Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje

 COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER -

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

So, this is the story of Buddy Bolden, regarded by jazz aficionados as being the father of jazz or to be more precise: the inventor of the music that became jazz. Even more than this, however, it's the story of a man who became a legend after spinning away into madness.

You don't have to be weird to be wired, as Mark E Smith once said, and Buddy Bolden was proof of that. During the day he cut hair in a barber shop and lived very happily with the mother of his daughter whom he loved very much. At night, however, he was the best, the loudest and the most loved cornet player in New Orleans and in the downtown world of bars, prostitutes and after-dark streetlife was where he became lost in music.

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje is the story of crossing a metaphorical bridge and then burning it. It's the story of Icarus. Reaching for the sun but then falling. It's the story of crying for the moon as Syd Barrett would do years later - with the same results. 

Syd Barrett's fall, as we know, inspired Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond and likewise one single line - 'Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade' - inspired Michael Ondaatje to write this book.

The parade referred to was the annual procession of brass bands held in Louisiana in 1907. Two years prior to that, Bolden had gone off on a short tour with his band but then failed to return home. Instead, after living on the street for a while he moved in with a woman whom he'd met and fallen in love with during that tour. The fact that she was married and lived with her husband being of no consequence. Bolden simply turned his back on his family, his fame, his music - his whole life - and entered into a three-way relationship and to all intent and purpose, near-vanished from the world.

Something happened to Bolden on that tour to make him never want to see anybody he knew ever again. Two years later, however, an old friend of his had tracked him down and had persuaded him to go back home and return to his family and to his music, with the annual parade to be his first return performance.

It was on that parade that Bolden 'went berserk', pouring himself into his cornet playing to such an extent that the blood vessels in his neck burst. From this incident it was then just a short hop, skip and a jump to Bolden being detained in an insane asylum where he there spent the rest of his life.

There are echoes here not only of Syd Barrett but also of Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Peter Green, and Brian Wilson. All iconic musicians who in one way or another went mad. Like theirs, Bolden's is an equally interesting story though there are in actual fact very slim pickings to be rummaged through in regard to his life both private and public. Two obvious examples of this being that there is just one single photograph of Bolden in existence and no known recordings of him actually playing, so everything known and said about him is mostly through word of mouth.

Whether this lack of information presented a problem or a gift to Michael Ondaatje when writing his book is academic because what he's wrought from it is a work of art in itself. Coming Through Slaughter reads like one of those dreams that you wake up from and then try to get back into when falling asleep again. You usually fail and the dream is left cut off without any ending or resolution and therefore no meaning. Except that with Ondaatje's book there's a constant feeling of successfully re-entering a dream and being able to follow it through to some sort of conclusion. What this tells us is that Michael Ondaatje is a very, very good writer with the heart and mind of a natural poet. Weaving words and forming sentences that shouldn't make any sense at all but overall and put into context do - just like they might in a dream.

So yes, Coming Through Slaughter is dream-like and reads very much like a sad but extremely beautiful, fully-realized, perfectly comprehensible dream that will linger a long time after its ending.

John Serpico

The Lives Of Lee Miller - Antony Penrose

 THE LIVES OF LEE MILLER - ANTONY PENROSE

To the casual observer it's just a black-and-white photograph of a woman in a bath but with everything in life, context is all. Look closer and you'll see the muddied bathmat from the discarded combat boots and propped-up on the side of the bath you'll see the framed photograph of none other than Adolf Hitler. The woman in the bath is Lee Miller and the bathtub she is in is actually Hitler's very own. For further context, it's Munich 1945 and the dying days of World War Two. Hitler has fled Munich for his Berlin bunker and his house at Prinzregentenplatz 27 has been billeted by a Division of American troops who the next day would be heading to Hitler's Alpine fortress at Berchtesgaden, and Lee would be accompanying them.

The previous day, Lee had been among the first to enter Dachau concentration camp on it being liberated and so was one of the first to bear witness to the horrors there. Alongside photos she had taken as evidence she had cabled her editor back in England the words 'I implore you to believe this is true'.

Lee Miller was a photographer whose style and eye for a picture had very much been influenced by Man Ray and the French Surrealists, and this - The Lives Of Lee Miller, by Antony Penrose - is the story of her life. Or rather, as the title says, the story of her lives because Lee more than most lived many.

It's an interesting idea, of course, and one I understand and agree with, as in you don't live just one life - you live many lives. It's an idea that only makes sense as you grow older and you have a past to look back on though it has very little to do with age. Childhood, teenage and adulthood are but different phases of the same body but the lives you live during those phases are the real markers. They are the stuff of dreams of which Shakespeare wrote and like snowflakes, no two dreams are the same.

By all accounts and by all the evidence, Lee Miller was a remarkable woman. Not only was she a photographer but at various times also a war correspondent, a fashion model, a writer, a traveller, and a chef. More than anything else, however, she was formidable. At times she may well have come across as being brash but being uniquely talented prevented her from crossing over into the realm of entitlement or even insufferability. Moreover, when dealing with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Cecil Beaton a certain amount of brashness would probably have been required and similarly, timidity is not going to allow you to nap in Eva Braun's bed, which Lee also did.

From fashion model to war correspondent is quite some leap but it's the fact that it was done under the auspice of Vogue magazine that made it all so doubly unusual. Lee had at first been sent to Europe by Vogue to cover and photograph 'fashion under siege' and nurses working in war zones but what she ended up reporting back to their London office on was the reality of war captured in brilliantly shot, black-and-white photographs and beautifully composed prose.

The Vogue editors were astonished because of course they were the last people anyone would expect to run such articles. The frivolousness of fashion had suddenly been joined with the seriousness of war.

World War Two was the making of Lee but it was also, in a way, her undoing. After you have lived in the white heat of battle and not only stared mankind's inhumanity in the eye but also got it to sit and pose for a photo, where is there left to go? What is there left to do?

'I get so depressed,' she confided to her doctor friend who replied with a stern 'We cannot keep the world permanently at war just to provide you with excitement'.  So, Lee effectively retired from photography and returned to live in England whereupon she became a mother and a world-famous gourmet chef. As you do.

The author of The Lives Of Lee Miller - Antony Penrose - is actually Lee's son, so when it came to research and access to archives this would obviously have made things easier. He's featured in the book, of course, though not prominently and when his presence is required he writes of himself in the third person. An interesting thing is come the end of the book it's clear that he understands his mother a lot more than he did when she was alive and in so doing helps us understand her also, shining a whole new light upon her multiple, multifaceted and multifarious lives.

The Lives Of Lee Miller is fascinating but then given the subject matter - how could it not be?

John Serpico