I must begin by telling you what type of book 'Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay' by Benjamin Taylor is. It is not any of the things I have shelvI must begin by telling you what type of book 'Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay' by Benjamin Taylor is. It is not any of the things I have shelved it as, history, memoir, travel, though it contains elements of all of those things. It is old fashioned in many ways, and I think it is no coincidence that the one author Mr. Taylor dwells most lovingly on is the English writer Norman Douglas who is now forgotten except for the disapproval his personal life now attracts (please see my footnote *1 below). It reminds me of many 'travel/memoirs' I read as a teenager in the early 1970s. Most were published in the early 1960s or even 1950s but they were on the shelves of my local library and though I can remember many stories from them I can recall no titles or authors. There is only one such book that I can recall in detail 'The Stones of Florence' (1958) by Mary McCarthy and it will stand in for all those forgotten titles as a template of what 'Naples Declared' is.
'The Stones of Florence' by Mary McCarthy was a romp through five centuries of Florentine history and art seen through the personal perspective of the author's time living in and exploring the city. It was, like many of these types of books back then, a 'travel' book but not a book to aide a traveller. None of these books were meant to be 'guide books', the very idea of them being thought equivalent to a 'guidebook' would have appalled their authors. These books were an idiosyncratic boulebais of information designed to enlighten and entertain those who knew their classics, history and art but were unable to 'travel' the way authors of these books did. It was vicarious enjoyment of an ideal lifestyle they offered to their stuck at home readers.
That, in essence is what 'Naples Declared' is. The insertion of photographs of buildings, places and art works, is reminiscent of the lavishly illustrated edition of the 'Stones of Florence' in my father's library but in Taylor's book they are tiny and often frustrating. Nowadays that doesn't matter so much because it is so easy, when a place is mentioned like, for example, the Charterhouse of San Martino, to consult the internet and find wonderful photographs of the monks burial ground and the marble skulls that decorate their enclosure.
If Mr. Taylor's book has a failing it is that he keeps himself too much in reserve. We need more of his own input, feelings, observations and prejudices. Also the books relative brevity and scantity supporting references have allowed some inaccuracies to creep in. The Fritz Krupp scandal rose not so much from Krupp's activities in Capri but because he imported several Caprisian youths to Berlin were he had the cooperative management of the luxious Aldon Hotel 'employ' them so they would be on hand whenever he could escapr from Essen. As for Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen he was a mediocre writer but why Mr. Taylor describes his 'boyfriend' Nino Caeserini as 'out-for-the-main-chance' is hard to understand because he was actually very loyal and supportive.
I enjoyed 'Naples Declared' for what it was and I would have liked more of it.
*1 Least anyone imagine I would find in his paedophiliac relationships justifications for such behavior now let me say I don't but retrospective condemnation without context or understanding pointless. To understand Douglas read 'Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality' by Rachel Hope Cleves (2020) or the earlier 'Norman Douglas: A Biography' by Mark Holloway....more
I must preface this review by saying that I didn't read this a Kindle but a print edition which is listed under one of the author's two other GoodreadI must preface this review by saying that I didn't read this a Kindle but a print edition which is listed under one of the author's two other Goodreads listings, Randall K. Ivey and Randall Kent Ivey. I 'discovered' Mr. Ivey's work from 'Serendipity: The Gay Times Book of Short Stories' (2004) edited by Peter Burton and, aside from my respect for Mr. Burton's acuity in selecting first rate authors for his various anthologies, Mr. Ivey's his story impressed me sufficiently to buy this book.
I am struggling with how to rate and review these stories. They are not bad stories, and could be described as well written, but I can't help finding them somewhat odd. A number of the stories are clearly set in pre or immediately post WWII Southern USA. But they are not really 'historical' stories, it is as if the author wished he was writing back in the time of the Southern Agrarian authors (about whom I will have more to say later). That Mr. Ivey has set almost all these stories (and his novel and many other stories) in a fictional 'Compton County' in South Carolina leads me to believe that he has created a counterpart to William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. The problem is not that Mr. Ivey is writing pastiche Faulkner, he isn't, but he is writing as if he was living at the time of Faulkner, writing about the South as writers, such as the 'Agrarians' might have written.
There is nothing wrong with writing historical fiction but if you are going to set a story in Victorian London and write as if it was written by Charles Dickens then, to me, it is pointless. If an author writing today has nothing new to bring to a story about Victorian London then there is no point reading them, you might as well read Dickens. Mr. Ivey is writing 'new' Southern Agrarian fiction in the 21st as if it had been written in 1950.
That the Southern Agrarians are Mr. Ivey's intellectual heroes rings all sorts-of-alarm bells for me. Over seventy years ago a book 'I'll take My Stand' by 'Twelve Southerners' which was the manifesto of Southern, White, writers against well, everything. They didn't like change and considering the Southern Baptist origin of most of them it is bizarre that their philosophy is based on the counter-enlightenment work of the French catholic Joseph de Maistre via French catholic writers like Charles Maurras plus the anglo-catholicism of T.S. Eliot as well as a huge dollop of the pseudo Medievalism of English Victorians like John Rushkin and, the catholic, Augustus Charles Pugin. At the heart of it was idealisation of fast disapearing agricultural based way-of-life which the Southern Agrarians, like many others, idealised in a paternal fantasy of kind masters and willing serfs? no slaves? no sharecroppers? no tenant farmers. It was virulently anti urbanism and anti industrial society.
Whether you see the Southern Agrarians as great regionalists or protofacists is irrelevant in the 21st century, outside of academic literary/historical debates. The world they were fighting to save and/or defend disapeared (That their 'I'll Take My Stand' book/manifesto only sold 2000 copies in 1930, a really tiny amount for a book at that time, suggests that not many people were really engaged in worrying about the passing of the 'Agrarian' south they so cherished) but more importantly the Urban/Industrial world they were fighting against has also disappeared. Americans now live in a suburban sprawl and 'factory' work is a concept like newspapers, bookshops or department stores that needs to be explained to anyone born since the late 1990s.
That doesn't mean that the past is of no importance, just that you need to view it, and write about it, from your own time. Randall Kenan in his work set in 'Tims Creek' has created a world as rich as that of Yoknapatawpha county and in 'We Never Danced the Charleston' and 'What the Dead Remember' Harlan Greene has written of things past that still echo and have relevance.
Becauyse the stories are well written I have given them three stars but I suspect I may have been too generous. ...more
Here are some of the praise this novel attracted when it was first published:
"An extraordinarily evocative novel set on a California juvenile prison fHere are some of the praise this novel attracted when it was first published:
"An extraordinarily evocative novel set on a California juvenile prison farm. One of the best and most important first novels published during the last ten years." —Saturday Review of Literature
"Without peer . . . a work of genius, but because of its subject matter, a classic without a genre. Some books leave impressions; this book leaves scars." —Andrew Vachss, Change, Justice Department Magazine
"A classical first novel. An ugly, beautiful, nauseating, terrifying, profound, disciplined exploration of the depth of the human heart." —New American Review
"A masterwork." —Forgotten Pages of American Literature
"Powerful and disturbing." —Publishers Weekly
"A natural talent of tremendous strength." —Kirkus
"A work of art." —Walter Van Tilburg Clark (a highly regarded American Novelist, who wrote the 'Oxbow Incident' which was made into a film)
"This is a savage novel and a work of art, a powerful, ugly, poetic, brilliant, compassionate rendering that even the squeamish should read because its important message rings loud and clear -- and unfortunately true." —St. Louis Globe-Democrat
"This novel . . . . is a strange crucible. From its center we may pluck out a glowing ember of aspiration. If we can bear the intensity of the light, we may look into the flames and discover with what precious fuel we have fed these fires." —Fred Cody, San Francisco Chronicle
More detail about the novel is provided below:
“This is a remarkable first novel. Floyd Salas projects the reader into the slender body of his fifteen-year-old prize-fighter hero Aaron D’Aragon. We see through Aaron’s eyes the structured underworld of a California prison farm dominated by sadistic perverts operating under the protection of the no-squeal code of their victims. Aaron D’Aragon is a spirited gamecock of an adolescent being gradually torn apart by the desires to retain the faith of his dead mother and his contempt for the hypocritical world that has destroyed both mother and faith.
"Salas has gone to the heart of the dilemma that faces a human being blocked on the one hand by evil that outrages a deep sense of justice and on the other by the violence of that sense of outrage which destroys his humanity — crucifixion upon the wicked cross, the Satanic tempter speaking with the voice of genuine righteous indignation.
"Even as Aaron D’Aragon falls short of that recognition which constitutes the salvation of the tragic hero in the midst of destruction, recognition of our common human nature floods the reader with the conviction that in his very damnation, Aaron renews our faith in the human spirit.” New American Review"
All of which certainly aroused my curiosity and I have the book on order - I'll be honest that I provided so many reviews because the information that the novel was about a 'slender' 15 year old boxer in a story that sounds easily like lubricious porn unless you knew it was from a rewspectable publisher and had received mainstream reviews - I'll be curious to read the book. Yesterday's masterpieces can be lost classics or just junk so until I read it the optionsare wide open!
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