'... one can't get back to the pure state of reading;
when one knew nothing about the author (not even
his picture) ...'
I couldn't agree more, Kim.
Yet I wonder is it altogether deplorable that we can't
enjoy the texts pure & unencrusted with all the biographical
crap & gossip. The man & the work are, surely, finally
indivisible. To pretend otherwise is to impose on oneself
unrealistic strictures.
When I see that handsome, saturnine face & read about
the pre-war cafe society dandy, it confirms my assumptions
about the chap who created the snobbish & privileged Holden
- & somehow confirms my enjoyment of him. When I read
War & Peace or Anna K., it pleases me to know that the writer
was so completely at home in the drawing room & the battlefield.
Hearing about that impossible, irresistible old aristocrat with the
tragi-comic marriage & his crazy ideas & his bicycles & his self-taught
Greek - all go to make up the entity TOLSTOY, of which the books
are only the main components. They themselves would be the less
without that extra knowledge & set of associations.
I don't really think I should be QUITE as moved by a Schubert
quartet if I didn't know about the unhappiness that informed much
of his short life. Would Picasso's satyric figures be QUITE as
exciting without the images of that sunburnt old goat with his arm
round a twenty year old Parisienne?
Il y en a plus que contient le texte. (Approx. Valèrie?)
Scottie B.
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Received on Thu Aug 22 14:24:48 2002
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