Backlisted - Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos

Episode Date: July 24, 2017

In this edition of the podcast that gives new life to old books novelist Joanna Walsh and critic and academic Sarah Churchwell join John & Andy to talk about Anita Loos' Jazz Age novel. Also discussed: The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, and Bedouin of the London Evening, an anthology of poems by Rosemary Tonks.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)6'14 - The Fact of a Body by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich12'45 - Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks25'11 - Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. So I've got the magic of blue tick. It is very, very impressive. And one of the things that it means is that you don't see everybody. It filters people out.

Is that right? Who does it filter out? How do you get one? Nobody has any idea who it filters. Nobody can tell what its logic is. Sometimes it might filter out my friends. Exactly, it's just a good thing to have. No, it's not supposed to do that,

but it does it very randomly. It doesn't work very well. So is, in theory, the blue tick, this is on Twitter? I'm amazed you don't have one, Andy. So am I. I've applied repeatedly. How do you apply? How do you apply for one?

Count Arthur Strong, fair enough, can't have one because he's a fictional character. Yes, that's right. That's true. So you have to, now what they do to get very wide But Count Arthur Strong, fair to say, can't have one because he's a fictional character. So you have to, now what they do to get verified is there is an online form that you fill out and then you have to send links to published stuff

or your public presence and then you have to give it your birthday so it can verify that you're a human being and then it verifies you. That's a very bizarre way to verify you're a human being. It's all very peculiar. Did you...

Do blue tick people only talk to other blue tick people? Yeah, yeah. There's no rhythm. It'll be like the VIP. It's like behind the velvet rope of Twitter, right? That's what I figured. But it didn't work out that way because as I say, it doesn't't really work so then it cuts out the

people i want behind the vip rope with me it lets in all kinds of trolls so it's not really clear to me what the purpose of it is except to impress a handful of people who care about exactly who noticed It's niche. Right. Let's go. Let's go. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. You join us around a table in the dining car of the Orient Express, courtesy of Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller. I am the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and as from today's episode of Backlisted, I now wear glasses to do this because all the reading that I've done in the last couple of years has left me practically worth sightless. So joining us today are, we have two guests with us. Amazing. Joanna Walsh. Hello, Joanna. Hello. And we have Sarah Churchwell. Welcome back, Sarah.

Thank you. Joanna is a writer and the author of books in a variety of formats, including most recently an experimental digital novel made in collaboration with the Google Creative Lab. Yes, and visual editions. And featuring illustrations by Charlotte Hicks. And that's called what? It's called Seed, and it's very beautiful and somewhat sinister. Great.

How did it differ, composing that, from composing one of your more traditional paper-bound books? I probably write a bit like that anyway, so I tend to kind of write in this sort of fragmentary way which, it does add up to something I hope but it's quite, in some

ways it seems natural to distribute it not in chapters but in little threads you can follow in different pathways in a slightly non-linear way you can go forwards and backwards and sideways and how can we access it? yes, we can it's free, it's online

seed-story.com brilliant and also just to say about Joanna three things she has a new collection of stories Worlds from the Words End that's it yes brilliant and also just to say about joanna three things she has a new collection of stories worlds from the words end as in september she was the founder of read women on twitter and you should follow that if you don't follow it and she is a brunette okay so and we're also joined welcome back back, to Sarah Churchwell,

who has been sat on a stationary train in the middle of England for most of today. You've seen all parts of England, haven't you? You were saying, isn't it? And Sarah is Professor of American Literature at the University of London, where she also runs the Being Human Festival. And Sarah is a blonde. I am I for listeners may be keen to know that I was once

a brunette and I'm now grey haired as is my colleague were you a blonde? I was never been blonde I've always been is it not obvious I used to have a shock of dark hair and a shaggy black mane of a beard,

but now I'm just a silver back or silver front. Silver back. Before I ask John the traditional question, I just want to say thank you to a listener whose name is Anna. She is in Stockholm in Sweden. I'm big in Sweden. She might be listening to this now. I hope she is.

She wrote a lovely message on Facebook, and I just wanted to read out a little bit. She says, Dear Batlisted, I just wanted to tell you how your podcast not only has improved my intellectual well-being on so many levels, it's also improved my health. Since I made the decision that I'm only allowed to listen to your podcast while at the gym, the hour I spend there is the best of the day.

I've always loathed training. It is usually so boring. But thanks to Backlisted, I am now walking and running the treadmill with a smile. Well, Anna, that sounds awful. And I frankly can't approve of that, but I'm very pleased. You know, I feel like this feels logistic. It feels like I need to say, do other listeners listen to us in unusual spots? Let us know. Yeah, do send in your...

So, John. Well, we're here to talk, Joanna and Sarah are here to talk today about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which we should say, which I don't think we had said. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Luce and also the sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. But before any of that, it's a small book but a big subject. But before we get to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Anita Luce, let's ask the traditional question. John, what have you been reading this week? I have been reading a book called The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnovich. She is a joint lawyer, creative writing fellow now. It is her first book and it has been getting very good

reviews. I have to say it's difficult to summar difficult to summarise neatly, but it is about, it's a memoir, but it's also the, I guess, a kind of Capote-like reconstruction of a, the murder of a child in Louisiana in the early 90s, the murder of Jeremy Gilroy by a man in his 20s called Ricky Langley. And it starts with Alexandria arriving in New Orleans to work for Clyde Stafford Smith, who is the lawyer that works tirelessly to get the death row cases commuted in Louisiana. And she watches the confession of Ricky Langley, the confession of the murder of the tape, and is possessed by a powerful, visceral urge

to see this man put to death, which is absolutely, completely against everything that she hitherto believed in. She was going there to go and help. And understanding that visceral reaction is really what prompts the memoir. And the memoir really is

a memoir of how she was abused by her much-loved grandfather as a child. All of this makes it sound very grim, and it is pretty grim in places. I mean, horribly grim in places. i think it the balancing act between trying to understand her own emotions but also trying to understand both the mother of the child that was murdered who goes into court to testify for ricky langley and to say, you know, she doesn't want him to receive the death penalty.

To understand how she does that, to understand also Ricky Langley himself. It's a real act of, I think, of sort of imaginative reconstruction, but also forensic. I mean, she goes through every single 30,000 pages of documentation to try and understand what happened. And without giving too much away, I wouldn't say that there is necessarily a neat resolution to that.

But what there is, I think it's an incredibly brave and powerful bit of writing. I mean, the comparisons that have been made are Capote, as they always are if it's true crime. Shot in the heart. Shot in the heart, Michael Gilmore. It's hard to say, is it successful? It's successful on this level.

It really, really makes you realise that understanding complexities like abuse and murder and paedophilia, that these things, there aren't any simple answers. I thought the best best i've read it as well because when sarah perry came in to do that listed a few weeks ago she was really raving about the book and she has a background in the law yeah so she was sort of saying this really one of the things that this book does very well is describe process in such a way that feels right to me i must say i think the thing that I liked most about the book was the sense... You're right, John, it's sort of...

The grimness in it is the idea that the law is a sort of rather useless compromise when confronted with something as complex as the truth. So there's various bits. She sets up a scene at the beginning where she's talking about, is it probable cause, have I got that right? So she's talking about who is to blame for this event? Who is the person who started this? It's very hard to say. There's no easy way of saying. But what the law has to do is pretend there is a way, an easy way of attributing blame to one person and heaping

everything on them. So I thought it was good, yeah. Very good. them so i i thought it was good yeah very good so just uh just this paragraph which more or less kind of takes up what andy was saying she writes what i fell in love with with the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story in making a neat narrative of events it finds a beginning and therefore cause but i didn't understand then that the law doesn't find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies and we call it truth.

Which is the sort of, I think that paragraph is kind of the core of what she's trying to do with the book. And I think she does, she achieves, I think she achieves that aim. And there are some, I mean, she I think she does, she achieves I think she achieves that aim and there are some, I mean as I think I said there's some horrifically difficult passages to read and there's a haunting quality

because I guess you know yeah, life's complicated I was talking to that book is published in the UK by Macmillan and I was talking to the editor who's publishing it, George Morley she was saying

one of the great things about the book in her opinion is many books that cover this area would the idea is that they would attempt to say to you, look anyone can be a victim that's not what this book does this book says anyone

can be a perpetrator at not what this book does no this book says anyone can be a perpetrator yeah at some level not everyone is guilty but the contexts that people find themselves in can lead them to do things that another context they wouldn't do and it does not explain why ricky langley killed jeremy gilroy it does not explain why her grandfather abused her it does not explain why her parents i mean that's the other thing why her parents refused they just changed they changed their living arrangements so that the grandfather didn't have access to the two girls in the family but they didn't ever talk about it openly there was no there was no open discussion of it so none of those things are explained

but they are, the way she unpacks them and the way she lays them I mean it's I think in its own way it's sort of an exemplary book I mean I think prizes yeah, very likely

Andy, what have you been reading? You've been having fun haven't you? Yeah I have I was going to talk about one? Well I was going to talk You've been having fun haven't you? Yeah I have, I was going to talk about one book but I'm going to talk about that on the next podcast instead because instead I'm going to talk about a collection of poetry called Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks

and I read this about 48 hours ago and I was so seized with enthusiasm for it that I thought you know what I'm and I was so seized with enthusiasm for it that I thought, you know what, I'm going to capture the moment of enthusiasm for it. You're going to foist your enthusiasm on the rest of us. I tweeted a poem, which I'm going to read now,

and it was written, published in the late 60s, and it's a poem called Dressing Gown Olympian. And I just thought it was wonderful. I'd seen someone on Twitter refer to Rosemary Tonks as the Jean Rees of 60s London poetry. Now, I know, Joanna, you are a great admirer of Ms Rees. Yes. So that instantly, I thought, well, that's going to be...

We're all united. I think I was at Rosemary's. A celebration for Ms Rees. I saw you in your dressing gown when I read this poem I don't know why Andy all I'm saying is let's just say I have stuff invested in me so I'm going to read this out

it's called Dressing Gown Olympian I insist on vegetating here in moth-eaten grandeur haven't I plotted like a madman to get here well then on vegetating here in moth-eaten grandeur. Haven't I plotted like a madman to get here? Well then. These free days, these side streets,

mouldy or shiny with their octoroon light. Also, I have grudges, enemies, a religion, politics, a new morality, everything. Kept awake by alcohol and coffee, inside her oriental dressing gown of dust, my soul is always thinking things over thoroughly. No wonder my life has grandeur, depth and crust. Ah, to desire a certain way of life and then to gain it what a mockery what absolute misery dressing gown hours the tint of alcohol or coffee am i an imbecile of the first water after all

yes i think i can claim now that all grandeur, depth and crust is stacked around me, that I am. I read that. I just thought, whoa, that's my favorite thing that I've read for a long time. So I'll say a little bit about Rosemary Tonks. There's a photograph on the cover of this book, Bedouin of the London Evening. It's published by Bloodaxe Books. If you were listening to this and you have a chance to go and look it up on the internet, this book, Bedouin of the London Evening, it's published by Bloodaxe Books. If you were listening to this and you have a chance to go and look it up on the internet, go and look it up.

It's a photograph of Rosemary Tonks taken in 1966 by Jane Bowne of The Guardian and The Observer. And it is a fantastic picture of her. She has on spectacular trousers, or trues, as they would have been called at the time. And do you know where this photograph was taken? I do not. It was taken in the coffee cup in Hampstead, which is still there, which was a proper bohemian 50s coffee house and has survived there.

It still looks like that inside. And Rosemary Tonks wrote two volumes of poetry, both of which were published in the 60s. She wrote five novels, I think I'm right saying, maybe six novels. And she vanished in the late 70s. And she died in 2014. And she refused to allow any of her poetry and any of her fiction to be republished. She underwent a significant religious conversion. So she burnt all her manuscripts and she burnt all her work. She saw her work as being fundamentally not what Jesus would have wanted her to do. And one of the things about her that is so fascinating is, for instance, when I was reading her biography, she created a sound piece in the mid-60s

with the assistance of the great Delia Derbyshire. And as I was reading, I was thinking, of course she did. Why don't I know about this? This is such an interesting thing, such an interesting figure. And two of her poems were chosen by Larkin for his Oxford Book of 20th century English verse. She vanished. She totally vanished.

And copies of the two volumes of her poetry, both of which are gathered in this collection, Bedouin of the London Evening, were selling two or three years ago for £1,500 each. Because there was no way of getting to read them. How have they been republished? She died in 2014, in early 2014. There had clearly been some efforts made

by the editor of this collection. Let's give him credit, whose name is Neil Astley. Yeah, love that. So the editor of this collection, Neil Astley, had been in touch with her, although she had mostly ignored him. He'd read her diary.

And she'd stayed that religious? Yes. She said she referred to him in her diary, says another postcard from Satan today. OK. Because she saw anyone reminding her of the... We all feel that way sometimes. Anyone reminding her of her previous life, which she deeply repented.

And she would... So even into her 80s, she could be found at Speaker's Corner handing out Bibles. She stayed in London? No, she moved to Bournemouth. Right. But she'd just make the occasional...

Yeah, so Neil Astley had found out... Had got in contact with her, had regularly contacted her. Anyway, when she died, he then, after a series of discussions with her family, persuaded the family to let this work out. It really is, all I can say is... What an amazing story.

I booked a... Jeremy Noble Todd tweeted a page from a novel of hers called The Bloater, which is written in 1966. It's a description of what it was like to work in the radiophonic workshop at the BBC, which was enough to make me, I have a book today at the British Library,

to go and sit there and read it because she just seems incredible. And I cannot recommend this collection highly enough. Half the poems in here made my hair curl, and the other half I didn't understand.

That's always the best combination. So I'm going to read another one, and then we'll get on to the main event. But this is one of the ones that Larkin chose for the Oxford Book of 20th Century English verse. This is from her first collection, and this was published in 1962. It's called Story of a Hotel Room.

Thinking we were safe. Insanity. We went in to make love. All the same idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom. Then in the gloom. And who does not know that pair of shutters with the awkward hook on them, all screeching whispers.

Very well then, in the gloom we set about acquiring one another, urgently, but on a temporary basis, only as guests, just guests of one another's senses. of one another's senses. But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing because the bed of cold electric linen happens to be illicit. To make love as well as that is ruinous. Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us that without permanent intentions you have absolutely no protection. If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,

the concurring deep love of the heart follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it. I mean, that's just spectacularly good. And there's a wonderful thing she says in one of the rare interviews that she gave in the 60s, where she says, people have been reading Baudelaire for 150 years but haven't learned any of the lessons of it.

And so one way you can read it is to see... Trying to work out the lessons of Baudelaire. Trying to find a way of talking about the modern city. London in the 60s, particularly, in a kind of symbolist way. I'm so enthused by it. Please, please, if you like all the things that we've been talking about on here, you will love that collection. So Rosemary Tonk's Bedouin of the London Evening.

Excellent. Now now follow that well we briefly i think we have to dip out at this moment as we now do on the podcast to an ad for a uh a very really long and i think fantastically ambitious book called the story of john knightley by top Taylor, which is a kind of, it's a sort of modernist, high modernist account of the rise, fall and rise again of a musician called John Knightley. It's a sort of extended meditation on creativity and Todd Taylor, the author, is here to talk about it my name's tot taylor and i've written my debut novel it's quite a long one of the story of john knightley which is about how someone who's extremely talented at genius level born 1948 so he sort of comes to flower, comes to sort of fruition in the mid-60s. But as with so many

people, particularly in the music business, they have a very, very fast rise. And if they don't have a burnout, then they have a kind of slow fade. But basically their gifted period, what I refer to in the book as their spirit wind, may have lasted just two or three years. And my idea was, OK, well, what are they doing for the rest of their lives? You know, being geniuses. How does a genius cope with not having adulation and not being able to fulfil their promise? That's what the novel is about. The character of John Knightley is very much 99% of the book. What he is thinking, how he operates, how he sees himself, what he wants to achieve, how disinterested he is

in other people. It's not based on any particular character. It's not an amalgam of other characters either, which people keep telling me it is, but it isn't. It's not based amalgam of other characters either, which people keep telling me it is, but it isn't. It's not based on myself either. I went to great lengths to make this person, to make his circumstances and his situation very different to my own. It's not based on observations either. It's based on a kind of a vision. I guess the person that I did think about quite a lot was John Wesley, the Wesleys. I always thought that the Wesley brothers, you know, who began Methodism, basically started a religion from nowhere and had a very fast rise, sort of more or less forgotten now, except in churches.

But you have to remember that the Wesleys could go to Cornwall. Part of it is set in Cornwall. But you have to remember that the Wesleys could go to Cornwall. Part of it is set in Cornwall. And they could preach to 30,000 people in a pit, in a clay pit. Quite phenomenal. You know, like a rock and roll band now. Okay.

Nowadays, the capital's people are groovy. Their clothes are groovy and their outlook is groovy. Even the streets are groovy. With groove-ridden names like Bond Street and Wardour, Portobello and of course Carnaby Street, the grooviest of all. The magnificent Carnaby is probably the happeningest thoroughfare anywhere on the planet at this very moment. Doesn't that fact alone make you want to be here with all these fabulous characters and streets and names and occurrences? It should do, if you have anything to offer, that is, because what this all means is that London is suddenly a place of immense opportunity, a city of significance and enterprise,

one big happy cake you can all bite into. The Story of John Knightley by Todd Taylor is published by Unbound and is available from all good bookshops and Unbound.com. Backlisted listeners can get a special discount by entering the code BACKOFF at checkout on Unbound.com. Now it's commercials. Right, well, we're back now from the swinging 60s and the wilds of Cornwall to early 20th century New York and Paris and London and the...

London is really nothing, though. And the central of Europe, indeed. This completely compelling novel, I think. I hadn't read Gentleman Preferred Blondes before. This is not going to be the last time I read it. I can't remember laughing as much reading a book for a very, very long time. It's gorgeous.

So where do you want to start, Andy? We've taken turns and asked, maybe Joanna start, when you first encountered Anita Luce and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It must have been via the movie, which I expect how most people come to it. I didn't know it was a book. And I can't

remember the precise moment at which I discovered it was a book and read it. I must have been in my twenties. But honestly, from then it's kind of been there. It's permeated my consciousness and my language and a lot of other things too. Yes, I don't know.

For an acquisition of diamonds. There it is. Yes. For a small book. I mean, there's so much to say about it, isn't there? Yes. That's right. Yes, well, the first thing I thought about when I was reading it,

the first thing I think is this kind of very, very hypnotic and enticing idea of the two women, which is usually talked about, often by men. I was thinking of Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idées Résues, where he talks about, he has this, it's a very amusing dictionary of aphorisms,

of stop phrases, and he has an entry on blondes, and he says, blondes, see brunettes. So you scroll along, and you look at the entry on brunettes, and it says, brunettes, see redheads. So you scroll along and you look at the entry on brunettes and it says, brunettes, see redheads. Then you go many, many more pages further in and you get to redheads and it says, redheads,

see also blondes, brunettes. This kind of idea that you can have the snow white and rose red, the two women who are somehow, because they look slightly different, are kind of representing two different sides of something or two different ways to live. Juliet and Justine, even, to go to Dessart, I was thinking, you know, Juliet being kind of Lorelai, I think, the person who presents an appearance of living

exactly as society would wish her to, but doesn't obey any of the rules. And Justine, who generally wants to be good, but doesn't meet a very good end. We should say Lorelei Lee, the blonde, Dorothy Shaw, the brunette, in these books, played by, as you talked about, the Howard Hawks film. The film is made 30 years after the book is published, but is, of course, very famous in its own right. So Marilyn Monroe is not a likely...

And was an adaptation of a musical. That's right. Which was an adaptation of a stage play. And Jane Russell is Dorothy Shaw. They're both wonderful. But it's worth saying that the musical version is really, at most, it's inspired by the novel. It's a very, very loose adaptation, and they've updated it to the 50s novel. It's a very, very loose adaptation

and they've updated it to the 50s. So it's a very, very different story. And I think that's the first thing that strikes you, leaps out and grabs you around the throat. It bears quite a glancing most superficial resemblance to that

sort of film. So Sarah, when did you can you remember when you crossed paths with Anita Luce? Yeah, I... My field of study is the 1920s and 1930s in terms of literature, but I've also, since I was a kid, been obsessed by old Hollywood movies from the 20s and 30s. And so I actually first encountered Anita Luce as a screenwriter

when I started to get interested enough in how movies were made that I was starting to notice directors' names and screenwriters' names and then was reading around it and discovered that she took credit for the rest of her life for having helped to bring in the Hays Code, the censorship code of Hollywood from 1934. Yeah, because of her movie, The Red-Headed Woman with Jean Harlow. She actually replaced Scott Fitzgerald

as the screenwriter on Red-Headed Woman. Whoa, Sarah. I'm getting ahead of you. We are going to come on to that. We are going to come on to that. So that's actually how I got there. So what happened was, she'd been in the back of my mind.

So you didn't read this book as a child? As a kid, no. It's not taught in America, at least it wasn't when I was growing up. It did disappear, didn't it? It definitely disappeared. And the movie was still there. So I saw the Marilyn Monroe movie, and I thought it was silly,

and it didn't really do anything for me. And then when I was starting to study the 20s and 30s, and then particularly because Gentlemen Prefer Blondes came out the same year as The Great Gatsby, and I particularly work on Scott Fitzgerald. And there's a remarkable moment. Anita Luce wrote a preface for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 40 years

after it was published, which is in most of the paperback versions called The Biography of a Book. And in it, can I get it too early to read? Because this is what got me into it. So she says, she talks about, and I think we'll come back to this more than once, because she says a couple of interesting things about how she came to write this quite remarkable novel. She gives a little précis of the story, and she shows how dark the subject matter actually is, this very satirical vein that she's operating in. And then she says, in fact, if one examines the plot of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,

it is almost as gloomy as a novel by Dostoevsky. When the book reached Russia, this was recognized, and it was embraced by Soviet authorities as evidence of the exploitation of helpless female blondes by predatory magnets of the capitalistic system. The Russians, with their native love of grief, stripped gentlemen for blondes of all

its fun, and the plot which they uncovered was dire. It concerns early rape of its idiot heroine, an attempt by her to commit murder, only unsuccessful because she is clumsy with a gun, the heroine's being cast adrift in the gangster-infested New York of Prohibition days, her relentless pursuit by predatory males, the foremost of whom constantly tries to pay her off at bargain rates, her renunciation of the only man who ever stirred her inner soul of a woman,

her nauseous connection with a male who is repulsive to her physically, mentally, and emotionally, and her final engulfment in the grim monotony of suburban Philadelphia. Given the above material, Anita Luce goes on, and you could just hear her laughing as she writes this, right? Given the above material, any real novelist such as Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, Faulkner, or Hemingway probably would have curdled his reader's blood with massive indignation. Scott Fitzgerald would have, and indeed, he did make his readers shed bittersweet tears over such sad eventualities and it was when I read that sentence that I thought 1925 she's absolutely right this is the comedic version of

The Great Gatsby this is The Great Gatsby but told in a comic vein and she saw that instantly so that's how I came at it and then I read it and I just laughed my head off that's why Edith Wharton famously to the extent to which it may or may not be. That's why Edith Wharton famously, to the extent to which it may or may not be tongue-in-cheek, but Edith Wharton famously says

this is the great American novel. This is the great American novel. And of course the Edith Wharton novel, to compare this to, and in fact it's one you should do if you haven't, and if you haven't don't let anybody else do it because I'm coming back and doing it. I'm staking my flag in this. I've bagzied this one.

We're going to do a separate strand called Church. Church. You absolutely should. It's Edith Wharton's novel Custom of the Country, which is undeservedly forgotten and is a very similar book about an unscrupulous woman who sleeps her way to the top and is completely rewarded for sleeping her way to the top.

Now, live on air, will you vouch for that choice? Will I vouch for the choice of it's completely rewarding for sleeping her way to the top. Live on air, will you vouch for that choice? Will I vouch for the choice of it being a gentleman? A good one for backlisted. Yes, yes, definitely. It's hilarious. It's very good. Thank you both. Joanna, have you got a little bit that you could read us? I have. To give people a flavour of

what, how it is. I'm going to illustrate the great sadness and seriousness. The Russian. When you were talking about it being the Great Gatsby, by other means, though, I was thinking when you were talking about Rosemary Tonks and Jean Rees, I was thinking this is exactly the story of all those Jean Rees heroines.

They're chorus girls, they're staying in cheap hotels. But the thing is, if only the heroine of Quartet or The Voyage Out had a blonde friend, the story would have been entirely different. That's so good. Jean Rhys would have been a completely different person. I'm just going to fall under the table laughing at that idea. Do you know that great thing about Faulkner, that really patronising note about the book,

and he said that he really wished he'd invented Dorothy. Yeah, exactly, because she was a great American character. It was really interesting, the patronising notes that this book received, because it was the best-selling book of 1925. So we've already said it came out in the same year of The Great Gatsby, but The Great Gatsby was pretty much a commercial flop. Disaster, yeah. It certainly just disappeared,

whereas Do You Remember for Blondes was the best-selling flop. Disaster, yeah. It certainly just disappeared. Whereas, Do You Remember for Blondes was the best-selling novel of the year, and it put a lot of very serious male writers' noses very far out of joint. We'll come back to that, because I think there's some interesting stuff to say about any phenomenal book in terms of its sales tells us something that we may not previously

have identified about that moment. I totally agree. So let's, Joanne, let's have a little bit now. I was going to read a little bit from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and it's Lorelei's diary. It's mid-May. She's travelling in the central of Europe to get an education

financed by the button king, Gus Eisman. The button king of Chicago. Yeah, the button king and many other places. Apparently he's trying to become the button king of Vienna He's trying but it's not working And you know the things I can't do in American accent at all

And I certainly can't do Marilyn Monroe But what I think I can do Is I can do Miriam Margulies As the caramel bunny And that's about The closest to a kind of cute Voice that I can do So I'll just imagine that closest to a kind of cute voice that I can do. So I'll just imagine that she was a kind of jobbing actress

from the West Country instead. May the 27th. Well, I finally broke down, and Mr Spofford said he thought a girl like I, who was trying to reform the whole world, was trying to do too much, especially beginning on a girl like Dorothy. So he said there was a famous doctor in Vienna called Dr Freud, with Y, who could stop all of my worrying because he does not give a girl medicine,

but he talks you out of it by psychoanalysis. So yesterday he took me to see Dr Freud. So Dr Freud and I had quite a long talk in the English language. So it seems that everybody seems to have a thing called inhibitions, which is when you want to do a thing and you do not do it. So then, you dream about it instead. So Dr. Freud asked me what I seemed to dream about. So I told him I never really dream about anything.

I mean, I use my brain so much in the day that at night they do not seem to do anything but rest. So Dr Freud was very, very surprised at a girl who did not dream about anything. So then he asked me about my life. I mean, he was very sympathetic and he seems to know how to draw a girl out quite a lot. I mean, I told him things I would not even put in my diary. So then he seemed to be very intrigued at a girl

who always seemed to do everything she wanted to do. So he asked me if I really never wanted to do a thing that I did not do. For instance, did I ever want to do a thing that was really violent? For instance, did I ever want to shoot someone, for instance? So then I said, I had, but the bullet only went into Mr. Dunning's lung and came right out again. So then Dr. Freud looked at me and looked at me and he said he did not really think it was possible. So then he called in his assistants and he pointed at me and he talked to his assistants quite a lot in the Viennese language. So then his assistants looked at me and looked at me and it really seemed as if I was quite a famous case.

So then Dr Freud said all I needed was to cultivate a few inhibitions and to get some sleep. You know, that's so brilliant. Brilliant. The two things that occurred to me while you were reading that, three things, Miriam Margulies, excellent. The second thing is, it's like a lot of great comic writing. It's very visual. That description of Freud pointing,

you can tell that she was a screenwriter because she has the economy of saying, here's the image, a little sketch of something. There's Freud talking to his assistants. You can really see it. The third thing is, and this is the highest compliment I can pay in some respects. When I was reading this, I was thinking, okay, you can really see it. The third thing is, and this is the highest compliment I can pay in some respects. When I was reading this, I was thinking, okay,

you know what this is like? This is like Woodhouse. It's the American Woodhouse. This has that rhythm and what Douglas Adams says about Woodhouse, word music. It has those strings of... But it also has the double layers

of irony, right? Where Lorelai is as silly as Bertie, but she's also Bertie's inverse in that she doesn't have a good heart, right? So part of the joy of reading Woodhouse is that Bertie is ridiculous, but he thinks he's quite dignified and he thinks he's quite serious and he has no idea how silly he is.

And then you're in on this double joke, right? And Lorelai is the reverse, which is that she does take herself seriously and she thinks she's quite clever. And she thinks that she's putting... She doesn't think she's good. And she thinks... Well, I'm not sure that she does, actually.

I read it a little bit differently. I think that she thinks she's putting something over on society. She's writing her diary to be read, she says at the beginning. So it's all a performance. It's interesting. She says to Dorothy a lot,

Dorothy will never... My friend Dorothy will never know how to act, which I always think is a nice loose pun there, that she knows. She's manipulating manipulating everybody and she's putting she's got this performance of being what she thinks society wants her to be and part of the joke in the way that you were just reading I think that's what she thinks of as being good though well I think she thinks she's refined and that it doesn't matter but I think she thinks she's putting it I think she thinks she's putting it over on everybody, and she doesn't realize how ridiculous she appears

because of her mistakes and her malapropisms. So she thinks that she's being a refined girl like I, and she thinks that everybody's falling for it. Where even Dorothy, you know, and that's why Dorothy is such an important sidekick, because Dorothy keeps coming in, and she's the kind of touchstone figure who comes in for the reader and speaks truth to all of them

and says things like, Lady, you could no more ruin my girlfriend's reputation than you could sink the Jewish fleet, which I think has to be one of those moments where it's clear then that in Luce's mind and in Dorothy's mind, society doesn't fall for this. Everybody knows Lorelai is a kept woman. Everybody knows that she's sleeping her way to the top, except Henry

Spofford, who's even stupider than she is. But she's manipulating everybody. The other person she makes me think of as a writer, though, who's writing at the same time, is Damon Runyon. And his characters also have this kind of double feeling of wanting intensity to be respectable. I can't even say it in a Brooklyn accent. Respectable, something like that.

And whereas they're all bootleggers and gangsters and murderers. Absolutely, it's exactly the same. Runyon is spot on. If Woodhouse and Runyon, you know, heads up to listeners, if you were to buy stocks in Runyon is spot on Woodhouse and Runyon heads up to listeners if you were to buy stocks in Runyon now they would come good a few months from now in backlisted terms it's running out of print

I've got a very old edition on Broadway well Picador from First Love he's absolutely wonderful yeah he is wonderful and yes absolutely there's that same kind of stylised

rhythmical prose yes which is always looking this is not and this isn't I hasten to add I'm not diminishing

this at all this is the best thing I could ever say about any writing is always looking for the gag yeah absolutely where is the gag

going to land in the rhythm of the prose? There's a lovely little bit in the introduction by Jenny McPhee to the Live Write edition where she says, it employs and slams modernist tropes. Stream of consciousness style, rightly penchant for wordplay, middle-brow misuse of grammar, a girl like I,

low-brow vernacular. The prose, I love this, the prose is a cacophony of loopy cadences, alliteration, redundancies, oxymorons, malapropisms, multilingual puns, homophones, innuendo, euphemisms, double entendres and more. Through these linguistic machinations, Luz takes irony to a new level of complexity. Our expectations are repeatedly thwarted. We are hurled into a troubling state of merry destabilisation and pleasurable chaos. Under Laurie Lee Lee's

gaze and pen, nothing is sacred, no one is safe, and it's all uproariously, uncomfortably funny. That's very good. Which is good, isn't it? It gets that so slightly... I'm just going to say a little bit about anita loose herself because i knew very little about anita loose and um i was very fortunate that um lee randall hello lee if

you're listening lee randall very kindly pointed me at gary carey's biography of anita loose which is terrific as a book as a book about anita loose but as a book about ho Luce, but as a book about Hollywood in the early years of Hollywood. Wonderful, wonderful book. Anyway, so Anita Luce, who is born in 1889. Or 1888, depending on who you believe. That's right. That's right. She's born in California. She's one of three siblings. Her father was variously a newspaper editor, a theatre manager, and a drunk.

Sometimes all at the same time. Yeah. She was a child actress and at a young age wrote a play called The Inkwell, which is still produced She sent a screenplay to a film studio on spec in 1911 for which she received

$25 straight away and she's like 22 and her third screenplay The New York Hat was produced and it was directed by dw griffith dw griffith starred mary pickford and lionel barrymore her first screen do you know what her first screen credit was this is so good oh yeah i've had this but can't yes it was mcbeth by william shakespeare and she did say that she thought dw griffith would have given her first It was Macbeth by William Shakespeare and Anita Luce. And she did say that she thought D.W. Griffiths would have given her first billing if she'd have asked.

And she worked with Griffiths a lot. She did the subtitling for... Or the intertitling for Intolerance, and she's around for the making of Birth of a Nation as well. 200 movies. She wrote 200 movies. And so before she writes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she's already got a reputation as famously, Photo Play magazine calls her in the early 20s,

the soubrette of satire. It's also worth just throwing in how she was extremely attractive. She was really, really pretty and had this little gmean look. And it's the early days of that photo play magazine, of that kind of publicity. So she's one of the first celebrity authors as well, which is worth throwing in there because she was so pretty. So she makes a transition from silent films to the talkies. And we have a clip now of her.

This was recorded near the end of her life this is the late 70s or early 80s and i i found this clip and um there's a thing in it that joanna will really like and there's a thing in it that sarah will really like so let's listen to i wrote 200 films for dw griffith before sound came. I had quit movies at that time because they were very profitable and I was rich. And I quit. Then came the crash and I had to go back to work. And when I went back to work, I was sent for by Irving Thalberg to write a sound movie. And he had had a property called A Red-Headed Woman, which he had given to Scott Fitzgerald to make a scenario of.

Now, Scott, with the most idiotic intention in the world, wanted to be a movie writer. With all his great talent, with his genius, with his success, he only wanted to write a movie. And he wrote a movie of a red-headed woman and it was deadly. And so Irving sent for me, this was in 1926, and he said, will you take this script and make it funny? So I did.

So, I mean, that's terrific. wrote jokes she put she says somewhere she's purchased that I put jokes in every she was a script doctor across all of MGM's movies and her job was to put jokes into people's movies she once put a joke into a Marx Brothers movie and apparently Groucho Marx I supplied a line and I think it was Groucho who thought a while and said do you really think this character would say something like that? And she said well, you know, as if a Marx Brother character

had any logic. So we should say a little bit about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. So it began with a series of short sketches serialised in Harper's Bazaar and the first indications that she was onto something this thing which had been written as a kind of

She did it to wind up H.L. Mencken It had been written as a silly kind of half thought through thing It quadrupled the circulation figures of Harper's Bazaar overnight The book is published in 1925

It's a huge bestseller as you as you said it's followed up in 1928 by um but gentlemen marry brunettes and i want to come on to the gentleman marry brunettes um i just want to say about anita loose but basically anita loose then has this long sparkling career um as a screenwriter as a hollywood, and in the 60s and 70s as a memoirist in the kind of David Niven, The Moon's Balloon tradition, right? And those books are as funny as David Niven's. If you like The Moon's Balloon, her books are hilarious. But so we were talking earlier, Joanna,

about The Gentleman Married Brunette. Yes, yes. Well, I think we both said it was a better book, and I think it is. I think it is a better book. It's fun is I think it is a better book, it's darker it's more varied the thing that happens though is we're told we're going to sort of hear Dorothy's

story but we never hear her voice in fact less even than In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes which she has because it's set in the past tense it's her story of her rise to kind of like her rise to rags really via riches again and i find myself wishing she had written another book that dorothy had really written because of course her

her tone of voice is completely different and her wisecracking um attitude to life uh i would love to have read a full-length book of that well i just want to read a very just a couple of paragraphs from the the second chapter of but Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. And because this is backlisted, I chose this bit because I think our listeners will appreciate it. So again, I can't do Marilyn Monroe or Miriam Margot. I can only do slightly loose, estuary... You decide for yourself, listeners.

Polyester voice, anyway. Well, I soon found out that the most literary environment in New York is the Algonquin Hotel, where all the literary geniuses eat their luncheon. Because every genius who eats his luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel is always writing that this is the place where all the great literary geniuses eat their luncheon. So I invited Dorothy to accompany me and go there at luncheon time. But Dorothy said that if I wanted to meet Hollybrows,

capital H, capital B, she was going to a literary party that was being held by George Jean Nathan at a place in Jersey that is noted for serving the kind of beer that is made without ether. It is prohibition, of course. And Mr. H.L. Mencken, Theodore theodore dreiser misspelled sherwood anderson sinclair lewis misspelled joseph hergesheimer and ernest boy would be there so i said to dorothy if they

are so literary why do they go to a place like new jersey which is chiefly noted for being inartistic and the only reason that dorothy could think up was on account of the beer. But I finally decided to go, because some of them do write quite well-read novels. I mean, and the joke within a joke there is that she, that Luce was very friendly with H.L. Mencken. That circle of authors round that she's just described there, she was part of that circle.

So she was never part of the Algonquin circle, the Dorothy Parker circle, but there was a kind of alternative there, she was part of that circle. So she was never part of the Algonquin circle, the Dorothy Parker circle, but there was a kind of alternative group that she was part of. And she did occasionally attend lunches at the Algonquin, so she knew whereof she spoke. So she always claimed that Gentleman Before Blondes was written, as John said, as a way to wind up Mencken because she said that he preferred a witless blonde

to a very clever and beautiful brunette like herself. I actually think there's reason to question that and to wonder whether, because Mencken, George, and Nathan were editing the Smart Set, which was this very influential magazine, and I actually suspect that she sent it to them as a submission. And then Mencken sent her this really insulting letter that she reports in the preface, where she says, he said to send it to Harper's Bazaar would be lost among the ads and it wouldn't offend anybody. And so I think she's really enjoying her triumph over Mencken here

because, yes, she's winding him up, but also that then it went away and it was this huge commercial triumph. So she's poking fun at a lot of people along the way. At some point, I'm going to insist that you let me read Lorelei with an actual American female accent. Do it now. Do it now. Okay. So this is one of my favorite scenes. And this has already been alluded to because this is the time when Lorelai actually does resort to violence. So then I told Major Falcon about the time in Arkansas when Papa sent me to Little Rock to

study how to become a stenographer. I mean, Papa and I had quite a little quarrel because Papa did not like a gentleman who used to pay calls on me in the park, and Papa thought it would do me good to get away for a while. So I was in the business college in Little Rock for about a week when a gentleman called Mr. Jennings paid a call on the business college because he wanted to have a new stenographer. So he looked over all we college girls, and he picked me out. So he told our teacher that he would help me finish my course in his office because he was only a lawyer, and I really did not have to know so much. So Mr. Jennings helped me quite a lot, and I stayed in his office about a year

when I found out that he was not the kind of gentleman that a young girl is safe with. I mean, one evening, when I went to pay a call on him at his apartment, I found a girl there who really was famous all over Little Rock for not being nice. So when I found out that girls like that paid calls on Mr. Jennings, I had quite a bad case of hysterics. And my mind was really a blank. And when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand, and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings.

He became shot. He became shot. It's the best use of the passive voice in all of literature. That's the thing. It's so funny and it's so good and it's so fresh. It's so remarkably fresh. What about the, there's a kind of,

so I was saying that the book was, you know, phenomenally successful in its era and also sets up a kind of, what's the sort of feminist reading of this book? It's really fascinating. It sets up an archetype which hadn't been identified before which is then

slavishly followed throughout the century. It's the first buddy movie. I mean she helps invent that and it's these two girls facing off against the world. And the two of them have each other's backs. Although they have quarrels sometimes about what kind of men they should go off with. Very quickly to

Lorelei's menage with Mr. Spofford once they're married. What I find very interesting is the bits where she keeps... Lorelei throughout the first book keeps almost getting married to people because she has many rich admirers who pursue her but at various points

she sort of stops and considers that it might be not so exciting to live with them in the long term. And more profitable to sue them for breach of promise. But also I'm interested in the fact that Lucy's making no you know presumably this was much more shocking but I

don't know but there's no moral judgement on you know Sarah you were reading that very funny description by Luce many years later of what the plot is but when it comes down to it you're looking at the reason why these quote unquote great writers like Wharton and Joyce are reading this and responding

to it is it's funny but it also seems to say something about America there's no moral judgement by Luce on what these characters are doing. Henry Sp to it, it's funny, but it also seems to say something about America. There's no moral judgment by Luce on what these characters are doing. Henry Spofford, when he's censoring his movies, Lorelei says that she realises that he doesn't really mind so much what happens to a girl so long as she is not enjoying it. Yes. And that being the main thing, so the main thing not being that kind of...

And, of course, that's the moral of the Hays Code, right? So when she writes Red-Headed Woman with exactly the same morality, in which a woman sleeps her way to the top and gets rewarded for it, the moral forces of America were so outraged that they created this 30-year censorship system of Hollywood that said exactly that. People could do bad things as long as they were punished, but they couldn't enjoy them, and they couldn't get rewarded for them.

So adultery could happen as long as you were punished. It's the Madame Bovary model. As long as you die afterwards, you can have an affair. But there will be no having affairs, and then, you know, getting remarried and living happily ever after, which is what loses heroines tend to do. Another modern pairing that I was thinking of, in fact, when I was talking about these pairs of women at first,

was actually the fat slags from Viz. They do exactly what they like, and have a fantastic time time and they're also blonde on the feminist thing which is obviously she she gets quoted as being anti-women's lib but what she says is actually a bit more as you'd expect a little bit more nuanced that she says what do you think of women's liberation so she says the two most bit more, as you'd expect, a little bit more nuanced. She says, what do you think of women's liberation? So she says, the two most important executives I knew in the movies were Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, and they did much better business because of their golden curls and other executives.

Mary stacked up the biggest fortune anyone ever made in films, and Lillian Gish knew more about lighting and camera technique than any man I know. She did it for herself. I've been done in by both men and women. I don't have any preference. But I'm afraid they're giving the gag away. I think women can get a lot further by covering up and going underground than by waving a flag.

And then she tells this great story. There was a big group of very beautiful lesbians in Hollywood, quite a number of them. I got dragged to a cocktail party one day and they were all there done up in chiffon and hats and being very elegant. And in walked Elsa Maxwell in a suit with cuffs and a necktie. And one of them said, oh, look at Elsa giving it all away. But of course, that's exactly Lorelei's attitude, right? Is that's how Lorelei wins is that she doesn't give it away. She does

know what she's doing. She is manipulating everybody, but she understands that her power is sex and that's what she uses and she uses it to trade up okay not you well laura like exposes the conditions by which women live successfully or unsuccessfully and you know thinking of another kind of person who's who's used that kind of diary form confessional form i was thinking of chris krauss and i love dick where she says why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Although she's not doing it by the debasement route because that would be to be sad about it. She's being funny about it.

Yeah, absolutely. As is Chris, in fact, of course. To me, the most feminist thing about this novel on a really, really simple basis, and what makes it so enjoyable for me to read over and over again, is that at the end of the day, Lorelei and Dorothy are friends and they are a united front and it's them against the world and although they are all you know Lorelai's always always after Dorothy because she thinks she's not making smart enough choices she keeps falling in love with handsome men who

don't have a penny and she keeps telling Dorothy she really ought to you know get somebody who's going to support her and Dorothy thinks that Lorelai really shouldn't be manipulating people in quite the way that she is and she shouldn't be marrying men that she doesn't love just for their money. And yet they have each other's backs and they protect each other through all of these sorts of shenanigans and chicaneries

that they get up to. There's this amazing double cross that they do in Paris with this diamond tiara and they just completely have each other's back all the way through. It's a great con team. And it's joyous. I'm so happy, very happy myself

at the end of the novel. I'm so very happy myself because after all, the greatest thing in life is to always be making everybody else happy. I think that's a pretty good place

for us to stop. Thanks to Joanna Walsh, to Sarah Churchwell, to producer Matt Hall and thanks once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod, Facebook, BacklistedPod,

and on the page on the Unbound site, unbound.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts.

If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.