Llegit u setembre 2015, de n'H.F. Heard A Taste for Honey (1941)
Un rendista jove esquerp i solitari s'ha retirat a viure a un vilatge on s'escau que hi faci també estada un tal Mycroft, en Xèrloc.
Un apicultor amb idees assassines, ha descoberta, mitjançant manipulació genètica i encara més per una d'aquelles escaiences, una nova varietat de vespa, o millor abella, frenèticament mortridora.
El solitari, molt llefec de mel, es veu ara atacat per l'apicultor, o pus tost ses malèfiques abelles. A l'ajut en Xèrloc, xerraire, ridícul, letal.
Ens adverteix l'element esquerp i pus tost timorat qui escriu la narració que no és pas que sigui escriptor. Potser per això de trast en trast, al començament, li ve per cargolar ridículament certs passatges.
p. 9) Looking (...) at an inscription which is quite out of eyeshot of the poor tourist peer he binocularly never so neck-breakingly.
p. 47) Again I was aware I was being sidelongly looked over.
p. 94) That is the kind of question I can't help profoundly disliking.
Al capdavall en Xèrloc reïx a resoldre-ho tot, és a dir, a assassinar mitjançant les mateixes abelles assassines, l'apicultor assassí qui ja els tenia agullats per a la mala mort de les múltiples fiblades molt verinoses.
Un parell d'indrets de nota:
p. 43) Alice was enjoying that sentimental sense of having sacrificed herself to make someone uncomfortable, which I believe bitter-sweetens the whole lives of the industrious poor.
p. 77) You've heard about the 'smell of fear'? It's the adrenalin which fright puts into our sweat when we begin, as we say, to get into a cold sweat of fear, and, indeed, long before we know we are even feeling clammy. It is this smell which all animals, especially bees, find intensely provocative, and, if it gets strong, quite maddening.
[És clar que potser és que quan 'estàs cagat', estàs cagat, i puts a merda.]
Ves. Passable.
Llegit d'en Witold Gombrowicz, Pornografia (1957) [traduït al francès per Georges Lisowski]
Un llibre que he tingut de fa 45 anys i que mai fins ara no m'havia resolt a llegir del tot. I això que el comprava a la Rambla de Barcelona quan encara em trobava tot diguem-ne colpit per Ferdydurke, que havia estat una autèntica descoberta per a mi.
Aquest és llegible d'allò pus. Tret del desenllaç, que sembla una mena de fantasia diguem-ne marieta, és força divertit, i duu a l'esment, amb totes les entrades i sortides, Dostoièvskiï, tret que sense les rucades d'aquest, amb les seues típiques ans molt carrinclones "angúnies metafísiques", o "angoixes divinals".
Diu en Gombro, al prefaci: "L'home, segons aquest llibre, és un ens opac i neutre qui s'ha d'expressar mitjançant certs comportaments i qui per tant esdevé exteriorment (per als altres) molt més definit i precís que no pas per a ell mateix. D'ací la tràgica desproporció que hi ha entre la seua secreta immaduresa i la màsquera que es fica per a d'alguna manera fer-se amb altri. Llavors, quin altre remei que adaptar-se interiorment a la màsquera, com si de debò ell fos qui prentèn d'ésser."
"Error que ell feia degut al fet que ensumava les flors amb l'ànima per comptes de fer-ho amb els oronells - creia massa en la lletjor del pecat i la beutat de la virtut."
Al llibre mateix dos personatges amb tendències diguem-ne marietes (mai del tot revelades), es veuen lleigs i incapaços de cap mena de seducció sexual, i es conxorxen, de primer com de per riure i en acabat follament i seriosa, per a convèncer de sotamà (perversament) dos adolescents, noia i noi, perquè s'entenguin, sexualment i criminal.
Al capítol segon, l'escena de l'església, una de les més potents que mai no llegia; s'hi revela amb força bestial, en tota la nuesa de la sola veritat dels qui som vius i amb el pes ultramérdós de la consciència, el no re subjacent a cada acte ni aparença, al capdavall inútils davant el rerefons maleït de les dues eternitats de mort que ens enquadren.
Molt bo.
Acabat, de Sōseki Natsume, Kōjin (1913) [tr. a l'anglès Beongcheon Yu]
Llibre diguem-ne existencialista abans d'hora. Llibre lat i descordat, amb un protagonista ingenu qui comença fent un viatge i llavors la seua família venint-lo a trobar, de vacances, i ell trobant-se una miqueta embolicant amb la dona de son germà gran. I llavors tot el protagonisme caient en aquest germà gran, el qual és ple de dubtes, i sembla alhora impotent i deprimit. Per al capdavall passar el protagonisme, durant tot el darrer feix de fulls, a l'escriptor d'una llarga missiva que assaja de desllorigar la trama (sense reeixir-hi).
Dia a dia d'una normalitat sense calamitats altres que les imaginades. Dos germans, el gran casat, la cunyada escalfant una miqueta el petit. I a la fi, com dic, un intèrpret, lat, com l'escriptor mateix, i tampoc no gens clar.
L'estrany (o l'individu), kōjin, és el germà gran, incomprès per la seua família, i en Sōseki sembla voler-s'hi identificar, com per a dir que l'intel·lectual es mereix més latitud que no l'altra gent per tal de poder-se exprimir; i el comú del públic l'hauria d'acceptar tal qual.
No n'ixc gens impressionat.
(...)
La cunyada, la més valenta en un situació compromesa.
_Si em toqués de morir, no voldria pas fer-ho havent-me de penjar o havent-me de tallar el coll; viltinc resolucions tan mesquines. M'estimaria més morir violentament - enduta per una riuada o segada pel llamp.
_Saps perfectament [li diu al minyó] que qui està nerviós ets tu; jo rai. De fet, els de més dels homes són prou covards quan cal afrontar situacions difícils.
[Destí de dona.]
Versemblantment era la mena de dona nascuda amb el convenciment religiós que no havia de tenir por de re que no fos el que li toqués per sort natural. De la mateixa manera tampoc no semblava tenir cap por del fat que toqués als altres.
_En aquest món què hi haig de pintar? No pas més que qualsevol planta d'interior? Un cop els meus pares m'han plantat a un lloc, què puc fer? No pas moure'm ni un mil·límetre, sense que algú [un home] no vingui a ajudar-me a fer-ho. No hi ha més remei... sí, cap altre remei que romandre a lloc fins que cap neula no m'abati.
(...)
Molt japonès, això dels actes sobtats.
_[Aquell home] tenia el costum estrany de colgar el dits estesos dins els seus cabells grisos i gratar-s'hi vigorosament la caspa; de vegades, assegut davant el braser, la resta de reunits empipats rai amb la pudor que llavors eixia del foc.
(...)
El jovencell rep la visita de la cunyada i la minyona, en anunciar-la, gosa fer-se la murrieta.
Me n'adonava que a la minyona li somreien els ulls maliciosament, mostrant aquell llampec de plaer típic de les dones qui es pensen haver engalipat un home.
[Per això, com mascle com cal, la repta amb irritació]
_I doncs? Què bades?
On la minyona de bursada caigué de genolls al llindar i anuncià, més seriosament:
_El senyor té una visita.
Els problemes del germà gran.
Interessat en el problema del viure després de mort, inspirat per les lectures de llibres i articles llavors populars a Amèrica i a Anglaterra. Tret que cap de les lectures no l'havien satisfet gens. Havia llegit en Maeterlinck sobre les abelles i tot allò, però li semblava que no era altre que la mateixa escombraria espiritualista de sempre.
_El que tu en dius inseguretat és la mateixa inseguretat que pateix la humanitat sencera, i no ets pas sol a patir-la. Cal fer-s'hi i prou. El nostre fat és el flux constant i au.
Em demanava si no era el tipus de persona qui no pot trobar la pau fins que es torna religiós.
[Tret que un home intel·ligent qui es rebaixa a aquest estadi, per força renuncia a la intel·ligència.]
(...)
_De fet, tot ben sospesat, l'única estona que ens separàvem era quan un dels dos havia d'anar al canfelip.
(...) Tu ho has dit. Ves.
Llegit, d'en Fredric Brown, The Screaming Mimi (1949)
Un trompa educat i existencialista torna a fer a de periodista en veure una deessa nua per casualitat. La deessa ha un gos malparit d'allò pus. També és boja. El periodista trompa esdevé doncs si fa no fa menys trompa durant tres o quatre dies per a resoldre el misteri de la dona nua i de l'estripaventres qui s'hi relaciona.
Haver algú els screaming meemies és haver un nerviosisme neuròtic, un atac d'histèria o de pànic, i el diguem-ne heroi resol els assassinats de rosses comesos per l'estripaventres mercès a una estatueta qui en diuen doncs "la mimí qui esgaripa esbojarrada".
L'existencialista s'oblida del seu existencialisme i va per feina — i llavors la novel·leta en pateix — esdevé menys interessant com més adotzenadament "criminal", o criminalment interessada.
A guy can get anything he wants if he wants it bad enough. Anybody can get rich. All you got to do is want money so bad it means more to you than anything else.
Awakening is never a good thing; sometimes it can be a horrible thing. With the cumulative hangover of two weeks of drinking, it is a horrible thing.
It was one of the few things that couldn't have happened. So it hadn't happened. That was logic.
Why did anyone in his right mind live in Chicago in a summer heat wave? Why did anyone live in Chicago at all? Why, for that matter, did anyone live?
The Lee girl was a private secretary.”
“How private? Kind that has to watch her periods as well as her commas?
He thought how very nice it would be to die, quietly and painlessly, without even knowing it was going to happen; just to go to sleep and never wake up.
Again an automobile almost ran him down as he cut diagonally across Chicago Avenue.
The thought of lying in an ever−cold grave, for instance, is a horrible thing in winter; in summer—
She'd have been there sooner or later anyway; five years from now, fifty years. Death is an incurable disease that men and women are born with; it gets them sooner or later. A murderer never really kills; he but anticipates. Always he kills one who is already dying, already doomed.
He watched the last of the water gurgle out of the tub, and he wondered—had he just committed a murder? Isn't a tub of water, once drawn, an entity? A thing−in−itself that has existence, if not life? But then life, in a human body, may be analogous to water in a tub; through the sewerage of veins and arteries may it not flow back into some Lake Michigan, eventually into some ocean, when the plug is pulled? Yet even so, it is murder; that particular tub of water will never exist again, though the water itself will.
Unconsciously, one judges others by comparison with oneself; and two people both of whom have eaten onions cannot smell each other's breath.
Wondered if she had died a virgin. He hoped that she hadn't, but not aloud. It's fine (...) for a girl to save herself for Mr. Right, but it's damn tough on her if Mr. Wrong comes along with a carving knife first.
L'explicació de tot plegat, absurda.
Only there was a transference. Seeing yourself—in that statuette—as a victim, seeing yourself in that state from the outside, you became, in your mind, the attacker. The killer with the knife.
Potser la conclusió que en trec (pobre de mi) és que en Brown és millor en coses curtes. Les llargues se li fan massa embolicadament llargues.
Així que ves.
Llegit (15-XI-2015), de Peter de Vries, The Mackerel Plaza (1958).
Llibre divertit i agradable, i prou intel·ligent, si fem abstracció del darrer capítol diguem-ne resolutiu, que és una abaixada de pantalons.
Un "ministre" de religió protestant, no gaire creient, havent perdut la dona, els imbècils de la seua parròquia en volen fer un monument. Els negociants aprofitats s'hi apunten per a fer calers a costa dels "fidels". Mentretant, el diguem-ne "pastor" només pensa en cardar, en trobar parella i enfilar-la.
***
[El seu escepticisme patent.]
—Let's bury the awfulness and the nothingness with somethingness we've made with our own two hands. Let's make the lie so big and so convincing, and worship it so bitterly, bitterly much, that it becomes a truth.
—I am always amazed at the infantilism one encounters in supposedly adult people. They are those whom the rest of us must make up for; must "carry," so to speak, in the round of social transactions that go to make up mature human life. [Els no enganyats per la ximpleria religiosa havent d'empènyer, per bon cor, el pes podrit dels inútils degenerats fanocs.]
—"There's only one thing I fear and hate," I said, shaking my face in his, "and that's people shirking the obligation to evolve!"
[La "salvació" només pot vindre per via d'educació. Hà.] —I thought, Can this man be educated? Or is he beyond salvation?"
[Això entre gent d'església, entre ell i la seua cunyada. Hà.] —"Families are the links in the chain that gives man the only immortality he has."
[L'acusen d'ésser poc religiós.] —"You also once said (...) 'It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.'"
***
[Uns quants tocs.]
—I remembered Freud's having defined melancholia as grief at the loss of libido.
—The only weapon in the war of nerves [is] calm.
—Who make a lot of the darn things up? [Facècies que corren.] Prisoners. They've got nothing to do all day and can't live a normal sex life so that energy gets turned inward.
—Never kid a kraut.
—The Americans mumble correct pronunciations while the British clearly articulate faulty ones.
—In one of those bursts of profanity whose roots lie so close to those of reverence.
[Ben veritat.] —Purity carried to an extreme becomes its own opposite. Rémy de Gourmont classifies chastity as a form of sexual perversion.
[Ple de verriny, versifica oblidosament.] —I must have a woman. A woman who would envelop my existence and befriend my spirit and leave her musk in my bed. The secret where the stocking ends. The flower where the fancy tends. The delta where the river wends. The garden where the hunger ends.[Diguem-ne una curiositat.] "—Negro toe?" she said thrusting at me a bowl dominated by salted Brazil nuts.
[Algú qui s'escanya.] —[She] gasped in a piping whisper. Evidently some of it had gone down her Sunday throat.
[Bon metge. I raríssim. Tots haurien d'ésser com ell, lluny de voler enganyar.] —He was one of those doctors who run their practice on the firm theory that ninety-nine per cent of their patients are quacks.
[Ben cert!] —Women were always spurring men on to hit the boss for a raise or to speak to so and so about this or that — generally to wage aggressions they themselves harbored.
[Un internacionalista li fa costat.] —"Hear! hear!" shouted a voice in the gallery. It was a bull-necked man in a red mackinaw. "National sovereignity must go! Only world government will save us!"
Tot plegat, bo.
////
També llegit, de na M.À. Anglada, El violí d'Auschwitz (1994) [tr. anglesa de M. Tennent (2010)]
No sé per què la novel·leta em duu a l'esment certs contes d'ETA Hoffmann [potser pel Violí de Cremona, o pels Somnis són bromeres (pel fet que la discussió és vora els cruanys o les brases d'un foc somort?) etc], però un conte d'en Hoffmann massa pobre, mancat de fantasia, de misteri, d'anècdota, de màgia, de gir de cargol — d'on que no vagi enlloc.
I doncs, relat insuls, suat, adotzenat. Un fuster qui amb penes i treballs fa un violí en un camp de concentració nazi, i el violí se salva i també el fuster, però no el violinista.
No sé si la traducció espatlla la diguem-ne poesia romàntica de l'original (suposant que en porti). En tot cas, el resultat no és gran cosa.
////
Llegit, d'en Norman Douglas, Good-bye to Western Culture (Some Footnotes on East and West) (1930)
Com sempre, irritat per la estupidesa humana. Tocant-hi molt, i molt sovint.
Un llibre de notes. I aqueixes són les notes i els has! doncs de les notes.
[Trens a les Illes (Britàniques)] That railway carriage was not conducive to the reading of a book like this. The heat, the proximity to objectionable fellow-creatures, children squalling in the next compartment, the screeching of machinery, the perpetual coming and going, the banging of doors, the whistling: what a coarse, undignified mode of travel! Here we were,cooped up like hens in a basket; open the windows, and clouds of noisome smoke pour in; shut them, and you are suffocated.
The world has grown not only older since Pericles; it hasgrown stupider.
[Les rucades de la Índia a través de la púrria llevantina] In regard to local epidemics like typhoid, namely, that the natives "from long consumption of diluted sewage have naturally acquired a degree of immunity." They have also grown fairly immune to their own poisons of the intellect which, imported into Europe by people who ought to have known better, swept over our continent in a devastating epidemic of unreason called Christianity, from which we Europeans have not yet acquired immunity. This is a grave moral misdeed to be laid to thecharge of Mother India.
One single Biblical phrase, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,"has led to the death by agonizing torture of unnumbered innocent old women; another one, "that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ," has condemned many hundred thousand young ones to lifelong imprisonment —to tears and misery in the cells of convents.
Curry is India's gift to mankind; her contribution to human happiness. Curry atones for all the fatuities of the 108 Upanishads.
Leave behind you the frowsy and fidgetty little hole called Europe. Savour the remedial effects of that other continent before you are caught in our humiliating machinery; before you are ticketed and labelled as to your monetary worth to a worthless "community"; before you are taxed, and overtaxed, for the purpose of keeping alive thousands of people who ought to be dead.
Education (...) instils uniformity, which is an enemy of civilization. It is a governmental contrivance for inculcating nationalism, another enemy of civilization. (...) Education is a State-controlled manufactory of echoes. (...) Imperialism is an undiluted mischief, and all its offspring are mischief. One of them is compulsory education. The chief result of such training on persons unfitted for it is that it begins by creating wants, and then proceeds to demonstrate that these wants are needs. Since these needs cannot always be gratified, it lies at the bottom of many varieties of discontent and unhappiness. Discontent and unhappiness are evils. This is what the education-fetich has hitherto accomplished in Europe. For every evil remedied, it has implanted the germs of ten new ones.
[Sembla no veure que hi ha una altra educació possible que la que existeix amb el comercialisme generalitzat del capitalisme. Car no és la bona educació que crea els mals desigs (en tot cas la bona educació hauria de crear els bons desigs). Allò que crea els mals desigs és, és clar, el martelleig de la propaganda que els venedors venuts qui es diuen periodistes esbomben pels mitjans. I, a escola, i els currículums manats per l'estat i que els mestres esclaus de l'estat imparteixen com virus malignes. Diguéssim que l'educació generalitzada en mans de l'estat, a urpes sanguinolents d'esglésies i exèrcits (en mans dels venedors de falses necessitats, incloses les guerres) és sens dubte còmplice del desastre.]
As to the enslaving of men, Plato, and after him the Stoic moralists and lawyers, already censured slavery, which neither Christ nor any of his followers discovered to be wrong till twelve centuries later.
Our European rule runs to the effect that a man's mistresses are to be kept by their husbands. This is an advance on Eastern methods.
What is honesty? A time-saving contrivance. The eighteenth century was not pressed for time. The majority of modern people being dullards pressed for time, honesty is not only their best policy, but their only possible one.
INDIAN gods are apt to be grotesque, and Kali is no exception to that rule. She is, on the other hand, too unnatural to inspire either reverence or fear or loathing. [Un exemple de "fear and loathing"]
If the brutes would at least take a bribe, and get through with their work! Alas, incorruptibilityis the fetish of the half-civilized.
You can live without friends, without wife or children or money or tobacco; you can live without a shirt, without a reputation; you cannot live without a document establishing your servitude to bureaucracy.
People are rushing about needlessly, groaning under a load of duties to be performed and puzzling how to avoid them. When a duty ceases to be a pleasure, then it ceases to exist. I recommend this maxim to those who would like to be masters of their own lives.
(Els europeus imaginen...) that they are driving a machine because they happen to be tangled up in its works.
(Els hindús) adapt themselves to reverses of fortune. They bend. In circumstances where a European can think of nothing more sensible than to commit suicide, they find no difficulty in maintaining their equanimity.
The ferocious sentences meted out to rustic half-wits for indulging in the bucolic sin of "bestiality" —a fragment, and not the most noxious one, of our legacy from those pastoral goat-keepers and Jahveh-worshippers.
[Nietzsche metafísic] Nietzsche was proud of the Polish blood of the Nietzkys in his veins: can it be a drop of that? Whatever the reason, his disparagement of men who brought order into our conceptions of human development is a queer feudal trait, and vitiates his cosmic outlook here and there.]
THE business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is a mockery.
I cannot visualize the soul of a prude; it must be something in the nature of a cesspool. [Són mentalment uns podrits.] If the "clean-minded" accuser could be forced by hypnotism or otherwise to give the Court a glimpse into the workings of his imagination, to reveal his inhibitions, and set forth something of his own habits of life... (com riuríem!)
Europe may be heading for Colney Hatch (casa d'orats). This impatience or strenuousness is the White Man's characteristic, and his curse. It is converting him into a harassed automaton, the slave of machines and unhealthy legislation.
By the time we reach, if we ever do, the age of Mother India, some pious Hindu, travelling westwards to observe the condition of our crazy Kindergarten, will discover the last European among the ruins of strange machinery, hugging his passport-talisman and dribbling at the mouth, in a state of mellow dementia.
[Excuses de la malignitat de la bòfia] A man may find himself committing some infringement of the code —they are easy to commit, since new ones are invented every day— for which a police inspector is delighted to run him in. The safeguarding of society is the inspector's pretext; love of man-hunting his basic instinct.
The law invents a crime, and then spends its morning collecting fines to swell the revenue. Even so the Church used to invent sins, inorder to fill its coffers. [Cal dir que metges I farmàcies s'inventen malalties per al mateix.]
[Ajudant els pobres qui, ajudats, encara crien més] Private philanthropy directed towards such ends is bad enough. Public philanthropy, which forces us to contribute to the upkeep of this scum, demonstrates how the intelligent and prudent members of the community are penalized for their superiority.
[Qui creu imbecil·litats és un imbècil...] A two thousand years' course of "believing the impossible" (les corruptores religions) cannot but debase the general standard of intelligence.
The Catholic races extirpate all living things save their own lice and bed-bugs.
Our dogs produce nothing but fleas and bad smells and a choice assortment of microbes in mouth and elsewhere, some of which can, and do, bring death to human beings. Which is absurder: cow-cult or dog-cult?
The peculiar downcast look in the eyes of Londoners walking about their streets; they attribute it to a kind of insular bashfulness or modesty. "These English must be a shy race," they say. That earthward glance has a more practical origin. Londoners are concerned for their boots. It has been suggested that dogs be taught to use the roadways for their purposes. In vain._Gentlemen prefer blondes_. Dogs prefer pavements.
The European stomach ache from which all of us are suffering, that moral constipation, has been traced to a variety of sources. I become more and more convinced, with increasing years, that the roots of the mischief lie far back, in the Roman point of view. The shoddiness of our ideals —the shoddiness of all our ideals social and political— is a heritage from those unimaginative Roundheads, with their ingrained vulgarity, their imperialism, their pernicious doctrine of the _raison d'etat_, and the welcome they gave, as vulgarians naturally would give, to imported pinchbeck like Christianity.
Bo. Divertit.
Acabat, d'en Frederick R. Karl, The Contemporary English Novel (1962)
Estudi de la novel·la a les Illes (Britàniques), en anglès, i de 1930 a 1960.
Els millors apartats els dedicats als millors autors, quina casualitat. Beckett. Waugh. Henry Green. Compton-Burnett... i alguns dels més joves (de llavors!).
Se'n fot de l'incoherent belief d'en Waugh. La seua religiositat, quan l'empra, espatlla el relat.
The real rebel even disdains what will come of his own efforts. (...) Perhaps the true English rebel in our day is the sensualist: Durrell's Alexandrians or Isherwood's perverted Mr. Norris. (...) A rebel, that is, a person who functions by virtue of what he is rather than by what is expected of him. (...) He is, at best, true to himself no matter what the consequences, and often they are unfavorable. [Els personatges d'en Proust, d'en Beckett.] Beckett's rebel is the supreme realist. (...) Beckett is great fun for those with little hope and much staying power.
(Waugh el farsant.) Religious fakery. False patriotism and sentimentalized sense of duty. (...) Waugh... with obvious debts to Firbank ans Saki. (...) His early novels close in their nihilism to Firbank's fruity nonsense.
[Els herois d'en Beckett falleixen en la tasca mateixa de fallir.] In all instances, they become increasingly aware of the absurd difference between their small expectations and their even smaller fulfillment. (...) His characters mean well, and unlike Céline, they do not hate; but their fate is even worse. Céline's Bardamu at least gains his identification through what he opposes.
Conrad, with his self-destructive protagonists, persecuted his heroes while he probed their central corruption.
[Un altre religiós (fotrem goig!), Graham Greene.] (Amb ell,) the novel declines into a tract. (...) Sink into bathos and melodrama. (...) Seduced by doctrine. (Millor seduït per una puta!) (...) Marred with specious arguments. (...) The novel becomes meaningless as a work of art. [Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! Greene una merda, talment com un d'aqueixos venedors de Djizass.]
[En diu "felí" per "femení", hà.] Bowen showing allegiance to (...) Henry James, perhaps de most feline of male authors. (...) All the persons in the novel, then, operate at a pitch close to hysteria.
[Orwell, com Dickens.] The poor man feels inferior and loses his potential as a male, for without money or means he is, as it were, demanned. (...) The clownish ridiculousness of the fat man.
[Tard o d'hora, l'espasa cau del sostre.] Beneath the English assumption of superiority is the great fear which underlies all imperialistic action, an anxiety which Orwell prophetically catches. This fear dictates that the conqueror deny completely the natives' intelligence. Accordingly, (la colònia cal que ignori o tracti de servents els colonitzats, car després de tot, el colon prou endevina que) the natives are bidding their time. [Mateix exemple amb els canfelipencs. Els catalans només esperem l'hora.]
[Waugh al començament és bo, abans la por (és a dir, la religió) no l'espatlli.] He assumes that everyone can be bought, everyone can be made acquiescent to any idea, no matter how ludicrous. The more ludicrous it is, in fact, the more chance of its being believed. [Llavors, amb la "conversió", és clar, els seus escrits es converteixen en merda.] (Ara,) the pretentious people that Waugh takes seriously are the very ones he once would have unsparingly taunted.
(Henry) Green theorizes as if the novel springs into being through a spontaneous creation and then lives on its own terms.
[Els "joves emprenyats".] They ask (en llurs obres) how an "honest" lowerclassman can move into genteel society with its sophisticated and frequently phony tastes... and retain his innocence. (...) Maugham had once called the Angries and their kind scum. (...) One can reject the world only if he can replace it with himself. The arrogant anti-heroes of the Angries, swilling beer in the corner pub, have nothing to draw upon; as empty as the people they attack, they too are parasites.
The Professor (en Rex Warner), armed with humanitarian ideals, attempts tho meet the opposition: the killers, the treacherous, the tyrannical
Força útil, au.
Llegit, d'en Peter Ustinov, Dear Me (1977)
Un altre rus zagranitza [Nabòkov, Brodsky, Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner...] qui es veu, més o menys, centre del món.
[Una curiositat. Per casualitat, llegia això de n'Ustinov en aquest llibre: —I have never learned to type. Quan el dia abans havia llegit a un llibre que no he llegit encara del tot, a Portrait of Max, el que hi diu en Max Beerbohm: —I have never had the secret knack of typewriters. Com si les màquines d'escriure guardessin cap secret.]
Ustinov, ben larvat rere la seua màscara d'albardà, tanmateix un intel·lectual de pes.
—Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.
—What is a more irrefutable proof of madness than an inhability to have a doubt?
—The stupidity of a stupid man is mercifully intimate and reticent [ep, tret que els estúpids els amunteguis en partits i cercles i exèrcits i corts i esglésies...!], while the stupidity of an intellectual is cried from the rooftops.
[Un dels seus avantpassats, pintor criticat per fer bé el que feia bé i no fer altre (aplicable a Ustinov ell mateix)] He was accused of an overriding facility, but (...) to heed criticism to the extent of refraining from (...) your particular forte is to go the way of many facile people who scandalously betray their facility in order to work hard and masochistically at things thay are not good at, while the critic who is not much good at anything himself breathes down their necks with the sterile satisfaction of a sadistic schoolmaster. [Hà!]
[Se'n fot de l'esperit rus — rígid fins a la propera revolució per a reprendre la mateixa rigidesa amb ídoles diferents.] Stalin, who was well fitted for his role of dictator, having been brought up in a seminary. [Exacte!]
[Converses obligades, durant la infantesa, amb un lloro (tantes de dones i de marietes qui enraonen com lloros — tot n'és ple!)] There is nothing more boring in this world than someone else's love story, especially if your are told it by a parrot.
What is the difference between small audiences and large ones except their size?
—D'you remember that horrid boy who used to stick a rusty hypodermic needle into his victims?
—Quiet! He's probably a high court judge by now, and utterly respectable.
[Al exèrcit, res més escarransidor de l'ésser] —You have to realize that most of your casualties are not caused by the Hun, but by your own covering fire. —Eighty percent (said the colonel), but I don't think we ought to frighten the public.
Words are always misunderstood in the army — at least intelligible ones.
There is no profession in which the books are easier to cook than the military. Generals are capable of mistakes so gross that they would lose their jobs in any other walk of life, but since the losses are not so much financial as merely human, they are either given posts of more responsibility or else left where they are.
The Academy is, as ever, the temple of mediocrity, and the ideals it imposes are strictly useful only for those with nothing to say.
The French, a nation of hero-worshippers. [Hà!]
[Per què els italians, qui són en general gent valenta, són a l'exèrcit poc complidors] They prefer not to die under anonymous, or worse, under stupid circumstances.
[Contra el nazi McCarthy, l'imbècil senador, màxim representant del provincialisme maligne i assassí de tant d'americà enverinat per bíblies i patriotismes de pobre miserable pec; i com es caguen els americans, sobretot els uniformats, davant l'autoritat] To watch one brave bemedalled façade after another collapse under the specious pummelling of this sinister clown was more than one's sense of workaday decency could stand.
[Que estudia les sempre inútils "ciènces socials"?] Social sciences were the overflow [entre els estudiants a la universitat] for those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation. [Tant de jovent enrabiat amb ell mateix qui no pot reconèixer que és un pobre desgraciat, i es torna violent fotent-ho pagar a totdéu i sobretot als qui no hi tenen res a veure. La culpa és tota seua, per haver nascut tan negat.]
—Once the human animal must face the terrifying fact of his solitude, it is unnatural to deny him the few advantages attached to being alone. —Such as freedom of choice? —All the freedoms possible. [Qui està sol ha de poder fotre el que vol. Tantes de prohibicions dels maleïts de ment podrida eclesiàstica qui en llocs d'autoritat, ço és, de repressió, et neguen tot oli que t'ajudaria a fer el passatge una miqueta menys patètic. Els repugnants sempre vigilant que ningú no obtingui en re que sigui de franc (i no fa mal a ningú) cap mena de plaer, en re altre, doncs, que en el que els aporta calers.]
Bo!
