Eudora Welty hated air conditioning. Why? She loved seeing and feeling the seasons change: “People simply cannot understand that I don’t air condition, but this is so lovely. The other day between the time I was fixing to go to the Jitney and the time I left I counted six robins on the lawn. I said to myself, ‘The season is changing.’”
Of the Cambridge Five spies, Donald Maclean was one of the most effective. A new biography of the man shows why, but it is also an indulgent account of the man’s motives, “casting Maclean as an idealist who pursued a noble ideal valiantly upheld to the end”: “Most top spies have a period when their intelligence is most valued. The Russians do seem to have had a genius first for spotting the talent and then for nudging them into an array of posts where they could do most harm; each of the Cambridge Five at one time held jobs where they could pass on secrets of exceptional worth. Arnold Deutsch, the KGB handler of both Philby and Maclean, was extraordinarily acute, sussing out the psychology of both men (and probably giving Maclean his first codename, Orphan). Maclean’s purple patch, in Soviet eyes, was probably from 1944 to 1948, when he was a top man in the British embassy in Washington and then head of the American department in Whitehall. Maclean sent copies of thousands of the most sensitive papers concerning American and British policy and plans to the Russians. He read and passed on the most intimate exchanges between Churchill and Roosevelt and between Churchill and Truman. Before the meetings in Yalta and Potsdam, where the war victors in effect divided up the world, he told Stalin exactly what the Allies were planning, for instance for Poland and the Balkans (especially Greece). He later revealed the entire game-plan for the foundation of Nato. He enabled the Russians to work out exactly how many atomic bombs the Americans had (Truman had exaggerated in public) and whether they would contemplate dropping them during the Korean war (they did not). As the American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, exclaimed after Maclean’s exposure: ‘My God, he knew everything!’”
Salvador Dalí’s wife, Gala, preferred the shadows to the spotlight but managed a great deal of the artist’s private life and public affairs: “Gala liked to read Tarot cards, but she was also a savvy businesswoman who knew how to attract gallerists while keeping Dalí away from people she distrusted. In a diary entry in 1939, the novelist Anaïs Nin recounted how Gala would assign specific tasks to her and to other people to help her husband during their stay together in the house of Caresse Crosby, an American patron of the arts.”
Giacometti’s waning influence and powerful work: “Giacometti’s stick figures literally embodied that specific moment in human history in a way that would have made little sense before 1945 and that makes somewhat less urgent sense today. We may live in an age as ironic as Giacometti’s, but we have lost that tragic sense of life that so crucially defined his art and the general culture of the postwar years.”
How Mary Karr’s conversion and recovering from alcoholism changed her poetry: “Tropic of Squalor is less inwardly focused and more ambitious than her earlier poetry. The most obvious example is her new elegiac bent. Having set aside the long war with her charismatic but troubled mother in ‘Illegitimate Progenitor,’ Karr tries to relieve her own guilt as she memorializes her longsuffering father, an oil worker in the Gulf of Mexico who was Karr’s mother’s fifth and seventh husband.”
Essay of the Day:
Who is the literary entrepreneur, Anna March, who has branded herself “an intersectional feminist, sensitive to issues of race, class and LGBTQ concerns”? Someone who owes $380,000 in Washington, D.C., and who also goes by the name of Nancy Kruse, among others. Melissa Chadburn and Carolyn Kellogg report in the Los Angeles Times:
“She threw a welcome party for herself at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, a beautiful old building with black and white marble, Alice-in-Wonderland floors. The guests, more than 400 of L.A.’s literati: authors, editors, publishers, book reviewers, literary agents, the local independent presses.
“Anna March whisked in and out, a flash of pink hair in a polka-dot dress. The 2015 party at the Ace’s mezzanine bar, serving free drinks, was packed to overflowing.
“March had never published a book but had been quietly working literary Los Angeles’ social media connections for months. A spunky, unapologetic, sex-positive feminist ready to raise hell, she was supportive and flattering. She was also conspicuously generous — concerned about the line of people waiting to get into the party, March asked a pair of new acquaintances if she should give $20 bills to those stuck on the sidewalk. The bill for the night would total more than $22,000. Why is she doing this? people asked, stealing glances at March. Some had a larger question: Who was Anna March?
“That was a harder question to answer than you might think. Anna March first appeared around 2011, when she started publishing online. Before that, she was known by different names in different cities. In researching this story, The Times found four: Anna March, Delaney Anderson, Nancy Kruse and Nancy Lott.
“In three places — Los Angeles, San Diego and Rehoboth Beach, Del. — March became a part of the literary community. She won over new friends, even accomplished authors but especially writers trying to find a way into that world, with her generosity, her enthusiasm and apparent literary success — only to leave town abruptly.
“In two others — Montgomery County, Md., and Washington, D.C. — she has had financial judgments against her, the latter for more than $380,000.”
Photo: Fuego
Poem: Kathleen Norris, “The Monastery Orchard”
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