A journey through key spaces in the lives of seven artists is imaginative and engrossing
of the island, she resisted fascism by making fearless interventions into the landscape. She produced homespun anti-German agitprop that she littered throughout her local streets.
Perhaps this psychogeographical approach, which shimmies away from straightforward methods of slotting artists into socio-historical contexts, might sound a little lofty. But Hester’s writing is anything but. Hester takes us through a range of meaty suppositions – the figuring of household dirt in Baldwin’s fiction or the imperatives of San Francisco’s New Narrative school of writing – and his erudition is always evident in the meticulously elucidated research.
But a resolutely unpretentious prose style – sometimes animatedly conversational, sometimes wonderfully camp – goes hand in hand with scholarliness here. Sam D’Allesandro, the writer whose short story inspired the lyrical title of this book, was “by all accounts, drop dead gorgeous.” When visiting Bloomsbury Square, as part of his investigations into the lives of queer suffragette dramatists, Hester remarks of the famous statue of Virginia Woolf: “I’m sorry to say, she’s seen better days.
This narrative voice chimes with the personal insights that Hester shares as the work unfolds. They enrich the work with an intimate, inviting character. The section about James Baldwin’s upbringing – raised in Harlem amongst fire-and-brimstone Christianity – is a beautiful example of this.
The writing also has a novelistic quality. Usefully, in a book interested in the import of locations, Hester is brilliant at setting the scene. His descriptions – particularly at the beginning of a chapter, as he introduces a new locale – are colourful, sensory, richly enveloping. Hester’s capturing of his nighttime arrival in the port of St Helier “the docking: lurching, interminable, cacophonous” conjures a queasy atmosphere of expectation and uncertainty with spellbinding accuracy.
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