Word: ego
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Since Erica Jong overcame her fear of flying, and Philip Roth professed desire, it is a great relief to find a novelist who isn't hiding, naked ego poorly concealed, behind her central character. The Ice Age is not about any one person, but rather a constellation of characters in an historical content, the downfall of their country. Each character, we feel, has his own identity, his own rationale for living, and a small but important fate to be played out against the background of a faltering England. Drabble has the novelistic strength to make the most of her role...
...Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick to bathroom, then orchestra says, 'There go god with diarrhea.' I, with my work, make service for our most important god?music. I tell them, you not work for me,' I not work...
...adopt the changes. When he finally did, the Yankees began to roll; they won 40 of their next 50 games. Jackson, his spirit at last lifted by batting fourth, drove in 49 runs. But even that did not satisfy the outfielder of the powerful shoulders and the tender ego. At the end of the season Jackson stood in the corner of the locker room and said: "I wouldn't wish what happened to me here on anybody." He had already told Steinbrenner he would refuse to play another season for Martin, no small dilemma for the owner...
...boost to his ego when he stepped onto Baker Field and botched the first extra-point of the season against Columbia. "I was more worried about missing it than just kicking it straight through," he now says...
Like one of his fictive double agents, the pseudonymous author scribbled in trains, constructing the character who was to be his later ego. George Smiley bears no physical relationship to his ruddy, unconventionally handsome creator. But like Le Carré, he is an Oxonian, an avid student of German literature and an intellectual manqué. He too was married to a lady named Ann from whom he was to separate...