Jordan Massee Accepted Fables

By Jordan Massee

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0976287552
• ISBN13: 9780976287551
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Indigo Publishing
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Macon in the Golden Years

For any of you Southerners with roots in Macon, this book is a grand read. I found it by someone telling me they Googled my name, I did the same and found my grandmother, whom I am named after, written about in the book and bought it immediately. From the late 1800 to the mid-1900's it gives a great perspective of the wealth and high society in Macon. Everyone would be lucky to have someone like Jordan Massee remember the stories of their childhood and their parents. Remembering my father's family and their style of life it was great to hear similar stories from Macon. His family lived on College ST., which is the street my Grandparents lived on. When I first learned my father and all his siblings went to Europe on the QEII (not from my father but from my uncle who went to buy a Jaguar) I was amazed. Similar stories of the lives of the affluent in Macon are told in the book "Accepted Fables."

The Life and Times of an Extraordiarily "Well Connected" Man with a Remarkably Vivid and Detailed Me

Jordan Massee was an impressively well-connected man! He came from a wealthy and influential family of Georgia and enjoyed an happy and privileged childhood and adolescence. This autobiography mainly, as Jordan completed it, deals with those years, with some editorially supplied (and, alas, all too brief) additions to cover his later years. Massee's father, William Jordan Massee (after whose middle name the younger Jordan was named) was a prosperous businessman and entrepreneur (on and off through more than one fortune, of various extents, made and lost!) in several fields. The father's bigger-than-life personality and extroverted nature led to him being know as "Big Daddy" not only by his family but also more widely, led Tennessee Williams to feature the real life prototype of the younger Jordan's father, "Big Daddy" in the play (film, etc.), "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". His son, Jordan Massee himself, the author of these memoirs, only very remotely reflects the son, "Brick", in the same play; about all that real life Jordan and fictional Brick had in common were gay sexuality (bisexual in the case of the play's character) and being part of of Big Daddy's family. (The name "Brick" for the Jordan Massee character in the play may be a sort of insider's joke, since one of Big Daddy Massee's principal enterprises was the manufacture of bricks and tiles!) Carson McCullers was a cousin of Jordan Massee and a collection of McCullers lore is in a Georgia academic library thanks to Jordan Massee's post-mortem provisions for it. Apart from distinguished and colourful relatives, Jordan Massee and his sister Emily and other members of the family were on terms of intimacy with many other figures in the artistic world. Literary figures include Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Harry Stillwell Edwards, Tennessee Williams, indeed, most of the really important authors of the South. Among opera and art song performers, Jordan had especially close and cordial relations with Éva Gauthier, Margaret Matzenauer, and Aristotle Panagako (the lattermost named being a singer of classical music who, variously, also performed and recorded popular, ragtime, and musical theatre music under the pseudonym Ari Petros). I met Jordan Massee through Panagako and Bismarck Reine, the latter of whom was very close to Jordan and helped him to cope with the limitations of old age, the two dwelling together in New Jersey and then back in Jordan's beloved Macon, Georgia. There were so many others in the world of opera and art song (the latter being a musical passion of Jordan Massee's that even exceeded his love of opera). Since Jordan's autobiography does not realise the outline which its author had set for it (as included in the book on prelim. p. vi-xi), many of Jordan's later connexions with celebrities and the arts go unmentioned in the book as published. The book sheds much light on the lifestyle and byways of the wealthy class of the era of Jordan Massee's childhood and youth. Mo