Tag Archives: autobiography

Singin’ and Swingin’ & Getting Merry Like Christmas by Maya Angelou

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Singin’ and Swingin’ & Getting Merry Like Christmas by Maya Angelou is the third volume of her seven book autobiography. As ever the writing is really good but this one was a real eye-opener for me, was there no end to Maya’s talent?!

In this one Maya gets married to a white man of Greek extraction – and gets divorced – he didn’t want a wife he really just wanted someone to look after him and the house. Maya was happy being a housewife for a year, she learned gourmet cooking and enjoyed the security that her husband gave her, then she needed more in her life. She had given up her job in a record shop when she got married and now she had to start again and support herself and her young son.

She got a job in a nightclub as a dancer, with white women who were strippers, but she was very popular with the clientelle. A couple of job changes later she gets an offer she can’t refuse, a part in the musical Porgy and Bess which has been wildly successful at home but is now going on a tour of parts of Europe and Africa.

Maya fnds herself in a similar position to her mother in the past, she had had to leave her children with her mother and Maya now has to do the same with her young son Clyde. She’s torn but can’t pass up the chance of visiting Paris, apart from other places. Canada, their first port of call had a magical sort of promised land reputation for the black cast and they were so excited to get to the place that escaped slaves made for in the past, it meant freedom for them. Canada didn’t disappoint, in fact nowhere did.

This one is really entertaining but apart from that it’s so noticeable how Maya takes every opportunity to learn something new. She buys a dictionary and phrase book for every country that she visits and wastes no time in getting out there and conversing with the locals. She even tackled Serbo-Croatian. The tour is just as succesful abroad as it was in the US and although it’s 1954 and they were visiting places where often the people hadn’t ever seen any black people, they were welcomed and feted. It was a new experience for them.

Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou

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Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou was first published in 1974 and it’s the second book in the author’s six volume  series of autobiography.

It begins in World War 2 which for some was a good time, jobs were plentiful in civilian life and black people who had been scraping a living doing bottom of the pile jobs had been able to earn good money in factories which were making munitions and other things needed for the war effort.  It was a good time for some, but with the peace all that stopped and unemployment loomed.

Maya got work as a cook in a restaurant, and she was good at it, but one of her male customers showed interest in more than her cooking, and so begins his charm offensive. Maya is in need of love, she’s an easy victim for a handsom older man, but it doesn’t last long. She’s reluctant to move on because her baby son has settled with a baby minder, but Maya’s brother persuades her to move to another state to begin again.

I liked this book but not quite as much as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first one in this series. Maya seems to have been a strange combination of street-wise sassiness and complete naivete where a certain sort of man is concerned. I suppose that more or less being abandoned by her own mother left her vulnerable and open to being abused by scumbag men.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings cover

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou was first published in 1968 and in the UK it was reprinted in 1988 by Virago. As I recall it was very popular back then, just about everyone seemed to be reading it – which just about guarantees that I won’t read a book, I hate to join the crowd I suppose. I’m thrawn (stubborn) that way!

However, when I watched that TV programme about Maya Angelou going on a pilgrimage to Robert Burns’s birthplace, and taking part in a Burns celebration, as well as visiting the famous Bachelors’ Club, I felt that I had to read this book now. Maya Angelou came across as such a lovely warm and funny person, it was time to catch up with her writing. This is the first in her series of seven autobiographies and I’ve already requested the next two in the series from the library.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is of course about the first 16 years of Maya’s life as a black child growing up in America’s south in the 1930s, mainly Alabama. Life was tough and traumatic but her upbringing by strong women in the shape of her grandmother and mother must have gone a long way to shaping the successful woman that she eventually became.

The 1929 Club – Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

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1929 club

Goodbye to All That cover

I was very happy to see that Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves was published in 1929 so I could read it for The 1929 Club which is co-hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. I’ve been interested in World War 1 since ‘doing’ it at school and luckily Jack has the same interest so we’ve visited some of the locations mentioned in the book, including trenches.

But at the beginning of the book Graves writes about his family history, his childhood and schooldays which were quite miserable, he wasn’t really very likeable to most of his peers it would seem. However, one of his teachers was George Mallory of Everest fame and he did go climbing with him which is definitely a claim to fame, but over the years Graves met up with lots of people who were going to achieve fame of some sort, even in the trenches.

For me it was the wartime parts of the book which were most interesting. Almost as soon as he finished his schooldays at Charterhouse he had decided to enlist, like the rest of them he was scared of missing what was going to be a very short war. Strings were pulled and he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers at Wrexham, and yes that is the correct spelling of ‘Welsh’ within that regiment. His parents were thrilled to bits, but he started off guarding German prisoners. He was so proud of his regiment despite being quite uncomplimentary about many of the people he met there. At this stage of the war the ‘highheidyins’ seem to have been very lenient with soliders who refused to conform and just had them categorised as ‘unlikely to be of service in His Majesty’s Forces’ and sent them home!

There’s humour but also a lot of the horrors of war and the stupidity of their orders. Given what he was doing eventually it seems amazing that he survived the war at all. I believe that Graves said that some of this memoir is fictional, as you would expect really, but amazingly he did meet up with and make friends of a sort with Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. But eventually fell out with Sassoon, a recurring theme with Robert Graves.

By 1926 and now married he had had enough of Britain and left for Egypt where he settled for a short time, working at a university as a teacher, but his pupils were less than sparkling, his marriage began to fall apart and he moved on again.

This was a good read, really harrowing at times as you would expect but Robert Graves comes across as being a difficult person – as many writers are.

My copy of the book is a Folio edition with endpapers showing a map and inset of Northern France during World War 1.

Kilvert’s Diary 1870-1879. Rev. Francis Kilvert

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I’ve been meaning to read Kilvert’s Diary by the Reverend Robert Francis Kilvert for years, so I put it on my Classics Club list to encourage me to get on with it. My copy of the book is a Penguin paperback from 1977, I hope I haven’t had it that long, but fear I might have!

The diary excerpts cover the years from 1870 to 1879, but sadly they’re just a small taster of what he wrote as his wife and later a niece destroyed a lot of his diaries.

In 1870 Kilvert was a young curate serving in a very rural community called Clyro which is in Wales close to Hay-on-Wye, so close to the English border, and his diary entries are full of the lives of his parishioners and what’s going on in the neighbourhood. He portrays them all so well, and with love, and they gave him back love in spadefuls. Most of the inhabitants are so poor and that’s something that Kilvert experiences as he travels around the parish visiting his parishioners, helping them out when he can, but not being taken in by the ones who roll around in bed and moan in agony but suddenly stop when he gives them some money!

There’s a lot of humour in his writing but also a lot of poetry in the shape of his beautiful descriptions of the surrounding countryside which he loved, and the rural traditions. It’s not all perfection though, I suppose human beings never change so there are multiple suicides, illegitimate children, murders, even child murder, fights between rival villages, ghastly relatives and broken hearts.

In fact Kilvert seems to have been very susceptible to a pretty face, especially if they were dark-haired. He writes about being in love with various women, but sadly his lack of money and prospects did not impress the father of Daisy who obviously was not at all willing for his daughter to be wife to an impecunious curate. Then suddenly it was Katherine that he was enamoured with! Poor Daisy. Very surprisingly he was completely honest about his attraction to pretty little girls, and even loved to see their little bottoms, but there’s no doubt that it was in all innocence, he longed to have a family of his own. He wasn’t bothered about bathing in the nude at the seaside, in fact he preferred that to getting manacled by his drawers as they got tangled around his ankles.

The local colour of the neighbourhood is interspersed with what was going in the world news-wise and there’s a lot about the medical problems that Kilvert is beset with, it was with real sadness that I discovered that he died at the age of 39, just one month after his marriage.

There’s an introduction by William Plomer and he does mention what happened to some of the people who appeared quite frequently in the text, which I appreciated. I really enjoyed this one on several levels, for the rural descriptions, history, social history, humour and the warm personality of Kilvert himself. I’m glad I got around to reading it at last.