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Regi Siriwardena: Unfashionable greatness
By C. N. S.
Sri Lanka lost one of her finest intellectuals when Regi Siriwardena died on December 16 last year at 82, having "never hungered for longevity" (to use his own phrase from his Birthday Apology of 80 iambic pentameters for his 80 years in 2002). He was renowned Lake House features editor, political commentator, literary critic, lecturer, civil rights activist, translator, film scriptwriter, linguist, essayist and poet. "The kindest word they'll find to say of me is 'versatile'," he said at 80.

He would have and could have, beyond doubt, made a lasting contribution to the education of generations of undergraduates had he accepted the offer of an academic career at the University of Ceylon, where he had just gained his Honours Degree in English. His contribution would have been of the same order and calibre as that of the late Lyn Ludowyk. But he declined the offer for reasons that sound so unfashionable.

This is how he remembers that offer in Working Underground: The LSSP in Wartime -A Memoir of Happenings and Personalities, one of his several most interesting publications:

"I had graduated and was teaching at Ananda. But Lyn Ludowyk had persuaded me to read for a doctorate, and had even secured a small stipend from the university to enable me to do so. I had once done a tutorial for him on Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge drama…Ludowyk was impressed and wanted me to develop it into a full-scale dissertation….I agreed to (his) proposal and spent some time reading both revenge plays and the social history of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; then I got bored with the whole business and chucked it. Ludowyk never quite forgave me for this, but I am glad I gave up, for if I had gone on with the doctorate, I would have been locked into the academic circuit, and that would have been a fate worse than death."

Nevertheless, it was no little comfort for us that he shared the riches of his knowledge of English literature through the written word in his Arts Page of the Ceylon Daily News. His gift of language made everything he wrote a delight to read. In later years, he also taught English literature at the University of Kelaniya, where the Peradeniya English Department was shifted in the sixties as part of some restructuring exercise. It must have surely been an experience of supreme value for those fortunate Kelaniya students of English to sit at Regi's feet as earlier Colombo and Peradeniya generations had done at Ludowyk's.

Among the many things that Regi left behind in our collective memory is his fearless and almost iconoclastic critiques of respected literary figures. One that comes uneasily to mind is his unfashionable debunking of the universally acclaimed greatness of T. S. Eliot in the year of the English poet's birth centenary in 1988, at a seminar organised by the British Council. Its programme note said:

"Reggie (this is how he used to spell his name until he changed it to 'Regi') Siriwardena will dissent from the general high valuation of Eliot's poetry and will argue that in his poetry technical mastery conceals a poverty of experience and a narrow range of sympathies; that in his work creative powers are expanded on negative emotions of repulsion and disgust, springing from personal malaise; and that he was a great literary engineer rather than a great poet."

He went on to describe the great Eliot as a snob, misogynist and anti-Semite. He considered the widely acclaimed "Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" and "The Wasteland", the poem by which he is best known, as expressive of the coldness and detachment of Eliot's personality and his class prejudices and personal inhibitions. This was something we, who had been taught in our time to deify Eliot, found hard to understand. It was as hard, when we were students, as understanding Eliot's poetry -so obscure and arcane and allusive- without help from our distinguished teachers, Douglas Walatara and the late M. I. Kuruwila. It was fearless, even subversive, criticism of the English poet.

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