Good evening!
I hope you’re well-- we’re almost at the end of January, which has lasted 8 millions years, as it always does.
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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’m nearly finished with Gavin Lambert’s Running Time (1982), which has been such a great reading experience. It’s as close to an ‘epic’ as a novel about Hollywood can be, in that it spans its very beginnings in the late 1910s, up until the 80s, covering a multitude of cultural aspects. It’s about a mother and a daughter who arrive in LA after the death of their husband/father, finding Hollywood to be a bit of a dead town, and nothing like they imagined. Baby Jewel, the daughter, is 7 years old but can pass for younger because she is so petite and because of the efforts of her mother, Elva, who doesn’t want her to grow up. Because of Elva’s determination, Baby Jewel becomes a world-famous child star in reels and movies, until she reaches an ‘awkward’ age of 18, when she is no longer thought of as cute. Her adulthood is spent picking up occasional projects, but she is economically fine because her mother has become a property magnate and investor, and one of the richest people in Hollywood. The novel is told in sections from Elva’s diary, interspersed by reflections from Baby as she reads them some years later.
Although it seems like the focus would be on Baby because she is the actress in a book about Hollywood, it's really her mother who takes centre stage. She is shrewd to Kris Jenner proportions, ferrying Baby through her career and able to see what everyone will love a year in advance. This was an interesting novel to read alongside his earlier Inside Daisy Clover (1963), which also has a strong mother figure, but in the other direction. Daisy is also a child star, but entirely of her own making and determination -- her mother is both emotionally and physically absent from her. Elva’s overbearing nature doesn’t really act as the opposite, as she’s equally as damaging to her child in her pushiness. What’s interesting is that neither children, Baby Jewel or Daisy, seem to feel this because of their focus on the bigger picture, which is, in both cases, the actual pictures. Hollywood is also a kind of terrible mother in how it nurtures and abandons the people who love it in equal measure.
Elva’s early investments in land and property sustain her and her daughter, which is something I thought was really interesting -- Lambert takes the time to acknowledge that Hollywood wasn’t only built on the movies, there were also a lot of other capitalist ventures upholding its physical location. This is something I’ve found hinted at in a lot of texts about early Hollywood, as in Jean Steins’ West of Eden (2016), in that investment from other revenue streams was equally as important in the making of a film as finding the right script and stars. This is a novel that gets into the nitty-gritty of the culture, and goes for a less-obvious route.
Running Time covers even more ground than this, as in its presentation of plastic surgery, alcoholism and drug use, organised crime, the rise of Las Vegas, queerness and divorce. Now I’ve listed some of the themes, it seems a bit pointedly sordid, but it really doesn’t feel like that in the reading of it. In fact, it has an almost comically chipper tone to it because Baby Jewel and Elva are such fun characters, who take most things quite light-heartedly. They’re Hollywood through-and-through, in that they accept that things are very often inexplicable and odd, and there’s no real use fighting it. In fact, a lot of the time they use it to their advantage, as in the introduction of the Hays code when they decided to ham up Baby’s young looks and go in for sticky-sweet projects that would be approved. (As a side note, I think the Hays code was handled really well because it quite robustly showed how it impacted people’s work, and how people got around it.)
I experienced something I haven’t in a while with a novel with Running Time, in that it was incredibly engrossing. Sometimes I felt a bit dazed after I read 50 pages or so because it is so detailed and dense, without becoming dull with it. It kind of felt like reading when you were little, when your concentration span was a lot better and you didn’t get the urge to check your phone (perhaps not true for everyone but it is true for me). I think that, above all, is a testament to how well Lambert presents Hollywood, a place he clearly loved while not being naive to its faults.
More next week!
Books on my radar
I’ve been sent quite a lot of books this week (thank u publishers!) including Maria Bastaros’ hungry for what?, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn and published by Daunt in June, Rachel Khong’s Real Americans published by Hutchinson & Heinemann in May and Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakely, published by Bloomsbury in March.