Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(13)
As if all this were not enough, she is chairman of the Society of Authors and campaigning fiercely for public lending rights which would pay writers for the number of times their books are taken out of libraries. Such a system in one form or another already exists in other places—Scandinavia, Australia, West Germany. There is opposition.
“Alas,” she laments, “the librarians are dead against it.” The librarians of England have reason to fear. Against them, at the head of her fellow writers, witty, engaging, and armed with the personal friendship of many politicians, is that most powerful of foes: a beautiful and clever woman, determined to have her way.
It is Friday. In the favorite restaurant where she has lunched at the best table, they are holding out her cape. “I must run,” she apologizes. “If I don’t catch the train my husband will shoot me. Which he is equipped to do.” She is off for Scotland with six new books packed in her bags.
“You’ll read all those?”
“Oh, no,” she says, smiling. “But in case the train breaks down . . .”
People
February 24, 1975
Ben Sonnenberg Jr.
In the firmament when I was a schoolboy were names like Achilles and Caesar, and Horatio, standing alone at the bridge. In the more immediate world there were Lindbergh, Jack Dempsey, and Scott of the Antarctic, writing with frozen fingers the heartbreaking farewell letter. When Dempsey’s eyes were swollen shut at the end of the championship fight with Tunney, a fight he had lost, he asked his handler to lead him across the ring so he could shake Tunney’s hand. Class.
In the grown-up world, I was surrounded by heroes: all-Americans, halfbacks who’d played with Bear Bryant, Medal of Honor and DSC winners, top aces like Bud Mahurin, Boots Blesse, Kasler, and Low. There were men who’d been on the Ploesti or Doolittle raid or landed on Guadalcanal. Heroes in their youth, acting out of natural impulse, so to speak, even if it meant greater courage and skill than others possessed. Oddly enough, none of them seemed particularly heroic at the time. They wore it, almost all of them, lightly. But the more they recede into legend, the greater they become.
There’s another style of heroism I find myself admiring: not the particular act or achievement, but the long, hopeless struggle almost beyond imagining, the battle that has no end.
I first met Ben Sonnenberg Jr. before he had any idea of what would be asked of him. It was about 1973. He was dandyish, well-off, in his thirties, several times married, a man with a certain loftiness, prodigiously read, a sometime playwright, raised in a handsome house in New York’s Gramercy Park, disapproved of by a very successful father.
I don’t remember when it was diagnosed, but there were the early signs: tripping slightly on a crack in the sidewalk, after a while the use of a cane, then two canes, the difficulty in getting out of a taxi, the process of somehow making it to the door of the restaurant and then falling across a table inside. In the end, a wheelchair, but how far from the real end this was.
He had MS, areas of the brain and spinal cord degenerating, the nerve fibers losing their covering and unable to transmit impulses.
Slowly, year by year, all that he possessed of physical ability was taken away. He became bedridden. He could no longer raise a hand in greeting, or feed himself, or even turn the page of a book. Absolutely everything had to be done for him.
Meanwhile, he never complained. He did not speak of the indignities, the nightmare of hygiene, the injustice of it all, the despair—these seemed not to exist. Instead, he founded and edited a literary magazine, Grand Street. He celebrated his birthday with an annual party, saw people, wrote, entertained. Perhaps he pitied himself, but he let no one else pity him. I think of Stephen Hawking, but I don’t know him. I think of Helen Keller, but hers was a life of optimism, a life that was enlarging. Ben Sonnenberg’s is of a long forced retreat.
I see him occasionally now, not like Richard Howard, who comes to read to him, not like Susan Minot and closer friends, but I am often near him. I think of him frequently. It’s hard to explain, but I am jealous of him. I am jealous of his bravery and spirit. A hero is, among other things, someone favored by the gods. Greater, perhaps, is one crushed by them who, despite it, triumphs.
Men’s Journal
May 2001
Life for Author Han Suyin Has Been a Sometimes Hard But Always Many Splendored Thing
In the China in which she was born, mile after mile of peasants sat in the branches of trees above the great floods. They were motionless, waiting for death as the train on its high embankment sped past. They did not wave or shout for help. No one would help them. Nothing would change.
In the China of her marriage to a fanatic young Nationalist officer, a husband could kill his wife—it was not unusual to beat her on their wedding night to teach her meekness and submission. China was a backward country, corrupt, poor, half-controlled by foreigners. Its problems were too immense to be solved.
Those Chinas have vanished.
And Rosalie Chou, the ugly-duckling daughter of a Chinese railway official and his Belgian wife, disappeared also to become, after incredible experiences, Han Suyin, doctor, writer, and a woman of her time.
Animated, beautiful, well-dressed, she gestures frequently as she talks. It is difficult to believe that she was once so plain she was told by her mother that she would have to earn her own living, she was too ugly ever to marry. How do these dazzling metamorphoses occur? She was always intelligent, always pretty and defiant, but the awkward child who could never learn to dance somehow became a handsome young woman with a brilliant smile and white teeth—North China teeth—not a cavity in them to this day. They’re very uneven, she insists; she is not beautiful, her features are uninteresting. “My eyebrows are too short, like Chou Enlai’s.” She moves her graying hair to reveal them.