A gripping memoir

Julia Blackburn is a well-known writer of non-fiction, but it is this, the memoir of her growing-up years, that will likely go down as the definitive work in her oeuvre. The daughter of a poet-father and painter- mother, Julia grew up in a Bohemian household that comes across as horrific for the scant regard it paid to the conventions of family. Her father Thomas was an alcoholic addicted to sodium amytal. In his madness, he turned into a violent beast who would come close to snuffing the life out of Julia’s mother Rosalie.

The real thrust of Julia’s memoir, however, is not the violence perpetrated by her father (whose love she was always certain of), but the strange jealousies that her growing up aroused in Rosalie. Soon after her parents separated, Julia moved in with her mother, and so began the process of renting out the spare room to eligible male lodgers, all of them potential mates for a ravenous Rosalie.

 

What follows is a disgust-inducing account of Rosalie competing with her daughter to win the affections of the lodgers, even as she is preternaturally interested in introducing her daughter to the vocabulary of adulthood — fellatio, masturbation, lesbians, dildos. A stung Julia, desperate to make sense of Rosalie’s vanishing motherhood, falls deeper into the vortex of self-destruction.

Matters come to a head with Geoffrey, a divorced artist, who seems as interested in Rosalie as well as Julia, at least in the beginning. Mother and daughter must go their separate ways in trying to win his charms even as their collective story comes to grief, ending in crime and guilt.

Julia Blackburn is a gifted writer, a consequence perhaps of the experiences life has handed her. Which is why, in spite of its grimly cautionary tone, The Three of Us is memoir-writing at its finest.

THE THREE OF US: A FAMILY STORY
Julia Blackburn
Pantheon
320 pages
$26

An affair with Hitler

Winnie and Wolf bridges memoir and fiction to chart a story of love, the love that a man and woman marked by history shared. Winnie, the daughter-in-law of German composer Richard Wagner, and Adolf Hitler, the world’s most hated villain, are said to have had an indiscreet affair for several years prior to World War II. Wilson fictionalises this story and washes it in renewed ardour.

The narrator is a secretary to the Wagners, a man who so passionately lusts for Winnie that he agrees to adopt the illegitimate child that she and Wolf, as Hitler is referred to in the Wagner household, have together. The novel is an account that this unnamed secretary writes to his adopted daughter, explaining her genealogy.

Wilson’s craft is a curious blend of his decidedly conservative politics and his skills as a novelist. When the novel sticks to characterisation and story, he shines. From the sly Cosima, Winnie’s mother-in-law, to Siegfried, her homosexual husband, the Wagner clan — in spite of Wilson’s best efforts — emerges as a deeply flawed family that was fortunate to cash in on its patriarch’s genius. Winnie is the beautiful, dutiful daughter-in-law who dons the mantle of returning the Bayreuth Festival — which Richard Wagner founded as a permanent destination for opera enthusiasts — to its former glory.

However, Wilson’s politics lord it over the novel in very apparent ways, and his genial defence of Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism places serious demands on the reader’s sympathy. Even Hitler is different things to different people — such as “the confident, jolly family friend” to the Wagners. Thankfully, Wilson stops short of exculpating the man whose brand of genocide scarred the soul of Germany.

Overall an admirable effort, Winnie and Wolf will be a most satisfying read if approached with a fair amount of discretion and while giving its writer the benefit of the doubt.

WINNIE AND WOLF
A N Wilson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
368 pages
$25