Fred Kaplan (1) (1937–)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3787394.html

Really interesting book about one of the less successful American presidents, at least considered as a president - only the second (after his own father) to fail to be re-elected. But John Quincy Adams had a long political career both behind him and, uniquely, ahead of him apart from his four not very happy years in the White House; he had been the USA's diplomatic representative to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia and the United Kingdom, a United States senator, and Secretary of State before becoming president, and then after losing re-election in 1828, went on to serve in the House of Representatives from 1831 until he had a fatal stroke at his desk in the chamber in 1848. (No living US President has ever served in the US House of Representatives; the last were the elder Bush, who served two terms more than fifty years ago, and Gerald Ford, who was a Congressman from 1949 to 1973.)

The climax of his career came in 1841, a decade after he had left the White House, when he defended the captured slaves who had taken control of the Spanish slave ship Amistad and subsequently been captured by the US coastguard; he successfully convinced the Supreme Court that the treaty with Spain which he himself had negotiated did not apply here, and exposed some embarrassing inconsistencies in the paperwork supplied by the Executive branch, as a result of which the Africans were liebrated back to Africa. He had always been viscerally opposed to slavery, though felt he could not say so out loud until near the end of his career.

Adams, like his father, left a lot of writing behind, including a lot of poetry which Kaplan integrates into the narrative. A lot of it is written to his deeply loved wife Louisa, who was born and brought up in London, though by American parents; she was the only First Lady born outside what are now the United States before Melania Trump. He was in St Petersburg during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. He negotiated the Spanish cession of Florida to the United States. He wasn't a good party politician, which is why he barely scraped into office in the Presidency (the only President apart from Jefferson to be elected by the House due to lack of majority in the electoral college). But his intellectual ability was clearly valued even by those who opposed him politically.

A good book from which I learned a lot.… (meer)

As a writer and historian, Thomas Carlyle stands as one of the dominant figures of Victorian literature. Growing up in Scotland, he was a shy boy who studied for the ministry and the law before deciding to embark on a career as a writer. After starting out as a literary critic he moved on to become a historian, outlining a vision of history as a chronicle of heroes who shaped events - a view that alienated him from the growing liberal and democratic trends of his time.

Drawing upon Carlyle's enormous correspondence and personal writings, Fred Kaplan provides a detailed study of the man. Much of Carlyle's life is uninteresting, coming across as constant intellectual anxiety and a never-ending concern about illness, frequently punctuated in his early years by moves in search of a more congenial locale. Yet Kaplan describes it in a surprisingly readable manner, one that moves the reader smoothly through what might otherwise be turgid stretches. His examination of Carlyle's tense marriage is especially strong; a woman of considerable gifts in her own right, she proved as popular in London's literary circles as Carlyle himself, though the pleasure she drew from this was often offset by her own frequent illnesses and fights with her husband. Punctuating all of this is Kaplan's analysis of Carlyle's ideas, which he often develops within the context of the historian's many contacts with the leading literary figures of his day - a perspective that adds further to his insights into his personality.

Yet while Kaplan's biography provides an excellent portrait of Carlyle's personal life, it lacks an examination of the very thing that makes him worthy of study: his writings. Kaplan does recount Carlyle's efforts to write his many books and essays, but the finished products themselves are never analyzed for what they said or how they were received by the reading public. This is a glaring omission in what is otherwise a fine study of an important Victorian historian, one whose work had a significant impact on the thought of his era.… (meer)

A quote from The Observer, an interview with Vidal in 2007 – I am using it as a potted review of this book.
““The catalogue raisonné of Vidal's remarkable meetings is a mini-history of Anglo-American literature and politics, from EM Forster and Eleanor Roosevelt to Rupert Everett and Hillary Clinton. 'The best thing about being Anglophone,' he observes, elegiacally, 'is that you have two countries.' As a young man, he encountered Harold Acton, Samuel Barber, Cecil Beaton, Albert Camus, Chips Channon, James Dean, William Faulkner, Federico Fellini, Greta Garbo, Evelyn Waugh (whom he describes as 'a drunken social climber') and George Santayana. The enfant terrible of the transatlantic literary scene, he partied with Isherwood, slept with Kerouac, dined with Auden, travelled with Tennessee Williams ('the Bird') and enjoyed a strange, platonic friendship with Anais Nin.
The Man Who Knew Everyone was especially successful in postwar London. Vidal's English connection, a source of pride and gratification, and well-represented by the signed photographs surrounding him in Hollywood, included Princess Margaret, Kenneth Tynan, Alec Guinness and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the Bois de Boulogne. It is a mark of his ease at this altitude, possibly as the perfect guest and also as a formidably entertaining wit, that he is emphatically neither a name dropper nor a snob. What people liked about Vidal, I suspect, was his exquisite manners, his contrarian mind and the exhilarating range of his gifts. The attraction was mutual: they were as much drawn to him as he to them.””
As someone who reads one biography which leads to another biography and so on, many of the names above are familiar to me as I have read biographies of Hillary Clinton, Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Chips Channon, James Dean, Kenneth Tynan, Alec Guinness, Duke and Duchess of Windsor and, of course, the diaries of Anais Nin. He also knew Amelia Earhart and so very many others I have read. It was a pleasure to meet them all again gathered together passing through Gore Vidal’s life like a cat’s cradle. The book was 850 pages of tiny print and slow going. Not boring but also not exciting, just interesting enough to keep going but dull enough to keep putting it down time after time to go off and do things like dishes. This is a major, very very detailed, not at all salacious look at Gore Vidal’s life and a must read for any true fan.… (meer)