Subject: a corrective from Yasna Polyana
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sat Sep 16 2000 - 07:38:01 GMT
Many thanks to Scout for finding us this civilised
& satisfying interview. Margaret Salinger came across
- to my no very great surprise - as cool, intelligent
& sympathetic. And she was well served by an interviewer
who sounded both reasonable & informed.
Whilst he declared himself frankly 'for' her father, time
& again I could hear my own reponses chiming in sympathy
with hers - even before she had uttered them. Whether
listening to her partiality for the 'Esme' story or her scorn
for the marble heads who scutter round 'protecting' the privacy
of the old eejit - I could only give a soft cheer.
I could also understand the daughter of such a humourless,
self-infatuated clown advocating celibacy for certain types
of person.
But any comparison with Tolstoy is, of course, absurd.
As someone has pointed out, when all those thousands
turned out for his funeral, rather few had even heard
of War & Peace or Anna Karenina or The Cossacks or
Resurrection or.... For them, he was the great, holy,
crackpot Count Lev who organised food centres for
the starving, worked alongside his own peasants, & had
often been threatened with banishment for his battles
against the established injustices of the state. And the rest.
A man profoundly engaged in the world - all his life.
Can you imagine? The greatest literary genius of
the past hundred years (& he was just as compulsive
as any writer) yet he often saw his books as unworthy
interruptions of his proper work for his fellow creatures.
What he did NOT do was retire to some cabin on one
of his estates to study his umbilicus & whittle exquisite
little studies of effete Muscovites.
He remained married to the same woman for fifty years,
a woman who bore him nine children & transcribed &
typed as many as four or five versions of his great books.
They fought like cats - often over situations of sexual
jealousy which they both suffered into their seventies.
(The children, I may say, remembered their father as
vividly for his fun & teasing, affectionate warmth as for
his crazy obsessions. And none of them wrote War &
Families or Life with Father.)
Leo was a mensch. For Chrissake. Don't talk me about
Salinger.
As for all those unpublished masterpieces. The long-awaited
opus is a recurrent phenomenon - especially in the world of
American letters. Most recently, who was it? - Brodky? I'm old
enough to remember how, after 1941, we kept being promised
great & unimaginable wonders from the desk of Ernest Hemingway.
It was all going to be about '.... the sea & the earth & the air...'
& God knows what. And after twenty years, look what we got:
one short, (OK, terrific) book of malicious memoirs, one failed
war-novel, one labouredly pretentious fable - & a great load of
embarrassing dross.
Don't hold your breath, chaps.
Scottie B.
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