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"The Books We Love, Love Us Back" : RIP Literary and Cultural Critic "John Leonard" (1939-2008)
ได้ทราบข่าวการเสียชีวิตของ Critic ชาวอเมริกันคนสำคัญ John Leonard จากเว็บ The Chronicle Review , Slate , Washington Post
เสียดายบุคคลที่มีความรอบรู้อย่าง John Leonard ได้จากโลกไปอีกคน เขาเคยทำงานกับ New York Times Book Review ได้เขียนรีวิวหนังสือดีๆมากมาย เป็นคนประเภท Polymath อ่านหนังสือเยอะ รู้รอบด้าน
เมื่อสองปีก่อนเขารับรางวัล NBCC Sandrof Award และในงานดังกล่าว เขาพูดไว้ดังนี้ครับ :
Thank you, Mary. I wish I were as good as you say I am. I only hope the Mary Gordons of this world know how wonderful it is for the rest of us to open up books like "Final Payments," "The Shadow Man" and "Pearl" -- how privileged we feel as we sit down to complicate ourselves.
I want to thank the Board. I remember Ivan Sandroff fondly from the pioneering days of the NBCC -- those smoke-filled afternoons at the Algonguin back in the Jurassic period, when even those of us employed by the New York Times were still allowed to belong to professional organizations, to express political opinions, and to appear on radio or television without anybody's permission, quite as if, underneath our corporate beanies, we were also American citizens. And It's terrific to be here in a room full of people so innocent of the profit motive. While there are many reasons to review books, nobody's in it for the money. And I should also say thanks to my claque. Since I haven't won any sort of award since junior high school, the whole family is here to see the end of a very long dry spell.
I'd like as well to thank the editors at Harper's, The Nation and the New York Review of Books for letting me educate myself in public. And the editors of New York magazine and the producers at CBS who have subsidized my book reviews by paying me to do something, anything else. But most of all I'd like to thank the writers who write the books, without whom we'd hang there limp as wind socks, or beat ourselves like empty drums. Once upon a time, in 1947, a young American and a middle-aged Japanese climbed a tower in Tokyo to look at the bombed temple and burnt-out plain of the Asakusa. The 23-year-old Amercian, in a U.S. Army PX jacket, was the critic Donald Richie. The 48-year-old Japanese, wearing a kimono and a fedora, was the novelist Kawabata. Kawabata spoke no English, Richie not yet any Japanese, and their interpreter stayed home sick in bed with a cold. so they talked in writers. That is, Richie said, "Andre Gide." Kawabata thought about it, then replied: "Thomas Mann." They both grinned. They would go on grinning the rest of the afternoon, trading names like poe, Flaubert, Colette, and Stefan Zweig.
Two men on a tower, after a war, waving the names of writers as if they were signal flags or sempahores. I take this lovely story personally. my whole life I have been waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. From these writers, for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace. At an average of five books a week, not counting all those sighed at and nibbled on before they go to the Strand, I will read 13,000. Then I'm dead. Thirteen thousand in a lifetime, about as many as there are new ones published every MONTH in this country.
It's not enough, and yet rich to excess. The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them -- not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agit-prop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff info-tainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish. Listen to Jean-Paul Sartre, a young brat, on first entering his grandfather's library: "I would draw near to observe those boxes which slit open like oysters, and I would see the nudity of their inner organs, pale, fusty leaves, slightly bloated, covered with black veinlets, which drank ink and smelled of mushrooms." Then recall Toni Morrison's "Beloved," in which Denver warned her ghostly sister about their difficult mother: "Watch out for her; she can give you dreams." And finally remember what Maxine Hong Kingston told a reporter after her house burned down, with all of her manuscripts, in the Oakland, California, fires: "Did you know that when paper burns," she said, "it is very beautiful? It's just amazing to look at a burned book. It looks like feathers, the thin pages, and it's still book shaped, and you touch it and it disintegrates. It makes you realize that it's all air. It's just inspiration and air and it's just returned to that."
How magical is THAT realism? Very. And that's how much I Thank you all.
บทความในอดีตของ John Leonard ที่เว็บ The Nation และ New York Magazine
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