Along with that I am reading Stephen Spender's autobiography/memoirs, World Within World, and for pure fun, Casablanca: Behind the Scenes by Harlan Lebo and Julius Epstein, the latter one of the writers of the famous movie. I had read Casablanca before, having bought it years ago during my first love affair with the movie, but I like to read something light and fun during breaks from more serious reading.
McCullough's The Greater Journey is an enjoyable. There are parts of it I don't particularly care for and tend to read through quickly, and am then surprised where the author has taken me. It's as if I am getting bored wandering through some forest path when all of a sudden I come across a most delightful scene, forgetting immediately the long, tedious path that led me there, and thrilled that I persevered.
I'm not exactly sure how he would have done it, but McCullough follows a bit of Parisian history through the eyes of the Americans that flooded to Europe after 1830. One way to have accomplished this feat, I suppose was to have read a biography of one American writer who returned to Paris during that time period, and that creating a nexus of names of those who the American writer met or mentioned in his travels to France. Regardless, the book ends up being a collection of vignettes of names one recognizes as the who's who of America during this period, generally writers, poets, artists, and sculptors and a few other disciplines including medicine. The latter includes Elizabeth Blackwell who was the first American woman to have become a physician, and visited Paris in 1840, to study medicine there, as many great physicians did at that time.
Among the writers mentioned was Margaret Fuller who I would have completely overlooked had I not recently read American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever, another excellent, albeit too short, study of American writers of Concord, Massachusetts, in the early 19th century.
The Spender memoir is outstanding. It is the most challenging, and therefore, the most rewarding of the three books I am now reading. I have always been fascinated by W. H. Auden, having read several of his works, but I was frustrated that I didn't have a feeling for the man himself. I was quite surprised, then, that Stephen Spender was an Oxford classmate of Auden's and it was such a joy to get a firsthand description of W.H. Auden. Many, many pages of the book are about Auden. And to add to that, I will be introduced to Christopher Isherwood in the next chapter, another novelist who has intrigued me but of whom I have not yet read. And looking in the index, it appears that Spender devotes much time to my all-time favorite, Virginia Woolf.
From page 106 of Spender's memoir:
Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Hemingway revealed to me areas of sensibility of which I had hardly before reading them. For example, the sensibility which can enable one to think about what one is thinking while one is thinking it. Hemingway made me ware of a quality and texture in the words upo a page which are like the rough surface of a plaster wall.I have read several Hemingway biographies and the autobiography of each of Hemingway's wives (at least three; I can't remember if the fourth wrote an autobiography; if she did, I read it; I just don't recall). I have read several of Hemingway's novels, but have never understood the allure of his works. I am obviously missing something and need to re-read them now that I am a better reader. If Stephen Spender puts Hemingway into the same category as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Hemingway is way more important than I realize.
What differentiated these from previous writers seemed, above all else, to be that they drew attention to the processes of thinking and perceiving. Other writers have made their readers aware of the significance of a stain on a wall. Virginia Woolf makes them aware of the moment in which an observer becomes conscious of the stain: the stain is made vivid by the description of the state of mind of perceiving.
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