Star-Bright Lie - Hardcover

Coleman Dowell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1564780228 ISBN 13: 9781564780225

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993

Synopsis

A Star-Bright Lie recounts the age-old story of the young provincial who comes to New York and is dazzled and betrayed by the bright lights of Broadway, but with a few kinks to the story: the provincial in this case was gay and would later develop into one of America's finest novelists. Coleman Dowell left Kentucky for New York in 1950 and spent the next decade trying to "make it" in the big city. With the same stylish verve and searching analysis that illuminate his fiction, Dowell recounts his frustrating experiences in show biz: early success as staff composer for a TV show (to which he was recommended by Tennessee Williams); next, touted as David Merrick's "Golden Boy, " a failed attempt to adapt O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! as a musical; several other attempts at a hit on Broadway; and finally, a sabotaged venture at making a musical of Carl Van Vechten's novel The Tattooed Countess. Throughout this memoir are unsparing portraits of Williams, Merrick, Van Vechten, Isak Dinesen, and others of the period. But the real star is Dowell himself: "his paranoia, his bedeviled fascination with glamour, his lyric response to nature, his nostalgia for a Kentucky he'd fled and then reinvented, his Gothic sense of horror, his touchy pride, his passion for black men, his alienation from both heterosexual society and the two forms of gay life he'd known" (from novelist Edmund White's foreword). Illustrated with eight pages of photographs (many, including the cover, by Van Vechten).

About this title

About the Author:

Edmund White (b. Ohio, USA, 1940) is the author of many critically acclaimed books, the most recent being "The Flaneur". He was made an officer in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and won a literary prize from the Festival of Deauville. He now teaches at Princeton University. His acclaimed autobiography, "My Lives", was published by Bloomsbury in 2006, while his play, " Terre Haute", was published by Methuen Drama in 2007.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Torso of an autobiography by novelist/songwriter Dowell (The Houses of Children, 1987, etc.), found among his papers after his 1985 suicide. Two chapters first appeared in the magazine Bomb. Autobiography was not Dowell's strong mode, states his novelist friend Edmund White in a foreword here: ``This unfinished book isn't quite the right vehicle for his genius. His novels, with their black pools of consciousness, are the best form for reflecting the white filigreed architecture of his inventive mind.'' After rising to sergeant-major in the Kentucky National Guard, which he left for a New York TV job as a songwriter/lyricist, Dowell found far less success writing musicals and never quite landed a hit on Broadway or off. Following several failures, he turned to the novel and, in the States at least, had an equally difficult time, even while gaining a cult following. Much space herein is given over to his bad reviews (when he was reviewed), with Kirkus singled out at length for gay-bashing and ``prejudice, inattention, a kind of resident viciousness [and]...macho femininity.'' In the introduction by Linda K. and John R. Kuehl, moreover, Kirkus is misquoted as having begun its review of Dowell's White on Black on White with: ``There is no doubt that this book is the worst that I have been given to review...'' (the review actually began, ``A melodrama about racism and sexuality...''). The present book has its pirouettes, with Tennessee Williams lauding Dowell's first musical comedy, Haymarket, as a ``ravishing work of art,'' then utterly forgetting Dowell after a three-day bender with him. Others who get harsh treatment include lyricist John Latouche (``His ego could have outfitted a Sicilian village composed of Mafia chieftains''); producer David Merrick, for his allegedly forked tongue; photographer Carl Van Vechten; and Baroness Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). Plenty of purple raisins, but this cake never rises. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1564780228
• ISBN 13: 9781564780225
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165