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Monday, May 01, 2006
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A Few More Galbraith Notes This is how I knew them, on the occasions when I visited with them -- they're standing in front of their farmhouse in Vermont, the sun is shining... Note that Kitty has to stand on a few stone steps to be anywhere near Galbraith's height. There's a big open field in front of them, and then, down a lane, a big lake. In the winter (for some years a group of us met at the Galbraith farm over New Year's -- we sat in front of the roaring fire in the main room drinking hot drinks and talking about the year we'd each just had) you skied about the property, skated on the lake, and generally froze your ass off. The New York Times obituary made a mistake: Galbraith had not six grandchildren but ten. "We figured it happened," said one of his sons, "because the Times wrote the obit years ago, assuming he'd die soon..." At Cliopatria, Greg James Robinson notes that Galbraith's death passed to a large extent unnoticed in Canadian media today, despite his Canadian birth and education. This is, on the one hand, surprising in view of the eagerness of nationalistic Canadians to claim their own (I have sometimes been tempted, after seeing one of these exercises, to define a “Canadian” as “a famous person who has lived for at least 15 minutes in Canada”). From another point of view, however, it is an apt tribute to a man who was beyond single and solitary attachments. I encountered this nationalistic claiming tendency years ago at a Malcolm Lowry conference in Toronto. The British author of Under the Volcano lived for some time near Vancouver, and everyone at the conference called him a Canadian. |
