Taki
For reasons known only to me I have chosen to read mostly prison memoirs throughout the year. Needless to say, Against All Hope, by Armando Valla- dares, the Cuban poet was the one that impressed me the most. Valladares is more than a poet. He is a martyr, and living proof of the strength of the human spirit. For 22 years Fidel Castro chose to keep Valladares in jail because the latter turned against his personality cult. The poet's account of the degradation, sadism, cruel- ty, and mediaeval torture of Castro's jails makes for fascinating reading. I found myself hoping against hope that somehow Valladares would be proved a liar, or at least that he was exaggerating, that things like the ones he wrote about simply couldn't have happened. But they did, and if anything, he underplayed them.
Why did I hope that he was lying? In order to control my rage at such Castro admirers, and arch phonies as Warren Beatty, Kathleen Tynan and Sally Quinn, the wife of Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post. Here is what arch pseud la Quinn wrote about the bearded monster that so many of her kind take seriously:
`He is surprisingly vulnerable, gentle and appealing . . . calm, logical, reasoned . . . highly complicated, sophisticated, intelli- gent . . .' well, not as sophisticated as she thinks, where torture is concerned, any- way. Just ask Valladares and the thousands that have died under his sophistication.
The other book I liked was yet another biography of Papa Hemingway, this one by Jeffrey Meyers (Macmillan). It's still damn good. And for me it was an extra bonus reading about a man who although a liberal, personified all the qualities that today's writers do not. Oh my, what Papa would have done to bitches like Quinn and Tynan. And phonies like Beatty. Ken Tynan had a taste of it early on.
The most overrated book? Easy. The one by Frank Giles. I did not buy it, and after it was forced upon me, I could not read it. Too snobby and too effete. Like the author.
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