John Mwazemba
15 July 2007
book review
Nairobi — No single monument in the United States of America is as famous as the statue of liberty, the crowned woman holding forth the torch of freedom in her hand, a symbol of American democracy.
Richard Musman, in his book, Background to The USA, becomes poetic in describing the country's diversity as encompassing "the cacti in the Arizona Desert, the Monument Valley in the real Wild West to the beautiful Gardens of Magnolia in South Carolina. From the sparkling cold of an ice-storm in New Jersey to the heat that ripens the oranges of southern California".
However, maybe nothing American has excited the world's fantasies like Hollywood. As Musman writes, "Hollywood suggests glamour, a place where the young star-struck teenagers could, with a bit of luck, fulfil their dreams. Hollywood suggests luxurious houses with vast palm-fringed swimming pools, cocktail bars and furnishings fit for a millionaire. And the big movie stars became millionaires. Many spent their fortunes on yachts, Rolls Royces and diamonds. A few of them lost their glamour quite suddenly and were left with nothing but emptiness and colossal debts.
Movies were first made in Hollywood before World War I. The constant sunshine and mild climate of southern California made it an ideal site for shooting motion pictures. Hollywood's fame and fortune reached its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, the golden days of the black and white movies. Most of the famous motion picture corporations of those days, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers are still in business and great stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper and many others besides, have become immortal".
In a book published just weeks before his death, Jack Valenti, formerly head of the Motion Picture Association of America takes readers into the intrigues inside Hollywood daring to bare it all. Valenti's reign in Hollywood will be remembered for devising a voluntary film-rating system using letters like G, R and X to rate films to beat official censorship by local town boards.
In, This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood, Valenti writes "a fierce ambition burned in me I wanted to see more, know more and feel more than what seemed to be my lot".
He took this burning ambition to three equally deadly and fierce combat zones of war, politics and movie making and writes about each of these.
A singular raconteur, Valenti, the bantam five-foot-seven Texan goes down memory lane to his days as a World War II B-25 bomber with the 12th Air Force. He writes that he was in the presidential motorcade that fateful day when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy succumbed to an assassin's bullet under a clear Dallas sky in an otherwise peaceful time.
After Kennedy's death, Valenti flew back to the White House as special assistant with the new president and fellow Texan, Lyndon Johnson. As a critic wrote, Valenti's memoir is about "Been there, done that, indeed. Texas-born and Harvard-educated, Valenti has led several lives, any one of which could have provided ample material for an unforgettable memoir. As it is, This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood, is the gripping story of a man who saw the terrible face of war while fighting with skill and bravery for his country; who was in the room, listening, participating and remembering, as political decisions were made that would benefit or devastate countless lives. He championed the interest of the vast and globally influential movie industry with tenacity and vision. The list of boldface names whom Valenti knew and with whom he worked is as varied as it is astonishing in number."
Indeed, the memoirs recount an extraordinary journey from Houston, Texas to the White House in Washington to Hollywood in California with all the astonishing portraits of large-than-life people or 'Texas size' in Texanspeak.
Indeed, Valenti loved his 'Texas twang' as David M Halbfinger wrote, "A voracious reader, Valenti devoured everything by Macaulay, Churchill and Gibbon, and his speaking and writing style would mix his native twang with the rhetorical flourishes of his heroes in a brew of clichÈ, cornpone, compelling phrases and clunkers that one critic called 'a kind of Texas baroque'."
Valenti should be praised, posthumously, for reminding us of the important art of writing memoirs.
In Kenya, where most people do not read, let alone write, we are bound to have only a handful of memoirs, if at all. The habit of recording events in dairies or journals would aid us when we are ready to write memoirs.
However, Dear Journal entries are still strange to many. No matter how good one's memory is, it cannot recall all the people, details or even emotions surrounding a certain event that happened many years ago. Therefore, the habit of recording events down is an important first step in laying down the groundwork of writing our memoirs when the time comes. Even though not all of us would be published because we are neither famous nor important, some of us would at least find a ready publisher and hopefully an eager market for our memoirs because of our inspiring life stories. Prominent people like politicians, media personalities, businessmen and other people in society could find a ready market for their memoirs especially if they share the secrets of their successes.
For us to write good memoirs, we must develop ways (whether writing notes or whatever reminders) of aiding our memories to recollect details, sights and sounds of events that happened long ago; details which seem to get blurred through the softening vista of yesteryears.
Memoirs form an important part of literature. The free encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, says, "As a literary genre, a memoir (from the Latin memoria, meaning 'memory') forms a subclass of autobiography, although it is an older form of writing. Memoirs may appear less structured and less encompassing than formal autobiographical works as they are usually about part of a life rather than the chronological telling of a life from childhood to old age. Like most autobiographies, memoirs are generally written from the first person point of view.
Gore Vidal, in his own memoirs Palimpsest, writes that 'a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates and facts to be double-checked'. It is more about what can be gleaned from a section of one's life than about the outcome of the life as a whole".
Future generations will read and interact with Valenti, thanks to his memoirs and in effect understand America's involvement in World War II, get a glimpse into America's seat of power, the White House, and quench the deep thirst of getting a sneak preview (hopefully with some celebrity gossip) into the star-studded world of Hollywood.
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