Richard Mayne

One minor pleasure of growing up is being allowed to buy sweets ad lib. The same applies to thrillers and detective stories. But there’s a difference. Few dieticians or gourmets would recommend or gravely evaluate competing brands of candy: yet ‘popular culture’ – including comic strips, trash films, junk videos, and rock music – is reviewed and criticised nowadays alongside opera, chamber music, paintings, novels, poems and plays. The main reason is probably media hype. A second is nostalgic self-indulgence – finding pretexts not to put away childish things. A third, perhaps, is semantic slippage, eliding the difference between ‘a culture’, in the anthropological sense, and ‘culture’ tout court. When millions enjoy something, the interest it arouses need not be aesthetic. George Orwell saw propaganda in boys’ weeklies and ‘the worm’s-eye view of life’ in seaside postcards. He was hardly concerned with Frank Richards as a novelist or (despite his essay’s title) the art of Donald McGill.–

Mitterand? Miterrand? Miterand? The misprints enhance the mystery. A Socialist President with Communists in his Cabinet but a foreign policy more ‘Western’ than General de Gaulle’s. A Fourth Republic politician, mauled by disappointment, who fought back, reorganised his party, and defeated all his rivals at the age of 64. A dour, saturnine figure, heavy-browed, with a high domed forehead, firm folded lips, and eyes like wet pebbles. ‘Florentine’ his enemies called him, thinking of long knives and Renaissance alleys. His friends speak of warmth and impulsive generosity, wit and passion, behind the lonely mask.

There are too many myths about Camus. One of the most persistent, first propagated in Britain by Cyril Connolly’s Introduction to the 1946 translation of L’Etranger, was that he ‘played a notable part in the French Resistance Movement’. The much-photographed figure in a trench coat, with Humphrey Bogart features, certainly looked like Hollywood’s idea of an underground hero. In fact, Camus derailed no more trains than Sartre. What he did do, from the winter of 1943-4 onwards, was help the Resistance circuit ‘Combat’ with its clandestine newspaper of the same name. But this had been started three years earlier by Henri Frenay, and even when Camus joined it he only gradually assumed a leading editorial role.

Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind. A good half of the book is pictorial – playbills, posters, designers’ sketches, views of Hollywood, facsimiles of memoranda and old newspapers, publicity stills and frame enlargements, pages of shots from David Selznick films. All it lacks is a disc in the binding with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin.