- - - - - - - -
Current
Issue
Editor's Desk
Write for Pif
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
|
|
| PAST REVIEWS | MORE REVIEWS |
Love Is Where It Falls
Novel by Simon Callow
Reviewed by Wendy Kussrow
There are people who live life, every moment of it, in extremity. For these few, each emotion is a grand passion, every twist of fate takes on a portentous fatalism, and every love is profound. The English Romantic poets and the American Transcendentalist philosophers seemed to share this aggressive zest for living, a very compulsion to "suck the marrow out of life," and there are many artists and celebrities today who seem equally obsessed with living and dying grandly. Simon Callow, actor, director, and author of Love Is Where It Falls: The Story of a Passionate Friendship, is all too familiar with the aching and exhilarating extremes of living. His memoir is half tribute to the late Peggy Ramsay, and half personal quest, written as it is by a man grappling with his soul in the wake of two lost loves. |
 Love Is Where It Falls Novel by Simon Callow Hardcover - $ 16.10 Published June 1999 Fromm Intl. |
Callow's tale begins in his first encounter with the daunting Margaret Ramsay, the result of a "chance meeting" at her agency when she snares him at the receptionist's desk and then half propels, half coerces the young actor into the lair of her inner office. What follows is a mesmerizing portrait of the grande dame herself, at home in the cluttered, pulsing heart of her business, and here Callow's prose is at its most poetic and vivid. He paints a seventy-year-old Ms. Ramsay in what can only be termed as the "prime" of her life, powerful, seductive, with a body too manically charged and a mind too keenly whetted by decades of experience and art to sense the early onslaught of Alzheimer's. More than anything, we quickly become attuned to and then enthralled by Peggy's voice. It is her voice, an almost disembodied force of character and "inexorable will" throughout her dialogues and letters, which drives the narrative. Callow so brilliantly re-creates the timbre, delivery, pacing, and power of Ms. Ramsay's words that readers can almost hear her, and in hearing her, we can intuit the sort of overwhelming charisma this woman exerted over her friends and the artists in life.
Soon after the story gains momentum, Simon Callow confides in us of his equally consuming liaison with the film-maker Aziz Yehia, begun only three months before Callow was plunged into his sudden, immersive relationship with Ramsay. Mere bystanders to the "swelling scene," we watch as Callow is polarized between his emotional addiction to Aziz and his intellectual passion for Ramsay. In fact, the impossibly mythic characters and epic grandeur of the story tempts readers to fictionalize the facts and speak of this book as if it were some Brontλan novel or, better yet, a newly unearthed Renaissance tragedy. It is all too easy to mistake life for art, in a memoir which so closely weds life and art. Callow is the very type of Shakespeare's speaker in the sonnets, caught between the dark lady and the golden boy (though in Callow's case, Ramsay's "fine golden hair" is the foil to the "dark glamour" of Aziz). Callow's affair with Ramsay never consummated but an affair of epic proportions all the same spans the next eleven years of written exchanges and rendez-vous and throws a pall over Callow's love with Aziz almost as palpably as does the shadow of Aziz's mother herself. Throughout their correspondence, Ramsay and Callow have a tendency to compare one another to characters from literature and opera. Yet even without such a comparison, the similarity of their plight with that of the great heroes and heroines of art is startlingly apparent. Engulfed as a British actor would be in the theatre's classic tales of love and death, Callow's story smacks of something too near Shakespeare impossible, sumptuous, tragic. He tells us a winter's tale in which both the young prince and wise queen must die, and in the face of real death, there is no Paulina to revive them, unless it is Callow's own poignant prose and loving memory.
While the author's recollections of Aziz Yehia are beautiful and haunting, like film shot through gauze, I found myself most touched by Callow's revelation of the many faces of Peggy Ramsay, fey and girlish in their first assignation, stalwart in an encounter with invading slugs, colossal in her impact on playwrights, fragile and courageous in death. A queen holding court in one scene and "Mariana in the moated grange" the next, Margaret Ramsay emerges from the inanimate pages of a book as few real people can a heroine on the order of Tatiana, Lady Macbeth, Hermione, and even, dare I say it, Daisy Buchanon. For a woman who had everything, and who was clearly larger than life in life, Callow has secured the one thing mortal memory alone could not: a grandeur that is surely deathless.
Love Is Where It Falls can be an exhausting ride for the reader who is not in the habit of living on the perpendicular planes of "agony or ecstasy...and to hell with the bits in between." The sheer magnitude of Callow's emotions, the Bacchanalian love of good food, good wine, great music and art the hedonistic gusto with which he retells the minutiae of daily living can leave a reader breathless, overwhelmed, even alienated. On the other hand, Callow gives us a vicarious chance to live more deeply and fully in a week of evening reads than most ever could in a full year of the merely 'day to day.' In fact, while the episodic nature of the memoir and the chapter-oriented organization of the book might seem to recommend a leisurely, piecemeal reading of the text, such an approach crushes the careening momentum necessary to a tragedy. Better to read the whole in one or two sittings, fling oneself into the vortex of life, love, and art, which is Simon Callow's story, and plan instead to reflect on the whole from some later, more objective perspective.
Simon Callow's remembrances both of Ms. Ramsay, and of his lover, Aziz Yehia, are deeply and, at times, painfully intimate; yet, in his retelling, the reader never feels that the author has in any way desecrated the holy ground that these two individuals occupy in his heart. Indeed, as we close his book, we are aware most of all of Callow's generosity as a writer. He casts the reader in the role of friend and confidant, not of voyeur. Never condescending, he speaks of heady things of music, and famous friends, and philosophy, as if the reader were as educated and well-connected as he. Callow allows his readers to see him in an honestly unflattering and fully human light. Conversely, even in recounting the last, desperate days in the lives of his two dear friends, he strives to protect the beauty and the integrity of these fragile loves, as if, like Shakespeare's sonneteer, with his golden boy and dark lady, his words could render them immortal and somehow beyond reproach.
While the novel is inarguably autobiographical, Callow's narrative perspective is that of a Horatio left behind to tell the tale, or else some votary bound to tend the holy flame. Love Is Where It Falls leaves us frustrated, exhilarated, and wiser for the telling and not a little in awe of those who can live so extravagantly and yet still manage to "pick up the bill."
Tell us what you think. Email
talkback@pifmagazine.com
Want Pif to review your book? See Review Suggestions for more details.
Wendy Kussrow holds a bachelor's degree in English and has spent the past five years teaching drama and English at a boarding school in Asheville, North Carolina. Her previous publishing history includes poetry, essays, and articles about education. When she is not on stage or back-stage, she enjoys the daily adventure that is life with a husband, a toddler, and a Siberian Husky puppy - though not necessarily in that order.