Czeslaw Milosz or Arthur Hailey.

A Maclean's retrospective on VIP-s who died last year had an item on best selling author Arthur Hailey, but Czeslaw Milosz, far more significant a writer, was not considered worthy of mention. That's the sort of thing I might have expected in Time magazine rather than in Maclean's. As it turned out, Time skipped Hailey, but featured Milosz and even included part of a poem of his.

The only Haley novel I read was "Overload". It certainly fits in with his reputation for writing by a formula, with sex playing an exaggerated role. Every female in the book wants to be screwed by Nim, who uses his erectile automaton to oblige in the course of his functions as a top executive of the San Francisco based electric utility company. The "Pacific" (or P in PG&E) becomes "Golden Gate". By similar allusion, the evil villains are San Francisco headquartered environmental outfits like the Sequoia (for Sierra) Club tied to anti-PG&E terrorists through the Friends of Freedom (the Earth, a Sierra Club offshoot). These get their well deserved comeuppance at the dramatic happy end, but one unfortunate result is the suffocation of a quadriplegic beauty Nim had screwed earlier, before he gets to service her grieving sister who had come to her apartment.

To anyone living in the San Francisco Bay Area (like me then), the plot would have been too preposterous to sell (except the getting screwed by PG&E). I certainly had been unaware of the book when I went on a trip to Europe where it was the hit of the season in places like Switzerland and Sweden. The publishers must have known to keep the local launching very low key. When I checked later, it turned out that the (big) San Francisco Public Library did have one copy.

Czeslaw Milosz probably didn't make nearly as much money as Hailey from his writing (including the Nobel prize money) and teaching combined, but he is likely to be remembered long after Hailey is forgotten (and Maclean's if it can't do better); for giving expression to the soul of the great of a people in a period of exceptional trials. I'll have more to say about Milosz (probably next posting), but not on comparison with Hailey; here only a poem or two

FORGET
By Czeslaw
Milosz
Forget the sufferingYou caused others.Forget the
sufferingOthers
caused you.The waters run and run,Springs sparkle and are
done,You walk the
earth you are forgetting.
Sometimes you hear a distant
refrain.What does it
mean, you ask, who is singing?A childlike sun grows
warm.A grandson and a
great-grandson are born.You are led by the hand once
again.
The names of the
rivers remain with you.How endless those rivers
seem!Your fields lie fallow,The
city towers are not as they were.You stand
at the threshold mute.
(Translated from the Polish by Jessica Fisher and
Bozena Gilewska)

AN HONEST DESCRIPTION OF MYSELF WITH A GLASS OF
WHISKEY AT AN AIRPORT, LET US SAY, IN MINNEAPOLIS
By Czeslaw Milosz
My ears catch
less and less of conversations, and my eyes have weakened, though they are still
insatiable.
I see their legs in miniskirts, slacks, wavy fabrics.
Peep at
each one separately, at their buttocks and thighs, lulled by the imaginings of
porn.
Old lecher, it's time for you to the grave, not to the games and
amusements of youth.
But I do what I have always done: compose scenes of this
earth under orders from the erotic imagination.
It's not that I desire these
creatures precisely; I desire everything, and they are like a sign of ecstatic
union.
It's not my fault that we are made so, half from disinterested
contemplation, half from appetite.
If I should accede one day to Heaven, it
must be there as it is here, except that I will be rid of my dull senses and my
heavy bones.
Changed into pure seeing, I will absorb, as before, the
proportions of human bodies, the color of irises, a Paris street in June at
dawn, all of it incomprehensible, incomprehensible the multitude of visible
things.
(Translated from the Polish by Robert Hass and Czeslaw
Milosz)

Czeslaw Milosz
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1980/milosz.gif

It might be argued that as a Canadian magazine Maclean's ought to push Hailey's name because he is supposed to have started his writing career while in Canada. If that is what results from giving preference to Canadian content (extended to past transients), then maybe such preference should be re-evaluated.