Ronald Blythe warned that we’d better keep the diarists and letter writers on the top shelf, out of the way, if we wanted to get any work done. Unfortunately, that reminded me how much fun it is to read the letters of Roy Bedichek.
His off-the-cuff remarks on literature often make me grin:
There is in Marlowe something of the ‘gong and cymball’s din.’ It’s a little noisy.
Churchill is an artist rather than a statesman. He is often wrong about the right policy but never about the right word.
Bedichek was suspicious of the medical profession and hostile to the pharmaceutical industry. He worked for the University Interscholastic League in Texas, a position that kept him neck deep in the worst kind of politics. He preferred Gibbon to sleeping pills.
When I used to get perturbed over League disputes and was subject to telephone calls any time of the night, I kept a volume of Gibbon by my bed for its somnolent virtue. It first interested me, took me away from the immediate annoyance, and then lulled me into repose.
Bedichek thought it was the “long sea-swells of his sentences.”
• Sources: The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998, pp. 116, 246, 338.
No comments:
Post a Comment