A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 by Victoria Wilson

Nonfiction, 2013

She had so many dogs that she had to take up carpets and get rid of various chairs. A visitor walked into her house, looked around at the lack of rugs and chairs, and asked, “Housecleaning?”

“No, dogs,” said Barbara. “Don’t sit there. The dogs have just about chewed the legs off that chair too. It’ll crash the next time anyone sits on it. I’m saving it for a producer.”

Victoria Wilson, who enjoyed a long career as a publishing executive, approaches her biography of the great American actress Barbara Stanwyck with an expansiveness that I’m not sure she would have tolerated when she was wielding a editor’s red pen. This massive tome only covers the first ten years or so of Stanwyck’s screen career, leaving decades to covers before she bows out with Dynasty spinoff The Colbys. Granted, there’s a lot of story to tell up to that point, including a fraught childhood, a combustible first marriage, and an ascendancy in Hollywood that could include as many as five pictures in a calendar year. To her credit, Wilson’s many pages thoroughly fill in Stanwyck’s headstrong personality as she rises to stardom.

The problem with the book as that Wilson is too eager to dump every detail she unearthed in her evidently Caro-esque research. Too often, that turn-every-page thoroughness appears as bulky lists of famous names who attended a party, a gala premier, or a horse race. Wilson also gets so deep into the personal histories of seemingly every other celebrity who crosses Stanwyck’s path, no matter how briefly, that there are almost mini-biographies peppered throughout the book. No matter how interesting the details, the main subject gets lost in the digressions.

The Phoenix and the Mirror by Avram Davidson

Fiction, 1969

The swart-faced man in the forest-green jupon and tights introduced himself as the Sergeant of the Hunt, and, “This one’s His Highness’s chief groom, who we hope will help high Doctor Vergil and this other high doctor—Duty, mesire”—he doffed his cap to Clemens—”to pick out one of the horses here. But if so be none of ’em suits, he will be happy to bring along another twelve or twenty, won’t he? Yes. And the compliments of Gracious high Doge. Likewise, also are saddles and other tackle and gear.” He kissed and smacked his lips to a passing wench.

This fantasy novel introduces the character Vergil Magus, who showed up in at least two more full-length books by Avram Davidson and was presumably intended for many more. The plot of the book is fairly standard castles-and-conjurer hokum. Vergil is forced to create a magical mirror that will find a missing maiden, and the book follows his quest to complete the fantastical task. If the story doesn’t always impress, Davidson’s steadfast devotion to paragraphs of ornate language that stand as sturdy as brick walls surely does. The Phoenix and the Mirror proves that the distance between dense, serious historical fiction and wild-eyed fantasy just isn’t all that far.