Subject: father, dear father, come home with me now ....
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sat Sep 02 2000 - 07:12:48 GMT
It's a little unfashionable nowadays to associate
genius with madness. They tell us that exceptionally
gifted children, far from being the maladjusted swots
& misfits as we'd all hoped, tend to be bigger, happier,
more beautiful, more naturally athletic & better adjusted
socially than the rest of us.
But j'ai mes doutes.
This latest apparent confirmation of Salinger's grotesqueries
coincides with my reading, over the past week or two,
of biographies of Hemingway & Tolstoy. And, by golly,
none of these chaps would have looked out of place sitting
in my waiting room.
I think the very compulsiveness needed to carry you through
X thousands of pages (endlessly corrected) of inner fantasy
denotes, in itself, a fair degree of mental disturbance.
Add to that the neurotic exhibitionism that scrambles
desperately to display all this before the eyes of the largest
possible number of strangers - & you're looking at a pretty sick
brew.
Count Lev is my personal favourite but even he managed,
with the best of intentions, to subject his wife to what
Andrew Wilson describes as the best documented &
unhappiest marriage in the history of literature. And while
Don Ernesto is sometimes conceived as a rollicking bear who
didn't always know his own strength, the truth seems rather
different. Long before the drink got the better of him,
he had revealed a manipulative & nastily begrudging personality
who regularly let slip glimpses of an distinctly Hieronymus Bosch
interior.
It's surely no great revelation to hear that Jerome subsists
on nuts, young girls & the occasional refreshing glass of pee.
Something similar was reported of that well known 'fakir in
a loincloth', Mahatma Gandhi.
It goes without saying that I do NOT share Cecilia's
protective instincts. It seems to me ludicrous for a man
who has made many millions parading in public his own
contrivances to complain when his daughter gets a little
of her own back - a daughter whose father, by the looks
of things, managed to screw up pretty comprehensively.
Scottie B.
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