Posted by Peter H on December 19, 2000 at 00:40:15 from 62.7.20.201:
In Reply to: Re: Roger's New One posted by Wayne Hammond on December 18, 2000 at 03:51:28:
Certainly I agree with Wayne that there is more work to be done on the books, but I am not so sure about continued wider and wider probing into AR's life. I am being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but do we really need or want to know about every single moment of AR's existence? Is it really relevant? We know about his childhood, his early adulthood, his time in Russia, and then his time spent writing the books. Isn't that enough? I am getting uneasy that we are tending to treat him as some sort of saint or holy man whose every word and possession must be venerated in some way. What we should venerate are his books. I am not trying to dissuade anyone from researching these matters, what I am saying is that you may find that not everyone is interested in the results. An example was a talk at the 1997 Literary Weekend about some of the schoolmasters who taught AR at Rugby. We heard a great deal about these teachers and their forbears, but after an hour of this I really started to wonder how far from the Swallows books we were going to go. I think there is going to be a limit, and we shall reach it sooner or later.