It’s a little early to be writing about Adam Nicolson’s The Gentry: Stories of the English (Harper Press), not because it hasn’t come out in the United States yet, but because I haven’t read very much of it. But it’s great fun — which I probably oughtn’t to say, either, because there is nothing frivolous about Nicolson’s examination of the chancy careers of a handful of English families over the past five hundred years.  What these families have in common is the time that they spend in the way station that we call “the gentry.” Some go on to greater things, while others sink back into obscurity. In each case, a heady brew of prudence, decisiveness and luck determines the outcome. We might think of the English gentry in placid terms of teacups and hedgerows, and doubtless there are families that have held on to their mossy manors for centuries without stooping to trade or rising to nobility. Nicolson’s people, however, are adventurers almost to the same degree as seafaring pirates. A lot of what they do isn’t nice, and it certainly isn’t lawful. Lying and cheating, acts that supposedly destroy any claims to the status of gentleman, abound in most of the tales. 

They abound in most of the tales that I’ve read, anyway — about a third of them. I have a sense of why The Gentry is important, not just as a history book, but even more as a study of family life; but I’m going to let it continue to develop as I read the book.   

***

Little did I imagine, when I wrote the foregoing, that any of Nicolson’s gentry actually were pirates, but such seems to be the case with Sir John Oglander’s immediate ancestors — Sir John may have dabbled at it himself, in his youth. There is no other way to account for family holdings that, by 1610, yielded annual revenues of about £800.

During his halcyon days, between returning to an estate on the Isle of Wight from which his family had decamped after being spooked by the passing Armada, and 1632, when his adored oldest son died of smallpox, on a junket to France, Sir John Oglander was an embodiment of the ideals of husbandry. He oversaw everything that was done on and to his extensive landholdings; he also belonged to the mandarinate that governed the localities of England — until, that is, he lost his perch, as a Royalist, in the Civil War. And he wrote it all down. He kept an account book with abundant diaristic interpolations that might well find a place on the shelf next to Virgil’s Georgics.

“He was his ancestry and his posterity,” writes Nicolson — wishfully, I think. The conceit of Sir John’s life was that human affairs, if properly moderated, could be as fertile and self-renewing as tended fields and herds. But Sir John turned out to be a singularity. No one before or after him kept such account books; no one seems to have cared quite as much as Sir John did for the rhythms of agriculture. His second son, climbing up in the world, became a baronet, and in the following century the Oglanders became genuinely rich. But the main line died out in 1874, and the riches were dispersed in entails. There are still Oglanders on the Isle of Wight, but they sold Sir John’s beloved Nunwell in 1982.

In the introduction to his three Seventeenth-Century stories, Adam Nicolson writes about “The Storm over the Gentry” that raged amongst scholars and historians in the middle of the last century, as theories explaining the Civil War in terms of this or that understanding of “the gentry” were launched and shot down. Theories of any kind would have been the legacy of Marxism, and the gentry, a class without boundaries that existed nowhere but in Britain, defied Marxian analysis. That’s because the gentry don’t constitute a genuine class. People describable as “gentry” for whatever reason you like are indeed travelers from one class to another, and none of the portraits in Nicolson’s book (that I’ve read so far) demonstrates this more clearly than that of Sir John Oglander, who derived bottomless satisfaction from the faux sempiternality of his world — until his son died. Sir John’s dream of the gentry life, like his son, predeceased him. His descendants moved on to other things. And piracy, of all things, was the foundation of Sir John’s dream. It is impossible to tie up Sir John Oglander, much less the gentry as an amalgam, in any kind of theoretical bow. The only thing that the gentry always seem to have is the time in which to make agreeable stories about themselves sound convincing. 

***

About twenty years ago, I was falling in love with husbandry. My “manor” was a half-acre of heavily shaded hillside, with a problematic water supply and an openly dodgy septic system, but, as I say, I was in love, and being reasonable had nothing to do with it. The very best thing that can be said about my folly was that it was expensive; I’m not about to share the worse. Looking back, I can’t begin to grasp how I managed to justify my outlays in terms of husbandry and stewardship, but that’s because, as I’ll say again, I was in love, and when the love passed away (something that I couldn’t imagine ever happening, of course), the rationales disappeared along with it. I only thought of it today because the story of Sir John Oglander set the memories tingling.

It’s a bad idea to fall in love with a way of life. It’s imprudent, first of all; every change — and change is inevitable — comes as a disappointment. Beyond that, the beloved way of life tends to age into a bar against real happainess. As you service the idol of your self-image, you’re tied down to a way of thinking that hinders growth — and growth is inevitable, too. If you’re forced to grow within the confines of an established routine, you’ll merely grow uncomfortable.

This is why, in order to enjoy your way of life to the full, you must be indifferent to its durability.  

Nancy Mitford to Lady Pamela Berry, 4 January 1952:

The Cabrols & Co have asked me to write a little sketch for them to act so it is to be an old French Duke & his wife sitting in their tourist-infected château while their only child explains to them that she is now a man. Everything she says is echoed by what the tourists are saying, you can imagine how it might be funny. They are having a revue this year to replace the usual ball — Charlie [Beistegui] is supposed to have killed balls for ever.

I found this letter when I looked up Carlos Beistegui in the index to Love From Nancy, Mitfords letters. I wasn’t entirely sure that his name would appear, but of course, there it was. Nancy didn’t go to the Beistegui ball, but she did date a letter to Gladwyn Jebb “Beistegui Ball Day.” The ball was given, in the Palazzo Labia at Venice, on 3 February 1951, and it did not kill balls for ever, because Truman Capote (who didn’t go, either) made sure that it didn’t.

Now you will be asking, “WTF Charlie Beistegui?” as, indeed, I have been doing for years. According to Wikipedia, he is “not to be confused with his uncle (1863-1953), whose collection of notable 18th- and 19th-century paintings was donated to the Louvre.” You can — and ought to — check out the guest list; there are many other WTF names. 

In another letter to Lady Pamela, one that editor Charlotte Mosley declined to print in full but a passage from which appears in a footnote to the letter to Sir Gladwyn, Nancy wrote, “I suppose it is rather dotty not to go to the Ball. But a dress of the mingiest description would have been £200 — the whole thing would have cost £300 I guess, hardly worth it.”

And there you have it: why Nancy Mitford remained on the fringe of what was called Café Society. Nancy never says that she was invited to the ball, but presumably she could have got in had she wanted to go. But to spend all that money on a costume? The Mitford commitment to frivolity had its limits.

Nevertheless, Nancy Mitford knew a lot of the poeple who constituted Café Society, and their names pepper Mosley’s footnotes. Mostly the footnotes, one suspects, because Café Societals (if I may be permitted) were not much given to writing. It’s not just that writing is work, hard work even for the most fluent writers, but also that writing is such a damned disorderly experience. You write a sentence and read it and think about it and can’t decide what’s not quite right about it, because there’s a verb out that stoutly refuses to come to mind, and, what’s this, a slew of typos. You can see why people who were almost studious about their soigné appearance would find the very act of writing unpleasant. (Now we know why Edith Wharton did all her writing first thing in the morning, while still in bed.) The picture on the dust jacket of Love From Nancy shows the writer seated in her drawing room in the rue Monsieur, with a stiff-backed writing pad on her lap, braced on the arm of her bergère. It would be fun to know how much the dress that she’s wearing cost. I doubt very much that the picture tells us what Nancy looked like when she was hard at work.

When I was a boy, Elsa Maxwell’s name was in the air. Who was Elsa Maxwell? She gave parties and knew Everybody and was an important member of Café Society, whatever that was. I doubt that my parents had a much clearer picture of Maxwell than I did. Then, in the last days of my youth, Diana Vreeland, another member of Café Society (said to be dead at the time), published Allure, with lots of pictures of fat and ugly old Elsa Maxwell. Who was she?

There was no Internet in those days. You might find out a tidbit here or there, but you’d never remember it, because everything about Café Society was ephemeral, especially its history.

Which is why I bought, after much agonizing over the expense (thirty-five seconds), Thierry Coudert’s Café Society: Socialites, Patrons, and Artists 1920 to 1960 (Flammarion), at the Museum yesterday. I expect that it will be gracing a lot of Upper East Side coffee tables this season, and for many seasons to come, because it is the ideal coffee-table book. Lots of pictures, many of them iconic, with a few pages of small print about the important people. I have always always always wanted to know who Mona Bismarck was, and I have never never never been able to hold a single fact about her in my mind for longer than a gnat’s lifespan. Now I have a book. Bismarck, who was born in Louisville and who married five times (the fourth was to the Iron Chancellor’s grandson), was — beautiful and rich, and of course unhappy at the end. If they lived long enough, these people were usually unhappy.

The inspiration for Thierry Coudert’s book appears to be a sweet and jolly scrapbook kept by — guess who! — the baron and baronne de Cabrol!

Having opened Nancy Mitford’s letters, I had to go on reading a few, and I came across this gem, from a letter about her wildly successful trip (she was “lionized”) to Rome, after the publication of The Blessing.

Of course I am in a fog, know nobody’s name & said to a very grand Italian, thinking he was English “I suppose you know a lot of Italians?” which went down very badly.

I suddenly understood that the marvelous charm of the Mitford girls owes to their all having been naughty little boys in youth.

When I find out where the Café was, I’ll let you know.

Here is a quick example of Edward St Aubyn’s magnificent prose style.

As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.

As a piece of English-language architecture, it’s as magnifcent as any country house (a house in town would be more severely punctuated, with quotes around the expressions and a colon after “sorry”), but it is also a clarion call for attentive decency (our favorite subject). Emily Price is a lout, which is unusual in a woman and therefore remarkable. With a man as its subject, the statement wouldn’t be as funny — but the surge wouldn’t be as extreme, either.

It’s his decency that redeems Patrick Melrose, that makes his miserable lapses into drug and drink abuse easy to overlook, at least when Patrick is not actually falling down or, more likely, lighting the fuse on a highly volatile situation. It’s his decency that makes him an interesting man, and not just the victim of beastly parents. (You’d think that his father, what with raping him for three years, would win the worst-parent laurels, but his mother’s incompetence as a human being makes his father’s wickedness seem ornamental.)

I spent an hour or so yesterday reading up on St Aubyn, who indeed, as one feared from various reviews, has drawn the Melrose saga from his own personal history. I managed to order copies of the two novels that he wrote in between Some Hope and Mother’s Milk; by the time they arrive, I’ll have finished At Last, which is, currently at least, the final Melrose novel. I wouldn’t be so sure. St Aubyn thought that he was through with Melrose after Some Hope; indeed, that’s the title given to an omnibus edition of the three Melrose novels that St Aubyn wrote before writing On the Edge and A Clue to the Exit, his two non-Melrose books. He wrote Mother’s Milk about a man called Mark something, but eventually realized that he was simplty continuing Patrick’s story. (He has a funny story to tell about what happened when he instructed his word processor to make the global change in names; a moment’s thought — aided by rueful experience — will probably tell it to you.) Now we have At Last, which begins (and, for all I know, ends) with Patrick’s mother’s funeral.

The Melrose novels may be the world’s longest suicide note, as well as (so far) an unsuccessful one. They constitute a letter written by a man who intends to take his own life, but who falls under the spell of his own writing. Not that you should imagine an attractive enchantment; one interviewer elicited from St Aubyn the confession that he wrote most of the first three books bare-chested, with a towel around his waist to soak up the sweat that poured out of him as he confessed his ghastly family secrets. (I don’t think that I could write very well under such conditions, but there you are — I’m no artist.) St Aubyn did indeed want to kill himself, and try to kill himself, but was saved by a rapture with the myth of Sisyphus. (Camus’s tract is mentioned early on in Bad News.) He would deal with the only serious philosophical problem (whether to commit suicide) as a novelist, doing the two things that the best novelists do so well that it’s hard to tell them apart: animating vivid characters with assiduous writing. Stories are all very well, but they can’t be allowed to upstage or trip up the quadrille of personages and prose, and St Aubyn has a wonderfully ironic way of not telling stories by hoovering them into backflashes. (The bit about Emily Price, above, comes from such a passage; Mary Melrose, sitting in the crematorium, is remembering a disastrous vacation in Provence.)  

I can sit here all day writing about these books — if I didn’t have a lunch date, that is — but it’s no use: writing about suicide notes is hardly going to fill up the tent. The only thing to do is to quote. From page 6 of the first novel, Never Mind.

When she had first met David twelve years ago, she had been fascinated by his looks. The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing room onto their own land had grown stubborn over five centuries and perfected itself in David’s face.

 I really do believe that Jane Austen and Edward St Aubyn are in a class by themselves.

Update: “surge in THE demand”; corrected, after a painful Google search, on 16 February.

Has anyone out there seen Brice de Nice, the 2005 comedy co-written by and starring Jean Dujardin? It is definitely a movie to bear in mind while you’re watching The Artist, if you can manage the cognitive dissonance. M Dujardin, who may receive an Academy Award for his suave performance in the latter film — he’s the compleat star that Old Hollywood never had, Douglas Fairbanks, Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant all rolled into one — turns out to be no less a maestro when it comes to playing jerks. He’s Jack Black, Peter Sellers, Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason all rolled into one. Throw in a little Buster Keaton for pathos — Jean Dujardin’s jerks are almost but not quite too lovable to be jerks.

My DVD of Brice de Nice offers no subtitles; I couldn’t even get the close-captioning to work. So I had no idea what the actors were saying most of the time. The only “dialogue” that was crystal clear occurred when Brice ploddingly read a newspaper story about his father’s arrest for money laundering, with his finger moving along the page. Language was not a barrier to understanding and enjoying the film, however. If it had been shot in Urdu, I’d have got it. All you really need to know is that 1991 classic, Point Break. If you know Point Break, you will understand why, for example, Brice, now that his allowance has been cut off by his father’s arrest for money laundering, and after he has failed to hold down a job as a waiter, wears two face masks of Jacques Chirac, one on the back of his head, when he attempts to hold up the Caisse de Nice. “Je suis le président de la Republique!” he declares. Break dancing ensues.

You may be aware that there isn’t much in the way of surf on the Côte d’Azur. But Brice is hopeful; he paddles out first thing every morning and sits wistfully on his board. When, later in the picture, no longer on the Mediterranean, he is confronted by an actual wave, well, you should see the look on his face.

There’s a very funny clip of Jean Dujardin on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon? He does an imitation of Robert De Niro, then an imitation of a camel, and then he combines them, doing a camel who is also Robert De Niro. In Brice de Nice, he offers another improvisatorial combination. It’s part Keanu Reeves and part 30 year-old moron with shoulder-length bottle-blond hair that keeps getting in his face. The little twisty shake of his head that gets the hair out of his eyes is pure Keanu Reeves, although I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen Mr Reeves actually do it. The deeper joke is that Brice idolizes the other star of Point Break, Patrick Swayze.

I expect that a subtitled edition of Brice de Nice will be available sooner or later. Sure, it’s dopey, but, like the two OSS 117 movies, it’s a riff on movies that Americans are very familiar with, and it’s much, much nicer than either of the Hangover movies.

Perhaps it’s the afterburn of Edward St Aubyn’s Bad News, the Melrose novel in which hero Patrick spends a few mightily drug-addled days in Manhattan (with a junket to the Bronx), but I’m feeling as though I’ve been on some sort of non-traveling trip, induced by immersion in a lot of other people’s creative imaginations.

The Melrose books themselves — I’m not too far into Mother’s Milk — have induced the now very rare feeling that I am living in alternate worlds, my own and the novels’. Almost everything that I do is internally reported in a voice that distinctly belongs to an English writer who is twelve years my junior. There is nothing grandiose about this; I’m not wallowing in the notion that my life is the stuff of great fiction and worthy of being written about. (It is worthy of writing about, but by me, and as nonfictionally as possible.) It’s just that the novels have me noticing everyday things and routines as if they were captioned, and my job were to fill in the words. That’s how intensely St Aubyn’s prose has clicked with my way of being conscious.

(Not my way of writing, certainly. St Aubyn writes strong but lean sentences, in which dependent clauses almost always signal facetiousness, as if only idiots required explanations. Isn’t that what you’d expect, though, of a fictional voice preoccupied by the opening line of The Myth of Sisyphus?

***

How about a bit of housekeeping? Things are always changing at these sites of mine, and it’s hard to keep up. I tweak and fiddle with “improvements,” but then I don’t tell anyone about them, and then I get cross when people don’t figure things out for themselves. As if nobody had anything better to do.

But first, two items that I left off my Morse Questionnaire. I watched Remorseful Day at last last night, and so now this Morse jag is really done. Because I had watched the shows in order, I understood Morse’s heartbreak at losing Adele, the music teacher with whom he almost got something permanent going; she went to Australia and decided to stay there. The heartbreak becomes quite literal in the ensuing episode, and the final shot, to the strains of Parsifal, is a pan of Oxford’s dreaming spires in a mist. 

• Indoor swimming pool (Y/N).
• Institutional election (Y/N).

There. Back to housekeeping. If you are a regular reading, I recommend that you bookmark not this site but the old Daily Blague. There you will find an entry that bears the same title and image as its corresponding one here, but also, a link to that corresponding entry that is set to open The Daily Blague / reader in the same pane of your browser. I don’t know about you, but I prefer a default setting that opens links in new windows, but I’ve chosen the alterenative setting in this case to make it easy for you to return to The Daily Blague and post comments on what you’ve read here, if you have any. (Comments, not corrections; write to me privately about the latter.)

Is it time to start talking about Web 3.0? This would be the ghost-downtown Web, the gated-community Web, the Web of Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone apps: the Web that’s already familiar and that you no longer want to know too much more about, not in any one sitting, anyway. The Web in which the flâneur might just as well stay at home.

Ah, the flâneur, beloved figment of Web 1.0.

And yet, reading Evgeny Morozov’s contribution to the Times‘s Sunday Review — well, I didn’t even have to start reading. There was Caillebotte’s great picture (still the best reason to visit Chicago), Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, with its burghers walking in the rain. Don’t say that they’re “strolling”; don’t imagine that their amiably aimless air has anything to do with Baudelaire or Benjamin. The setting may be “Paris” to you, but when Caillebotte painted it, this was one of the newest developments in town, too new for much greenery. (According to my map, it is now known as the Place de Dublin.) Neither grand nor funky, it was the last place you’d expect to encounter an errant bohemian in search of serendipity.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe the Times image editor appreciated the irony of illustrating “The Death of the Cyberflâneur” with a picture of post-flâneur Paris. That would be very clever. But I doubt that many readers saw it that way.

Meanwhile…(ahem): chopped liver? What am I doing here, do you suppose?

***

I don’t know much about Baudelaire & Benjamin’s idea of the flâneur; I’d never heard of it before the Web came along. AtWikipedia, I see, alongside the Caillebotte, that “the concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity.” I’ll try not to hold that against it. (Modernity turned out to be such a wicked idea.) The flâneur discovers that he (or she) is the ultimate arbiter of what’s interesting in the busy stream of city life, where the odds of running into something unexpected are at not only generally higher than they are anywhere else but also subject to rapid change, capable of dropping to zero if you walk into a newsstand where they sell lottery tickets. But we’re not here to talk about city life. We’re hear to evaluate Morozov’s claim, “Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore.”

(Can we speak of the “surfeur”? Best not.)

I’m trying to think of the last time I did anything like surfing. Nothing comes to mind. I begin the workday with 1000+ unread feeds and try to whittle the number down. Lately, I’ve been canceling “subscriptions” to sites right and left. Beachcombing is one thing, looking for needles in haystacks is another (I’m thinking of WSJ’s Speakeasy, which sued to turn up the occasional tidbit of interest.) I may follow a link from a site to which one my feeds leads me, but this doesn’t happen often; as a rule, my feeds take me to long reads, after which I have to lie down, far from a computer screen.

If people aren’t surfing as much as they used to do, that’s because a lot of the odd and intriguing stuff has been discontinued. Stocking a site with catchy items is great fun at first, but then you either run out of material or resent the obligation to crank it out. Or both. You either give it up or adopt a professional attitude. This is where the difficulty in Internet flânerie comes in: to have a clear idea of what you’re doing, and a regular schedule for doing it, then close encounters with the surprising are going to become unlikely.

On the other hand, the space that used to be taken up by weird fun is filling up with sites such as The Awl, the comic carapace of which you don’t have to scratch very hard to feel the warm vibration of genuine thinking. Remember Maria Bustillos’s piece on David Foster Wallace’s “self-help” library? Of course you do. It was so intensely surprising that the actual library, the books that Wallace had marked up with comments about his mother, were withdrawn from public access. That sort of corker doesn’t pop every day, but, when it does, you’re very glad that you were there to see it. I’ll plow through any number of Alex Balk’s entries about bears if that’s what it takes to read Bustillos’s amazing journalism.

***

You’ll have heard me rattling on about “livings.” I still have an exclusive on this term, unfortunately, but my keen eye for like-minded analysis has spotted a few published parallels, the latest of which is an essay, or rump of an essay, by Slavoj Žižek, in the latest LRB to reach me, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie.” From a Marxian point of view, I gather — I have never begun to understand Marx — “salaried bourgeoisie” is something of an oxymoron; either you’re a worker who receives a salary, or  you’re an owner who receives the profits. The growth of large corporations — Žižek leaves this to inference — leads inevitably to the dwindling number of outright owners and its replacement by armies of individually impotent shareholders.

What’s behind the revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie? Income disparity — it isn’t great enough. This is a fantastic insight. While everyone’s attention is riveted on the widening gap between a handful of extremely wealthy people and the rest of us, nobody’s attending to the real irritant, which is the shrinking of the gap between the bourgeoisie and the working class. This isn’t a matter of less money for lawyers and doctors, but rather one of fewer jobs for people who used to be the equals of lawyers and doctors. Whole classes of middle management have evaporated since the 1970s.

Which is probably what gave me the idea of livings in the first place. The poor have always been with us; what strikes me as a newlypressing problem is the matter of finding occupation for the displaced bourgeoisie. This isn’t tenderness of heart so much as common sense: Žižek cautions against treating the lot of 2011s worldwide uprisings as revolts of the salaried bourgeoisie, but they all seem to have some of that in common, particularly if you consider the role played by college students whose job prospects are dismal.

With Žižek’s final paragraph, I could not agree more heartily.

The proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is matched at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers (irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success). Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system is no longer capable of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.

***

While we’re on the subject of dandies, how’s this for a pose: when somebody asked me if I favored the Giants or the Patriots yesterday, I blinked. “Baseball, already?” 

It’s wintry cold outside again today, but on Wednesday we had our first taste of spring. I was too old and experienced to take it seriously; I knew that it wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — last. But I wasn’t too old to be quickened. The coming of spring occasions so much bosh that I’m almost as frozen as today’s air by the determination not to spout nonsense, but it really did feel, walking my Wednesday rounds, as if I was appreciably more alive that I’d been. I suppose the balmy afternoon was simply reminding me that this would be true anyway: this week, I finally felt that I had emerged, once and for all, from the mineshaft of grief and rhinovirus in which I’d been immured since November.

Exultation didn’t last. Yesterday, there came a dreadful phone call from the bank. I referred the clerk to Kathleen at the office; Kathleen is our banker. I tried to get hold of her myself, but couldn’t; it was lunchtime, and no one answered. For nearly two hours, I simmered in a miserable anxiety that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Then came the call from Kathleen, back from lunch. She had sorted the whole business out in two strokes when she received the redirected call and then gone off to lunch. Unaware that the call was redirected — that I knew anything about what did indeed turn out to be 100% clerical error — she never thought to call me beforehand to say that all was well.

I was still pretty rattled at bedtime. You may be asking if Kathleen possesses a mobile phone. The answer is, Sometimes.

To beguile myself during this agony, I turned to a book, to a series of novels in fact, that I’ve been avoiding since I first heard about it a decade or so ago. Every few years, I would read an enthusiastic review of the latest installment in Edward St Aubyn’s sequence of novels about Patrick Melrose, who it seemed was an even more alter-egoish creation than most. I would read that St Aubyn is darkly funny but also just plain dark about his not-so-fictional world of rude and dissolute epigones of the English aristocracy. No reviewer failed to mention child- and drug-abuse. Not for me, I would think, and another few years would go around before the excitement would bubble up again in the otherwise quiet patch of literary life that’s devoted to beautiful English prose.

For some reason, I imagined the writer to be a weedy neurasthenic, a small and petulant person. Perhaps it was the author photograph that ran with the latest round of reviews — the fifth and final novel, At Last, has just been published, and the previous four have been bound up into a convenient omnibus — that changed my mind about these books. I think that the real Edward St Aubyn looks something like Orson Welles, and I’ve found that he writes with something like Welles’s heroic gusto. There is a wealth of polished detail, but no small-mindedness. Opening the book at random, I come upon this passage from Never Mind, the first of the Melrose books. Eleanor is Patrick’s disorganized and deeply unhappy mother, her mind drifting from her own dinner party.

Eleanor thought about her stepfather barking at her mother across the wastes of English silver, French furniture, and Chinese vases that helped to prevent him from becoming physically violent. This dwarfish and impotent French duke had dedicated his life to the idea that civilization had died in 1789. He nevertheless accepted a ten per cent cut from the dealers who sold pre-revolutionary antiques to his wife. He had forced Mary to seell her mother’s Monets and Bonnards on the ground that they were examples of a decadent art that would never really matter. To him, Mary was the least valuable object in the fastidious museums they inhabited, and when eventually he bullied her to death he felt that he had eliminated the last trace of modernity from his life, except, of course, for the enormous income that now came to him from the sales of a dry-cleaning fluid made in Ohio.

It’s almost as though Hemingway had taken up Waugh. Unthinkable, but there it is. Never Mind goes on in this breezy but infernal way right up to the end. By that point, I’d been put out of my ninety minutes of misery, but I was well-primed to flinch and quail at the frightening scenes of substance abuse that take up most of the first half (anyway) of Bad News, the second volume.

He was so tired, he really must get some sleep. Get some sleep. Fold his wings. But what if George and the others sent somebody to look and they found the sick-spattered basin and hammered on the door of the cubicle. Was there no peace, no resting place? Of course there wasn’t. What an absurd question. 

Having put it off for over a week, I finally got on with the end of my Morse jag and watched “The Wench Is Dead,” the penultimate episode, last night. I’d delayed because it’s unusual in several ways at once. It was the first episode that I got to know well — meaning, among many other things, that I had no idea who Adele (Judy Loe) was (the first female interest to reappear in a second episode, that’s who). Written by Malcolm Bradbury, of all people, it’s unlike all the other Morses in involving a very cold case — a murder occurring in 1859. “The Oxford Canal Murder,” it’s called — nothing to do with the University. And there’s a big American part, played by Lisa Eichhorn. As it turns out, Lisa Eichhorn really is American (she was born in upstate New York), but half the time, on Morse, you have to wonder about those accents, which, although plausible, come from what the French call nulle part.

Seeing the show in order, knowing that Morse really was terminally ill, I bawled like a baby and could hardly eat my spaghetti alla carbonara. (Kathleen had a business date.) Lord knows how I’ll carry on during “The Remorseful Day,” the finale in more ways than one. (Not only does Morse actually die, but actor John Thaw himself died two years afterward.)

I thought I would share my Morse Questionnaire. I hope to have forms printed up the next time I go through the series. The database will be amusing.

1. University SOC. (Y/N)
2. Pathologist. (Name)
3. Outremer. (Only two shows leave the British Isles, but “The Wench Is Dead” goes to Ireland.)
4. Canal SOC.
5. Rich and Famous. (Y/N)
6. Tension with the police hierarchy. (1-10, with “Masonic Mysteries,” in which Morse is himself put under arrest, the sole 10.)
7. Lewis’s doubts. (Correlation, 0-1).
8. Crossword Puzzle Clues. (Y/N)
9. Drugs/Alcohol. (Correlation)
10. University off-use. (Summer schools and such)
11. Beaumont. Lonsdale. Gresham. This is actually item 1a.
12. Love Interest. (Name of character, actress; suspect? accomplice? murderer? Victim? All of the above?)
13. Music. (1-10, with “Twilight of the Gods” and “The Death of the Self” the two 10s.)
14. Does the chief superintendant insult Morse by calling him “matey.” (Y/N)

If you can think of anything to add to this questionnaire, please let me know! 

If I were younger, I’d let myself be annoyed by Pico Iyer’s stab at memoir, The Man Within My Head. But I’m older, and it is no longer necessary to couple a lack of sympathy with a show of impatience. I picked up the book because I wanted to know who Pico Iyer is. I’ve been reading his pieces in the NYRB for ages, and I’ve wondered about his name and where he comes from. I didn’t recognize “Iyer” as the Tamil Brahmin surname that it apparently is. Now I know. As to how somebody of such lineage came to be named after a Florentine humanist, that’s an unusual story but it is plausible enough. (Anyway, his real first name is “Siddhartha,” no?) Pinning down Iyer’s roots seemed all the more important to me as his topics were far-flung, a globe-trotter’s in fact. What I didn’t know, until I was well into The Man Within My Head, is that the author worked for a decade or so, in exalted positions, at Time Magazine. When I learned that, the lack of sympathy that I’d been feeling as one well-written page followed another became perfectly explicable.

I can’t say much about Time; only that, like New York and, lately, The Economist, it was a publication that I wouldn’t allow in the house. New York is openly trivial, but, like The Economist, Time is a magazine in which good writing is deployed with the aim of preventing the reader from doing any real thinking.

You could say that he gained from school not just his schoolboy’s sense of adventure, his love of mischief, his uncertainty about what to do with the most foreign country of all (the other sex), but his almost superstitious revulsion from success.

I would argue that this sentence, in which “he” is Graham Greene, the eponymous man within Iyer’s head — or at least one of them, the other, possibly, being his father (he waits forever to raise this question) — is the key to the book. To write of women as “the most foreign country of all” is almost as clever as it is thoughtless. The summing up of the things that Greene learned in school reminds me of that notorious remark of John Ashbery (in a conversation with Kenneth Koch):

I am assuming that from the moment that life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions.

It seems that some people are simply wired that way — how sorry one is for them. Not that Iyer is at all like Graham Greene. He appears to have led a level, satisfying interior life with lots of exterior excitement. He writes of Greene as perpetually escaping the past; Iyer is always looking for new possibilities. His restlessness is the consequence of rootlessness — it’s the kind of freedom that Marilynne Robinson has in mind when she talks about the advantages of being a “deracinated” Westerner.

That’s what would be annoying about The Man Within My Head, if I were immature enough to let annoyance cloud the real pleasure that I took in Pico Iyer’s exotic but wholesome company (a pleasure dependent upon my invisibility as his reader). Iyer is bewitched, if only to a manageable degree, by “Graham Greene.” A writer and a man who, despite many personal failings, seemed to strike everyone who knew him as remarkable. Iyer, who grew up — well, that’s just it: he grew up flying back and forth between Oxford and Santa Barbara. When he was nine years old, and newly transplanted to California, he not only got homesick for England but figured out in currency-exchange calculations that it would be cheaper for him to return to his prep school and fly home for vacations than to pack his lunchbox every day for the American public school. Whether his parents proved these numbers to their own satisfaction, they acceded to his request, and Iyer became one super-cool kid, always and everywhere an ambassador from a highly intriguing elsewhere. (After all, he could have shuttled between Tulsa and Athens, say — two places with little curiosity about the other.)

In short: if Graham Greene had taken up residence inside Pico Iyer’s head, then he must have found there the peace that he sought in vain throughout his life. I suspect that what inspired Iyer to write this book was the allure of borrowing a measure of Greene’s troubles, with a view to complicating his own worldliness. But the graft doesn’t take, and, despite the intensity of his engagement with The Quiet American, which he can appreciate deeply from both sides, Fowler’s and Pyle’s, Iyer cannot contain Greene, much less house him in his head. It would have been much better to approach Greene’s as the life that Iyer was, through luck and constitution, spared.

All right: here’s what’s unpardonably annoying about The Man Within My Head: the refusal to name “Eton College,” at least until the very end of the book, when we see that Iyer has saved it up for a joke — he has been holding it back so that it can be mentioned for the first time by the Bishop of Potosí, of all people, in the most unlikely circumstances. The joke is not very funny, and it does not dispel the annoyance piled up by a string of references — our distant patron Henry VI; the book that Cyril Connolly wrote about our school; between Slough and Windsor; New Buildings/oldest classroom in the world; eighteen prime ministers and the nineteenth taking office as I write — that act as shibboleths, designed to distinguish the sophisticated from the parochial. It seems almost rude. I was never for a moment mystified; I saw through each hint as it appeared. But I drew no satisfaction from this knowingness; quite the reverse. I was embarrassed; I felt like a know-it-all.

Grahame Greene, of course, did not attend Eton. His father was housemaster and eventually headmaster at Berkhamsted School, in an outer suburb of London. Greene took a second-class degree in history from Balliol and then jumped into journalism, from which the success of his fourth novel, Stamboul Train, delivered him for life. He married and had two children but did not live with his family. He had amazingly clear eyes. If you’re interested in his elusive charm, captured by a great writer who spent time with him over many years, by all means seek out Shirley Hazzard’s Greene on Capri, a book that I think it’s slightly churlish of Pico Iyer not to mention.

Don’t do what I did. When you get round to this week’s New Yorker, read the story about the successful musician second, after the story about the unhappy one. Jeremy Denk, writing with the most amiable brio in the world about recording a work that he plays, as he himself says, with the fervor of a gospel preacher, Charles Ives’s fractal Concord Sonata, will take your mind off the madly brief career of a young violinist who was apparently a better musician than he thought he was.

Ian Parker tells “The Story of a Suicide” with such insistent comprehensiveness that it reads like the masterpiece that would conclude an apprenticeship to Janet Malcolm. You may recall the tragedy that appears to have occurred at Rutgers University about fifteen months ago, but you will find, as you read Parker’s piece, that what you remember about it didn’t take place. Most notoriously, Dharun Ravi did not post a video on YouTube, or anywhere else, of his roommate, Tyler Clementi, making out with another man. Nor was Clementi unaware of what Ravi was doing. The fact that Clementi took his own life, by jumping off the George Washington Bridge, a few days after Ravi’s second attempt to spy on him — a move that Clementi himself thwarted by powering down Ravi’s computer before his lover arrived in the room — may have had something to do with a conversation between the roommates that we have no record of, but, the better you get ot know Clementi, the less the foolishness with the Webcam looks like a proximate cause of his suicide. His death is very sad, but it is, even more sadly, not the end of the story, because Dharun Ravi now faces not only a stiff prison sentence but the prospect of deportation (he was born in India). Like Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills, this wouldn’t be the story that it is without the commitment of bloody-minded and media-stimulated officials commited to a miscarriage of justice.

If prosecutors had been able to charge Ravi with shiftiness and bad faith — if the criminal law exactly reflected common moral judgments about kindness and reliability — then to convict him would be easy. The long indictment against Ravi can be seen as a kind of regretful commentary about the absence of such statutes. Similarly, the enduring false belief that Ravi was responsible for outing Tyler Clementi, and for putting a sex tape on the Internet, can be seen as a collective effort to balance a terrible event with a terrible cause.

In other words, there is little or nothing to prosecute here.

There is a great deal more to this story, and, now that I know as much as I do, I want to know the rest. Specifically, I want to know more about a 25 year-old man known hitherto only as “M B.” He was Tyler Clementi’s companion in the two trysts in the Rutgers dormitory that took place before Clementi killed himself. M B was not a Rutgers student; students who saw him were put off by his not looking like someone who belonged on campus. He may or may not be able to tell us something more about Tyler Clementi’s state of mind in response to what appears to have been a dangerously rapid conclusion to his belated puberty. As we follow the copious spoor of tweets and chats that Parker has reassembled (as well as more conventional conversations with Clementi’s parents), we watch a very shy young man undergo two critical developments. First, right before heading off to his freshmen year of college, he comes out to his family, a disclosure made more troubling by his mother’s attachment to an evangelical church. Then, he tries on full-blown manhood by going out to find someone to have sex with and bringing this person back to his bed. I for one had the feeling that Tyler took on too much too fast, and also that he had no choice about doing so.  Having no friends at the new school was probably his fatal vulnerability. The tomfooleries of Dharun Ravi and his old friend and fortuitous dorm neighbor, Molly Wei would have annoying at worst. You almost wish that Tyler had been more outraged about them. Having reported the spying to the residential assistant, Tyler appears to have moved on, on his pre-set course to suicide. It is not reaching too far to suppose that Tyler knew that his own death would exact a terrible revenge, by transforming an ugly prank into one with a plausibly lethal one.

The Rutgers story also brings increased clarity to my conviction that most college students would benefit by take a gap year or two after high school. By “most college students” I mean the students at most colleges. I’m not saying that every young man and woman who gets into Princeton is emotionally equipped for the challenge. But students at Rutgers carry an additional burden, a lack of academic focus, perhaps, or strained financial resources at home, a something or other that effectively prevented them from competing for more prestigious admissions. As a state university, Rutgers is more an amalgamation of institutions than a cohesive school, and to many students it offers professional training, not scholarly speculation. Everything suggests that what a university such as Rutgers requires in lieu of academic rigor is psychosocial maturity — a characteristic possessed by neither of the roommates in this case. My heart goes out to their parents — and then I want to smack their parents for having hurled their children into an abyss. How can they not have known that their sons weren’t ready to leave home? Social pressure undoubtedly accounts for their blindness, or their determination to overlook what they could see. That’s why gap years ought to be mandatory. Parents generally make a hash of the precocity of children, and they ought to be prevented from boasting that their brilliant darling has been admitted to the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen.  

Now, if I’d only finished the chapter on altruism in Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind before writing about it, I’d have been able to answer my own questions, posed at the end of yesterday’s Weekend Note. Robinson’s target is “that essential modernist position, that our minds are not our own.” Ah. That’s what she meant by “the exclusion of the felt life of the mind.” Also, if I’d gone on reading, I’d have encountered her astonishingly entertaining argument that what can’t be explained by natural selection can be explained by meme theory — not that she has much use for either.

She’s quite right about “that essential modernist position.” It’s the core of the bossiest school of thought in Western history. By comparison, the orthodoxy of medieval Christianity is essentially permissive: what it permits, and what modernism denies, is responsibility of knowing your own mind. Modernists, control freaks each and every one of them, insist that it’s precisely your (silly) ideas that stand between poverty and utopia. If you would only listen to them!

Still, I wonder, to borrow an uncongenial phrase, if I have a dog in this fight — this fight over the soul between thinkers like Steven Pinker and Marilynne Robinson.

Steven Pinker says, “The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle.” But the mind, or the brain, a part of the body just as Wilson says it is, is deeply sensitive to itself. Guilt, nostalgia, the pleasure or anticipation, even the shock of a realization, all arise out of an event that occurs entirely in the mind or brain, and they are as potent as other sensations.

Aside from a strong but not entirely coherent feeling that Pinker and Robinson are talking about apples and oranges here — to put it more fairly, Pinker is talking apples and Robinson is throwing oranges at him — I’m not sure that I care which one of them is right, or if either of them is. I have never been the “victim of an illusion” about God. When I was a child, I believed in hell, all right; it seemed like the natural continuation of the incredible tedium of everyday life. God as represented was not a figure with whom I wanted to spend much time; Jesus even less. There was nothing interesting or attractive about the religious experience for me. (The interest and attraction of religious display is another story!)

I think that it’s impertinent to say that I don’t know anything about God, and I don’t think that anyone else does, either. Even when think such things, as Mrs Clancy says, we don’t say them. What I would say is that I don’t know why anyone wants to believe in God, or draws any satisfaction from belief. Of course I’ve heard all my life about the comfort in affliction that religion provides, and I have to assume that, even though I never felt it — I have been lucky enough to know few genuine afflictions — other people really do, and that the feeling is not an illusion — as Robinson insists, it’s a mental, mindful fact. But I don’t understand it from the inside at all.

It’s a wonder I have the nerve to stand up here and write anything at all, given that I’m unresponsive to the two most powerful forces in contemporary society, religion and sport. Then again, I live in a world in which The Artist, since it opened last year, has brought in less than a third of the box office receipts garnered by The Grey in its first weekend. 

Before I go any further, I have to confess that there was a moment in time, long before I had made blanquette de veau for myself, when I wondered if “blanquette” were not some very old loan word from the English “blanket,” the blanket of veal being the ribs. Cuddly, no? Happily, the Internet came along presently, and put an end to such armchair speculations.

I’m in a very good mood this morning, because I had such a treat last night — and not late last night, either. The minute I got home after seeing The Artist, I ordered as many Jean Dujardin videos as I could (quite a few of them are not available here and not for sale to Americans). The first to arrive was OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. I knew that it was supposed to be a spoof, but I wasn’t expecting to be amused; all I wanted was the perspective of seeing this amazing actor in another movie. As it turns out, Michel Hazanavicius, who directed both OSS 117 and The Artist (he also wrote the latter’s screenplay), borrowed a lot of business from the earlier movie for the later one. He simply removed the clowning-around. Now, I’m one of those consommateurs de rosbif who finds French clowning-around to be sillier, as a rule, than it is funny — which is to say, embarrassing. And OSS 117 starts off — after a parody of a wartime army adventure series that brings Indiana Jones to mind (also Mulholland Falls) with a somewhat dopey make-out scene that, especially given its lackluster production values, isn’t promising. It takes a little while for M Dujardin to establish the coocoo genius of his send-up of the young Sean Connery. Once he does, the pleasure of OSS 117 becomes absolutely wicked.

Jean Dujardin doesn’t look like Sean Connery, really, but then he doesn’t not look like him, either. His face, at rest, is more Gallic than Celtic, but it is just as bland. Agent 117 may be an idiot, but he is just as nonchalant as 007. Every now and then, it’s true, the sangfroid gives way to the This-is-so-cool-I-can’t-believe-it’s-happening effervescence of a twelve year-old who is not quite ready for sex, and these moments of expressive helplessness are just about the funniest thing I’ve seen in the movies in a long time. Actually, I can think of only one comedian whose work is as thrilling: Sid Caesar. When M Dujardin leans in on Mlle Béjo (also in OSS 117) and thanks her for teaching him — the mambo! the joke is almost too demented to be funny. I died laughing anyway.

And let’s not forget the scene in which Agent 117, disturbed in his slumbers by the call of a muezzin, does something about it. As he later wails, “What did I say?”

Too much fun, really. After watching the movie before dinner, I played the best bits for Kathleen before bedtime. I made another discovery. The charm of OSS 117 and The Artist flows largely from Jean Dujardin’s ability to channel the visual impact of classic cinema. Classic television as well: I’d be very surprised to learn that neither the actor nor his director is familiar with Sid Caesar’s “Aggravation Boulevard.” But while we’re looking backward, whether to the silent era or to the denatured color of the early Bond films, something unwittingly prescient happens. When M Dujardin isn’t wearing a moustache, that impossibly broad smile of his, displaying an unnervingly saurian array of teeth, Jon Hamm comes to mind.

***

I am going to recommend Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet to everyone. It makes an important argument for refashioning intellectual life in American democracy, and in all but one respects it is admirably concise. I’m going to hope, however, that someone will re-present this issue without that one respect, the argument from food. Now, I understand that many readers, especially younger ones, are going to be very effectively stimulated by the analogies that Johnson works between what we put in our stomachs and what we put in our brains. Health-conscious readers who have considered going vegan will be enthused by Johnson’s concept of infoveganism. But I find it off-putting, especially the harping on “information obesity.” In the end, food and information are not usefully comparable.

We need food to stay alive, and the food that we don’t need in order to stay alive tends to make us obese and otherwise unhealthy. There is no corresponding reason to watch your intake of information. We don’t convert information into calories; on the contrary, we expend calories in the maintenance of information. The reasons for discriminating among sources of information are intellectual, and pushing the dietary analogy tends to oversimplify what minds are for. The Information Diet has nothing to say about art and literature, which, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn, Johnson, as a political operative with a keen sense of the irrationality of sports, regards as forms of “entertainment.” It is hard to see a place for the novels of Henry James in his book’s regimen. Somebody needs to attack this vital subject without the alimentary armature.

The Morse jag is nearly over. I have only two episodes left to watch, “The Wench is Dead” and “Remorseful Day.” In the latter, Inspector Morse dies. Shortly after it was filmed, actor John Thaw died. Talk about getting into a role. The other night, waiting for Kathleen to come home from Florida and somewhat Morsed out, I jumped ahead to the fourth season of Lewis, the ingenious successor to Inspector Morse. It’s nice to know that Lewis is doing well; already there are twenty episodes (I’ve just ordered the fifth season). I suppose the time will come for a Lewis jag.

But not yet. Watching videos has taken its toll. I stay up to late, with all that that entails. And yet I wonder if there isn’t some method to the madness. I may be watching videos to give my mind a working holiday. Ever since I finished reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, I’ve sensed one of those cerebral shifts that seem momentous because they really do make the world look like a different place. The first one that I remember had to do with the subjunctive mood: I went back to the school after summer vacation and suddenly understood it. Law school occasioned another, of course. “Learning to think like a lawyer” greatly understates the essentially cyborgian transformation of the mind. Since reading Kahneman, I’ve felt that I am living in extremely primitive times. It’s as though I’ve been hurtled back several centuries to a time without interior plumbing. No wonder nothing works! Well, the miracle is that anything actually does. We are so deluded about our minds, so unaware of heuristics, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance.

Those terms, and the italics, come from Clay Johnson’s new book, The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. Maria Popova noticed it at Brain Pickings and it seemed immediately indispensable. I’m about a third of the way through, at the point where Johnson begins to use stuff that I learned from Kahneman (whom he doesn’t seem to mention) to explain the sorry state of journalism, which he has outlined in previous chapters. The first half of the book is diagnostic: we’re afflicted by an epidemic of information obesity, which is not “information overload.” We consume too much junk information. In the second half of the book, Johnson will prescribe a diet. That’s what I’m keen to read.

Regular readers will know that I take a very dim view of watching television. I try not to talk about it much; I’ve made my point. But Kahneman and Johnson are remaking the case. Watching television seems more dangerous than ever. What I mean by “watching televsion” very much excludes watching old movies or old detective series. I mean sitting in front of a screen without knowing what’s going to happen, and hoping for something exciting. It’s one thing in a movie theatre, and quite something else at home. I don’t know why; possibly it’s that, at home, the pleasure of entertainment comes coated in the self-affirmation of sitting in your own milieu. Also, in a movie theatre, you have only two options: to stay or to leave. You cannot change the movie. The power to switch channels isn’t much of a power, really — it’s a choice of roughly similar toxins — but it feels impressive, especially when there are other people in the room. Ordinarily, my objection to television is simply that you’ve surely got better things to do. Kahneman and Johnson are reminding me how angry I used to be about television, years ago, when I first read the work of Neil Postman. And anger is the last thing I need.

So, here I am, thinking deeply about the problem of watching television while — watching television. I say that it’s not watching television — watching Inspector Morse is different. But it will be better when the Morse jag is over and I’m not giving what lawyers call the appearance of impropriety. 

One of the craziest things about law school — in my day, anyway — was the presence of Criminal Procedure in the first-year curriculum. I had a terrible time with the class because I could not suppress the conviction that we were not being taught things in the proper order. Criminal Procedure is, basically, Constitutional Criminal Law, meaning the body of procedural requirements ordained by interpretations of the Bill of Rights and its piecemeal superimposition upon state law. Law schools are not interested in the array of federal criminal laws, such as the Mann Act or Rule 10b-5. They’re even less interested in the states’ various criminal laws. But what’s worse about learning criminal procedure in the first year of law school is the postponement of learning about evidence to the second year. Criminal Procedure ostensibly lays out the rules for playing the Go To Trial game fairly. It’s only in Evidence that you learn how bizarre, deranged, and no-longer-just that game really is.

I was thinking about all of this yesterday as I read Adam Gopnik’s Critic At Large piece in this week’s New Yorker, “The Caging of America.” Nobody who reads The New Yorker needs to be told that we have a massive prison problem, with a far higher percentage of men behind bars than any other advanced nation; or that this prison problem is also, outrageously, a race problem, with a sickening disproportion of black and Latino inmates. Adam Gopnik brings two new items to his discussion. Well, one of them was new to me, William J Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, published last year right before the Harvard professor’s death. If I heard mention of the new title, nobody went on to tell me that Stuntz came to the conclusion that it’s our Bill of Rights itself that’s the root of the prison problem. “The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles.”

This emphasis, Stunts thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place.

This is just another typical, sad result of Anglophone credulousness when it comes to playing fair. The problem with trying to play fair in a criminal trial is that it’s absolutely unnatural. We may say that everybody is innocent until proven guilty, but we don’t back it up at all with safeguards against our bone-deep doubt that a truly innocent person would ever wind up in the dock. We’re unwilling to understand that many good police officers, seasoned by experience, will outgrow the essentially adolescent modality of playing fair and turn toward seeking justice instead, procedures be damned. And we tacitly conspire, all of us, to impose the brunt of our sillier laws — Gopnik rightly singles out our marijuana-possession proscriptions — on minorities, permitting white infractors to get off lightly, thus baffling the point that the law itself makes little sense.

I said that we don’t back up our innocent-until-proven-guilty rule with “safeguards,” but this is not true; it’s worse than untrue, because the safeguards provided by our laws of evidence  were put in place by an entirely different society, a largely homogeneous one with low social mobility. It’s worth bearing in mind that the original Anglophone witnesses, back in the Middle Ages, were also the jury. Imagine rules for an emergency-health-care system that took no account of ambulences or cell phones. That’s what our jury system is like. It made sense, about a thousand years ago. What the laws of evidence serve to do today is to block a lot of common sense. And they encourage the judge and opposing counsel to engage in all manner of fancy branles and bourrées over what is and what isn’t “admissible,” not to mention the surreal demand that jurors will pretend not to have heard this or that in the courtroom.  

The other thing that felt fresh about Gopnik’s essay was the note on which he ended it: “‘Merely chipping away at the problem by the edges’ is often the very best thing to do with a problem; keeping chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart.” This is a kind of conservative optimism, it’s true; it’s dangeously close to believing that “muddling through” will get you through any crisis.  But there was nothing muddling about the changes that brought crime rates to a national low in New York City — “just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities.” Not enough of these sanities were located within the criminal justice system itself, however.

Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Lizza points out that, thanks to the vast increase in self-segregation in American society since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, the divide between red and blue is not a bad dream but a political reality. Maybe it’s time for progressive thinkers to explore ways to exploit the divide. The denizens of securely-gated communities have very little reason to fear drug-addled “elements” from the wrong side of town. Why not encourage them to take the “live-and-let-live” that their seclusion, once available only to the very wealthy, now allows them?

I ought to feel a lot worse. We were at the table for nearly four hours; a lot of wine was consumed. And then some grappa. And then the bar closed, or so I was told. I did not grumble. Having a good time with a woman not my wife, at a restaurant which in the past I’ve visited only with my wife, is a very sure way of pissing off the establishment’s female waitstaff. How were they to know that my companion was one of my wife’s oldest friends (going back to second grade) — and, anyway, so what? Especially when elaborate lengths were gone to to make sure that I couldn’t pay for anything? Especially when the lady all but stood on a table — let me make it clear right now that she did not actually stand on a table at any time, or on anything but the floor — and, brandishing a red silk shawl, announced that she was heading down to the Carlyle to do some serious flirting?

I had a lot of fun, but I wasn’t the demonstrative member of the party. It wasn’t my idea to request an amuse-bouche from the chef at the beginning of the meal or a zabaglione at the end. It wasn’t my idea to ask the chef to come out and meet us. No, no, no! I would never ever do such a thing. All I can say is that Kathleen’s friend has been living in a distant city, one that discretion forbids me to name, for nearly thirty years. It is different out there, less sedate somehow. Of course it is less sedate everywhere than on the Upper East Side, outside of the nation’s assisted-living communities, anyway.

We will have to go back to the restaurant soon, Kathleen and I, and Kathleen will tell the waitstaff what a good husband I am to take her oldest friend to dinner (or to let himself be taken out by her) when, owing to an unforeseen conflict, Kathleen had to be in Florida. She has seen this happen before. Up close.

Maybe I’ve told this story before; I hope not recently. For a little while, many years ago, Kathleen decided to give contact lenses one last try, so that she could wear hats. Many years ago. We were going out to dinner. Without the glasses on her face, Kathleen indulged in a whimsical experiment with eye makeup. Then she pinned a small hat with a lot of face veil into her hair, and we walked a few blocks to the regular place.

By dessert, the waitresses were all but hurling dishes onto the table. We had no idea why they were being so rude, because it never occurred to us that they thought that Kathleen was Another Woman. Oh, the peals of laughter when the veil was lifted! Oh, the weirdness of the lesson unto me! I thought that that sort of mixup happened only in comedies.

My choice of restaurant last night was a mistake, but I don’t know how I could have avoided it, as I was specifically asked to select a quiet restaurant, where we could talk, and my first choice — a restaurant that I go to with all sorts of people all the time — was ruled out, because that’s the only restaurant that our friend’s father will go to anymore, and she’s tired of it.

Did I mention that Kathleen is cutting short her Florida trip, and coming home tonight? 

I spent this morning on a trip to Canada. It was a dream of course, and like all dreams, it had no beginning. I hadn’t been aware of being in Canada for very long when I was bothered by uncertainty about how long I’d been there — one night or two? — and how long I’d be staying. In actuality, I was dozing, waking up slightly every so often before sinking back into my slightly re-postured dream; but, in the dream, it was New York that was a dream. I was in Canada.

Let’s say that it was Toronto. I’ve never been to Toronto, but that didn’t get in the way. I was staying in a basement flat with several other young people who worked in publishing. Yes, I was young, too. Everyone was very nice, and at some point my dream must have decided that I was staying in Toronto, not visiting for the weekend. I may even have had a job — I certainly had work to do. And in those moments when I’d come to in my bed in New York, the work that I had to do in Toronto was much more agreeable than the work I had to do in New York. It was vague, the Toronto work — unlike the New York work. The work in Toronto was pleasant and easygoing. The New York work bristled with requirements. For example, a picture for this entry. I didn’t have one, and I still don’t. But the prospect of having to get up and work in New York became less onerous when I realized that I could write about my dream. When I got up, which was not now.

That was the other nice thing about being in Canada: I got to stay in bed. It’s a very gloomy day here in New York, plus it’s a Monday. I have to go to the Post Office at some point, to buy three-cent stamps to paste on the latest batch of postcards of Will and Kathleen. The postcard rate went up yesterday. If I had sat down an hour earlier to write out, address, and stamp the postcards on Saturday afternoon, I’d have made it under the wire, being able to shove them into the collection box inside Gracie Station. But the Post Office was closed before I even sat down. Oh, yes, staying in bed was very nice this morning, and I abandoned myself to my dream of Canada, and to moments of wakeful savoring of the dream, so completely that the voices of guilt and indignation, bidding me to get out of bed at once and get to work, were silenced by the pillows.  

Why Canada? I was reading about Singapore just before going to bed. I have never been to Singapore, either. Kathleen was there once, on her trip round the world in October 2001. Even she found the humidity hard to bear. No matter what time of day or night, no matter how recently it had rained, the air was sodden. Otherwise, however, she reported no discomforts. The corporate-totalitarian atmosphere did not oppress. She would not have described her brief visit to Singapore as William Gibon does: “Disneyland With the Death Penalty.” I don’t think that Kathleen got past the humidity.

I have always assumed, since first learning of the Lee régime’s success, that most of the people who live in Singapore are happy to be there. They’re willing to sacrifice ephemeral personal freedoms — the right to chew gum in the street, say — for solid personal prosperity. I don’t get the feeling that anyone in Singapore harbors imperial designs over the rest of the world. It really is a Confucian paradise, where father knows better and the city-state knows best. My only hope is that kids who have the mischance to grow up there without being psychologically suited to it are helped into new lives elsewhere with generous grace. Artistic kids, for example. Maybe Singapore has something like the Amish rumspringa, a period of tolerated adolescent rebellion. I’ve never heard of it, and, if they do, I expect that the running around takes place at special settlements well outside the city. In Hong Kong, perhaps.

So long as Singapore remains a prosperous city of two or three million people on the other side of the world, I have no objection to its form of government. I would caution visitors to be aware that they are taking their lives in their hands simply by setting foot in a jurisdiction prone to the draconian. But I don’t see why a city-state should set out to be generally welcoming. Singapore for the Singaporeans, I say! I wouldn’t mind seeing a dozen or so Christianist equivalents, where homophobes and racists could make themselves comfortable — at a distance. It wouldn’t work, though. First of all, Christians have been imperially-minded from the get-go. The second thing is, you know how they say that Islam has never had a Reformation (and therefore isn’t prepared for a modern, secular globe). Well, Christianity has never had a Confucius.

Snow.

If I go outdoors this afternoon, ought I to use a cane? One of those awful adjustable hospital things? I’ve got at least one in the closet. Do I really need to go out? Or am I just feeling a little restless, anticipating the pleasure of coming home from having been out in the cold. I’d really like to have a small steak for dinner.

Kathleen is off to Florida tomorrow afternoon for an industry confab; today, she’s taking the day off. Unlike me, she is not tempted to go outside. She is tempted to stay right where she is, under the covers. And she’s doing a fine job of giving it to it, too.

Last night, we sat with Will while his parents went out for dinner. It is clear that he calls me “Dadoo.” He’ll say “Daddy” first and then correct himself. Not only does he say “Darney” perfectly clearly, but he recognized Kathleen as such in one of the postcards that I showed him. This was before Kathleen arrived from the office. The postcard was one of the pictures that I took two weeks ago. Which reminds me: I ought to be sending them out right this minute. The postcard rate goes up tomorrow, and I have a few books of soon-to-be-insufficient self-sticks in the drawer. Anyway, Will looked at the postcard and said, “Darney.” D’you think “Dadoo” will stick? Kathleen claims to find it at least as cool as “Doodad.” I don’t. It reminds me of “Tutu,” the Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother in The Descendants.

***

The other day, I was casting about for a good read when one fell into my lap, right off my own shelf. I’d come across a receipt from Chatsworth, which I’ve never been to but from whose Web site I ordered a few books a while back. Instead of throwing the piece of paper away, I decided to tuck it into one of the books that I’d bought, all of which were either by or about Nancy Mitford. And right next to whichever one I tucked the receipt into was Wigs on the Green, which I didn’t even think I owned. The title is such a tease — whatever can it mean? Well, you find out, in the penultimate chapter or thereabouts.

Even though I recognized Eugenia Malmains as a caricature of Unity Mitford — the sister who shot herself when Britain declared war on Germany and who died of meningitis nine years later — I let the Mitford references that I got roll right off my back and didn’t go looking for others. Wigs on the Green is a sparkling but melancholy entertainment. In Waugh, who is so much darker, you’re invited to agree with the author that human beings are a depraved race. Mitford’s view is sounder, or at any rate grounded in history. Her disaffected, understating bright young things would clearly rather die than yield to a Victorian sentiment, and it’s clear that economic hardship is fermenting strange political brews. Mitford sits on the fence, laughing; she writes gleefully of geriatric Lords and MPs who “creep about the halls of Westminster like withered tortoises, seeking to warm themselves in the synthetic sunlight of each other’s approbation,” but she also shines a gimlet eye on the hysteria of ideology, particularly as embodied by Eugenia/Unity. Charlotte Mosley, in her introduction, puts it very well: “The dark side of Unity’s character is plain enough to see: ruthlessness, naïveté and a love of showing off, combined with an attraction to violence and a desire to shock, produced moral blindess of an extreme kind.”

But Mitford is naïve, too, or at least prone to wishful thinking: how much she would have liked to have a martini-chilled romance such as Jasper and Poppy’s, in which all the satisfactions of love are assumed to flow unspoken beneath a burble of vaguely affectionate insults. Mitford could do the insults with half an eye open, but she never got the passion. The men to whom her heart was drawn were either gay or cads. Nobody ever loved Nancy the way her sisters were loved — all of them, even Unity (by Hitler, I’m convinced — although chastely). It’s arguable that Nancy loved to show off as much as Unity did. She was always begging people not to take her acidic protraits too seriously. Surely they must see her caricatures as harmless, amusing distortions that no one would ever mistake for objective representation? Something occluded Mitford’s sense of being able to hurt other people’s feelings. She liked doing it too much. Moral blindness &c.

But there’s a difference between pursuing Hitler for uplifting post-prandial fireside chats and writing funny novels. We always forgive those who make us laugh.

***

I saw The Artist yesterday and was as blown away as anybody, possibly even moreso. Nothing had prepared me for the ecstatic finale, elegant tribute to a movie that I’ve probably seen a few more times than most cinema fans, and it was only because I couldn’t decide whether to jump out of my skin or sob to death that I am here today. Sadly, I cannot discuss the movie until everybody has seen it. So see it!

*****

Kathleen flew down to Florida this afternoon, for a convention that will keep her indoors for the most part but delightful warm when she isn’t. The minute she left, I felt the air go out of my tires. I am a slow learner: when Kathleen’s about to take a trip, I think that I’ll do thus and so, as if there were things that I do that require her absence. In the event, I’m beset by a general lack of desire to do anything. Thank heaven for reading.

I plowed through to the end of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s remarkable Pulphead, and decided that it is a memoir. Nothing could be further from the “collection of essays” or miscellany of magazine articles than this book; nor could it be less conventionally journalistic, no, not even if David Foster Wallace wrote it. Sullivan doesn’t write about unusual things, he writes from amidst them. And he is not a complete outsider when he crosses the line (which he always does briskly) between “reporting” and “living.” The book’s title is more apt than I thought: it is Sullivan himself who is the pulphead. He reminds me of that stage that serious bloggers go through early on, when they do things so that they can blog about them. That’s exactly what Sullivan does. How intentionally or straightforwardly he does it is not always clear. In the final essay, “Peyton’s Place,” it is never stated that Sullivan and his pregnant wife bought a house in Wilmington, North Carolina, because  they knew that the producers of One Tree Hill had been using it as a location and would be wqilling to pay, basically, the Sullivans’ mortgage to continue to use it, but this is not denied, either. It doesn’t matter. Sullivan’s very home life is more interesting than yours or mine, because he shares it with a fictional teen-aged orphan in a bad but popular cable drama.

And, as the dislaimers at the end of “The Violence of the Lambs” remind us, Sullivan’s pieces are not always strictly non-fictional. No matter. As the book went on, I found myself less and less concerned with whatever his nominal topic was and far more interested in what he would do with it, or let it do to him. Now I have to go back and re-read the beginning of “Upon This Rock,” the book’s first and most written-about piece, because Sullivan rather nakedly lays out a completely abortive strategy for “covering” a Christian-rock festival at Lake of the Ozarks; it is so funny and at the same time creepy that you fall for an image of the writer as a naïve tyro looking for a cool angle and bombing badly. What you don’t see until much later (“American Grotesque” for me) that you see what a troublemaker Sullivan is. I wouldn’t accuse him of starting a fire so that he could write about the excitement, but only because he’s not destructive by nature. No; he’s creative.

William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavor is like Pulphead in one way only: it’s a collection of pieces published (or read) elsewhere. It is so far from Sullivan’s brand of non-fiction that some sort of triangle seems called for. If Sullivan is practicing journalism at the most advanced level, Gibson is simply sharing his thoughts about things, something that nobody would be asking him to do if he weren’t a celebrated writer of science fiction. Everything that he says is interesting, including the few things that he says about himself, but the air is thick with after-dinner smoke. The degree to which Gibson asks you to think about the world around you is approached by Sullivan in only one of his essays, “The Violence of the Lambs” — and then only remotely.

More on Gibson later. I’m just hoping that he’ll say, somewhere, that “the future is here, but unequally distributed,” so that we can source the quote.

 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

What astonished me most, on my first trip through the newly installed galleries of American painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing, was the power of Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 icon, Washington Crossing the Delaware. I’d been thinking about this painting ever since the Museum’s Fall 2011 Bulletin announced (to those of us who hadn’t heard the news otherwise) that this very large painting was going to occupy the pride of place in the new configuration.

It would hang alone, at the end of a long room, cased in a replica of the very imposing frame in which it was originally presented. I was very disturbed to learn all of this. I believed that the Museum ought quietly to get rid of the picture, pure kitsch in my eyes. At the very least, it ought to be mounted as far as possible from the Sargents and the Homers and the Cassatts and the Kensitts that form the backbone of a very great collection of American paintings. Instead of which, it stands in the middle of them.

But when, at the end of our tour, I finally stepped into the room, I had to stifle a sob. I was wrong. I was wrong about something. Maybe the Leutze isn’t kitsch — but I don’t think that that’s what I had wrong. More likely it’s the fact that this painting has been revered by generations of American, pored over with all the attentiveness that the Mona Lisa has ever received. The Museum has chosen to honor that interest, and remind the rest of us that pictures can be very powerful in ways that have nothing to do with art, truth, beauty, or anything else that John Keats wrote about.

The Bulletin photographs did not show the other pictures that would hang in the room; presumably, they hadn’t been put up yet. Here, too, the Museum has made an arresting decision. The other pictures are all landscapes, and landscapes, from what I gathered with a sweep of my eye, of the Far West. Mountains, mostly. (Maybe mountains exclusively.) Busts of Washington and Lincoln flank the Leutze, with other noble sculptures standing here and there between the frames. The space is almost ceremonial, as though the room were itself the recreation of an historic chamber. Everything transcendant about the American Dream is represented: the awesome spaciousness of the territory, and the boundless determination to cross it. As in a Gothic cathedral, you do not need to partake in the local orthodoxy to be abashed by its visionary power.

The photograph that I’ve lifted from the Museum’s Web site could not be more misleading in at least one way: in person, Washington Crossing the Delaware looks that small and distant only from the far end of two galleries away. If you are standing anywhere in the room with the painting, it looms immensely, overpoweringly. You walk back to what seems to be a suitable distance for appraising the picture, turn round, and find that you have miscalculated; you’re still too close to take it all in. The grandly deep frame has the air of a strange machine that might begin to whir and grind any moment — perhaps to help Washington’s men break the ice, perhaps something to more apocalyptic end. I had to ask myself, on the spot, to explain how Leutze’s large-form history painting was inferior to, say, The Raft of the Medusa; it is certainly superior to the picture that hangs opposite that work at the Louvre, also by Delacroix: the Death of Sardanaplus. (I may like to think that I’m a sophisticate, cosmopolitan member of the Transatlantic tribe, but I’m not that Continental!) The question remains open.

I look forward to revisiting the galleries many, many times. Many old friends have reappeared there, and I’ll probably make a few new ones. But I hope I never forget the shock of being so improbably awed by Washington Crossing the Delaware.

One of the most highly-regarded books last year was John Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection of magazine pieces, Pulphead, but although I was tempted by the praise, I was put off by the title, and by the kinds of things that Sullivan was said to write about. Since I first learned how to tune into the Internet and to eavesdrop on the cool kids’ table, I have wasted a lot of time and money on disappointing books — Marissa Pessi’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics will probably always be the one that comes to mind when I make this complaint, but there’s a bunch of small-press cranky stuff that has lost my interest on the first page — and am now resolved to waste no more. There is no room in my head for Christian rock festivals, no matter how well captured. And now that I am a senior citizen, I have given myself license to act on a life-long conviction, to the effect that nothing very interesting to me takes place between the Appalachian and Sierra Nevada Mountains, and very little west of the Hudson River. (I will always make an exception for Vestal McIntyre.) It was hard to imagine coming away from Pulphead with anything but a sense of emptiness, of time simply lost.

Then along came William Gibson’s collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and I saw a way to stand by my snobberies while yielding to desire to read Pulphead, a desire powered by the relentless cascade of admiration that, by now, must have made the life of John Jeremiah Sullivan hardly worth going on with. I would read both books, and keep a record here of my thoughts about how they compared. I have read one novel by William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, and it is unlikely that I ever read another; but I know that Gibson is important thinker, in the “for our time” sense, so it seemed that the two books would have complementary virtues — bare but useful ideas from Gibson, and lush but pointless prose from Sullivan.

So far, which isn’t very, I’d say that I’m right about Gibson. Let’s face it: William Gibson spent an unhappy childhood reading as much science fiction as he could get his hands on, and science fiction is very bad for table manners. Even the elegant Borges tends to be pompous and vain. So it would be surprising if Gibson grew up to write like — like John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose one venture into science fiction appears to have been an adolescent “Jesus phase.” At the same time, Gibson is thoughtful enough to see that television has failed to realise its early promise — especially the promise foreseen by science fiction writers between the wars — and to note that his own diet of TV, arrived at naturally by his organism, is twelve hours per year. “While science fiction is sometimes good at predicting things, it’s seldom goo at predicting what those things might actually do to us.” Spoken like a true man of sense.

I’ve never read anyone quite like John Jeremiah Sullivan. His writing has the impact of David Foster Wallace’s, but it’s actually stronger because less histrionic. In that opening essay about the Christian-rock festival that everybody writes about, Sullivan deals with the sudden death of an older man in the food court in three moderately-long but walloping paragraphs, in the last of which he wraps things up by having “a colossal go-to-pieces.” The passage works as much on the strength of its dexterity — did that really happen? — as on that of its pathos.

“Upon This Rock” is almost extravagantly not about a Christian-rock festival. The music is dispatched with a compassion that would be condescension if it were any cooler. Sullivan sticks with the gaggle of guys from West Virginia who help him situate his ungainly RV, rented at the last minute by his editor, and what he has to say about them is what most critics have written about, and what kept me away. Even after reading about Darius and Ritter, I couldn’t say that, in spite of everything, I found them interesting. I did not. I found them sad. They’re living lives in which they will flourish only to the extent that they turn away from local society, as indeed they do on their extended hunting and camping trips. One of them has contrived to die since Sullivan met him. (That’s what dedication pages are good for.) And yet, Sullivan’s time with them prompted an observation of the first importance.

I suspect that on some level — the conscious one, say — I didn’t want to be noticing what I noticed as we went. But I’ve been to a lot of huge public events in this country, during the past five years, writing about sports or whatever, and one thing they all had in common was this weird implicit enmity that American males, in particular, seem to carry about with them much of the time. Call it a laughable generalization, fine, but if you spend enough late afternoons in stadium concourses, you feel it, something darker than machismo. Something a little wounded, and a little sneering, and just plain ready for bad things to happen. It wasn’t here. It was just not. I looked for it, and I couldn’t find it. In the three days I spent at Creation, I saw not one fight, heard not one word spoken in anger, felt at no time even mildly harassed, and in fact met many people who were exceptionally kind. Yes, they were all of the same race, all believed the same stuff, and weren’t drinking, but there were also one hundred thousand of them.

It’s enough to make me ask if I’ve got it right when I argue that society no longer needs the external authority of a divinity in order to behave itself. 

As for the book’s second essay, “Feet in Smoke,” I can only scold the critics for not making more of it. It’s a model essay, for one thing, about a highly dramatic event. But beyond all the excitement (which we get in parallel strands, since the event under discussion was covered by an early reality show hosted by William Shatner) there is the diagnostic novelty, as it were, of the exhilaratingly crazy ideas that residual voltage sparks even as it dissipates in the mind of an electrocution survivor — who happens to be the essayist’s older brother. Ardent young writers are encouraged to copy this essay out by hand.

Today would have been my father’s 98th birthday. It’s unlike me to remember such a thing on the day itself. I see it coming, and then I’m aware that it has past, but on the day itself the thought never crosses my mind.

My father didn’t live to be anything like 98. He died a little over 26 years ago, of cancer mostly, although we didn’t understand that until the autopsy. His last months, after an intestinal abscess nearly killed him, were fairly uncomfortable. His wife — his second wife — had her work cut out for her and did it valiantly, changing sheets and whatnot more or less round the clock.

My father, who was four years older, survived my mother by eight years. She, too, died of cancer, although we knew all about it. It started with a lump on her tongue and quickly became non-Hodgkins lymphoma. One of the nice things about living in New York is that it is very, very far from M D Anderson hospital, where I’m sure they do heroic things (although not for Christopher Hitchens, it seems), but a place that seemed a death camp to me when I left it the last time.

My father wanted me to stay in Houston, but that’s not why I went to the trouble of law school. I went to the only school that he would pay for that was outside the Southwest, our alma mater, his and mine both, Notre Dame. And then, a U-Haul attached to my Granada, Kathleen and I drove to Manhattan, where we have been ever since.

Even if I’d stayed in Houston, my father would have remarried. He developed a serious drinking problem after my mother died. All it took was one AA session to bring him round, but the loneliness was pervasive, and the trip that he took me on to Europe, in my just-dead mother’s place, established my inadequacy as a companion. (I was always reading.) My sister was better at it, but she had her own life, too.

Nonetheless, his remarriage came as a shock to me, because his second wife inspired a response that stopped just a hair short of outright antipathy. Having this woman, an Irish-Syrian doll who lived in the same apartment on Eighth Avenue in Park Slope her entire life — Park Slope when it wa respectable, then when it wasn’t, and finally during the rebound — and who dressed her hair in the manner of Veronica Lake even though she was in her mid-sixties, in our family felt like an insult. I was astonished by the force of my contempt, and being aware that my feelings were reprehensibly ugly didn’t make things easier. The woman who introduced my father to his second wife later conceded that she was “an adventuress.” However, she worked hard for the money during the last year, and, unlike me, she proved to be a very good companion. I never really thought that she was wrong for my father. She was just wrong for me.

I never saw her after my father died, but I got back to the hard work of growing up. Years and years later, I went to her funeral mass, even though I had a pretty good idea that reading her will would be stinging (it was). I wish them both the eternal rest that they prayed for. But I really do miss my father, and when he shows up in my dreams, they are always the sweetest ones.