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by Prof. Bertram Bastiampillai

Guy Amirthanayagam passed away quite recently in the United States. His last visit to Sri Lanka when he travelled in December 2002 to Jaffna where he lived and studied in his boyhood at St. Patrick's College, of which school Guy was an outstanding product, was also his last brief sojourn in Sri Lanka.

A Civil Servant of the time when a few rare brilliant graduates administered the island, a poet and a fine product of the then only University of Ceylon, a scholar of immense, profound knowledge, a diplomat who brought honour to the country, a writer of elegance and later a don, in today's Sri Lanka only a few may know of him. I was related to Guy but more than that a close friend since the 'fifties.

Many were the delightful and exciting experiences in which Guy and I indulged in, till marriage made him and me more domestic and family-concerned. After that we rarely met one another.

It was Guy, when he was a teacher at St. Joseph's College, where he bided his time till he passed into the civil service, moved with me closely and intimately. He exhorted me to study and enter the University of Ceylon offering English as a subject in the days of Ludowyk, Passe and Doric.

English comprised a formidable and coveted course of study and quite a few were tutored in this exacting discipline by Guy.

Guy was an enthralling teacher when he introduced English to me. Ludowyk's "Marginal Comments", I.A. Richards and his "Practical Criticism", F.R. Leavis, his "Scrutiny" and other works, the exhaustive study by Legouis and Cazamian, "Reading and Discrimination" by Raymond Williams, Ivor Winters' "Hunting the Highbrow", the contributions of L.C. Knights and Derek Traversi were all truly familiar to him in English learning. He persuaded me to read these and the books on understanding fiction, poetry and drama, the writings of Brooks and Warren, and the one on Drama had another collaborator, Heilmann, I believe.

He taught you comprehensively and lucidly.

It is not easy, after more than half a century, to recall in detail most of what he inculcated to a clerical officer of the Postal Department in an ineffable manner. I can recall reading the fiction of L.H. Myers, T.F. Powys, John Dos Passos, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Joyce and Yeats, Kafka and Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Hawthorne and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, T.S. Eliot and Charles Dickens and many others.

His explanation of the poetry of Donne, Marvell and Hopkins can be recalled in parts even today although I had later switched onto study History.

His erudition in English made him a truly fascinating pedagogic conversationalist who made abstruse literature, challenging poetry, delightful fiction and exciting drama comprehensible to a clerk, even Eliot's "The Confidential Clerk" Frost and Cummings, Pope and Dryden, Conrad and Forster were made to sound delectable in reading.

I shall now turn to Guy, the dear friend. through him I came to know some fine people; George Bruin, S. Suntharalingam who helped me to eat breakfast in the mornings and learn Government and Politics at Bagatalle Road, William and Eustace Fernando, Basil Mendis, Amaradasa Fernando and a few other splendid friends.

The trips to Galle, Jaffna-Kalutara and Batticaloa are a few of the escapades in which I participated with Guy. He was an exhilarating and witty companion, enlivening his friends with absorbing conversation while travelling. It was Guy who spoke to me of Godfrey Goonetilleke whom later I came to know well. Guy enriched my experience.

Whether it be at a carnival in the company of a charming lovely lithe, lass and others, or at the Hotel Metropole endeavouring to identify a menu manageable on modest means over a "gimlet" (gin, lime and ice), Guy was a companion whose presence I could cherish. He chose tantalizing but affordable dishes with incomparable finesse.

His writings to the newspapers as on "Wuthering Heights" was wonderful to read and reflect upon. I still recall of what he wrote a couple of sentences or rather parts of them such as "the Scissored lightning cuts across the sky" or "a politician let loose in the field of learning". He wrote to be read and ravished.

It is not possible for me to encapsulate in an appreciation of this sort all that I knew of Guy. He was a fine mentor and a fine friend who one would grapple to one's soul with hoops of steel. As my dear friends are taken away one by the grim reaper, I too begin to hear Time's Wing'd chariot hurrying near behind me. Guy was disappointed with what had befallen Sri Lanka when I last spoke to him but was polite enough to gently call our politics and government aberrant and eccentric.

He was fortunate to have spent time out of the troubled island, although nostalgia for Jaffna and Sri Lanka lingered in his innermost being. Guy shall now be in Paradise enjoying his eternal reward, an enviable being indeed.

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