International Day of Friendship: Biographies from the Basement

Our colleague, Claudia is back with her monthly blog post about our special Biographies Collection at Kensington Central Library. 

On Saturday 30 July  it will be International Day of Friendship, so we are taking this opportunity to look at how friendship features in our Biography Collection at the library.

For most people, friendship is one of the most important things in life, and during the pandemic many of us realised acutely how much we depended on our friends for support, and how much we missed them when unable to get together.  Whether we have a wide circle of diverse friends, or whether we just have one or two, whether we maintain friendships into our old age with people we met as children, or have enjoyed making new friends late in life, friends are the people we share the ups and downs of our lives with, sometimes able to confide in them in ways we can’t manage with family members.

Friendship reflects the full spectrum of human emotion and behaviour – friends can make extraordinary sacrifices on each other’s behalf, and carry out acts of inspiring kindness.  They say ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’, and friendship can make the most challenging periods of our lives more bearable, providing solace and sometimes steadfast adherence to someone who has been abandoned by all others.  The catastrophe that overtook Oscar Wilde when he was imprisoned under the homophobic laws of the 1890s saw most of the many friends who had courted him when he was the toast of fashionable London turn away.  Not so his indefatigably loyal friend Robbie Ross, whose story is told in Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde’s Devoted Friend by Jonathan Fryer. 

Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde’s Devoted Friend by Jonathan Fryer

In Iris and the Friends : A Year of Memories, one of his several books about his wife the novelist Iris Murdoch and her struggle with dementia, John Bayley writes movingly of how their social circle negotiated the changes in their beloved Iris with patience and love.  

Iris and the Friends : A Year of Memories by John Bayley

Some friendships grow from the most unpromising soil, sometimes where insurmountable adversity might be expected – so Christo Brand, who aged 18 became Nelson Mandela’s prison guard on Robben Island,  writes of how the two men became deeply fond of one another. Mandela, aged 60 when they first encountered each other, took a paternal attitude to the teenager who began to recognise the evil of the white supremacy he had been brought up to believe in.  Brand risked imprisonment himself by smuggling Mandela’s newborn first grandchild into the prison so that his grandfather could see him, and on becoming President, Mandela found him a job and helped advise on his children’s future careers.  The full amazing story is told in Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend.

Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend by Christo Brand with Barbara Jones

An equally unlikely friendship was that between Raymonda Tawil, Palestinian journalist and mother-in-law of Yasser Arafat, the first President of the Palestinian National Authority, and Ruth Dayan, the wife of Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader and government minister.  In his aptly titled An Improbable Friendship, Anthony David describes how the women sustained a secret friendship throughout decades of conflict between their peoples.

An Improbable Friendship by Anthony David

As with all areas of human life, friendship can sometimes go wrong, and betrayal and misunderstanding features in some of the books documenting friendship in our collection. Julie Metz was horrified to discover that her husband had been carrying on numerous affairs during their marriage, and the fact that one of his lovers had been the woman she considered her best friend was a devastating blow.  What she could never have imagined was that she would become friends with one of his other lovers and that they would help each other deal with the fall out of it all. 

Perfection by Julie Metz

A more profound and horrifying betrayal cannot be imagined than that of Pieter Menten of his friends the Krumholz family; having socialised with them happily for many years in their Polish village, he later supervised their murder as an SS officer.  The sole survivor, who had emmigrated before the Nazi invasion, spent years tracking Menten down so that he could be brought to justice, and at the same time trying to piece together the psychological drama that could have led to such a grotesque revocation not only of personal friendship but of basic humanity.

The Last Victim: One Man’s Search for Pieter Menten by Malcolm MacPherson

Some of the richest friendships are those between people from very different backgrounds, and across the generations; some involve mentoring, like that between painter, Beauford Delaney and writer, James Baldwin, and some arise when genuine connection is ignited by philanthropic interest, as when upper class socialite, Fanny Howe corresponded with impoverished sex worker, Maimie Pinzer in early 20th century Philadelphia, transforming the lives of both women. 

Amazing Grace A Life of Beauford Delaney by David Adams Leeming

The Maimie Paper: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute by Maimie Pinzer (author), Ruth Rosen (editor), Sue Davidson (editor)

Some friendships between creative people shed light on their creative processes; such a case is that of poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, whose complete letters we have, spanning 30 years.

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell by Elizabeth Bishop

In other cases, the desire to reach out to someone perceived to be in need of help can run into complicated waters, as when journalist Michael Finkel attempted to befriend the hermit Christopher Knight, who had lived undetected in the forest of Maine for 27 years; divided by huge gulfs of experience and perception, the connection between the two men could only go so far before Knight began to erect barriers.

The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel

Finally, I feel I must acknowledge the fact that not all of our dearest friends are human! The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar is just one of the many books we have that tell the stories of the love and companionship we can enjoy with our pets – most often these are dogs and cats, but this hilarious and moving memoir by Martin Windrow describes sharing his flat in a high-rise block in South London with a very opinionated and volatile tawny owl.

The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar by Martin Windrow

We hope there will be something for everyone to enjoy in this display of books on friendship in Kensington Central Library.  Come along and see if any of them appeal to you – and perhaps share them with a friend.

Claudia, Kensington Central Library

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Childhood memoirs for World Children’s Day

Did you know we have a special Biographies Collection at Kensington Central Library? It’s a collection of 80,000 books to which we add 1,000 new titles a year. Every month or so, our colleague, Claudia takes a look at this very special collection. This month, she has been looking at childhood memoirs.

Today Saturday 20 November is World Children’s Day. It commemorates the Declaration of the Rights of the Child by the UN General assembly on 20 November 1959 (its precursor was adopted by the League of Nations 35 years earlier, drafted by Eglantyne Jebb who founded Save the Children).

One of the most fundamental things that all human beings share is that we were all once children, though the experience of childhood varies enormously.  For this blog post and the accompanying display on the ground floor of Kensington Central Library, I wanted to concentrate on peoples’ own childhood memoirs, rather than on reconstructions of the childhoods of the famous written by others.  

Many writers and artists return to their childhood to examine the source of their inspiration; those interested in social history and psychology look to it to cast light on changing times and psychic development.  Many other people who are not necessarily professional writers are drawn to revisit childhood memories, often in their later years as the understanding that the world in which they grew up has gone forever makes it appear more urgent to record it. We have many childhood memoirs linked to particular places and eras, some recording vanished rural lifestyles with a golden glow of perhaps selective nostalgia, others recording harsh conditions and the fight to improve them. Notwithstanding the huge differences in childhood experiences, as in all human experiences, certain features of childhood memoirs recur around the world and throughout history – the sense of the freshness and intensity of perceptions, the partial understanding of things that become clearer as we mature, and often the huge influence of significant people in forming who we become.

My Father’s Places by Aeronwy Thomas

It is fascinating to see famous people through the eyes of their children, and memoirs of the children of important figures can give unique insight into those people’s daily lives and intimate relationships.  Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of the poet Dylan Thomas, records the brilliance and volatility of both of her parents, and the wild beauty of their home at Laugharne on the estuary of the River Taf in Carmarthenshire, in a childhood full of love and joy as well as instability, alcoholism and poverty. Vyvyan Holland’s father, Oscar Wilde, appears more as a haunting absence than a quotidian presence in the memoir he wrote in his sixties.  He describes the collapse of his happy childhood when Wilde was imprisoned under the persecutory homophobic law of the day, and his mother’s flight abroad with their children in an attempt to shield them from the scandal.

The Education of Little Tree by Forest Carter

Childhood memoirs can give extraordinarily acute glimpses of ways of life because children’s eyes tend to focus on and record details that adults may overlook and which may be left out of historical analyses, giving a depth and texture to our understanding. The Education of Little Tree is Forest Carter’s memoir of his childhood being brought up by his Cherokee grandparents in Tennessee in the 1930s and is a depiction of a world threatened by the dominant culture. The unsentimental immediacy with which childhood memories are laid down, and with which some especially gifted writers depict them, makes stories like that of Little Tree’s removal to school to be “educated” out of his culture and heritage by those who think it is inferior, particularly piercing – here is another child, like Holland, who suffers due to bigotries he cannot understand and who as an adult must try to make sense of what was inflicted upon him.

The Woman Who Saved Children by Clare Mulley

Although not childhood memoir, I had to include in this display our biographies of Eglantyne Jebb, who as mentioned above was the extraordinary woman who founded Save the Children and drafted the original declaration of the rights of the child adopted by the League of Nations in 1924.  Jebb’s urgent commitment to enshrining children’s human rights grew in the wake of the situation in Germany and Austria after their defeat in the First World War, when economic breakdown brought about by punitive peace terms caused the starvation of many children. 

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

So I have included several moving memoirs and diaries of children caught up in war and genocide – the most famous such document is undoubtedly The Diary of Anne Frank, of which we have several editions; we also have the diary of Zlata Filipovic, describing her life during the war in Bosnia between the ages of 11 and 13, Loung Ung’s memoir of the Cambodian genocide, and more recently Malala Yousafzai’s description of her incredible fight for girls’ education in Pakistan, and how it led to her near-fatal shooting.

A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova

Other memoirs of children experiencing totalitarianism include Carmen Bugan’s wonderful Burying the Typewriter, about being a dissisdent’s daughter in Communist Romania, and Elena Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs, about negotiating the rigid demands on a Young Pioneer in the Soviet Union. Very different demands were made of child stars like Shirley Temple and Drew Barrymore, and other child celebrities whose stories we can find in our collection.

Aké by Wole Soyinka

Some of the world’s greatest writers have left records of their childhoods that rank among their finest works.  The great Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki describes growing up in Tokyo in   the 1890s and in My Reminiscences, giant of Bengali literature Rabindranath Tagore carefully examines the influences that awakened his curiosity and activated his genius.  Ngugi Wa Thiongo, who grew up to become one of Africa’s greatest literary figures, wrote Dreams in a Time of War about his 1940s boyhood in Kenya, and Wole Soyinka, another giant of African letters, produced an unforgettable childhood memoir in Aké, about his village childhood in 1940s Nigeria. Isaac Bashevis Singer, the most important Yiddish writer, recorded his childhood in a Jewish Warsaw that was to be destroyed, including his eavesdropping on the conflicts brought to his father’s rabbinic court.

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

Some childhood memoirs have been treasured inclusions in bookshelves around the world for decades – Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie are both such classics, which cast fascinating light on the adults they became, and the subsequent books they wrote. Some childhood memoirs glitter with irreverent humour – Norman Lewis’s Jackdaw Cake and Natalia Ginzburg’s The Things We Used to Say (also translated as Family Sayings) deal with serious subject matter, but highlight the ridiculousness of childhood’s confrontation with adult eccentricity in a way that is extremely funny – this is also true of Gerald Durrell’s childhood memoirs, brought to TV screens in the recent popular ITV series.

Children’s views of their own lives provided invaluable social insight to sociologists, and we have some fascinating period pieces from the sixties, when Donald Measham interviewed a group of suburban children about the experience of being 14, and Ronald Goldman followed up children who had been taken into care – our Collected Biography Collection, a sub-group of the main Biography Collection which deals with groups of people, includes many books about groups of children united by a common experience, like wartime evacuees or children brought up under colonial rule.

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The Colour of Water by James McBride, Fourteen Revisited by Donald Measham and Surban Boy by Adrian Bristow

As well as these memoirs of childhoods distinguished by historical drama or by subsequent fame, we have many memoirs of more simple, less eventful childhoods remembered by those who chose to preserve them with tenderness, regret, celebration, pain or humour – or, often, a mixture of all these.  I hope you will enjoy discovering childhood from around the world and across the centuries.

Loves of the Famous

In honour of Valentine’s Day, this month’s Biography Store display at Kensington Central Library is on the theme of Loves of the Famous.

Many couples have walked on the world stage as separate individuals in their own right – but what of the more intimate stories of the relationships between them?

How have the relationships between Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Philip, between Bill and Hilary Clinton or between Gilbert and George helped inform the work they do?

What was the experience of the partners inhabiting the shadows behind their more famous significant others – sometimes, as in the case of Alice B. Toklas, made the subject of the other’s art?

Then there are the private passions which became part of the mythology and iconography of some of the biggest Hollywood stars – Burton and Taylor, Bogart and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Amongst the biographies of the famous which focus on all aspects of their private and public lives are those which concentrate on marriages, affairs and liaisons, sometimes official, sometimes clandestine, and show that the same passions and problems recur in all human love stories.

Jackie and John F Kennedy

Some of the most intimate records of relationships are love letters by the famous – though sometimes famous for very different things than their romantic passions (who knew Ramsay Macdonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, was such a one for sweet nothings?

Or that Albert Einstein called his first love “my little everything” and worried constantly that he might have upset her?)

Henry the VIII could be pretty risqué and was not backwards in coming forwards in his letters to Anne Boleyn.

Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII

Some of the love letters included are intensely private, and the writers would never have imagined they would be read by anyone other than the addressee.  Some have become famous as works of literature and historical testaments in their own right, like Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”, his letter written to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol, which shows that the intimate minutiae of feelings come before the retrospective resonance of socially significant moments.

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas

Some – like the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise in the 12^th century – are classics of world literature, and prove that whatever the forms of expression used, human emotions are still very recognisable across the centuries.

Wallis Simpson and Duke of Windsor (King Edward VIII)

One of my favourites is one of those many books in the Biography Store Collection which give an intriguing insight into previous times – it’s Royal Love Letters, a collection from 1911.  The publisher is none other than Mills and Boon, and it seems not only the content of their books but their presentation has definitely been spiced up in the last 108 years.  This is a decorous volume – although maybe the deep purple binding hints at the passionate content – and the illustrations are of various royal personages looking very correct, not a steamy clinch in sight.  A list of other available titles doesn’t quite set the pulse racing, and apparently Mills and Boon didn’t only produce romantic titles in the Edwardian era: “Rambles in the Black Forest” and “Nerves and the Nervous” were amongst its non-fiction offerings.

Barack and Michelle Obama

We hope you enjoy our Valentine’s selection of the romances of some of our most celebrated figures.