One of my pleasures during the first two years of writing my English-usage column for The Manila Times
was receiving highly interesting, very well-written feedback from fellow English-lovers all over the world. One of them was Douglas Maliszewski, a New York-based American electronics engineer married to a Filipina. In retrospective, I am posting in the Forum his letter in this 2002 “Silent Fire” column of mine for you to know why. (August 28, 2018)Way back in 2002, my column in
The Manila Times took up what might be the world’s 100 best fiction and nonfiction books ever that had appeared in English. That piece breezed through the popular choices and the informed choices, then gave this comment: “Among the top popular 100 fiction choices (was a title that I thought was) excellent as entertainment but not really that good as literature: J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings. (About this) book, which was hailed by Britons in one survey as ‘the greatest book of the century,’ I have a little story to tell: sometime in the past, someone I knew had the habit of skulking around and muttering this extremely adulatory opinion: ‘Anybody who has not read Tolkien is an ignoramus!’ I got so peeved by this arrogance that I decided, despite the bestseller touts and raves, never to read Tolkien ever. The result is that I am still an ignoramus, but I do hope it is only as far as Tolkien goes.”
That comment, I thought, had already sunk into oblivion, but a note belatedly harking back to it popped into my electronic mailbox the other day. It was from Mr. Douglas Maliszewski, an American electronics engineer married to a Filipina and a regular follower of my columns. With the thought that the subject remains relevant to this day, I am sharing his comments with
Times readers for this week’s summit:
Dear Mr. Carillo:
I was rooting around in the archives of “English Plain and Simple” and found a piece commenting on
Lord of the Rings. I know you are older than I am, so out of respect, I’ll just say that I, too, have often made the mistake of getting my views biased by a zealot. We do tend to accept
carte blanche a presumed ally’s ideas as correct thinking, yet to paraphrase the character Gandalf in
Lord of the Rings, “Advice, even given by a wizard, has no guarantee of being wisdom.” Be that as it may, I must say that J.R.R. Tolkien’s four books are beautiful.
During the two years of my life right out of college, traveling overseas and literally living in and out of airports, hotels, and my suitcase, I read
The Hobbit and the Tolkien trilogy looking over the world from 8 miles high. Business class passengers were usually pretty miserable during those flights, but not I. Those books were excellent companions. And make no mistake about this: the hype on the movies based on them is of no interest to me. The images in my mind from reading those books could never be created on screen by computer-aided imaging.
I also read your opinion of Ayn Rand. She was not the greatest of stylists, obsessed as she always was with this and that digression, but I give her credit for her honesty. We must understand that she was a little girl growing in Petrograd during the last days of Tsarist Russia. Her family fled to the Crimea to escape a nation of intense cold, hunger, and unfathomable bloodshed. She was schooled under the harsh Leninist doctrine and later escaped to the United States and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I find her novel
We the Living awesome, yet the novelist Stephen King refers to her as “a wooden journalist.”
Still, as one who knows something about the Russian language and its 12 tenses, I feel she does a good job writing in English considering that her primary thought patterns are in Russian, a language that as you may know is devoid of articles, with an alphabet that has seven extra characters, whose verbs—like German—could be masculine, feminine, or neuter (with each gender further taking either a proper or impersonal form), and whose modifiers are so studded with declensions.
I did want to recommend an old, wonderful book to you: Ross Lockridge’s
Raintree County. Try not to miss it. Beside Thomas Wolfe’s short stories and William Faulkner’s
Absalom Absalom, I think
Raintree County simply eclipses both.
Douglas
My reply: Dear Douglas:
Despite my resolute efforts to get rid of my irrational bias against the Tolkien books, I must admit that I haven’t read any of them till now. There’s just this horrible contrarian nature in me that’s repelled by excessive media hype and academic pontification; I really wish I could get rid of it. As to Ayn Rand, she was a magnificent obsession of mine in early adolescence, but am I glad that I’ve outgrown her! Regarding
Raintree County, my only recollection of it is Elizabeth Taylor (1932 – 2011) in that lovely, larger-than-life décolletage of hers, seducing me in my youth from those huge billboards of the book’s movie version. I’ll take your word for it, though, and look for a copy of
Raintree County in my favorite bookstore this weekend.
Joe Carillo
This article appeared in the column “Silent Fire” by Jose A. Carillo in the February 21, 2004 issue of The Manila Times
, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.“Silent Fire” was my weekend reader-feedback column when “English Plain and Simple” used to run five days weekly during its first two years.
