Camille Claudel: A Life, by Odile Ayral-Clause****

Camille Claudel, 1864-1943, was a headstrong, difficult person from her childhood. She also proved talented for sculpture at an early age. Her mother always resented her, but her ineffectual father loved her. Her younger brother Paul was her friend and confidant, but a very religious Catholic, he eventually decided that Camille was probably "possessed."

The famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin accepted Camille as his student, and soon fell in love with her, although he had another mistress whom he would not give up. Camille's strong personality eventually showed signs of mental illness, chiefly paranoia, a strong persecution complex. She broke with Rodin and became obsessed with the idea that he, and others, were stealing her works and plotting against her life.

Her family committed her to a French asylum in 1913, where, at the request of her mother, she was restricted from seeing or communicating with anyone outside the asylum for long periods. Rodin continued to have strong feelings for her the rest of his life, but in his old age he married his mistress Rose, and they honeymooned in an unheated government house. Both died of pneumonia within the first year of their marriage. When Camille died, possibly from malnutrition, in 1943, she was buried in the asylum's cemetery.

Ten years later, her brother Paul requested permission to move her remains to her home village of Villeneuve. The reply he received was that her burial place had been reclaimed for the needs of the Cemetery Department. The bones of all the interred individuals had been exhumed and  transferred together to a communal grave. Camille never returned to her beloved Villeneuve. Of the communal grave, of her bones, there is no trace.

Camille Claudel, 1878

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff****

"Tumbling down the rapids from Kinshasa to the Atlantic, the Congo River bursts out of Africa with such force that you can see its sediment churning into the sea for hundred of miles offshore, tinting the blue ocean brown. That was the first violence Konrad would have witnessed as he approached the Congo Free State on the Ville de Maceto in June 1890." - TDW p. 186

Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 and died in 1924. He was born Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, in Poland which was part of the Russian empire. Early in his adulthood he went to live in England, became a naturalized British citizen, and considered himself an English writer. He worked as a sailor, holding various posts, for twenty years, then quit to write full-time. He married a Miss Jessie George; the book says she was homely, but her photograph is lovely.

Conrad's major novels were written after his retirement to England. They included Almayer's Folly, Nostromo, Lord Jim, and Heart of Darkness. His only "best-seller" during his lifetime was Lord Jim, which was immensely popular soon after its publication.

One Saturday morning in August 1924, Conrad went to see a house that he was thinking about moving to. He had a bout of chest pain during the trip. He went to bed with the doctor's diagnosis of indigestion. His breathing became difficult, and he was placed on oxygen. Next day he felt well enough to get up and sit in his chair; Jessie was laid up in the next room with injured knees from an earlier accident, and she and Conrad called to each other from their rooms. Then "everyone in the house heard a thump. Conrad had fallen dead from his chair...." He was buried in "the kind Kentish earth." TDW

A quotation by the author regarding Heart of Darkness: "Anyone could be savage. Everywhere could go dark."

Joseph Conrad's works that I have read:

The Secret Agent
Lord Jim

An Outcast of the Islands

Falk

The Nigger of the Narcissus

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

Conrad and his cousin

                                                                                         Jessie George Conrad

                                                                                             From a Getty image

Outside the Magic Circle****

The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr

"Life has a strange irony. You fight for something--like the right to vote in the South. Give the Negroes and the poor folks the right to vote. And you win. And then they elect George Wallace."

Mrs. Durr's exasperation and many other attitudes abound in this excellent [my opinion] account of politics in Alabama, roughly from the 1930's through the '60's.  I say excellent, because it is readable, un-put-downable.  The last section of the book really spoke to me, because I lived through some of it, and it mentions several of the characters I knew, sympathetic and otherwise.

Southerners love nicknames. A choice one in this book is Dinkydonk, a daughter (Constantia) of Jessica Mitford. Jessica herself was called Decca.

Hero of the Empire, by Candice Millard*****

This is a very good book about part of Winston S. Churchill's life, the part during the Boer War. I had never quite understood about the Boers. Very tough hombres. They were originally Europeans who had settled in South Africa. There were actually two Boer Wars; Winston was a newspaper correspondent in the second one (1899-1902).One of the best books I've read about him.

E.E. Cummings, by Susan Cheever (2014)***

This is a good biography of Cummings, finished reading today. It includes many photographs from his life and acquaintances. Something I didn't know, Cummings was also an artist. His name was Edward Estlin Cummings, and he was called Estlin. This is my favorite poem by him:

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn... et seq.