Roland Beevor on tue 18 aug 09
lili krakowski wrote:
> Some one asked me off list that it "would be enlightening to know how Lea=
ch was rude " (which I said he was) and does his behavior "reveal [he]was r=
ude, unaware, or misunderstood?"
>
> Do you know the saying: "In the house of the hanged one does not speak of=
rope?" Did your parents not teach you that a guest should be polite?
>
> When you are invited to dinner at someone's home, and the cuisine is very=
different from what you know, do you think it proper to say of X or Y "I d=
o not eat that ****"?
>
> Leach cannot have been unaware. He lived through the Hitler years. He kn=
ew who, like Rie and Coper--just naming potters--had fled to Britain. He k=
new who had fled to the US. AND by 1950 he knew who had died... To appear =
at Black Mountain and lecture on the need for tap-roots to the deracinated,=
and the inferiority of US potters to hosts and guests..is rude. Plain rud=
e.
>
> I was pinpointing his use of the word "race." He could have chosen many =
another.
>
> According to Cooper, once more,Susan Peterson, the potter in charge at a =
confrence at Choinard Art Institute wherea gain Leach talked of tap roots, =
"recalls thinking that'none of the three men could comprehend the melting p=
ot nature of the United States."
>
>
Dear Lili
Yes, if I am invited to dinner I take what I am given, but I don't offer
my Jewish friends pork; if asked my opinion I offer it honestly and, I
hope, in a way that does not cause offence (I try not to speak ill of
the dead, cast aspersions on people's parenting skills, and some other
small matters). I think that Leach generally did the same, and if he
did not do a good job in the not causing offence department evidently he
was appreciated sufficiently to have been asked back.
If there is really more in this than appears on the surface (and we are
talking about a vital issue for society, about which artists should be
making statements, and about a crucial juncture for potters, Leach was
surely right about that if nothing else) do those who were around not
owe it to the future to report what happened, and what was thought,
reliably and dispassionately; and those of us who did not have that
privilege a duty to question those that did? Otherwise we remain
victims of twentieth century thinking. I don't want in any way to
belittle the tragedy of Europe in the twentieth century, but I think we
should seek to understand the past, and aim our weapons with care.
There is plenty here that I do not understand, what does he mean by a
wheel at which you stand sideways? When he writes. 'I believe so.' is
he answering his first question, 'Can they be integrated?' or the third,
'Is it a mesalliance?'
Thank you for the pointer to Peterson and Chouinard, another chunk of
American culture that I had missed.
Yours
Roly Beevor
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