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For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius "The Commodore" Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy Burden's birth, the Burdens had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed bluebloods on the verge of financial and moral decline??and were rarely seen not holding a drink.
In Dead End Gene Pool, Wendy invites listeners to meet her tragically flawed family, including an uncle with a fondness for Hitler, a grandfather who believes you can never have enough household staff, and a remarkably flatulent grandmother. At the heart of the story is Wendy's glamorous and aloof mother, who, after her husband's suicide, travels the world in search of the perfect sea and ski tan, leaving her three children in the care of a chain-smoking Scottish nanny, Fifth Avenue grandparents, and an assorted cast of long-suffering household servants (who Wendy and her brothers love to terrorize). Rife with humor, heartbreak, family intrigue, and booze, Dead End Gene Pool offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of old money and gives truth to an old maxim: The rich are different.… (plus d'informations)
I am really surprised by some of these reviews. I picked this book up per the recommendation of Kristyn at McLean and Eakin in Petoskey, Michigan, and I couldn't put it down. The author is hilarious, the story is compelling and the writing is stellar. How could anyone think otherwise? Here are some of my favorite lines from a description of Christmas morning:
The grown-ups finally emerged and gathered by the fireplace in the living room, my grandparents still in their dressing gowns. Uncle Bob, the oldest, already had a five o'clock shadow. He had to shave about five times a day in order to not look like a gangster....For the Christmas festivities he was dressed in his usual barge basement clothing--an ill-fitting sports jacket and a pair of worn slacks....The second-in-line entered the living room like he was being chased by a bee. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham was clutching a slopping cup of coffee in one hand and cigarette in a holder in the other. His shirttails were out, and his Yuletide red tie was as askew as a guy with the social skills of a five year old could make it... My grandfather sat in the molded plywood-and-steel Eames side chair he always sat in on Christmas morning, with a plate of butter-soaked English muffins and the thermos of coffee he was always served on a small table before him, extracting presents from his ermine-trimmed stocking with his long, slow fingers just like he always did. My grandmother was on the purple couch, a poodle on each side, doing the same. They both exhibited genuine surprise as they unwrapped their gifts. "Popsie! Earrings from Verdura! How divine--" My grandmother, however, did not seem too surprised by the necklace of red and green millipedes I'd made for her with the Creepy Crawlers set I'd gotten for my eighth birthday the week before. Nor did my grandfather swoon with pleasure over the paint-by-numbers horse head on black velvet I'd given him, intending for him to replace the Klee in the hallway with it."
That snippet doesn't even begin to do the book justice. Well worth a read! I highly recommend it.
This book is a bit like the train wreck you can't take your eyes off. It certainly demonstrates that even extreme wealth cannot make everything better. On some pages, it is fascinating (like active monkeys at the zoo) - the rich really do live differently. But the book shows a striking dichotomy of life that The author lived. When with her uber-rich paternal grandparents, she had access to the life of luxury, but when she was with her mother at home - they often lived (in later years) in near squalor. The thread that runs through both sides of the family is alcoholism (and other substance abuse). Like other reviewers, I wish more family photos had been included. It is a great fast read when you need something truly different to shake things up. ( )
“Sepulchrally dismal, she was the three-dimensional equivalent of woe.”
My third memoir for the year, Wendy Burden’s Dead End Gene Pool is a dizzying ride through the lives of the ultra-rich descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt, starting briefly with her grandparents’ antecedents, focussing for quite some time on Wendy’s childhood, which was heavily influenced by her paternal grandparents, and moving into her teenage and student years.
The first half of this book was highly comic – Wendy recounting the tales of her forebears, over-moneyed, over-sexed and often under-endowed with sanity. Similarly the stories of her early childhood, mostly revolving around her grandparents and their staff at the New York mansion. As Wendy grows older, though, the anecdotes get a bitter edge and the book becomes one of those ubiquitous misery memoirs of growing up with an alcoholic single parent. The grandparents become senile and sadly dependent, rather than amusing.
Memoirs are clearly a form of non-fiction that I am coming to enjoy, though – I very much enjoyed Sleeping Naked Is Green and The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance (when I wrote that review, I hoped I’d never have to write the title again. It seems to be following me).
Worth reading if you are interested in rich American people. Otherwise, there’s funnier material out there. ( )
Although Wendy Burden begins her darkly funny memoir, Dead End Gene Pool, by recounting the lives of her ancestors on her father’s side (she’s the great-times-four-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt), the book’s dedication makes it clear where the heart of her story really lies: “For my mother, goddamn it.”
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
For my mother, goddamn it.
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Prologue: It's a testament to his libido, if not his character, that Cornelius Vanderbilt died of syphilis rather than apoplexy.
Chapter 1: “Your attention, please – whoops!”
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Florence, on the other hand, did marry. Which vastly benefitted my father’s side of the family, where we will remain, because even though this book is about my father and my mother, the truth of the matter is my mother’s family didn’t have a lot of money, and my father’s family did, and rich people behaving badly are far more interesting than the not so rich behaving badly.
My mother’s advice was to (quote) shut up and put up. Leslie Lepington Hamilton Burden … was not one to coddle her children with parental guidance.
Number One Son got everything before me. Even psychoanalysis. … When Will returned from his appointment, I sniffed him all over like a dog checking out a mate who’s been to the vet. “So?” I would demand. … He didn’t recognize his hour with Dr. Berman as the spotlit, center-of-attention shower of love I knew it to be. I was burning up with curiosity; I needed to know what I was missing. But inevitably, my weekly joust for the dirt ended with no answers, and Will punching me in the stomach and declaring, “Dr. Berman says you’re acting out ‘cause you’re jealous.” No shit.
My grandfather could never have enough staff. His grandmother Twombly had run her three behemoth houses with the help of two hundred servants, whereas he was forced to make do with a skeleton staff of twenty for his own four.
Red-knuckled hands perpetually wiped and dusted, scrubbed and polished, mopped and waxed, and tidied and organized, putting to rights the everyday messes of we, the Goddam Spoiled Rotten.
I had no idea how to give a hickey, or a love bite, as the Brits call them, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Trouble often evolves from confusing semantics…
It was a revelation that all I had to do for attention was wear falsies and show my underpants. Naturally my mother endorsed this new trend.
I would have long since petitioned George to come over to my house, but for the obvious deterrent: my mother. I knew from experience that she would attire herself in one of her favorite slutfits… There was always a reason to bend over … Whoops! Why, she forgot to put on any panties! (Again!)
Everyone knew about my father’s bipolar disorder, even though the medical community had yet to call it that and Prozac was still a twinkle in some future billionaire’s eye.
Once the ultimate twentieth-century man, my grandfather had become outmoded on this, the cusp of the next. He’d had a great run, from the edge of the Edwardian era, to the Atomic, but he was no longer a viable source of energy. The boards he still sat on didn’t have the heart to throw him off. Saddest of all, there was no one to hand the hard-fought reins to.
They were the tones of self-confident, self-satisfied, unabashedly tipsy grown-ups. Getting them to shore for a picnic would be tricky. The first rowboat carried precious cargo: the bar and, even more essential, the shaker of drinks - the butler. Adolphe wore formal attire even when presiding over an al fresco event such as this. Adolphe had never learned to swim. Still, he maintained the dignity of a wrongly sentenced monarch as he suffered himself to be transported, sitting stiffly upright like a pasha in the bow of the dinghy.
Slightly less dramatic were his [Obadiah the dog's] attempts to run away from home. I'm pretty sure the idea was to either starve or get run over by at least one automobile along the way. As he set off at a snail's plod, you could almost see the miniature hobo sack swaying on a pole over his shoulder.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
“A house full of babies. Go fucking figure,” I repeated in the car driving home.
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For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius "The Commodore" Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy Burden's birth, the Burdens had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed bluebloods on the verge of financial and moral decline??and were rarely seen not holding a drink.
In Dead End Gene Pool, Wendy invites listeners to meet her tragically flawed family, including an uncle with a fondness for Hitler, a grandfather who believes you can never have enough household staff, and a remarkably flatulent grandmother. At the heart of the story is Wendy's glamorous and aloof mother, who, after her husband's suicide, travels the world in search of the perfect sea and ski tan, leaving her three children in the care of a chain-smoking Scottish nanny, Fifth Avenue grandparents, and an assorted cast of long-suffering household servants (who Wendy and her brothers love to terrorize). Rife with humor, heartbreak, family intrigue, and booze, Dead End Gene Pool offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of old money and gives truth to an old maxim: The rich are different.
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The grown-ups finally emerged and gathered by the fireplace in the living room, my grandparents still in their dressing gowns. Uncle Bob, the oldest, already had a five o'clock shadow. He had to shave about five times a day in order to not look like a gangster....For the Christmas festivities he was dressed in his usual barge basement clothing--an ill-fitting sports jacket and a pair of worn slacks....The second-in-line entered the living room like he was being chased by a bee. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham was clutching a slopping cup of coffee in one hand and cigarette in a holder in the other. His shirttails were out, and his Yuletide red tie was as askew as a guy with the social skills of a five year old could make it...
My grandfather sat in the molded plywood-and-steel Eames side chair he always sat in on Christmas morning, with a plate of butter-soaked English muffins and the thermos of coffee he was always served on a small table before him, extracting presents from his ermine-trimmed stocking with his long, slow fingers just like he always did. My grandmother was on the purple couch, a poodle on each side, doing the same. They both exhibited genuine surprise as they unwrapped their gifts. "Popsie! Earrings from Verdura! How divine--"
My grandmother, however, did not seem too surprised by the necklace of red and green millipedes I'd made for her with the Creepy Crawlers set I'd gotten for my eighth birthday the week before. Nor did my grandfather swoon with pleasure over the paint-by-numbers horse head on black velvet I'd given him, intending for him to replace the Klee in the hallway with it."
That snippet doesn't even begin to do the book justice. Well worth a read! I highly recommend it.
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