Good afternoon everyone,

As I've darkly hinted at least once in this newsletter and associated media, I had a roughish time at work last year and it consumed a lot of my thinking/reading energy. But at the end of last year, the week before Christmas, something kind of magical happened. My work situation had resolved itself but I was still feeling a bit werrrrr, sitting by the fire with a friend and her children. Her daughter was reading aloud, the Christmas story as written by Jeanette Winterson. There were continually these little flashes of T. S. Eliot's "The Journey of the Magi," and as she read I remembered - I am a modernist. It was a beautiful feeling to be, as it were, called back to an identity I'd almost totally neglected throughout the year. Thank you [name witheld] and thank you Jeanette Winterson. Here's the latter:

It might have been because my parents had been in the second world war. It might have been because we lived in End Time, waiting for Armageddon. Whatever the reason, there was a drill to Christmas, from making the mincemeat for the mince pies to singing carols to, or rather at, the unsaved of Accrington. Still, Mrs Winterson loved Christmas. It was the one time of the year when she went out into the world looking as though the world was more than a vale of tears.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/24/i-love-christmas-because-of-mother-jeannette-winterson

I'm currently reading a biography of noted modernist T. S. Eliot and just cannot stop thinking of this quotation from Vivienne Eliot:

not nearly finished. Barely getting started. Big plans. Here is a lady who is not afraid to advocate for herself.

Look, it would absolutely harsh your Friday mellow to think too hard/at all about T. S. and Vivienne Eliot's marriage, so let's skip straight to the biographer who wrote the above, Lyndall Gordon, recommending her own best literary biographies:

If a poet writes a sonnet, it’s part of the intensity of that form that there are very strict rules. And there are strict rules of biography – you have to authenticate facts, you have to include that detailed back-matter to tell the reader where a fact comes from. On the other hand, documentation alone is inadequate for the kind of biography that interests me. You need some shell of the public life, but the deep matter of the biography is the “private life” that Henry James talks of – he meant the writer’s life, the inward life.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/best-biographies-lyndall-gordon/

Love,

Alex.