Ten Years in the Tub Read Online Free PDF

severe dressing-down, and only avoided a three-issue suspension by promising never to repeat the offense.Anyway, We (i.e. the Polysyllabic Spree) have decided that if it looks as though I might not enjoy a book, I will abandon it immediately, and not mention it by name. This is what happened with the Literary Novel and the Work of Nonfiction—particularly regrettable in the latter case, as I was supposed to be reviewing it for a London newspaper. The loss of income there, and the expense of flying from London to San Francisco to face the Committee (needless to say, those bastards wouldn’t stump up), means that this has been an expensive month.
    I did, however, finish Blake Bailey’s biography of Yates that I started last month. I haven’t changed my view that it could easily have afforded to shed a few of its six-hundred-plus pages—Yates doesn’t sell his first story until page 133—but I’m glad I stuck with it. Who’d have thought that the author of Revolutionary Road wrote speeches for Robert Kennedy, or provided the model for Alton Benes, the insane writer-father of Seinfeld ’s Elaine? (Yates’s daughter Monica, an ex-girlfriend of Larry David, was apparently an inspiration for Elaine herself.) And who’d have thought that the author of an acknowledged American classic, as well as several other respected novels and an outstanding collection of short stories, could have ended up living and then dying in such abject penury? A Tragic Honesty , like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in a straitjacket are thin on the ground—or no one tells them to me, anyway—but it seemed to happen to Lowell and Yates all the time; there are ten separate page references under “breakdowns” in the index of A Tragic Honesty .
    Just as frightening to anyone who writes (or who is connected intimately to a writer) is Yates’s willingness to cannibalize his life—friends, lovers, family, work—for his fiction: just about everyone he ever met was able to find a thinly disguised, and frequently horrific, version of themselves in a novel or a story somewhere. Those who have read The Easter Parade will recall the savagely-drawn portrait of Pookie, the pathetic, vain, drunken mother of the Grimes sisters; when I tell you that Yates’s mother was known to everyone as “Dookie,”you will understand just how far Yates was prepared to go.
    It was something of a relief to turn to Jasper Rees’s biography of Arsene Wenger—not just because it’s short, but because Wenger’s career as a football manager is currently both highly successful and unfinished. I don’t often pick up books about football any more—I wrote one once, and though the experience didn’t stop me from wanting to watch the sport, as I feared it might, it did stop me from wanting to read about it—but I love Arsene, who, weirdly and neatly, coaches my team, Arsenal, and who would probably feature at about number eight in a list of People Who Have Changed My Life for the Better. He transformed a mediocre, plodding side into a thing of beauty, and on a good day, Arsenal plays the best football that anyone in England has ever seen. He was the first foreign manager to win an English championship, and his influence is such that everyone now wants to employ cool, cerebral Europeans. (The previous fashion was for ranting, red-faced Scotsmen.) Even the English national team has one now, much to the disgust of tabloid sportswriters and the more rabidly patriotic football fan.
    I gave an interview to Rees for his book, but despite my contribution, it’s a pretty useful overview of