Final essay from the Leonard collection...will start in again after the long Columbus Day weekend, next Tuesday with something new.

“Sad Sam Beckett”

Leonard concludes his collection with a very strange (maybe appropriately so, given the subject?) sort of eulogy for Samuel (“Sam” he calls him throughout) Beckett. Beckett died in 1989. Leonard doesn’t really have much to say about Beckett’s work, but gives us a brief, interesting walk through Beckett’s idiosyncrasies with five short sections each introduced by a quotation from one of Beckett’s works. The final quote is from Endgame, “Do you believe in life to come? Mine was always that.”

Leonard sums up the writer by telling us “I think Beckett’s just weird…The masters of modernism are almost always weirder than anybody they write about or for.”

Last lines of the essay (and the collection), “Lighten up, Sam [Beckett]. It’s only the end of the world.”

New word: scrofula = tuberculosis

New learning: Beckett “lived for forty years in the same Paris apartment with a wife “…to whom he communicated only on the telephone.”

Godot:

“Doris Lessing Returns From Outer Space”

Evidently, a transcript of Leonard introducing Lessing at an event. About Lessing’s early work, The Golden Notebook, Leonard writes, “I learned more from that novel than I’d really wanted to know.”

Later he was unhappy with Lessing’s books about other worlds in the Canopus of Argos series and writes, “It’s not fun to be dismayed by a writer you are compelled to read because so much of what you know, you got from her in the first place.”

He obviously loves Lessing’s writing, “Any prize for literature that Lessing hasn’t won, including the Nobel, embarrasses itself.” She did eventually win the Nobel in 2007, one year prior to Leonard's death.

His conclusion is “…don’t tell a great writer what to write about; you take whatever you can get."

New word: Canopus = the brightest star in the constellation Carina.

New learning: Lessing was born in Iran (then called Persia) in 1919.

Picture of her on the morning of the Nobel announcement and the NYT article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/11cnd-nobel.html?_r=0

“Wole Soyinka: A Garden of Too Many Cultures”

Leonard’s commentary on the event of Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize…a pick that inspires Leonard to write that the Nobel committee “…finally got one right.” Not only have I never read any Soyinka, I’ve never heard of him or his classic memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood about which, Leonard writes, is a book that “would dazzle anybody into sentience” and that “Ake locates the lost child in all of us.”

Leonard brings up Nabokov (who did not win a Nobel) several times and writes that “Soyinka belongs in [his] company.” Near the end of the essay, Leonard writes “If most of Ake charms, however, the last fifty pages inspire and confound; they are transcendent.” OK, onto the Goodreads list!

New word: cowrie = small to large sea snails

New learning: Soyinka, most notably a play write and poet, is Nigerian and was the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Funny Video of Soyinka’s poem “Telephone Conversation”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFRHZL3OIeM

“Jean-Paul Sartre: Problematic Pillhead”

Leonard’s review of Annie Cohn-Solal’s Sartre: A Life and Ronald Hayman’s Sartre: A Biography.  He starts with the statement, “Giacometti…tortured metals, Sartre…tortured ides,” and describes Sartre this way:

…philosophizing novelist, pamphleteering playwright, celebrity intellectual, “pope of existentialism,” …one-eyed, chain smoking, piano playing booze hound, pillhead, womanizer.

Leonard clearly doesn’t like Hayman’s treatment of Sartre (his “potted psychologizing is a trial throughout.”) and likes Solal’s less judgmental approach ( …"who’s along for the ride with a wicked grin.”)

Leonard ends with a quote from Solal but, just before sums up Sartre this way, “He talked himself into commitment and stayed there, even at the price of relinquishing his claim on us as a great imaginative writer.”

Great quote from Che Guevara to Sartre, “It’s not my fault that reality is Marxist.”

New word: corydrane = a combination of aspirin and amphetamines.

New learning: When Sartre was in high school, he and his friends would hide in the stairwell waiting for the rich kids to return from a night out, “…and then drop water bombs on them shouting, ‘Thus pissed Zarathustra!’”

Che and Jean-Paul in 1960: