Unaffected Great Man

THE GAY GENIUS [427 pp.) -- Lin Yutang--John Day ($3.75).

In China some 900 years ago, there lived a thin-faced little man with a mandarin beard named Su Tungpo. According to Biographer Lin Yutang, Su Tungpo was "an incorrigible optimist, a great humanitarian, a friend of the people, a prose master, an original painter, a great calligraphist, an experimenter in winemaking, an engineer, a hater of puritanism, a yogi, a Buddhist believer, a Confucian statesman, a secretary to the emperor, a confirmed winebibber, a humane judge, a dissenter in politics, a prowler in the moonlight, a poet and a wag."

But that catalogue, says Dr. Lin, does not do Su Tungpo full justice. Says he: "I can perhaps best sum it up by saying that the mention of Su Tungpo always elicits an affectionate and warm, admiring smile in China." With an affectionate and admiring smile on his own face, he has written an unaffected biography of an unaffected great man.

During his lifetime, Su wrote 1,700 poems, 800 private letters and at least 800 imperial edicts in his capacity as secretary to the emperor (he could have been premier had he not disliked the politics he had perforce to engage in). "What is the use of occupying a high position, while degrading one's character?'' he once wrote. The theme of his era, says Dr. Lin, is a "study of national degeneration through party strife, ending in the sapping of national strength and the triumphant misrule of the petty politicians."

Su was born in 1036 in Meishan, Szechuan province, in western China, died in 1101 in Changchow on the east coast, nearly 25 years before the conquest of northern China by the Khitans. His political life was spent in unswerving opposition to an oppression that masqueraded as social reform.

Under the "bullheaded premier" Wang Anshih, this took the form of state capitalist enterprises which wrecked small business, taxes which deprived farmers of their land and a totalitarian form of military conscription. Su fought them all, with varying success. Among his achievements was the founding of the first public hospital in China and the engineering of an adequate water supply for the city of Hangchow.

Twice in his career, Su was deprived of all rank for "slandering" the Government (i.e., attacking politicians who ruled under the blind or benign eye of one emperor or another); once he was imprisoned, another time exiled to the island of Hainan off the South China coast. He was then an old man, and ill in health. He was set free in time to make his way home for the last time. Two weeks before he died at 64, he wrote his good friend the local abbot: "Life and death are mere accidents and not worth talking about."

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