Tag: books-tag/features

As an artist Florine Stettheimer embraced a decorative, slightly camp aesthetic with which she created paeons to the city life she adored. “She was just so good at capturing those really ephemeral moments of modern life, whether that’s a street scene in New York or the Stetteheimer gatherings,” says Whalen. At the same time, she refused to be cowed by modernity’s cult of youth, painting herself full-frontal nude at the age of 44.

While Florine was painting, Carrie was creating her own fantasy world in the form of a doll’s house, which intriguingly subverted the boundaries between art and craft. A standout feature is the ballroom, which contains around 30 miniature versions of paintings and sculptures by the Stettheimer’s artist friends, including a tiny version of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. Whalen believes that Carrie’s doll’s house was an influence on Duchamp’s own miniature project, Boîte-en-valise, which he began in 1935. However, as with Norton and Wood’s involvement with Fountain, this has been overlooked.

The reasons for these women’s relative anonymity today is down to multiple factors. Rising rents forced the creative communities of Greenwich Village to disband, and, post-World War One, conservative forces were keen to have women back in their box. When the art history of the era was written, their contribution was conveniently overlooked in favour of their male compatriots.

However, their impact is undeniable. Whalen points out that on a very physical level the map of New York’s contemporary art world would be very different without Armory Show supporters Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Lillie Bliss. Whitney of course founded her eponymous museum while Bliss, alongside Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan, was behind the founding of MoMA.  

When it comes to the more daring artists of the 1910s and 20s, Whalen sees their legacy coming back into its own with second-wave feminist performance artists in the 1960s. “Think of artists like Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann, and the way that they play with the body and sexuality… I think Carolee Schneemann was taking on the Baroness’s legacy in a really wonderful way,” she says.

Ultimately “we’re still coming to understand how important these women’s work was,” says Whalen. “There’s still a lot of work to be done. Their legacy continues to unfold in the present day.”

Radicals and Rogues: The women who made New York modern is out now

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Daisy Buchanan, author of books including Insatiable and Limelight, host of the You’re Booked podcast and Jilly Cooper superfan, first discovered the writer as a teenager. “I think I was about 13 when I fell in love with Jilly’s books,” she tells BBC Culture. “Riders and Rivals were being passed around at school, almost 20 years after they were first published, which is a testament to her power. Her stories are dramatic, extravagant, escapist tales – but while she sets her books in glamorous worlds, her characters are so vulnerable, loveable and human. It’s only in Jilly-land where you get heroines who triumph while feeling self-conscious about their spots.”

As it had for millions of readers before her, the sex left a lasting impression, too. “She was the first writer I read who talked openly about women seeking pleasure,” says Buchanan. “She’s not the first writer to write about sex, but I think she’s one of the first to show sex on the page that is tender, joyful and loving – and to say that you don’t need to be perfect to seek those sexual experiences. In her stories, sex is sometimes Earth-shatteringly profound, and sometimes simply fun.”

Escapist and educational?

This positive attitude to sex was a huge influence when Buchanan started writing her own novels. “My first novel, Insatiable, wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Jilly Cooper’s novels,” she says. “Jilly’s books formed my emotional sex education, and Insatiable… owes an enormous debt to Rivals and Riders. I wanted to write escapist sex with real emotions.”

But while there is much to celebrate in Cooper’s portrayals of sex, it wasn’t always fun – or consensual. “There are rapes that happen in Jilly’s books, and it is very rare that the rapist has any kind of comeuppance,” says Burge. In one particularly disturbing scene in Riders, Rupert coerces his wife Helen into a sexual act. “It’s a really horrible scene,” says Burge. “Those aspects are difficult to read now.”

Despite Campbell-Black’s frequently appalling treatment of women, he’s continued to be the hero of Cooper’s books. As for feminists, they are rarely sympathetic in her novels, and usually marked by their hairy legs. Cooper is, of course, of a different era– as evidenced in a recent interview with The Sunday Times. She thinks the #MeToo movement has made people too “tense” and “anxious” about sex. “I’m quite depressed about sex at the moment. I don’t think people are having nearly as much fun.”

In her fictional worlds, though, there’s still plenty of fun to be had. Tackle! sees the return of Campbell-Black (now a reformed and faithful husband), who buys ailing local football club Searston Rovers and propels them to the Champions League. If it sounds like Cooper has been binging Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham, her interest in football was actually sparked by a lunch with Alex Ferguson, while Searston Rovers are loosely based on her local team, Forest Green Rovers, owned by eco-millionaire Dale Vince.

As Martin Scorsese’s latest epic Killers of the Flower Moon, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone, is released this week, Caryn James explores the terrible true history that inspired the film.

“They won’t remember”, Robert De Niro’s character says in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. As the real-life William Hale, a cattle baron in 1920s Oklahoma, he is deluded in thinking that the Osage Nation would move past the memory that dozens of their members who had become rich from oil rights were systematically killed for their money. But the line leaps out of the film as a reminder that much of the world did forget, until the events were restored to the mainstream in David Grann’s dynamic, deeply researched 2017 bestseller, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which inspired the film. While he was writing the book and long after, Grann tells BBC Culture, “The most common comment I have received is: ‘I can’t believe I never learned about this’”, adding, “I think that is a reflection to some degree of the underlying force that led to these crimes, which was prejudice.”

Spoiler alert: This article contains plot spoilers for Killers of the Flower Moon.

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Those murders and their near-erasure from history go to the heart of US culture. “American democracy arose from the dispossession of American Indians”, the Yale University historian Ned Blackhawk writes in his recent book The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History. “Scholars have recently come to view African American slavery as central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans in a similar light,” he writes. His work is part of a trend aiming to restore those injustices to their crucial place.

Dozens of Osage people were systematically murdered for their money in the 1920s (Credit: Getty Images)

At the centre of Killers of the Flower Moon, both the book and film, is Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) a modest, oil-rich Osage whose family was especially targeted, one sister shot to death, another’s house firebombed, their mother most likely poisoned. Later Mollie herself becomes mysteriously, gravely ill. Her true story offers a dramatic example of the cultural atmosphere that allowed what came to be called the “Reign of Terror” to happen, and then to be swept aside.

The pattern of dispossession that began with Columbus continued for hundreds of years. In the 19th Century, the US government forced the Osage off their land in Kansas, so they moved to Oklahoma, where in the 20th Century oil made them fabulously rich, for a time the world’s richest people per capita. Even then, the US government labelled many Indigenous people “incompetent”, a designation that often depended simply on how much Native blood they had. Guardians, often corrupt, were put in place to oversee and restrict how those designated spent their own money. Early in Scorsese’s film we see Mollie meeting with a guardian, even though she is extremely intelligent and capable.

Like the book, the film is extraordinary in the way it captures both Mollie’s intense personal story and the cultural prejudice that fostered the crimes. (Unlike the book, which unfolds like a detective story, the film reveals the killers’ identities early, and there are spoilers ahead for both accounts.) In the early 1920s, William Hale was a powerful force in Osage County, a venal man who regarded Native Americans as less than human while pretending to be the tribe’s friend and benefactor. Hale encourages his equally greedy nephew, the World War One veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) to marry Mollie. We are deliberately left guessing whether Ernest genuinely loves her, wants to marry for money, or some combination of the two, a question that slowly comes to haunt Mollie as well.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a greedy World War One veteran who marries the well-off Osage, Mollie (Lily Gladstone) (Credit: Apple TV+)

Scorsese’s film, using mock archival newsreels, depicts the baffled resentment with which white society regarded the wealthy Osage being driven by chauffeurs, and Native women dressed in fashionable furs and jewels. Mollie herself wore a traditional blanket as a coat and lived a simple life even though she had a large house and servants. But Grann’s book cites a 1920 Harper’s Monthly Magazine article called “Lo, the Rich Indian!” which refers to the oddity of “red millionaires”. Another typical article in a 1922 travel magazine was called “Our Plutocratic Osage Indians”.

Increased public awareness

Despite the condescension, many white people married into the Osage tribe, with sinister motives. When the US government allotted parcels of Oklahoma land to the Osage, the tribe members kept the rights to profit from the oil, called headrights, which importantly could only be inherited, not sold. Marrying an Osage for the inheritance was a way white people could get their hands on the oil money. As Grann tells BBC Culture, “There was a particular diabolical nature to these [murder] plots because they involve people marrying into families pretending to love you while simultaneously plotting to kill you.” While planning murders in the film, Hale bluntly voices the opinion that the Osage are not worthy of their money and eventually not worthy of their lives.

Hale was not alone. “The more I dug into it, the more I realised this was really about a culture of killing and a culture of complicity,” Grann says. “I found evidence of doctors who were administering poison. I found evidence of morticians who were covering up bullet wounds. Some of the guardians and the lawmen and the prosecutors were on the take and either not investigating these crimes or sometimes maybe even had a hand in them, and many others were complicit in their silence.”

William Hale (Robert De Niro) was a cattle baron in 1920s Oklahoma who befriended the Osage, while covertly plotting to kill them (Credit: Apple TV+)

The film reflects that real-life culture of white supremacy. There is a glimpse of the nearby Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, contemporaneous with the Osage murders, in which a prosperous black neighbourhood called Black Wall Street was burned to the ground by a white mob. The film depicts a parade on the main street of the Burkharts’ town, with robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan members marching in the parade just behind a group of women carrying a banner reading “Indian Mothers of Veterans”, a clear indication of how blatant and entrenched in society white supremacy was.

As the Osage murders accumulated, the crimes became so alarming and so frequent that the FBI investigated. Soon the story was receiving national attention. When Hale was convicted of a single murder, it was reported in The New York Times, but the headline was telling in the way it focused on the white criminals and not their Native victim: ‘King of Osage Hills’ Guilty of Murder: Hale, Cattleman, and a Cowboy Are Convicted of Killing an Indian.

Why did such a volatile story, skewed though it was, then virtually disappear? Tara Damron, program director at the White Hair Memorial, a repository of Osage history, and a member of the Osage Nation herself, tells BBC Culture that the erasure “goes to the overall treatment of Native Americans, and indigenous history not being taught, not being included and those voices being silenced”. Indigenous tribes, she says, “have a government to government relationship with the United States that goes back to treaties. What happened to the Osage People during this terrible time in our history is American history, and this story needs to be told.”

At the centre of Killers of the Flower Moon is Mollie Burkhart (played by Lily Gladstone in the film) (Credit: Getty Images)

Killers of the Flower Moon in both forms can now be seen as part of a larger cultural reclamation. In 2011, for $380 million, the US government settled a 12-year-long lawsuit the Osage Nation brought against it for mismanaging the tribe’s funds. In announcing it, a statement from the Department of the Interior said the settlement signalled “President Obama’s commitment to reconciliation and empowerment for American Indian nations”. Today’s Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, is the first ever Native American cabinet secretary, another sign of change.

But some injustices can never be redressed. Grann’s research uncovered many Osage murders that were not investigated and can likely never be solved. “Many killers went free,” Grann says, because the FBI “did not actually uncover this much deeper and darker conspiracy that existed.” The witnesses are now dead and the crimes were often not recorded. “Often you just can’t find the evidentiary material to even identify who the perpetrator was and resolve these cases”, Grann says. As the film and book remind us, though, they can be brought to light and remembered. Since the book was published, Damron has found increased public awareness of the murders. She says, “I hope that cultural attitudes have changed but the impact is yet to be seen”.

Killers of the Flower Moon is released on 20 October.

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However, while some readers might have preferred that crime novel fad, there’s no sign of cosy crime’s popularity flagging in the near future – and there are certainly plenty of cosy crime authors only just getting started. “I feel a strong affinity with this genre now, as I don’t particularly want to write ‘gritty’ crime,” says Everett. “I love being able to add little jokes, and historical detail, and I’ve no interest in grim pathologist detail – I’m focused on the characters and the mystery they need to solve.

Why cosy crime connects

“Cosy crime, at heart, celebrates the best of people alongside the worst – bravery, decency, doggedness alongside the darkness – and I suspect that deep down, I’m an optimist who fundamentally believes that people are usually good,” she continues. “I don’t want to write about serial killers and trauma, it depresses me. I have to spend months with these imaginary people, so it helps if I like them and enjoy their company.

Everett feels that cosy crime speaks to our need for resolution and neat endings in an often messy, unfocused world, and the longing to trust people to ultimately do the right thing. In a lot of other contemporary crime fiction, by comparison, the good guys don’t necessarily win – in fact, it’s often hard to tell, especially in morally ambiguous psychological thrillers and even police procedurals, who the good guys even are.

“I don’t find that need twee at all – I find it vital,” says Everett. “Particularly at the moment, when it’s so hard to trust politicians, the police, the press – it’s natural that we’d turn to a fictional world to see order restored and give us some reassurance that crimes get solved, bad people repent or are punished and good people are rewarded.”

For Osman, genre classifications are redundant anyway. “No one should ever write in a ‘genre’,” he says. “Just write what you’d love to read. Entertain and surprise people. That’s what Christie did, and that’s why we’re still talking about her 100 years later.”

The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman is published by Pamela Dorman Books in the US and Viking in the UK

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Set against the backdrop of a divided, post-war Berlin, the novel tells the story of disillusioned British agent Alec Leamas. Leamas has failed in his mission as head of the West Berlin office of the British Secret Service, and after witnessing the murder of his last undercover operative, Riemick, as he tries to cross the border, he returns to Britain, and requests leave. However, the mysterious Control, the head of “The Circus” – Le Carré’s fictional nickname for MI6, based on its offices’ setting in London’s Cambridge Circus – offers him one last mission before retirement.

Leamas is to purportedly defect to East Germany in order to sow disinformation regarding enemy party member Hans-Dieter Mundt, the man responsible for Riemick’s murder. But, as with all espionage, nothing is what it seems, and, as the mission becomes complicated by Leamas’ cover story, namely his relationship with British Communist Party secretary Liz Gold, tension mounts as to whether he will complete it – or if he is really even meant to.

Amidst the ideological battleground of the Cold War, The Spy transcended the conventional espionage thriller, revealing the raw, gritty reality of field operations undertaken during the period of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie and smuggled microdots. However, Le Carré was less interested in merely dramatising the various nuts and bolts of basic tradecraft – though he certainly did so in more detail than any other writer at the time – and was more concerned with questioning the very act of spying itself, emphasising the amoral techniques used in the invisible battle between East and West intelligence services.

How it manages to be so authentic

Le Carré’s background as a real-life intelligence worker could be felt in the authenticity of his work, especially The Spy, as well as in its decidedly pessimistic tone. Born David Cornwell, Le Carré served in British intelligence from the late 1940s, when, for his National Service, he was stationed in the Austrian city of Graz; with his expertise in German, he helped to interrogate defectors from East Germany.

He then returned to study at Oxford, where he became an informer for MI5 on Communist student groups, before joining the agency full time when he left. And it was when working in the dirty world of phone-tapping and break-ins that he began writing – under a pseudonym, as was a service requirement.

He transferred to MI6 in 1960 and became attached to the embassy in Bonn. The Spy was the last novel he published before he was, like many, compromised by double agent Kim Philby’s infamous 1963 betrayal of his fellow British secret service officers. Philby revealed their covers to the KGB, ending le Carré’s intelligence career for good.

As in The Hours, this sequence in Woolf Works gestures towards Woolf’s death, opening with a reading of her suicide note. It is a bookend to the ballet’s beginning, which features the only recording of Woolf’s voice, a BBC radio broadcast from 1937 called “On Craftsmanship”. In it, she expresses the challenges of using English in writing, so enriched with “echoes, memories, associations” that it becomes impossible to deploy them to express a singular thought without triggering a thousand others. Woolf’s legacy is to be tied so intimately to language that her image holds symbolic power in works like The Hours decades after her own lifetime. She continues to give an interpretative language to others.

In the broadcast, Woolf asks, “How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question”. The answer, as provided by Cunningham in The Hours, is to retell the old stories in new ways, to place one foot in the past whilst acknowledging that we have no choice but to keep the other in the present. We lose a sense of the “real” Virginia Woolf, whoever she might have been, but it keeps her work fresh and alive in the way she so desperately wanted it to be. 

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf reminds us that we cannot write without laying down flowers at the tombs of the authors, poets, and playwrights who came before us. “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” How Woolf is perceived depends on what we want her to be, so that when a passer-by sits on the bench in Richmond with her statue, the conversation can hold whatever meaning they desire. Like the artist Lily Briscoe at the end of her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Woolf had her vision. Now we must have one of our own.

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Where would we be without gothic literature? With its seductive blend of the strange and macabre, gothic literature is one of those few genres that is also a mood: castles, coffins and claustrophobia, yes, but also darkness, secrets and vengeance.

That flexibility helps the gothic slip in through the cracks, popping up in everything from the dark academia trend to TV’s Stranger Things. I found it sneaking into my second novel, The Birdcage Library, without even trying (though admittedly it is set in a castle).

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It’s more than 200 years since Mary Shelley went on holiday with Lord Byron and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and, bored indoors, they challenged each other to write a ghost story. The outcome was pretty productive for the gothic genre by anyone’s standards: Shelley wrote Frankenstein, while Byron’s tale of an aristocratic vampyre laid the foundations for the bloodsucking tradition. 

Since then, like Dracula himself, the gothic has refused to die – quite the opposite. #gothicliterature and #gothic lit have racked up more than 30 million views on TikTok; its moody sister, dark academia, has ruled the app for some time now.

That could be because the gothic is a “characteristically modern” genre, writes Professor John Bowen in an article for the British Library: it’s obsessed with technology (all those mad scientists), which helps it stay relevant, but that very newness is held in tension with the archaic, the ancient, and the strange. It teems with delicious darkness – or to put it in the words of the aptly-named critic Terry Castle, an “exorbitant hankering after horror, gloom and supernatural grotesquerie”.

With that in mind, here are eight gothic must-reads from past and present. The subjects and settings are enormously varied, but they all share this genre’s shadowy nature.

Epic adventure-satire Whale, written by Cheon Myeong-kwan in 2003 and translated into English by Kim Chi-young, was the South Korean nominee this year (it follows Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny – an anthology of surreal and twisted tales addressing Korea’s patriarchal, capitalist society, nominated in 2022). Like Pachinko, Whale is a multi-generational tale that sheds new light on Korea’s societal transformation in the years following the Korean War; it follows an enterprising woman who leaves home to trade foodstuffs in a port city – who later becomes obsessed with the construction of a cinema shaped like a whale in a fast-modernising rural village. The Booker 2023 judges called it: “a rollercoaster adventure through Korean history and culture… full of magic and humour, profound darkness and struggle, terrible violence and prejudice.”

Other notable recent Korean novels include Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 – about a woman who strives to defy restrictive gender roles across her childhood, marriage and motherhood between 1982 and 2016. It sold more than one million copies upon publication in South Korea in 2016, and was seen as a catalyst for the country’s #MeToo movement. Equally compelling is the latest by Hwang Sok-yong – who, in 1993, was sentenced to seven years in prison after travelling to the North to promote exchange between artists. Mater 2-10, released on 11 May in the UK, centres on three generations of a family of rail workers – spanning the Japanese colonial era through to the country’s liberation, right up to the 21st Century.

That such rich, nuanced works have taken a backseat to the status quo-rupturing efforts of dynamic filmmakers and pop stars until now is, perhaps, in line with the wider course of Korean cultural history. Fulton points out that “the oral and performance tradition [of Korean storytelling] developed back in the old kingdoms… there was no Korean alphabet until the 1400s”; and that the written word was largely the providence of “a very few educated men” right up until the modern era. But as this flood of literature (from men and women of all backgrounds) is increasingly acclaimed and available in the West today, perhaps the Korean wave might be turning a page – even as it continues to look to the past.

Hallyu! The Korean Wave is at the V&A until 25 Jun 2023

The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories is out now

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