Love Story
1970
SOME BRILLIANT PEOPLE, for instance George Steiner, make you feel stupid while others, for instance Erich Segal, make you feel as brilliant as them. I first heard him give a lecture, really a tour de force, on the unlikely subject of Jews in the classical Olympic Games. Slight but evidently athletic, he had been a runner in his time. When I then buttonholed him, it was as if we were the oldest of friends. France had played a large part in his education, as in mine. Presented with the Légion d’Honneur, he asked me to come along to the ceremony. Pinning on the decoration, the French ambassador innocently asked, “Sur quel champs de bataille avez-vous gagné votre médaille?” (On which battlefield did you win your medal?) “Paris,” Erich answered, launching into conversation about literature.
His Hebrew was also fluent. I possess a scarlet silk yarmulke that he gave me for Seder one year. He commuted from his home in Hampstead to Wolfson College in Oxford. Thinking that my Latin and Greek must be at a working level, he also gave me volumes he’d edited in a series headed Oxford Readings which went from Greek Tragedy in 1983, via Aristophanes in 1997 to Menander, Plautus and Terence in 2001. The Death of Comedy is Erich’s guided tour through world literature (with a nod in the title to George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy).
Anthony Powell in one of his reviews makes the point that selfpity is the necessary ingredient of a bestseller. Love Story, I take it, is a drama, even a melodrama, with the requisite element of self-pity. To me, Erich gave no sign of ever being sorry for himself or embittered by experience although universities in the United States refused to grant him tenure; jealous colleagues whispered that a best-selling author like him couldn’t be a scholar; and in his thirties, unusually young, he developed Parkinson’s disease. He inscribed his books in handwriting whose increasingly unreadable squiggles testify to physical infirmity but also to superior character and courage.