Word: manuscripts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Self-Educated Naturalist. Marais's reputation is likely to suffer from the publication. After 54 pages of overheated, condescending preface, Robert Ardrey bumps to a comic conclusion: "Had Marais been enabled to finish his manuscript, polish the rough parts, rethink a few conclusions, add further ideas that had come to him, then beyond all question he would have left us more than we shall find in the following pages." Too true. There is a provocative chapter on the sex life of baboons, whose customs find some resonances in human behavior. Baboons also become addicted to intoxicants, it appears...
McGrady's rewriting was interrupted by a reporting stint in Viet Nam, so at midpoint he turned the task over to another columnist, Harvey Aronson, who finished the manuscript last September. Fine, but who is the temptress on the book jacket? She's Billie Young, a Long Island housewife, mother of six, and not incidentally, McGrady's sister-in-law, who managed to sell the manuscript to Publisher Lyle Stuart with a straight face. Stuart learned of the hoax only after he had agreed to publish, and now gamely insists he was even more delighted than before...
...Chulkaturin's admirable qualities. He dismisses Chulkaturin's compassion as maudlin because nothing can arouse his sympathy, for Zoditch, Chulkaturin's love is overly sentimental because Zoditch is not even capable of the mildest sort of affection. That is precisely why he cannot accept the ending of Chulkaturin's manuscript, why he must scream "I am loved; there is no other ending!" He has not even the smallest bit of the self-respect that allows a man to endure so cruel a fate...
...write honestly "as far as possible." To choose subjects that are not dangerous. To write in allegories. To seek out cracks in the censorship. To circulate your works from hand to hand in manuscript form. To do at least something: a sort of compromise solution. I was one of those who chose this third way. But it didn't work for me. The censors always managed to bring me to my knees. My anxiety to save at least something from what I had written, so that something would reach the reader, meant only that...
...asks Daughter Nathalie, "did Babel leave The Jewess unfinished?" Was it because, as she suggests, he could not resolve in himself the conflict he hoped to portray in Boris? The slim hope remains that a completed variation of the manuscript may yet be found. The Jewess has never been published in Russia, and it is not difficult to see why. In a nation where anti-Semitism and the assimilation of minorities are sensitive issues, this tale is bound to cause embarrassment. Babel's name may have been rehabilitated, but some of his work remains incorrigible...