Buddy's Book list: Henry Miller, Durrell, E.B. White

I've finished "The Custom of the Country", Edith Wharton's ode to female awfulness- in short a gripping tale of deceit based on amoral and remorseless greed. Undine Spragg keeps an eye on her rivals, though they hardly appear in the novel excpet as spurs to Undine's avarice. It ends as one of them, her country gal-pal Indiana Frusk becomes an Ambassadress, something the divorced Spragg can never achieve. "Mrs Spragg... yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity." & "Her incessant movements were not the result of shyness: she thought it the correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity." Edith Wharton Rules! I was outpaced by Masterpiece The-A-ter, and their Bleak House lapped mine, so I have laid it aside. City Room, Arthur Gelb's reminiscences of The New York Times, and Kay Boyle's turgid "Being Geniuses Together" have both been waiting patiently, half-read while I enjoyed Edith and Dickens. Both were picked up again at inopportune passages. Gelb has just emerged from red-baiting, and his drama critic years and all that is ahead seems to be labor disputes and the blackout. Boyle thought she had tuberculosis, and poor as dirt, accepted the hospitality of a couple, the male half of whom she gets pregnant by. He dies quickly, presumably to keep his production of ersatz Olde English verse to a minimum. She quotes too much of it, though too much is a debatable measure when giving us lines like: "Lyke a marygolde O the wynde has notte anye nose to mayke". Her autobiography is alternated with chapters of McAlmon's. The latter is eloquent, propulsive and fascinating. Here on Hemingway (who McAlmon published): "It's difficult to say who started the attitude in writing which one finds in "My Old Man".... It isn't so much a style or an approach as an emotional attitude: that of an older person who insists upon trying to think and write like a child." McAlmon was an assiduous drinking partner of Joyce's and somehow ended up piecing together the last fifty pages of Ulysses from the incoherent notes he was handed. (the first typist had destoyed the text as being obscene) He dragged Joyce home many nights and had him carried upstairs to the belligerant beetle-browed Nora. He also knew Wyndham Lewis well, Pound, and of course Hemingway. Interlarded with his tales are Boyle's maudlin, starry writings. The previous owner of this volume has a strange jabbing notational style. Sometimes she jabs her inkpen at the book when she is stirred by it, though often it appears to be just nervousness. Lee Hibbib was her name, and her marginalia is.. in total: Oh, Wow, Baby, Interesting, Class, Key, Am! and Ha! She prefers Boyle to McAlmon, with whom I have to say she shares certain qualities. Buddy has mauled the corner of the next book waiting, a biography of E.B. and Katherine White. It is only his second book. His first was the correspondence between Larry Durrell and Henry Miller. If I could only get him to take my current book and eat the Kay Boyle out of it.