’s estate and home in London provided refuge.

Those of us who were around in the late sixties and early seventies thought we were being progressive regarding sexual and moral matters, but the Bloomsbury crowd was ahead of us by half a century. No one blinked an eye at the Strachey/Carrington/Partridge arrangement, and no one had any judgments about the same-sex relationships of the younger generation. The author says Virginia Woolf “provided a sympathetic adult ear in a period when same-sex love was open to hostile challenge.” Wolf did, however, observe the activities of men like Tommy and Sackville-West with a certain bemusement, as quotes from her letters and diary show. Such opinions, though, were without negativity or judgment.

As a member of the Strachey family, Nino Strachey was granted open access to archives and records. And as she states in the beginning of the book, she has another reason for her interest in the subject. She tells us she has an offspring who identifies as gender fluid.

Young Bloomsbury is fascinating reading and adds a new dimension to the history of a rich period in twentieth century British arts and letters.

Metaphysical Animals

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman
Doubleday (May 10, 2022), 416 pages
Kindle edition $13.99, Amazon paperback $21.99

Metaphysical Animals is a joint biography of four women who studied and taught philosophy at Oxford. The authors investigate the lives of Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch.

The book examines the lives of the women as undergraduates at Oxford in the days before World War II. This was a time when women were rather grudgingly accepted as students there. The authors then describe their time at Oxford during the war when there were very few men present. Later in the war they had to leave Oxford as women were conscripted to perform civilian tasks in order to assist with the war effort. All four of them returned to Oxford after the war, taking on various teaching roles.

The narrative is bookended with a prologue and epilogue that center on Oxford’s desire to give Harry Truman an honorary degree and Elizabeth Anscombe’s efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to block that honor on account of Truman’s responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The obsession of the authors with this incident is rather puzzling as it has little to do with the material in the rest of the book. Nonetheless, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman cover a lot of territory in the decades that this book covers.

Given that we are talking about Oxford, there is a lot of attention paid to the classics, and these women studied with professors whose works I read as an undergraduate at Pitzer College. I knew Gilbert Murray and his treatment of Greek Tragedy and E. R. Dodds who wrote the assigned text The Greeks and Their Gods. (Dodds, I did not know, was interested in the paranormal and a member of the Society for Psychical Research.) They also studied with Gilbert Ryle, with whose work I became acquainted in a philosophy class.

One philosopher who gets a lot of attention in the book is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although he taught at Cambridge, he was in London during the war and Elizabeth met with him regularly. After the war she continued to study with him. In fact, she translated his final work from the German after his death and took his former Chair at Cambridge University.

The final quarter of the book is less biography than an exercise in “doing philosophy.” I took two philosophy classes during my first two years at Pitzer where we did philosophy. That was a long time ago and engaging in this kind of mental gymnastics is a different way of thinking. I admit to having had trouble absorbing this material.

Oddly, I did not see evidence of the claim in the subtitle that these women “brought philosophy back to life.” It is only in the book’s Afterward that the authors clearly detail the significant accomplishments that the group left behind. I would like to have seen those accomplishments more clearly described in the body of the book.

However, those interested in the academic history of mid-twentieth century Britain and those who love the process of philosophy will find Metaphysical Animals worthwhile reading.