Good evening!
If you were to have a conversation with me right now, you would say to yourself, “wow, what a relaxed woman.” And you’d be right! I’ve been off work this week and am going on holiday tomorrow so I’m feeling fresh and fun, and I also finished my redraft of my third (out of four) PhD chapter today. I haven’t got a great amount fo reading done this week for that reason, but still, much to say.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I read The Slide Area (1960), the third novel I’ve read by Gavin Lambert. For newer subscribers, Gavin Lambert is a writer who is very beloved to me, but you’re forgiven if you haven’t heard of him, because his books aren’t in wide circulation at all. Serpent’s Tail did some reissues of them a few years ago, but these are actually quite hard to find, especially new. My friend Sara gave me his most well-known novel Inside Daisy Clover (1963) for my birthday last year and I immediately loved it and him, and for Christmas she also gave me Running Time (1982), another one that I loved. Lambert is perhaps best known for editing Sight and Sound magazine between 1949 and 1956, as well as his screenwriting work on films like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977) and Second Serve (1986). Lambert was committed to promoting and focusing on gay, lesbian and transgender characters and actors, as well as writing trusted accounts of figures like Natalie Wood, his long-standing friend, and the filming process of Gone With the Wind (1939). Because of his connections in Hollywood (he moved there from England quite early on in his life), he was able to collect together reliable information, which he was particularly interested in showcasing as part of his work.
An interesting life, which ended when he was 80 years old in 2005. His final book was the biography of Natalie Wood, published in 2004, which was praised as authentic and caring by Wood’s daughter and other people who knew her. This kind of care for people in a location that was, and is, notorious for exploitation comes through in his fiction, and I think The Slide Area is perhaps the most indicative of his thought processes behind that. This one is the only text I’ve read of his that is told from the perspective of a man, someone that you can probably safely assume is based on Lambert himself. The unnamed narrator is a screenwriter who is precariously employed, and who spends much of his time walking around Hollywood seeing and meeting its large cast of characters. These are not just actors or ‘movie people’ -- one person he focuses on is a Countess, one of the last Austro-Hungarian aristocrats living who has taken residence in California during the twilight of her life. Another is the wayward son of a top agent, and another is a friend from his English school that he runs into by chance. There are actors and directors peppered into the novel, but what this is mostly about is the strange assortment of people who are drawn to Hollywood, who are never written about disparagingly. The narrator, and perhaps Lambert himself, is instead investing in showing the town as it truly is, and for taking people as they are, whether or not they are morally ‘good’ or not. People just seem to ‘happen’ to the narrator, as in the young woman he meets in a 24 hour diner who has escaped the decaying hotel her aunts run in order to chase her dreams of being an actress, or the aforementioned son of an agent who causes trouble for himself and anyone he decides should have his attention in that moment.
The Slide Area is more like a set of short stories than a narrative-led novel, although several characters pop in and out of the text as a whole. Each chapter focuses on a different person that the narrator meets, with very little information given about him himself, aside from some of his daily movements. The Slide Area of the title is the dangerous landslip areas that keep falling down near the ocean, taking houses and people with it. When I ordered the book online, the title gave me the impression of those AI graphics of the ‘backrooms’, liminal spaces that have like, office spaces, swimming pools and play areas with slides that lead to other rooms. They’re meant to make you feel uneasy and like you can’t get out. I knew that this would obviously not be what Lambert was referring to, but he does actually talk about California in similar terms during parts of the book. For example:
It is only a few miles’ drive to the ocean, but before reaching it I shall be nowhere. Hard to describe the impression of unreality, because it is intangible; almost supernatural; something in the air. (The air…Last night on the weather telecast the commentator, mentioning electric storms near Palm Springs and heavy smog in Los Angeles, described the behaviour of the air as ‘neurotic’. Of course. Like everything else the air must be imported and displaced, like the water driven along huge aqueducts from distant reservoirs,like the palm trees tilting above mortuary signs and laundromats along Sunset Boulevard.) Nothing belongs. Nothing belongs except the desert soil and the gruff eroded-looking mountains to the north.
Beautiful prose, isn’t it? It reminds me of both Christopher Isherwood (especially his A Single Man (1964)) and Lucia Berlin. What he gets so right here is the unreality of a setting that is all about unreality in its focus on making films, which he then populates with a kind of hyper-reality in his generous but truthful-seeming accounts of the people he encounters there.
I really can’t wait to encounter more of Lambert’s work, and I actually have a copy of his Natalie Wood biography so I’d love to get to that soon. I encourage you to seek him out also, especially if you have an interest in Hollywood or in LGBTQ hidden histories.
More next week!
Books on my radar
I’m finding it quite agonising choosing books to take away with me, so who knows what the next newsletter will look like.
Love this so much. And agreed about Lucia! It's something about the attention to liminality and the long, parenthesised asides — and the mix of high and low registers...