Where have all the eccentrics gone?

I’m not even sure exactly where the interest has come from, but in the last few weeks I’ve been learning more about Ernest Hemingway. He was some character. Either unlucky or careless he had some truly spectacular accidents: once going to the toilet at his flat in Paris he pulled the cord that opened the skylight instead of the toilet chain and pulled it so hard that the whole skylight fell on his head resulting in a visit to hospital. Another time, whilst in Africa, the plane he was in with his wife crashed leaving them by a waterfall surrounded by elephants. Rescued a day later he was then in a second plane crash almost immediately – and survived both.

You don’t hear such things about E L James and Dan Brown, the biggest selling authors of the last decade. The most that can be said about Brown is that he hangs upside down every morning wearing gravity boots. E L James is the most reclusive of characters. What of the other member of the Holy Trinity? JK Rowling. Writing a book in a café and now part of cyberspace and a multi-millionaire is ordinary when compared to the writers of the past.

Ian Fleming, once a member of the Secret Service during World War II, retreated to Jamaica each year to write the Bond books. Lord Byron and Percy Shelley – renowned eccentrics and fully paid up members of the odd ball club. Barbara Cartland was a vision in pink and taffeta – although the vision would cause nightmares in many who saw her. Enid Blyton was another strange one and Agatha Christie disappeared for 10 days, with those missing days never explained – despite the strange film with Elliot Gould and Cybil Shepherd.

The point is do you have to be eccentric or even considered odd to be a writer? Poets do seem to capture this flavour of oddness or is that because they more performers than authors? The idea that they have to go out in front of people rather than the people taking them home with them, as they do with a book. (In the photo is a poet at a wedding - thanks Justin Thyme).

The irony, of course, that many of the great eccentric writers did not meet the best of ends. Hemingway shot himself, Fleming died through ill health – largely because of his Bond-like lifestyle, Shelley drowned in an accident at sea and Lord Byron died of illness whilst fighting in Greece. The question remains then. Do authors and poets have a need to be eccentric or are they odd by conventional standards? And by the standards of Hemingway, and the others, are today’s writers as ordinary as I have painted them? Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.

Yours literally

Andy Gibney

@andygibneystwitter

When magic pours into your eyes

What is it about the magic of books? Those of us who love them find ourselves transported to imaginary lands, we get inside people’s heads and they get inside ours. We learn from them, we are fascinated by them, those of us who are true book geeks love the feel of certain books and others are so a part of us that they are like old friends.

Where does your book love come from? A couple of weeks ago I was talking about the Ladybird books story. Since then I’ve bought 7 of them from a local bookshop; they range in age from 1956 to 1973 and what is surprising is the quality of these books. Not just the quality of the secondhand copies that I bought, but the quality of the writing and the quality of the artwork. As I browsed through my new/old purchases something magical happened; memories were stirred. Memories so real and yet not thought of for many, many years. One of the books was on cowboys and I remembered a cowboy toy I had as a child, not a Woody from ‘Toy Story’, but an Action man like figure and what reminded me of this was one picture in the Ladybird book. It was a book that I had devoured as a child and now, more than 40 years later, I was transported back in time. It took me totally by surprise.

It has continued. I remembered reading ‘Lord of the Rings’ when I worked in warehouses in the early 1980’s; I remembered sitting on a train in London reading James Clavell’s ‘Shogun’; another memory was laughing out loud on a tube train to Bill Cosby’s book on fatherhood. Or reading ‘Watch My Back’ by Geoff Thompson and thinking I couldn’t keep reading this as I had to go back to work, then realising I was self-employed and now reading was part of ‘work’.

At the moment I’m reading ‘Careless Love’ the second part of Peter Guralnick’s masterpiece on the life of Elvis Presley and I’m reminded of Jerry Hopkins biography that I read as a child so much that the spine fell off. Books, books and more books. I thumb through my shelves and see the works of Ian Fleming, Malcom Gladwell, William Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I see my friend’s books: ‘Madam’ by Becky Adams, ‘The Botty Rules’ by Nigel Botterill, ‘The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment’ by Isabel Losada and I am reminded that every one of these encouraged me to become a writer. To let my words flow from my head and onto a piece of paper that someone, somewhere would be just like me. Moved by the written word, to think “I can do this, I can write a book.” I might not be Stephen King or Dan Brown or Carlos Castenada, but my words might move someone, might affect someone, might make them laugh or make them cry.

Words are all we have and yet they are everything we need. Read more, write more, express yourself more and do it through the love of the written word.

Yours lovingly

Andy Gibney

@andygibneystwitter

www.underthefable.com

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