BREAKING THE RULES
The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill
Edited by Philip Gambone
Rattling Good Yarns Press. 530 pages, $29.95
BORN IN AUSTRALIA in 1938, Ross Terrill came to the United States to earn a doctorate at Harvard. He stayed on there as a junior faculty member in the 1970s (where our paths briefly crossed, although we did not know each other) and became a pioneering scholar on China just as it was becoming a major power and the U.S. was establishing diplomatic and economic relations. After his junior appointment at Harvard ended, he became a much-sought-after freelance author and commentator, publishing book after well-received book, as well as important scholarly articles. He became an American citizen but retained a pinch of British colonial class-consciousness.
Now in his mid-eighties, Terrill has published the diary he kept between 1963 and 1989, edited by Philip Gambone. Surprisingly sexually explicit for its era, this is the first in a planned two-volume set.
It would be a pity, though, if readers picked up the book only for the sex (which is plentiful and almost pornographic at times), for it is also full of well-written and thoughtful passages on the nature of relationships, different kinds of friendship and love, and emotional and physical attraction, not to mention world-altering events and politics. Terrill traveled constantly, both for work and for pleasure, and he cast a keen and sometimes cold eye on everything he experienced and observed. He moved between worlds with head-spinning ease, going from a chat with California governor Jerry Brown at a New York reception to a local bathhouse seemingly without batting an eye.
There is some poignant soul-searching here, an unusual blend of the intellect and the erotic. Terrill was determined to live a full life on his own terms, and at the same time to survive and indeed thrive in an academic and literary establishment that changed only slowly and grudgingly. This is a valuable and eminently readable document of a life lived with enthusiasm, honesty, and, it must be said, incredible stamina of every kind.
H. N. Hirsch, emeritus professor of politics at Oberlin, is the author of the memoir Office Hours and the Bob and Marcus mystery series.
