Word: potter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Potter went on, heroically, from the day he learned his cancer was incurable, Valentine's Day -- "a little gift, a little kiss from somebody or something." He continued to care for his wife Margaret, whom he called "my rock, my center," as she battled breast cancer. And he worked ferociously, testing the limits of his anguish, to complete two teleplays: Karaoke, another musical drama; and Cold Lazarus, about a 20th century man whose head has been preserved for 400 years. Potter planned to write 10 pages a day. "I will -- and do -- meet that schedule every day," he told Bragg...
...nothing became Potter's life so much as his grace in leaving it, then nothing became his death so much as his having written so often about it. Mortality hung on his plays like crape. While awaiting his own demise, Philip Marlow, the hero of The Singing Detective, plots the death of all who may have hurt him. Lipstick on Your Collar climaxes at a grave site, where one of the three main characters is dead, a second falls into the open grave, and a third woos the widow -- all to the '50s tune Sh-Boom...
...pieces -- and in his stage plays (Sufficient Carbohydrate), screenplays (Track 29) and novels (Ticket to Ride) -- Potter did see things under the aspect of eternity. Novelist Julian Barnes aptly described him as "a Christian socialist with a running edge of apocalyptic disgust." Christian, yes, in residue. Though Potter gave ecclesiastics the willies with his God play (Son of Man) and his Devil play (Brimstone and Treacle), he could still recite, as meaningfully as if it were a pop standard, the words to an old hymn: "Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown?" Socialist, yes, decrying British mercantilism...
...rage against Murdoch was part of a general anger at the present for not living up to the image in the gilded rearview mirror Potter held to his youth. In Blue Remembered Hills he re-created his West Country childhood (but with adult actors as the kids). He larded his breakthrough series, Pennies from Heaven, with sentimental tunes from his '30s infancy. "Childhood," Potter said, "is full to the brim with fear, horror, excitement, joy, boredom, love, anxiety." He was welcome to cherish his youth; he never got to savor...
...should always look back on our own past," he said, "with a sort of tender contempt." The past echoed in Potter's inner ear like an accordion rendition of Peg o' My Heart: trite, tinny, extraordinarily potent. But as his days dwindled, he attended, rapturously, to the present. "I'm almost serene," he said to Bragg. "I can celebrate life. Below my window there's an apple tree in blossom. It's white. And looking at it -- instead of saying, 'Oh, that's a nice blossom' -- now, looking at it through the window, I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom...