by James Salter
Her favorite biography is Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, with Painter’s Proust perhaps second. Her style is modeled on Gibbon’s and is very Latin-based. “Those ablative absolutes,” she moans. She was twenty and smoking cigars at Oxford when she read the Brontë and was stunned by it; she remembers thinking, gosh, this is what a biography should be. She reread it while writing Mary Queen of Scots.
As if all this were not enough, she is chairman of the Society of Authors and campaigning fiercely for public lending rights which would pay writers for the number of times their books are taken out of libraries. Such a system in one form or another already exists in other places—Scandinavia, Australia, West Germany. There is opposition.
“Alas,” she laments, “the librarians are dead against it.” The librarians of England have reason to fear. Against them, at the head of her fellow writers, witty, engaging, and armed with the personal friendship of many politicians, is that most powerful of foes: a beautiful and clever woman, determined to have her way.
It is Friday. In the favorite restaurant where she has lunched at the best table, they are holding out her cape. “I must run,” she apologizes. “If I don’t catch the train my husband will shoot me. Which he is equipped to do.” She is off for Scotland with six new books packed in her bags.
“You’ll read all those?”
“Oh, no,” she says, smiling. “But in case the train breaks down . . .”
People
February 24, 1975
Ben Sonnenberg Jr.
In the firmament when I was a schoolboy were names like Achilles and Caesar, and Horatio, standing alone at the bridge. In the more immediate world there were Lindbergh, Jack Dempsey, and Scott of the Antarctic, writing with frozen fingers the heartbreaking farewell letter. When Dempsey’s eyes were swollen shut at the end of the championship fight with Tunney, a fight he had lost, he asked his handler to lead him across the ring so he could shake Tunney’s hand. Class.
In the grown-up world, I was surrounded by heroes: all-Americans, halfbacks who’d played with Bear Bryant, Medal of Honor and DSC winners, top aces like Bud Mahurin, Boots Blesse, Kasler, and Low. There were men who’d been on the Ploesti or Doolittle raid or landed on Guadalcanal. Heroes in their youth, acting out of natural impulse, so to speak, even if it meant greater courage and skill than others possessed. Oddly enough, none of them seemed particularly heroic at the time. They wore it, almost all of them, lightly. But the more they recede into legend, the greater they become.
There’s another style of heroism I find myself admiring: not the particular act or achievement, but the long, hopeless struggle almost beyond imagining, the battle that has no end.
I first met Ben Sonnenberg Jr. before he had any idea of what would be asked of him. It was about 1973. He was dandyish, well-off, in his thirties, several times married, a man with a certain loftiness, prodigiously read, a sometime playwright, raised in a handsome house in New York’s Gramercy Park, disapproved of by a very successful father.
I don’t remember when it was diagnosed, but there were the early signs: tripping slightly on a crack in the sidewalk, after a while the use of a cane, then two canes, the difficulty in getting out of a taxi, the process of somehow making it to the door of the restaurant and then falling across a table inside. In the end, a wheelchair, but how far from the real end this was.
He had MS, areas of the brain and spinal cord degenerating, the nerve fibers losing their covering and unable to transmit impulses.
Slowly, year by year, all that he possessed of physical ability was taken away. He became bedridden. He could no longer raise a hand in greeting, or feed himself, or even turn the page of a book. Absolutely everything had to be done for him.
Meanwhile, he never complained. He did not speak of the indignities, the nightmare of hygiene, the injustice of it all, the despair—these seemed not to exist. Instead, he founded and edited a literary magazine, Grand Street. He celebrated his birthday with an annual party, saw people, wrote, entertained. Perhaps he pitied himself, but he let no one else pity him. I think of Stephen Hawking, but I don’t know him. I think of Helen Keller, but hers was a life of optimism, a life that was enlarging. Ben Sonnenberg’s is of a long forced retreat.
I see him occasionally now, not like Richard Howard, who comes to read to him, not like Susan Minot and closer friends, but I am often near him. I think of him frequently. It’s hard to explain, but I am jealous of him. I am jealous of his bravery and spirit. A hero is, among other things, someone favored by the gods. Greater, perhaps, is one crushed by them who, despite it, triumphs.
Men’s Journal
May 2001
Life for Author Han Suyin Has Been a Sometimes Hard But Always Many Splendored Thing
In the China in which she was born, mile after mile of peasants sat in the branches of trees above the great floods. They were motionless, waiting for death as the train on its high embankment sped past. They did not wave or shout for help. No one would help them. Nothing would change.
In the China of her marriage to a fanatic young Nationalist officer, a husband could kill his wife—it was not unusual to beat her on their wedding night to teach her meekness and submission. China was a backward country, corrupt, poor, half-controlled by foreigners. Its problems were too immense to be solved.
Those Chinas have vanished.
And Rosalie Chou, the ugly-duckling daughter of a Chinese railway official and his Belgian wife, disappeared also to become, after incredible experiences, Han Suyin, doctor, writer, and a woman of her time.
Animated, beautiful, well-dressed, she gestures frequently as she talks. It is difficult to believe that she was once so plain she was told by her mother that she would have to earn her own living, she was too ugly ever to marry. How do these dazzling metamorphoses occur? She was always intelligent, always pretty and defiant, but the awkward child who could never learn to dance somehow became a handsome young woman with a brilliant smile and white teeth—North China teeth—not a cavity in them to this day. They’re very uneven, she insists; she is not beautiful, her features are uninteresting. “My eyebrows are too short, like Chou Enlai’s.” She moves her graying hair to reveal them.
Han Suyin, fifty-nine, is most famous perhaps for her bestselling novel A Many-Splendored Thing, published in 1952 and transformed into both a movie and a popular song. But she has also written a series of autobiographies, very moving in both their humanity and their vast detail. The Crippled Tree was the first, and A Mortal Flower and Birdless Summer followed.
She has just brought out Wind in the Tower, the second and concluding volume of her biography of Mao Tse-tung, whose death came almost on the eve of publication. An admittedly sympathetic work, it was eight years in the writing, and at what a moment it has appeared! Obscurity covers China: once again, fierce struggles, new paths. Mao seems certain to be the sacred figure whose legacy will be sought after for years to come. It is extraordinary how little of him is really known—the only intimate accounts are still those of Edgar Snow, the American reporter of the Far East who died in 1972.
Han Suyin did not know Mao personally. She had never read a word he’d written when one night on a Peking street she bought a pamphlet called On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People. It was 1957. She was practicing medicine in Malaya and Singapore and had gone back to China to see for herself if the new ruler was to be another Stalin, ruthless and bloody. “I would die in my soul if I did not return to see for myself.”
It was one of the turning points of her life. She was fascinated by the man, his vision, his ideas. The story of Mao began to possess her, “a story that really shook me—the love of Mao for his people.”
She saw Mao only once, in a room with forty other writers, and he did not speak. She met Chou Enlai many times, and she knew firsthand the era. She has become a kind of apologist for China now—with friends
in Peking in high places, although she has enemies too, she admits. The extreme left does not like her, probably because of her European life and privileges. She has never returned to China to live. But the left is in eclipse. As always, she has been fortunate.
There were eight children in her family. One-half of them survived. “The average,” she comments, “in those days.” She had a brother who died of convulsions when the French doctor refused to come. “I’m not going to bother myself for a dirty Eurasian,” he said. There were only three mixed couples living on the Peking-Hankow railway line, and the Eurasian children were despised. “We were looked upon as prostitutes and freaks.”
Her mother named her Mathilde Rosalie Claire Elizabeth Genevieve Chou, and her father gave her the Chinese name of Chou Yueh-ping, which means guest of the moon. (In China the family name always comes first—there are only 186 surnames for all Chinese.) Their mother made the little girls remove their earrings every night. If warlords or bandits came they would rip them out of their earlobes. Rosalie—she preferred that name—went to a convent school and was raised as a Catholic. She read only pious works, “and once, Jules Verne.” In 1935 she won a scholarship to go to Belgium—there were four or five students chosen a year—and she began her medical studies. She had dreamed of becoming a doctor since the age of twelve when every Sunday on the way to church the Chous had to fight their way through hordes of beggars. “I wanted to cure them.”
The high-bourgeois family of her mother refused to accept her at first, but she eventually conquered them. One of her uncles, a diamond merchant in Amsterdam, wrote in a letter, “This girl is intelligent,” and before long she was an ornament at family dinners. She was sitting one day in a park in Brussels, far from the China which had been invaded in her absence by a powerful new Japan. Above her were the tall, summery trees of the Bois Fort. “How peaceful it all is,” her boyfriend sighed. She suddenly smashed her teacup. “I’m going to China!” she announced.
“The true me is inner-motivated,” she explains. “My craziest decisions—things that appear crazy—I’ve thought about for months.”
The voyage home was by boat from Marseilles. Onboard, in first class, was a young Chinese man who had been attending Sandhurst. He was returning to serve China, he told her. “So am I,” she said. His name was Tang Pao-huang, and he came from a landowning family, part of the ruling elite. He was sincere, handsome, intensely patriotic. He proposed when they reached Hong Kong, and in a rapture of idealism they were wed. His true nature was soon revealed. He was, in fact, a demon, a cold fanatic filled with absolute loyalty and devotion to the leader, Chiang Kai-shek. In time he was to become one of the generalissimo’s aides and eventually to find death in battle against the Communists in 1947. For the seven years they were together, he beat her.
Chiang Kai-shek had a ferocious temper. Everyone was terrified of him, Han recalls. This was the China in which six young writers, members of a leftist organization, were made to dig their own graves by Chiang’s men and then were bound, thrown into the holes, and buried alive. Suyin and her husband lived in the wartime capital, Chungking. “A woman of talent is not a virtuous woman,” he told her. He was ashamed of her, mortified that she had not immediately become pregnant, but despite everything she could not leave him. He would have killed her. She worked as a midwife, and Tang, to explain her frequent absences, invented a daughter for her. One day in Cheng-tu she bought one—children were for sale everywhere then—a year-old baby, beautiful but covered with sores and so pathetically hungry she cried when she saw a bowl of rice. Even today, thirty-five years later, Han Suyin’s voice falters and her eyes fill with tears as she remembers. She paid a thousand Chinese dollars for her daughter. “Everybody said, ‘Oh, you’ve paid too much. You could have got her for 200.’”
She wrote her first novel, Destination Chungking, during this period. It was widely praised and her talent was immediately evident. But only in London, where her husband had been sent as military attaché, was she finally able to break free. She refused to return to China with him in 1945. Did she not fear for her life then? “Ah, but this was in England,” she says with a lovely smile. She went back to school to complete her medical education, graduating with honors in 1948, by then a widow. She was thirty-one.
Because it was the doorstep to China, by now Communist, she settled in Hong Kong and began her practice. She fell in love with a married British correspondent, and the story of their affair, written at night on the kitchen table, became A Many-Splendored Thing. Her lover was killed in Korea. Han Suyin married Leonard Comber, another Englishman, on the rebound—and because she thought her daughter, then twelve, needed a father. She was living in Malaya, running two clinics and working from early morning until night, charging one dollar a visit while other doctors charged $15. After work, she wrote. “It amused me,” she explains. The reason is plainly deeper. “I do what I want. That’s the leitmotiv of my life.”
There is a long tradition in literature of doctors who have been writers, some good and some great. Rabelais and Chekhov, for example, Céline and Conan Doyle, A. J. Cronin and Somerset Maugham. “I don’t think of myself as a writer,” she protests, and the name she chose, Suyin, means simple sound. Nevertheless, she wrote four more novels between 1956 and 1963, none of them quite as successful as her bestseller, and then she turned to the autobiographies. Her marriage to Comber ended in amicable divorce. “He was a nice man,” she says. “He spoke five languages, but our relationship bored me to tears.”
She lives now in an apartment in Lausanne with her third husband, Vincent Ruthnaswamy, an ex-colonel in the Indian army, broad, deeply burnished, and a man of considerable tact. They met in Nepal where he was building roads. Medicine is behind her; she has not practiced since 1964. She and her husband travel, spending about four months a year in Lausanne. They have a house in India and a small apartment in Flims in the Swiss mountains. The apartments are rented. “I don’t believe in accumulating property after sixty,” she explains. She is rushing things a bit. Most women would be happy to look like her at forty.
Szechwan is her province; her father’s family is from there. An isolated region deep in the mountains, it has often during its history been independent, with close ties to Tibet. The Yangtze flows from there and many great legends of China come from there as well. The people are different. “We are the Italians of China,” she says. “We eat more red pepper than anyone else. Also, we are not afraid to die.” She turns to her husband. “Don’t you think it’s better than other places in China?” “Yes,” he says shrewdly. “It’s very Indian.”
Her day begins at seven. She wakes and has coffee. For an hour she does housework and then settles down to her correspondence, using the dining room table. “My husband has his typewriter on the desk,” she explains, “and since he is a man, he should have the place of honor.” Vincent doesn’t smile as she says this but on his face is a certain mixture of forbearance and disbelief. “Every twenty minutes or so I get up,” she says, “and do something else. I think it’s good for the figure.”
Vincent cooks the lunch, and from two o’clock on she works. There are no Saturdays or Sundays. It is always work; no matter where they are living. They see few movies or plays, go out rarely, seldom entertain. She has too much to do: the next volume of her autobiography and a novel about India. Who knows what the future will bring? As another famous doctor, this one fictional, wrote: “To live life to the end is not a childish task.” That was Zhivago.
People
November 8, 1976
D’Annunzio, the Immortal Who Died
He was born in a backward province, in a town of no consequence. His father was a politician and lecher, his mother one of those saintly women that Italy is famous for. He was one of five children. None of the others ever amounted to much. He had his first glimpse of glory at sixteen, the glory of Pushkin and Balzac that never tarnishes, and he was never to lose sight of it, e
ven in the final years of his life when toothless and senile he died on a day he had predicted.
When I visited Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villa which overlooks Lake Garda in northern Italy, it was November 1976. The big hotels along the lake were closed for the winter, the guides—the villa is now a national monument—stood around the cloakroom in their overcoats with newspapers stuffed in their pockets. D’Annunzio bought this villa just after the First World War when it was not much more than a small farmhouse. He named it the Vittoriale which meant roughly, “signifying victory,” and set about enlarging and rebuilding it to his taste. It is filled with books, sculpture, grand pianos, bas-reliefs, and all the memorabilia of his life, even the airplane in which he flew over Vienna.
On the days I was there, few other visitors appeared. The grounds were empty except for an occasional workman. In one of the outlying buildings a large exhibition of photographs of D’Annunzio’s life was in its final, unattended days. I had taken a tour of the main house the day before and now wanted to go through slowly with a notebook. The guide had wandered off and I was alone in a room when a man engaged in replacing a light bulb suddenly noticed me and, straightening up, demanded what was I doing? Photography or making notes was absolutely forbidden, he said. An argument began and finally the guide agreed we would have to obtain permission. We walked down to the administrative offices near the gate. The president of the Vittoriale was not in but an assistant, a woman in her fifties, came out to see us. I explained that I was a writer interested in D’Annunzio. I had taken the tour and was merely going through again and making notes. I showed her some pages.
Ah. If I had only written for permission, she told me, everything would have been all right. As it was, she was sorry, she could not permit it.
“But what objection,” I said, “can there be to making notes?”