letter to Colin

Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Fri, 06 Aug 1999 16:55:48 +0100 

    The family, as they pass my door here, sometimes 
    come in to ask: 
             'What's the hell's the matter?  What's so funny?'
             'Nothing,' I say.  'Just something I wrote.'

    So I'm sorry, Colin, that you should be missing what 
    sometimes seems to me at least to be a real pleasure.  
    Though I realise that humour is, of course, individual 
    & unarguable.
 
    I'm dismayed that someone like yourself or Tim should 
    see my stuff as rancorous or sneering.  It's so remote 
    from the cosy, adorable image I have of myself.  
    Even worse, must I now recognise in the forced smiles 
    of Camille, Jim, Paul, Sonny - as well as all those paying 
    patients & - worst of all - my family, the smouldering 
    resentment of a bunch of cowed victims?   

    My welcome to Jocelyn was, truly, an impulse of relief 
    & congratulation to someone quite young who was 
    expressing herself without recourse to that undifferentiated 
    stream of consciousness kind of writing which seemed, 
    seems & always will seem to me a self-indulgent & 
    babyish affectation.  My dig was not at Jocelyn - 
    quite the contrary - but at those others.

    At a more general level.  This list is dedicated to 
    a writer who first made his name on the New Yorker.  
    In the days when he still spoke to his friends he was 
    noted for his conceit - & even more for his acerbity 
    & indignation: qualities very evident in some of 
    his best writing.  Do we really want the primary consideration 
    of the list to be a pernickety care for the sensibilities of 
    the most delicate, the most touchy, the most 'correct'?   
    (Because I suspect you were really smarting from my mockery 
    of your finding 'Star Wars' racist.)  

    'The convoy shall travel at the speed of the slowest ship' 
    is fine for the wartime Atlantic.  It's also an surefire recipe 
    for a damned dull list.

    Scottie B.