Re: au revoir to a young writer

Thanks to Scottie and Tim for their last two posts (meaning this one and
Tim's about Grealy)...I was unaware of either of these writers until now, and
I'm very sorry to hear about Ms. Grealy.

Jim

Scottie Bowman wrote:

> Tim is doubly welcome - principally for himself but also
> for the sweet balm of his rain in this apparently unending
> Christmas wilderness where no voice is heard, no human
> trace is found. (Yes, CHRISTMAS dammit - & all you yids,
> wogs, chinks & hand-wringing atheists can fuck off.)
>
> The Grealy life is obviously one to be noted. The writing,
> as presented in the extracts, seemed a bit wrought for
> my taste but the story itself has an inevitable power.
> (You can never go by photographs, of course, but in
> the teeny portrait provided I thought she looked - apart
> from a certain curtailment of the right jaw - something
> of a smasher.)
>
> What this all brought back was another book that played
> a great part in shaping my own adolescent consciousness:
> 'The Last Enemy' by Richard Hillary.
>
> Hillary was one of the golden, 'long haired boys' of the Thirties
> Oxford generation who in the autumn skies of 1940 over Kent -
> & in the company of rather less gilded chaps - gave the Luftwaffe
> its first severely correctional lesson. In the course of it, Hillary
> was trapped by the jammed canopy of his burning Spitfire &
> lost the skin from most of his face & hands.
>
> Unlike the innumerable other war memoirs of the time where
> the urgency derived more from the events than from the writing,
> Hillary's book - written during the long months in hospital
> when he was not yet 22 - had all the marks of a natural.
> He was a lovely writer: vivid, ironic, & with all the reined-in
> power of a very high intelligence. The book is about flying
> in the Battle of Britain, of course, but more importantly about
> his journey from unthinking privilege through awful suffering
> to compassionate awareness - while the great Archie McIndoe
> rebuilt his face.
>
> He went back to squadron service & was killed one winter's
> night when his damaged hands failed him as he tried to raise
> the undercart of his Beaufighter. He was 23 & I was 13 &
> when the news came I would have wept - except that British
> boys did not weep in 1942 any more than they do in 2002.
>
> He left his mark though. It can't be wholly coincidental that
> in a happy life, four of the happiest years were spent wearing
> the same uniform as Hillary's, doctoring to his successors -
> & even emulating his own quest to become a writer.
>
> Scottie B.
>
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Received on Thu Dec 26 11:07:26 2002