Helen, me, and the late, great Turner Cassity
We’ve known poet and historian Helen Pinkerton for ohhh, a zillion or two zillion years. We’ve written about her on the Book Haven here and here – and also for a Stanford Magazine article here. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, and just received this email this week. We thought it was worth a share with you. You will recognize the book she mentions from our plug for the NYRB Classics’ “Classics and Coffee Club” here. We showed the book. We showed our cup of coffee. We even had a nice quote from the book: “Life’s grace and charm can never be erased by the powers of destruction…” But alas, we actually haven’t had the time to actually read the book. Not yet. But soon.
Meanwhile, here’s Helen’s mini-review, and more:
“About a year ago Steven Shankman recommended to me Vassily Grossman‘s novel, Life and Fate, and had sent me several essays he has written on it. I finished it recently and found it possibly the greatest novel I have ever read. He creates a world – actually, two worlds, the Russian and the German – of believable human characters, who try to live worthy lives under a totalitarian government that is structured to destroy their humanity by bringing out the worst in each of them. Chapter after chapter unfolds individual dramas, wherein moral choices are made that are lived with and often died by.
“Meanwhile, spurred by Grossman’s vision, I have been catching up on the history of the period 1917-1945 in Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries. I haven’t read Robert Conquest‘s great work, but I know what he has revealed about those years. And I have read some Solzhenitzyn, Winston Churchill‘s history of that period, and others, in a search into what actually took place during the years that I was growing up in Montana, sheltered from those far-off terrors. Now, in my old age, at least I’ve become sharply aware of a potential repeat in our time of the great evil that human beings can inflict on one another, when driven by a false and monstrous ideology. We are this very week presently confronted with the apparition of an Islamic Caliphate, announced by Bakr al-Baghdadi, which is appallingly similar to the rise of Hitler in 1933. I congratulate you on your perception and your ability to write with such good judgment about what is going on. And I agree that ‘nihilism’ is a most appropriate word for the intellectual root of it all. Keep it up!”
The Islamic Caliphate? That is sooooo last week! Helen is referring to my discussions of the parsimonious, reluctant, and even timid use of the word “genocide” in the last month here and here, and the grisly slaughter of American journalist James Foley. (Believe me, they’re off to a much faster start than the Nazis were. The Nazis weren’t sending off snuff videos and films of mass executions as part of their world debut.) As for “nihilism” … more on that in the next day or so.
Meanwhile, “Life’s grace and charm can never be erased by the powers of destruction…” But they’re trying. Really they are.