Citation chase

If I were to think of all the books I have read because they were mentioned in another book, why I would be thinking for quite a while here.  It is so often the case that I follow an author’s mention of a title and look for and read that title, that I don’t even think of this relationship when people ask me how to find an ‘interesting book’—it seems that everybody should be doing this, yes? And yet, it is actually a technique that students used to use—identifying research possibilities through footnotes, or other references—and seldom using a bibliography or the library’s catalog.

Like now—I am reading about France in the 1920’s and 1930’s, having just finished the excellent Hollow years:  France in the 1930’s by Eugen Weber.  I learned about this book because I read Quiet American: The secret war of Varian Fry by Andy Marino—not only does it mention the Weber book, but it also talks about Peggy Guggenheim, the American heiress who bought up art from refugees at bargain basement prices so they could leave Europe—her memoir, Out of this Century: Confessions of an art addict is on my pile, and so far is very chatty and full of gossip about expat Americans and Europeans before WWII.  The Weber book led me to Americans in Paris: Life and death under Nazi occupation, by Charles Glass—and another great occupation-era title, And the Show went on: Cultural life in Nazi-occupied Paris, by Alan Riding—or was it maybe the other way around? The Riding book talks a great deal about the intellectuals, writers, and others during the occupation, who collaborated and who did not—and what the consequences were for these people after the war ended.  

Where from here? Maybe more memoirs—the Josephine Baker story has been well delineated in  Jazz Cleopatra by Phyllis Rose and it is a great story—she was a spy for the French during the war, risking her life to transmit secret documents.  In the Glass book there are lots of mentions of Sylvia Beach, the American bookseller who stayed in France during the Nazi time and befriended James Joyce and others—all of whom have stories as well.  The trouble about this chain reading, or connected reading, or citation chasing, is that it doesn’t seem to want to end.  The interesting thing about it is that different chains of literary connection keep coming together—related to this sequence is the story of Lee Miller, a beautiful blonde American who knew Man Ray and modeled for him, knew Ernest Hemingway, and so many others—and during the second world war was there for the liberation of Paris, and of Germany, as a photographer imbedded in the U.S. Army—her work appearing in European Vogue.  Her life embraces the bohemian life of pre-war Europe and the war, and for a while there, she was married to a rich Egyptian, and there is an interesting novel sequence by Olivia Manning, part of which takes place in Cairo… so there really is no end, is there?