Quote time

It was back to work for me, meaning the fabulous Feuchtwanger archive at the USC. There is a thrill about going through original manuscripts, letters etc. which is unique to libraries, and always in my mind connects to A.S. Byatt's novel Possession. Now of course I never made that kind of monumental discovery, but in addition to a lot of useful background material for my thesis written over a decade ago, I found, and am still finding, fragments of the past that might not have literate merit yet still tell us something about the people they hail from, and haven't turned up in any biographies. Take, for example, a letter written by Charlie Chaplin to Lion Feuchtwanger shortly after finding, on the middle of the ocean between the US and Britain, that his greencard had been revoked. To stake that Chaplin was bitter about this is putting it mildly. In interviews and in his memoirs, he was restrained, of course, and in time he and the US made up, but in a private letter to a friend and shortly after the event, you get an acid blast like this:

It is so wonderful to be away from that creepy cancer of hate where one speaks in whispers, and to abide in a political temperature where everything is normal contrasted to that torrid, dried-up, prune-souled desert of a country you live in. Even at its best, with its vast arid stretches, its bleached sun-kissed hills, its bleak sun-lit Pacific Ocean, its bleak acres of oil derricks and its bleak thriving prosperity, it makes me shudder to think I spent 40 years of my life in it.

On a less bitter note and more amusing note, you also get confirmation that Chaplin, for all his leftist views, was still a child of the Empire. Here he is, again to Lion Feuchtwanger, about having met Jawarahal Pandit Nehru (a genuine socialist, btw), the first Prime Minister of India:

I spent a couple of days with Nehru at the time when he was helping to negotiate the Korean truce. The day I visited him Rhee had let the war prisoners escape, and Nehru was terribly worried and shocked abut it all. Cablegrams were coming and going all the time I was there. I found him quite interesting; we talked a great deal about Lord Mountbatten and what a splendid job he did handing back India to the Indians – the mert of which I do not quite understand from the English point of view! He seemed quite a nice man but a little pompous, but then that may be the Indian manner.

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Some more pictures of selenak's Los Angeles adventures, as I visited the Getty Center yesterday:

( Picspam ahoy )