The Fatal Englishman [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTE By chance I read a book about a young American who had been by so far the outstanding character of his generation - as scholar, athlete and personality of ambitious charm - that his graduation írom Yale in 1957 was covered by Time magaziné, while his contemporaries selected the jobs he would give them when, not if, he became President. Yet after a glorious start, his career stalled. The book (Remembering Danrty by Calvin Trillin) was an investigation into what went wrong. The subject ended up committing suicide, and much of his problem seemed to stem from the fact that he could not accept his homosexual desires. Had he been born a few years later, the author implied, he would have encountered no such problems. The book made me think that young or short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and crowned with honours. The stories of young people who delight parents and friends with their talents have a concentrated significance in their beginnings, and in their premature ends there is a natural poignancy that brutally epitomises the disappointment that is alsó common but less evident in longer, duller lives. Three such lives, each done at the length its span naturally required (a third of a life, a third of a book) - that might well seem full enough to take away the sense of 'so what' that would cling to a single short life. And then if perhaps the subjects actually had achieved something interesting and if they were to come from different parts of the century and so have lived against a different