FFM: VENTURE: THE TRAVELER'S WORLD, February 1965, edited by Curtis Anderson & Cynthia Kellogg (Cowles Magazines): Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, John D. MacDonald et al.

Venture, the initially hardcover bimonthly published by Cowles Magazines and Broadcasting (the Look magazine people) knew whom they wanted reading their travel magazine... apparently not sold on newsstands, founded with the February 1964 issue, by the 1965 issue I have in front of me they were charging almost $3 per issue via an annual subscription of $17.50 ...when most slick magazines ran one 50c-$1 an issue on newsstands. The advertisers were mostly airlines and cruise ship lines with some cars thrown in, including inducement to buy a VW Beetle in Europe and have it shipped home when the vacation was over. You needed disposable income to afford this magazine, and at least the aspiration of throwing that income around to visit the destinations they covered, in rather good photography and not the least expensive (and often English emigrant or frequent visitor) writers. Not challenging themselves too much, but nonetheless coasting on practiced charm. So, too, this issue, with essays by Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, John D. MacDonald and Graham Greene (though only Waugh, with the then-recent reissued/filmed bestseller in part about the British exile community in Los Angeles The Loved One, getting cover billing). Alistair Reid, not yet a commodity, is a columnist (MacDonald is given no great attention, either, despite serving as both photographer and essayist about the Everglades). Cowles spared little expense (considering they were charging the equivalent of well over $20 an issue to subscribers in inflation-calculated terms, they might well); lenticular covers were soon offered on the magazine.

Muriel Spark writes about how she would Get Away to NYC to do her writing, living in a certain unnamed hotel for months on end to, among other ends, remove herself from the familial nature of the UK community of writers and editors, all apparently enmeshed and without boundaries; in New York, they will leave you be if you say you need to work. She also notes that in 1964, the most common British complaint she'd hear about the city was the poor quality of the restaurants, somewhat comically given the reputation of British cuisine even then (raised under straitened circumstances as a Scot, Spark notes she's usually willing to eat anything put before her without complaint). She also, as a faithful Roman Catholic, passes along a few observations about the churches around the world and particularly those in Gotham...they tend, among other factors, to have more Bleeding Hearts among the sacred art up on the walls. 

David Holden, by this time a "roving reporter" for the Manchester Guardian,  provides a sort of sub-Mailer essay on the three cities of Saigon, Singapore and Bangkok, characterizing each in gender terms...Saigon corruptly female, Singapore brusquely male, Bangkok a harem eunuch. He isn't quite as self-indulgent in prose or personal anecdote as Mailer, and he does drop some rather sensible observations in with his mild contempt for people trying to make their ways in the tough times each city faces (a tendency that is too common in most of the lesser writers for this elitist magazine). He does remind us that Burma and Indonesia are as wartorn at the time as the eventual reunited Vietnam.

John D. MacDonald gets no credit in the table of contents for his photo-feature (handsome) about, and back 0f the book essay on how best to tour, the Everglades; among other advice, he suggests not bothering with airboats (Sterling Archer would be disappointed). 



For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB: THE LOVED ONE by Evelyn Waugh and some other Funny Books...

The contemporary Dell paperback (the
 edition I read) w/Chas. Addams cover.

I've been reading about humor and satire recently, sometimes a dull and infrequently a dangerous thing, and it occurred to me how many genuinely or reasonably good and how many rather tired or otherwise not so good humorous novels I've read over the decades...among those aimed at adults, the most thoroughly successful I remember off the top would be the novella The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's jaundiced look at Los Angeles and the primary industry in the city, also the funeral industry (and its offshoots) and the British expatriate colony that clustered around the entertainment establishment in a vaguely marking-time way at the turn of the '60s. I've yet to see the entirety of the film version, but the novella was more than sufficient for anyone's purposes, right up to the biggest laugh-line in the book, a grim little joke to cap the rest assembled here. Brevity, soul of wit, and all, though certainly there is no lack of long, funny novels...it's simply easier to sustain a consistent tone, particularly of black comedy much as with its cousins horror and suspense fiction, in the shorter lengths (and this novella can remind one, particularly in retrospect, of another contemporary short novel with ultraviolet humor and even a certain amount of similar undertaking within, Robert Bloch's Psycho). A light touch never hurts...Waugh wouldn't dream of making matters any more blatant than he needs to, though of course the grotesquery of much of what he's dealing with here takes care of that for him...which is part of why I enjoyed this novella so much and found very little to stir enthusiasm in, for example, the blatant and unsubtle pity-success, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which novel was never content to simply squirt water from a plastic lapel flower if it could hit you with an oversized powder puff as well. The residue was palpable. 

Likewise, as I recall some of the less successful humorous novels of the past decades, sometimes the invention or motivation simply flags, and one is left with the mildly amusing (Art Buchwald's Irving's Delight was meant to be as scathing of the advertising and, in another odd kinship with the Waugh, the pet food industries and related matters as the Waugh was in its compass, but Buchwald was rarely too prone to go for the jugular, hence probably both the popularity of his column and the obscurity most of his work, very much including this novel, has fallen into since his death; Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth had far less restraint, and so their The Space Merchants has at least a good-sized if infrequently-heard-from cult following, and such similar work from them as Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" can be utterly plagiarized for other cult-followed items as the Mike Judge film Idiocracy). It's not as if the models for the likes of Buchwald or Erma Bombeck weren't at times at least as outraged or at least as amused as Waugh...think of Jean Kerr's parody of Mike Hammer (and of the Dramatic Reading) collected in her breakthrough volume Please Don't Eat the Daisies (though, sadly, her corrosive mockery there isn't what she's remembered for), or Robert Benchley at his most enervated. 

Ah, well. I'll have more (and probably better) to say about a number of these and perhaps some more over the next several weeks (I really should be talking about Bruce Jay Friedman here, if not also the Angry Young Men and Heller and Thurber and Ms. Parker and Twain...). And I see Bill Crider was inspired by an old review of mine to look up Nelson Algren's anthology...I'm honored. Better essays and reviews by Bill and others are linkable at Patti Abbott's blog today...

The Library of America version.