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38
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1989
HOURS:
MON.-THURS.
9:30-4:30
FRI.
9:30-6:00
London Love Story
`Love Story' author Erich Segal has found a haven in
England where he can write serious novels and pursue his
first love: classical scholarship.
HELEN DAVIS
Foreign Correspondent
W
hen Erich Segal
sets out for his daily
run at 6 a.m., he
steps into a very English kind
of paradise.
A few strides from the front
door of his home in the chic
London suburb of Hamp-
stead, the American novelist-
cum-scholar plunges into a
wood. Following a track that
leads past the swamp, over
the bridle path, down
Wildwood Road he arrives on
Hampstead Heath.
There, jogging past cricket
pitches and horse chestnuts,
with St. Jude-on-the-Hill
pointing an admonishing
finger at the heavens, Erich
Segal kick-starts a day which
is tiring even to contemplate.
By the time I ring the
doorbell of his red-brick home
at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, he
has already put in a solid six
hours.
Up at 4 a.m., he spent an
hour at his word processor
and another hour playing the
piano. He followed his
physical workout on the
Heath (with his • personal
fitness intructor) by indulg-
ing in a touch of mundane
domesticity: sitting down to
breakfast with his wife,
Karen, and 8-year-old
daughter, Francesca.
Then he put the finishing
-touches to the film-script of
his latest novel, Doctors,
which, now lying on a table
by the front door, is awaiting
a courier who will whisk it off
to Los Angeles. In another
room, Segal's review of The
Psychology of Greek Tragedy
by Bennett Simon is being
faxed to the London Times.
The elegant entrance hall is
littered with running shoes,
the morning papers, a baby
carriage. Somewhere in the
house a vacuum cleaner is
humming. There are
workmen at the front door
and a secretary running
distractedly up and down the
stairs answering telephones
and intercoms.
"I'm so sorry," she says to
me eventually, "it's a little
chaotic!'
Erich Segal says exactly the
same thing when he comes in-
to the living room, adding
that the birth of a daughter,
Miranda Miriam, in the late
spring had taken its toll on
the already-busy household.
He looks exhausted, with
the greyhound cadaverous-
ness of long-distance runners
who feel compelled to break
through the limits of normal
human endurance. At 51, he
still has the face and head of
a precociously clever fawn.
But his hand shakes as it lifts
a glass of water to his lips.
It is almost 20 years since
Love Story, a slender tale of
love and death, swept the
young_classics scholar out of
Yale and into a tumult of
fame and riches. Love Story
sold 20 million copies in 10
languages. The film of the
book was an international
blockbuster, and the phrase,
"Love means never having to
say you're sorry," entered the
English language.
Segal the boy wonder hit
the celebrity circuit and, as
In Segal's view,
Oxford is the
elephants'
graveyard, the last
stand, the citadel
of classical
studies.
he ruefully admits today, ego
and libido ran amuck under
the hot sun of adulation. For
one thing, the writer sudden-
ly found he could have almost
any girl he wanted. Were they
all. Jewish girls? "Oh no," he
replies, "there weren't
enough!"
Segal went on to write
Oliver's Story and then Man,
Woman and Child, both of
which were translated into
successful movies. The only
thing Erich Segal could not
do, it seems, was please the
critics who hated his work as
much as the public loved it.
His next book, Class, broke
the mold of slender, emotional
novellas. Doctors is in the
Class
genre: a big,
blockbusting novel, packed
with more detail about doc-
tors and medicine than most
of us imagined we'd encounter
in a lifetime.
Doctors, of course, is another
Segal success story. It was on
the best-seller list in the
United States all of last sum-
mer, sold a quarter-million in
hardback and is expected to
sell two million in paperback.
The book is also being
published in dozens of foreign
languages throughout the
world. The film of the book
surely cannot be far behind.
Gazing out into his garden,
Segal surveys some of the
fruits of his success: a lush
rose garden and a pavilion he
built to house his narrow, one-
man swimming pool . and
gym.
Segal professes not to care
two hoots that the critics do
not share the public's en-
thusiasm for his work. The
critics, he says, always greet
a new Segal novel with bare-
ly disguised contempt — "The
usual tear jerking stuff."
But he cares enough to pro-
udly produce a review of Doc-
tors which appeared in the
London Sunday Times. The
reviewer noted that the novel
"has a vast emotional range
and manages to endow even
morbidity with glamour!'
Sweet words indeed to the
writer who apparently doesn't
care.
Segal tells the story on
himself of once meeting
Philip Roth, out jogging in
Central _Park, New York.
Segal introduced himself to
Roth: "I admire your work!'
he told the creator of Portnoy.
"And I admire your running,"
Roth replied.
That kind of put-down pro-
bably hurts. Segal allows that
he will never be admitted to
"the Pantheon of Jewish
writers" — Roth, Bellow, Her-
zog — but proudly identifies
himself as a Jewish writer
"who writes about Jews — not
ghetto Jews, but Jews who
live in the world of today!"
"I do have an ax to grind,"
he says. "I deal with -issues; I
am didactic. And I conscious-
ly strive for a simple style. I
show that the web of life
weaves good and bad, and nay
books show people going
through real crises and
emerging elevated."
His next book, he predicts,
"will do for religion what Doc-
tors did for medicine!" He will
say no more except that his
research schedule includes
Jerusalem and Rome and
that he is suffering from a
touch of stage fright.
Stage fright? "Certainly. I
procrastinate, I go through
hell. I get up at four in the
morning so that I'm not
awake enough to get stage
fright when I sit down at the
computer monitor."
He has no doubt, however,
that the book will be written
and that his temporary loss of
nerve is a necessary part of
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