music, books, love and kindness

Fidgety at 3 a.m. with that weird "I have a million books all around me, but I don't know what to read next," I remembered an article I had read about underrated (and sometimes easily dismissed) authors of the 50s and 60s so I downloaded a book by one of those mentioned: Theodora Keogh.

The granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, she focused on rather unconventional and provocative (to the say the least) topics for her era and was sometimes even thrown in with the "ilk" of pulp fiction writers. Even so, I'm finding The Mistress to be far less sensationalistic and much more in tune with human emotions, even if they are sometimes detached ones.

The writing is sincere and surprisingly fresh even if somehow at the same time a sign of its times. Some of the passages already 'speak' to me:

-What's the difference when it's over now? she begged silently and insistently of some listener within. Because it's over, however it was—and does not too much worship break the shrine? 

-She enjoyed, however, really enjoyed listening to classical music on the radio. One is safer with music.

This profile in The Paris Review is intriguing and dispels some of the exaggerations about events in her life. Since I find myself now wanting to know more about Theodora Keogh I just had to read:

       http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/08/22/the-late-great-theodora-keogh/
 

As someone who is far more fascinated with people's voices than their looks I loved this passage, especially, though the rest of it's darn good, too:

It was Theodora’s amour propre that kept us from meeting face to face. She said she felt “diminished” physically, but “herself” on the telephone. In her early eighties when we started speaking, Theodora could have passed a voice audition for a worldly thirty-eight-year-old. Her voice was an emollient—smooth, chaleureuse, empathetic, and buffered by an elegant American diction which has been almost lost in the present day.