Never uncharitable

Durante muitos anos, na adolescência e juventude, eu vivia sempre com minha pequena angústia, a sensação de que queria profundamente "escrever", mas a vida real me atrapalhava - escola, emprego, vontade de namorar, todas as coisas que eu precisava ou queria imediatamente fazer e ocupavam meu tempo.

Foi talvez minha identificação mais pessoal com o narrador de Proust, no primeiro volume da Busca. A incapacidade de escolher entre a vida mundana e o desejo de escrever.

Há quatro ou cinco anos percebi que meu mito original, baseado em alguns escritores - trabalhar pouco, ganhar pouco, se acostumar à pobreza e ter tempo livre para escrever - era bobagem.

Que eu queria e gostava de ter mais dinheiro, viajar, namorar e esquecer que eu "precisava" escrever. A vida mundana, defendida por médicos e psicólogos costantemente argumentando que o sacrifício pela arte é um mito sofrido e desnecessário.

Tenho vontade de reler o texto de Lillian Hellman sobre Dashiell Hammett e - maravilhas da internet - descubro que foi seu necrológio, aparentemente clássico, pois consta na íntegra no site da The New York Review of Books.

Olhar esse texto me emociona. De todo modo, impaciente, não consegui reencontrar a frase que mais me marcou - ela descrevendo as leituras de Hammett enquanto ele deixava de escrever, algo como "eu gostaria de dizer que essas leituras e aprendizagem deram a ele mais energia para escrever, mas isso não foi verdade".

De todo modo, encontrei o trecho sobre os livros:

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"Hammett, like many Southerners, had a deep feeling for isolated places where there were animals, birds, bugs, and sounds. He was easy in the woods, a fine shot, and later when I bought a farm, he would spend the autumn days in the woods, coming back with birds or rabbits, and then, when the shooting season was over, would spend many winter days sitting on a stool in the woods watching squirrels or beavers or deer, or ice fishing in the lake. (He was, as are most sportsmen, obsessively neat with instruments, and obsessively messy with rooms.) The interests of the day would go into the nights when he would read Bees, Their Vision and Language or German Gun Makers of the 18th Century or something on how to tie knots, or inland birds, and then leave such a book for another book on whatever he had decided to learn. It would be impossible now for me to remember all that he wanted to learn, but I remember a long year of study on the retina of the eye; how to play chess in your head; the Icelandic sagas; the history of the snapping turtle; Hegel; would a hearing aid—he bought a very good one—help in detecting bird sounds; then from Hegel, of course, to Marx and Engels straight through; to the shore life of the Atlantic; and finally and for the rest of his life to mathematics. He was more interested in mathematics than in any other subject except baseball where, listening to television or the radio, he would mutter about the plays and the players to me who scarcely knew the difference between a ball and a bat. Often I would ask him to stop it and then he would shake his head and say, "All I ever wanted was a docile woman and look what I got," and we would talk about docility, how little for a man to want, and he would claim that only vain or neurotic men needed to have "types" in women — all other men took what they could get.

The hit-and-miss reading, the picking up of any book, made for a remarkable mind, neat, accurate, respectful of fact. He took a strong and lasting dislike to a man who insisted mackerel were related to herring, and once left my living room while a famous writer talked without much knowledge of existentialism, refusing to come down to dinner with the writer because he said, "He's the greatest waste of time since the parchesi board. Liars are bores." A neighbor once rang up to ask him how to stop a leak in a swimming pool, and he knew; my farmer's son asked him how to make a trap for snapping turtles, and he knew; born a Maryland Catholic (but long away from the church) he knew more about Judaism than I did, and more about New Orleans music; food, and architecture than my father who had grown up there. Once, I wanted to know about early glass making for windows and was headed for the encyclopedia, but Hammett told me before I got there; he knew the varieties of seaweed, for a month studied the cross pollination of corn, and for many, many months tried plasma physics. It was more than reading, it was a man at work. Any book would do, or almost any — he was narrowly impatient when I read letters or criticism and would refer to them as my "carrying" books, good only for balancing yourself as you climbed the stairs to bed. It was always strange to me that he liked books so much and had so little interest in the men who wrote them. (There were, of course, exceptions: he liked Faulkner and we had fine drinking nights together during Faulkner's New York visits in the Thirties) Or it is more accurate to say that he had a good time with writers when they talked about books, and would leave them when they didn't. But then he was deeply moved by painting—he himself tried to paint until the summer when he could no longer stand at an easel and the last walk we ever took was down the block to the Metropolitan Museum—and music, but I never remember his liking a painter or a musician although I do remember his saying that he thought most of them peacocks. He was never uncharitable toward simple people, he was often too impatient with famous people."