On Enrique Gómez Carrillo.
For family reasons, we bought a flat in Paris, near the entrance to the most famous cemetery in the world, Père Lachaise. I have always loved cemeteries and find them almost as irresistible as bookshops.
I took many walks in Père Lachaise, and one day the not very startling idea came to my mind, that if there were many famous writers—Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde—buried there, it was likely that there were also writers, many more of them in fact, buried there who had been completely forgotten, not necessarily because they were not good but because cultural memory is necessarily limited.
And so it proved. In an afternoon, without much difficulty, I assembled the names of at least twenty writers. I checked that they were unknown to the educated and literate French and British people of my acquaintance, and even when their names rang a faint bell, which was rarely, my acquaintances’ knowledge of them never went further.
Continue reading the piece here at The New Criterion
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Jacques Julien/Getty Images