Running Scared
First things first: I am back. So is the webmaster.
I wanted to write something about why American Pastoral was such a cool book, but I won’t now: What if one of the hundreds of people I’ve hurt by my razor sharp wit shoots me to death, and blames it on poor Philip Roth? He can’t even defend himself in court, he’s such a reclusive old man. Now why would I think that, you ask? Read this:
I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there’s no bridge between the two.” [Roth interview in The Guardian].
On the day I beat PrufrockTwo to a link, I will buy you all coffee.
Although I am not sure if Philip’s straight shooting abilities extend to actual weapons, I won’t risk it. Plus, my wit is very sharp, and the list of my enemies is long.
Why now, you ask? Why American Pastoral, you ask? Well, here’s why.
David McMahon, writing in the Indian Express quotes Mike Whitney, former Australian bowler talking about Sachin Tendulkar.
Whitney was bowling to the youngster in a county game in England in 1990, shortly after the Mumbai batsman had made his Test debut. ‘‘Sachin was on 99 and I bowled him with an inswinging yorker. But it was a no-ball.’’ No doubt grateful for the timely reprieve, Tendulkar duly reached his century off the next delivery. As he completed the single to bring up three figures, the Indian exchanged a brief glance with the bowler.
Whitney still chuckles at the memory. He thought Tendulkar was going to sledge him. Instead, he said something that startled the bowler even more than a four-letter word. ‘‘He said to me, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mister Whitney’.’’
I thought it was, umm.. , very cute and all and even chuckled a bit, but on second thought, I wonder if Sachin gets the irony at all. And that’s what led me to Roth, to American Pastoral. If you go back and read the first few pages of the book, you are struck by something. Roth could very well be talking about Sachin Tendulkar.
Yes, everywhere he looked people were in love with him. The candy store owners we boys pestered called the rest of us “Hey-you-no!” or “Kid-cut-it-out!”; him they called, respectfully, “Swede.” Parents smiled and benignly addressed him as “Seymour.” The chattering girls he passed on the street would ostentatiously swoon, and the bravest would holler after him, “Come back, come back, Levov of my life!” And he let it happen, walked about the neighborhood in possession of all that love, looking as though he didn’t feel a thing. Contrary to whatever daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feeling. In this boy embraced as a symbol of hope by so many - as the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor that would prevail to return our high school’s servicemen home unscated from Midway, Salerno, Cherbourg, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Tarawa - there appeared to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility.
But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you’re getting your way as a god. Either there was a whole side to his personality that he was suppressing or that was as yet asleep or, more likely, there wasn’t. His aloofness, his seeming passivity as the desired object of all this asexual lovemaking, made him appear, if not divine, a distinguished cut above the more primordial humanity of just about everybody else at the school.
I told you I was sharp, didn’t I? Tomorrow, I will tell you all about Dan Brown and Sourav Ganguly. Until then, go away, and please don’t be jealous.
Sania Mirza, who