One of the fascinating things about Frances FitzGerald’s America Revised is her tour of the various editions of a history text, aimed at seventh- and eight-graders, written by Ralph Henry Gabriel and Mabel Casner and originally published in 1931 as Exploring American History. She traces the text’s rightward drift through five editions, culminating in 1955.

Later on in the book, the authors fulfill their promise by giving an account of Soviet institutions. In this section,  one is told that “Russia” is a police state, where “the leader of the Communist party has absolute power over … every person.” (The book cautiously does not name this leader; Stalin had died two years before publication.) Russia, one learns, is a “fake democracy” and a “fake republic”; worse yet, its industry is geared not to the production of television sets but to war production. In addition, one learns that Russia is tremendously powerful — perhaps even more powerful than the United States, because, in spite of all the American aid to free nations, Russia has managed to block progress and block the growth of prosperity. It is now threatening the free world. […] Internationally, nothing is safe from the Communists, and the home front is not very secure, either. The United States may be a free country, with “wonderful machines” and a free-enterprise system (over which the government now presides in t much reduced capacity of referee), but the Russsians are in the process of undermining it. They have already stolen American state secrets through Alger Hiss andd the Rosenbergs. They lie a lot, and the Communist Party in the United States espouses violent, undemocratic means. The book therefore approves of the Internal Security Act, the Loyalty Board, and the firm hand of J Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Is it any wonder that a generation, fed this malarkey, developed a taste for guns?

I wish that I could remember more reliably my impressions at the time — not as early as 1955, perhaps, but certainly by 1960 — for I do know that I was aware of a discrepancy between reality and the party line (the American patriotic line) before I got to high school. As FitzGerald writes in a nearby passage, history books did not discuss money or business or manufacturing in any detail. This originally reflected a progressive distaste for big business; Mugwumps like David Savile Muzzey (whose long-popular textbook also gets detailed coverage in America Revised) identified with the professional ascendancy that resented being trumped by the merely rich. But the evasion grew more determined as candor became problematic. (How to acknowledge that some people were poor so that others could be rich?) For my part, I was surrounded by money and businessmen, but factories were far away. We were taken on tours at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Tuckahoe and at Pepperidge Farm in Norwalk, but both of these installations, as I recall, showcased automation. The “workers” weren’t doing much of anything beyond watching the machines. We were not taken on a tour of the big GM factory in Tarrytown. The only workers I ever saw were janitors and construction gangs.

And what was this much-vaunted “freedom,” anyway? What I remember most about the three years that I attended Bronxville School is the insistence with which teachers urged us to resist conformity. Without preaching open rebellion, they chided us for our fads — fads in thinking just as fads in dress. They were genuinely worried that we would be crushed by conformity; it was assumed that grownups who weren’t teachers were zombies. (Our teachers were very highly paid, by the standards of the time.) Wondering why every grown man wore more or less the same suit and tie, we refused to tuck in our shirts and we stopped wearing socks. All (or most) of us. We didn’t have freedom. We had opportunities, and we were bound to take them as best we could.

Having decided to replace my disintegrating copy of Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake with a paper book, but wanting to keep her voice in my ear while waiting for it to arrive, I turned to America Revised, her essay on the textbooks that have been used to teach American history to public-school students since the 1890s. (Before then, students were provided with poetic sermons, long on invention and short on fact.) It’s a very funny book, in its sardonic way. because, instead of bellowing indignantly at the pusillanimous mediocrity of the textbook business (which is, after all, a business — one wonders if it need be), FitzGerald writes with a winking equanimity that I should like very much to praise as ladylike but for fear of being misunderstood. (Few share my belief that civil life affords no more admirable characterization.)

As might be expected, the texts of the forties give emphasis to political history, or, rather — since in many ways these texts deny the very existence of politics — to the history of government actions. The word “democracy” is not, as it was in the thirties, a call to social action but simply the name of the American system, and the opposite of Fascism and Communism — which are not themselves very well defined. The curious thing about these books is that all of them insist upon the right to vote as the foundation stone of democracy. They do that in spite of the fact that this right exists in the Soviet Union and provides no real impediment to the rule of the Communist Pary bureaucrats.

That “curious thing” is like a speck of dirt on your cheek that, slipping you her compact under the table, FitzGerald discreetly helps you to see.  

I read America Revised in The New Yorker, where it appeared in 1979, and only bought the book a few years ago. I’ve read bits and pieces now and then, but not the entire book, as I’m doing now. As with Fire in the Lake, time has smiled on FitzGerald. Although her account necessarily makes no mention of the Internet, her discussion features an array of problems upon which the development of Internet society has had, so far at least, little impact. (That textbooks are available online does not mark a material change in the regulatory environment that FitzGerald sketches.) The sloppy thinking that she politely deplores has not abated, and our educational practices still turn out legions of students who believe that bigger states are represented by more senators than smaller ones. Ideas about making schools better tend always toward the ill-considered. “Attacked for being too intellectual,” she writes of the proponents of the New Social Studies drive in the Sixties, 

the reformers were in fact not intellectual enough. Nearly all of them … lacked philosophical training. Not only did they fail to develop any original ideas about the structure of knowledge but they actually confused the social sciences with science. Some wasted a great deal of time making and unmaking meaningless conceptual schemes. Others … would explain a few elementary points of logic and then disappear into a cloud of pedagogical or social-science jargon. Finally, they did not do what really had to be done if the schools were to make any advances in the art of training minds — and that was to define new purposes and set new standards for the curriculum.

The only thing that has happened since FitzGerald wrote that is that the business of defining purposes and establishing new curricula has been detached from any thought of training minds. Nationalist thinking still curtails the ability to learn from history — in most public schools.  

***

On Friday night, we were introduced to the Latin jazz of Eddie Palmieri and his Afro-Caribbean Jazz Octet, and came away persuaded by Mr Palmieri’s claim that it is the fusion of the Twenty-First Century. Never has jazz sounded like so much fun, and never has Latin music been so interesting. As was pointed out, it is the percussion section that distinguishes Latin jazz from jazz with a Latin accent, and complex but imperturbable rhythms generated by the timbales, the congas and the bongos supported the trio of horns on flights of amazing virtuosity. Reading Nat Chinen’s rave review in this morning’s Times, I learned a lot of new words, and wished that I could have known the titles of the four jazz pieces while I was listening to them — I don’t know how people get by without knowing the names of things. As it is, I can’t say much more about the jazz half of the concert than “Wow!” (I’ve ordered a couple of CDs, too.) The dance-band half that followed did not catch our fancy. The three numbers that we sat through consisted of two minutes of song and five minutes of coda, full of dazzling riffs that left us dazed. The extremely festive, somewhat blaring music seemed out of context in Rose Theatre; at least to my gringo ears, there was a want of atmospheric licentiousness — smoking, drinking, and adultery were not much in evidence. I call attention to these clichés in my head simply to underscore their absence during the jazz set.

***

My sensitivity to bad weather is almost debilitating. On Saturday, I slept late but not too late, and was busy all day. Yesterday, I could not get out of bed, and, when I finally did, it was only to move to my reading chair, where I spent the rest of the day. In the evening, I watched A Royal Affair, with Alicia Vikander and Mads Mikkelsen. It was gripping even though I knew (from history books!) how it was going to come out.

During the afternoon, I read most of Jim Sterba’s Frankie’s Place: A Love Story. It’s a genial sketchbook of Sterba’s holidays in Maine, on Mount Desert Island. (The French origin of the name, bestowed by Champlain, is semi-preserved in the pronunciation of “Desert,” with the accent on the second syllable.) Sterba came relatively late in life to the island, paying his first visit not long after he became friends with the “Frankie” whom he later married — Frances FitzGerald — and he sees the place with a reporter’s eye honed in long professional tours of Southest Asia. He sizes up the flora, the fauna, and the tribal customs with humane attentiveness. A great many good stories are told, mounted lightly on a narrative that follows, with no particular insistence, the memorable events of one particular summer. Threads are picked up and put down gently; we never do find out the name of the local eminence who puts a dent in Frankie’s parked car only to deny it, because that’s not the point of the intermittently developing story — the point is that the collision was widely witnessed. Sterba is enormously discreet: Peabody uncles aside, visiting friends and relations are identified by first name only. (Brooke Astor is the exception who proves that Sterba knows better than to be coy.) The love story of the subtitle is hardly the portrait of a marriage; we’re shown, rather, the place where two simpatico people of widely different backgrounds discovered not just love but genuine companionship. You have to think that the marriage, a late, first one for both parties, changed the island for the girl who had summered there all her life.

Each chapter abounds in jolly moments (also featuring a tempting recipe or two), but the funniest moment in the book comes in the middle. Sterba has been on the lookout for “High WASPS.”

I had met my share of run-of-the-mill WASPs in Northeast Harbor over the years. Their names are usually a giveaway: Schofield, Minturn, Hamilton, Bradley, Whitney, Warrington, Denholm, Burnham, Crawford, Crompton, Stockton, and Granville. Those were their first names, their given names. Their given names, middle names, and family names all looked like last names. Hardly a Bob, Bill, or Dick among them.

But something leads Sterba to believe in the existence of an über-WASP species, one variety of which is the “snooty Philadelphian.” He goes a party, sure of tracking his quarry, but he is so charmed by a long chat with Mrs Astor that he forgets his search. Finally, he asks a “third-generation Northeast Harbor veteran” to identify someone who “qualified as the quintessential High WASP.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “You’re living with her.”

By this point in the memoir, you are aware that discussing the taxonomy of WASPs would not be a subject of any interest whatsoever to Frankie FitzGerald. She would never help out her husband with this particular quest. QED!

We went to the theatre last night, but our evening was dramatic in all the wrong places.

I happen to share Terrence McNally’s belief that Vincenzo Bellini’s opera, I Puritani (1835), is one of the very great music dramas, clearly up to Verdi and Wagner and Strauss, and better than anything by Mozart for the stage that doesn’t have a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. At first, the opera sounds merely pretty, “perfect” — as stylized and artificial as opera can be. But the style and artifice are eminently habitable, and, pretty soon, Puritani really does seem to be perfect. The scoring is exceptionally interesting for an Italian opera by anybody, and it’s no wonder that Chopin loved it (Bellini wrote one of the heroine’s arias as a polonaise, as a private joke for the two new friends to share, and Chopin appreciated it) or that Tchaikovsky cribbed from it. It is opera at its lyrical summit, but it also exerts the same compulsions as a great Broadway musical cast album, which makes you want to replay what you’ve just heard, but then you don’t get to the remote in time, and the next number begins, and you want to hear that instead. I’m no fan of Norma, by the way, or of bel canto opera in general. Puritani is the only one of that batch of operas that peaks through the clouds. 

But Mr McNally’s new play, Golden Age — the latest of his homages to Maria Callas — is a disaster despite its great cast. I shall say as little as possible. Golden Age ought to be withdrawn and recomposed in the key of Tom Stoppard. Chock full of wit and enthusiasm, the play nevertheless shows McNally up as a fainthearted dramaturge who goes for jokes. Clever on several different wavelengths (some of which threaten to jam the others), the show bogged down in a backstage set that I couldn’t wait to leave — but I never got to. I felt that I knew what McNally was aiming for, so I wasn’t just bored by the play, such as it was, but also pained by his wide miss. (Mr McNally needs to read Lee Child’s Times piece about suspense. The real problem with Golden Age is that it doesn’t ask any questions.) At the same time, I was completely engaged by the train wreck of it all. Instead of a play, we were treated to the excruciation of a host who keeps postponing dinner until his guests listen to “just one more” song. Bebe Neuwirth was fabulous, but we’d have had to be drinking Jonestown Kool-Aid for her star turn to lift the mess over the bar. (Also, her line about how “love dies” would have had to be erased. She might as well have said, “Playwrights disappoint.”)The applause was the worst. The applause and the desertion at the interval. 

And although I think it’s perfectly all right to take liberties with dates in the service of dramatic interest, in the absence thereof I can only scold Mr McNally for making Gioachino Rossini to be something like twice Bellini’s age, when in fact he was not even ten years older, and would survive Bellini by nearly thirty-five years.

The drama came after. From the theatre, we walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner. It was closed for a very noisy holiday party. So we hailed a cab and headed uptown to another. I wasn’t really paying attention — I haven’t been out much lately — and presently we were in a jam on Third in the Fifties, with cars all tied up trying to get into the right lanes for the bridge and for the FDR. Beyond that, paving, if you please — at 10:45 on a holiday weeknight! Such stupidity! And no police to manage traffic. The comble was a collision: someone cut in front of our taxi. I was already a wild caged animal, crazed by having sat through light after light going nowhere, when another car pulled in front of the taxi and there was a collision. (Apparently; I didn’t feel anything. Who was moving?) The cab driver wanted us to stay as witnesses, of course, but of course I wouldn’t — we’d have been there for another forty minutes at least, waiting for a cop. The massive incompetence all around me put me into a complete panic (nothing frightens me more than small brains in charge of big machines), and I only stopped shaking after I’d had a glass of wine at home. There was nothing about the evening to compensate for those ten minutes of disaster. 

You can imagine how much I’m looking forward to going out again tonight!  

Last night,  after dinner, I pulled down a book that I’ve been meaning to revisit, Frances FitzGerald’s Fire In the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. The book came out in 1972, and was covered with awards. I read it the next year, after it came out in paper. I read it very quickly, apparently. In those days, I wrote the date of acquisition on the front flyleaf, and the date of consumption on the inside back cover. It’s hard to believe that I had time to do anything but read this book between 27 September and 1 October 1973. Certainly I didn’t notice that my marriage was about to end. That would happen at Thanksgiving, when (as I recall it, anyway) a discussion of where to spend the holiday — with which parents — spiraled into something much more grave. I was twenty-five years old, and when I read the FitzGerald, Megan was not even one yet. Ever since, though, Fire in the Lake has stood prominently on my bookshelves, its Imperial yellow background making it very easy to spot.

Fire in the Lake was the first book that I read that could, it seemed to me then, have been written by a man. I had been waiting for such a book, because I believed that women’s minds were as good as men’s. But few women expressed themselves with the understated authoritative swagger that distinguished the alpha-male writer. I see that now, that that’s what it was, the elusive quality that was possessed by men only — by very few men, but men only — “understated authoritative swagger.” It was a kind of sex appeal, really, but nobody would have seen it that way in those days; aside from Cary Grant and Elvis, men weren’t supposed to have sex appeal. This was a sex appeal that led to dens, not to bedrooms. With the texture of tweed and the fragrance of pipe tobacco, it was not a good look for women. Frances FitzGerald trumped it with formidable good looks and patrician nonchalance. The look, I mean. She certainly had the understated authoritative swagger down pat.

The first chapter of Fire in the Lake hums with it. “States of Mind” is a model essay about the fundamentally antithetical worldviews of traditional Vietnamese and Americans in the postwar world. It demonstrates, with the grace of a Euclidean proof, that there was really nothing that the United States could do for Vietnam in the latter’s struggle for a post-colonial identity — if, that is, the Americans remained incapable of grasping the ways in which those worldviews differed. FitzGerald shows the folly of dismissing Confucian civics as primitive or passé, at the same time that she shows how Ho Chi Minh adapted Marxism to fit and fill the dimensions of a Confucian society (an achievement never attempted by Mao). She never scolds the Americans for neo-imperial ambition or exceptionalist egotism. She has no pacifist agenda. She simply lays out a cogent analysis that makes it easy for us to see that the impossibility of a practical alliance between the government of the United States and the people of Vietnam.

It is, startlingly, a cognitive analysis, a kind of mapping out of fundamental preconceptions that has become much more familiar today.

It was this very coherency of man and society that was to Westerners trhe most bewildering and unsympathetic aspect of the Vietnamese — Communists, Buddhists, and Catholics alike. … While generally admiring of the North Vietnamese leader, [Ho’s biographer Jean] Lacouture could not get over the suspicion that he was “playing a part,” that he was, to put it more harshly, insincere. Lacouture was right in a sense. But the very terms he chose to describe Ho Chi Minh showed exactly how Westerners and Vietnamese differ in their view of the function of the individual. To Westerners, of course, “sincerity” means the accord between a man’s words or actions and his inner feelings. But to Vietnamese, for whom man is not an independent “character” but a series of relationships, “sincerity” is the accord between a man’s behavior and what is expected of him: it is faithfulness not to the inner man, but to the social role. The social role, in other words, is the man. To many Vietnamese, therefore, Ho Chi Minh was perfectly sincere, since he always acted in the “correct” manner, no matter what effort it cost him. And it was the very consistency of his performance that gave them confidence that he would carry the revolution out in the manner he indicated. Ironically enough, because of this very intimate relation of man to society, it was precisely those Vietnamese military men, such as Nguyen Cao Ky, who had no notion of a political system and who did not therefore “hide their feelings” or practice the Confucian “self-control,” who seemed to Westerners the most likable, if not the men most fit for the job of government.

This could be an example of inadvertent misconception taken from a book like Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong or Stuart Firestein’s Ignorance. FitzGerald is also brilliant about the nature of revolution in Confucian society: it is the redress, not necessarily violent, of macrocosmic disorder, the correction of imbalances between all the levels of being (family, state, heavens) and the restoration of fertility. Its manifestation in society is the final, not the initial step. FitzGerald quotes a story about Confucius that establishes an identity between revolution and recognition. It explains the speed, baffling to Westerners, with which many Vietnamese switched allegiance, often multiple times.

Sadly, my copy of Fire in the Lake began to fall apart before I finished the first chapter, and I have to decide between replacing it, with another book, and supplementing it, with a Kindle edition. I do so like reading it as a book. But if I replace it, I’ll have to throw the old copy away.

Can I blame the utter inertia that seizes me this morning on an extraordinarily good book? Probably not. But I’m here to say that Dave Eggers’s new novel, A Hologram For the King, poses the risk of a literary form of sunstroke to anyone rash enough to read it in one sitting. Which is, nevertheless, how it ought to be read, the first time.

As I took in the story of Alan Clay, an American salesman in Saudi Arabia, I felt, as intimately as I would feel the temperature of the water in a swimming pool, that I was reading a book that both Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace had wanted to write, but could not, because their typing fingers helplessly transformed vernacular speech into something more sophisticated and complex. Alan Clay’s story is sophisticated and complex — this is a very big present in a very small package — but the language in which Eggers tells it is apparently artless, nearly flat. What gives it life is a muted but biting sarcasm. Here is Adam catching himself out at rationalizing his failure to set aside enough money for his daughter’s college education.

Now he was lying. She didn’t deserve that. She’d done nothing wrong. And, yet, the economy was this, the world was that, these schools were overpriced, ridiculously overpriced — my God, did they simply pull a tuition number out of the wind and then add ten percent? — but still. Had he planned better, had he not been so incompetent, he would have whatever she needed. He had twenty years to save $200k. How hard was that? It was ten thousand a year. Much less assuming any kind of interest on the money. All he had to do was save $60k and leave it alone. But he didn’t leave it alone. He played with it. He invested it, invested it in himself and others. He thought he could make the $200k at will, in any given year. How could he have predicted the world losing interest in people like him?

The better part off the text is either reflective material in Alan’s inner voice or minimally reported dialogue.

— There’s a party at the embassy tonight.
— The Danish embassy?
— Yes, and it will be bacchanalian.
— I’m already drunk. That moonshine.
— That’s good. You’ll fit in. Will you come?

It will be obvious to anyone who has ever tried to write the simplest letter that this unadorned style is not easily achieved, but nevertheless it reads easily — too easily, we uneasily feel, to account for its power, the source of which is hidden among the plain words. By the same token, we don’t have to put any work into imagining Saudi Arabia: to Alan, it is very much the cliché of glitz, sand, and veils familiar to any well-informed reader.

***

The question at the end of the first passage is not offered as an excuse for not saving money; the subject has shifted slightly. The question explains why Adam is both desperate and deflated — and in Saudi Arabia. The world that has lost interest in Alan is a world made by Alan and others like him.

Another novelist who came to mind was Walter Kirn, and, behind him, Kazuo Ishiguro and Franz Kafka. These writers would all have bent Alan’s story beyond straightforward naturalism. The wonder of Hologram is that it packs the same dread, the same sense of impalpable doom, without invoking mysterious influences. As a businessman doing what the other businessmen have appeared to be doing, Alan has taken part in the absurd dismemberment of the American economy, and presided over his own bankruptcy. He has responded to the threat of suffocating bureaucracy in ways that make it more suffocating. His response to regulation has been reckless relocation. As Alan’s agony and redemption unfold beside the Red Sea, it becomes clear that China is now the number one country, thanks to a lot of help from the prior incumbent. You can make this stuff up, but how much more satisfying when you don’t have to. 

The tragedy, if any, is America’s, not Alan Clay’s. True, it does seem likely, at the beginning of the book, that Alan will come to a bad end. His situation is too precarious for any degree of confidence. His finances are in worse than disarray, and his neck is disfigured by a growth that, when he comes up from denial, Alan feels sure must be cancer. At first, his participation in the presentation that has brought his sales team to Jeddah is ineffectual. The atmosphere of the first half of Hologram is that of a Last Con.

But, just as Eggers doesn’t have to invent the horror story of American business in the age of financialization, neither does he have to invent the dangerous absurdities of life in Saudi Arabia. As Alan strays from the corridors in which visitors to the KSA can reasonably expect to be safe, he is revived by a series of thrilling adventures. He becomes attentive and competent — and lucky. The shapeless fifty-four year old whom we meet on the opening page becomes, in the second half of the book, more recognizable as George Clooney. It would be wrong to say that A Hologram For the King has a conventionally happy ending, but it would be right to say that its hero is unquestionably robust at the finish.   

On every page, I felt: I’ve read this story before. I’ve seen the movie, many times. But this is the best. This is it.   

You may think that I’ve been playing with Photoshop, but (sadly), no. Our windows have been covered with “clear” plastic tarpaulin, and this is what we see when we look out the window on a sunny day. On a day that isn’t sunny, the view is much less of a view. A demoralizing mess is what it is.

Even through the tarp, regular readers will see at a glance that the balcony railings haven’t been touched. The balcony floor has been sealed with waterproofing — and that’s where we are. Nothing has happened since the middle of last week.

As if to make up for the blur at home, I spent about an hour yesterday with Google Maps’s Street View, dashing up and down North End Way, in Golders Green, London, looking for a house that photographer Richard Hooker captured in his study of London bus stops. I encountered the study at The Morning News, and flipped through the images collected for the interview with TMN‘s Rosecrans Baldwin. The North End Way photo was one of the last. Unlike the others, it seemed to be more about the people coming out of the house than about the young man with the mobile standing alone by the post. I was unable to find the house in Street View, and this made me wish that I could go to London right now and look for it in person. I wish that I could explore the really rather vast region of Hampstead Heath, which is certainly a park, but also a place where some rich people live, rather as some rich Americans live “on” golf courses. Hampstead Heath seems the very opposite of our Central Park in having no distinct perimeter. London is so much more interesting that way than New York. It is also much lovelier. I really wished that I could be there.

But perhaps not in December. And even if I found myself standing opposite the house in Hooker’s photograph, right this very minute, there would probably be no hint of the family drama, if that’s what it was. Why is the man, who is not wearing a jacket and therefore does not seem to be leaving the house, bending to one side? Why does the woman at the passenger-side door seem to be ignoring him? With her pink trainers, is she more likely to be his child than his partner? Nor would there be any sign of the young man on the pavement, totally engaged with whatever it is that is making him smile. Standing on the other side of the post that marks the bus stop, and backed by dense, green foliage, the fact that he is in another world — the world of adolescent inattentiveness that strikes me in retrospect as a Garden of Eden of self-absorbtion, the ultimate expulsion from which marks the beginning of adulthood.

***

Yes! I am reading feeds again. One day last week, I accepted as fact that I would never so much as glance at the thousands of feeds that had piled up, unread, since August, and I saw that the only way forward was to “Mark All As Read.” Once the number of unread feeds dropped to zero, and all the boldface was cleared away, I began to manage the list, consolidating folders and eliminating a good many feeds. There is still plenty to be done, but at least I’m back in the habit of reading feeds. It was heaven not to, for a while, but also insupportably uncivil. You can’t write for the Internet without reading what other people have been writing.

One writer whose blog will almost certainly survive all further culls is Levi Stahl, of Ivebeenreadinglately. Levi works at the University of Chicago Press, I believe, although his profile doesn’t say so. (Maybe he used to.) The latest entry begins with the characterstic humor that it is always a pleasure to read.

I’m traveling for work this week, so posting will be more of the quote-and-run variety than the usual longform, print-and-bind-that-brilliance-and-be-sure-to-put-a-copy-in-the-next-Voyager-as-an-example-of-the-best-humanity-has-to-offer sort that you’re used to in this space.

Indeed, I recall that, just last week, there was a rumination prompted by the death of Dave Brubeck that was definitely of print-and-bind caliber.

On a rainy afternoon, there was really nowhere else to run around. So we hopped into a taxi and said that we were going to the Museum.

Sharks! Dinosaurs! Will couldn’t wait. How to break it to him, that we weren’t going to that museum?

He had not been inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (hereinafter and always, simply, “the Museum”) in over a year — since just before our first Fire Island holiday. I can’t say how much he remembered, but I do know that he knew the way through the moon gate to the pool of koi in the Astor Court scholar’s garden. He was not as fascinated by the arms and armour as he had been, but he was thrilled by the glassed-in elevator in the American Wing. He also led us up the Louis Sullivan staircase (from the Chicago Stock Exchange). That brought us near enough to the American painting galleries to warrant a bit of fine-arts exposure: I walked him through the enfilade of galleries to Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, where I picked him up for a better look — the better not to have to pick myself up from the utter unlikeliness of this dubious picture’s new-found power of place. Nothing else in Gallery 760 caught Will’s attention, but the seascapes by Winslow Homer, in Gallery 767, did, and it was there that we encountered some sharks after all, in Homer’s masterpiece, The Gulf Stream. I was still holding Will, and he examined the scene closely. I wondered if he shared my feeling that, even more than the broken mast, the absent rudder, or the sailor’s abstracted gaze, it is his shoelessness that signals his vulnerability to the sharks swimming around his derelict vessel. Will certainly registered the situation, though. “This is not good,” he said.

***

There was only one thing wrong with Paul Krugman’s column in today’s Times, “Robots and Robber Barons“: its date. Or perhaps it was my date. I felt as though I were reading something written ages ago. A decade, certainly.

I don’t know how much of the devaluation of labor either technology or monopoly explains, in part because there has been so little discussion of what’s going on. I think it’s fair to say that the shift of income from labor to capital has not yet made it into our national discourse.

Can that be right? It’s jarring to see that what, to me, is not only America’s but the world’s most serious problem — far more serious than the interrelated menaces (by no means slight!) of fuel exhaustion and atmospheric corruption — “has not yet made it into our national discourse.” How can I make a suggestion that we put it at the top of the list?

It is ever more obvious to me that the pace of industrial and techological development has dangerously outstripped the social imagination. Personal imaginations, especially in the graphic arts, have kept up fairly easily, but generally in individualistic, almost private ways, so that it is no surprise to find that what our more rigorous dreamers foresee is the collapse of liberal civilization into some form of dystopia. That dystopian forecast is an uncanny reflection of the current failure of social imagination, of the fact that we, the people, have no idea where we’re going, or where we want to go. Our collective, and quite unrigorous, dream entails little more than enjoying more of what there already is. Which is almost to say that we have no social dream at all, just a plethora of sloppy personal ones.

It used to be thought that work was a scourge — not unreasonably, because it by and large was. We envisioned, as recently as the immediate postwar years, a future in which work would be automated: nobody would have to do it. The fancy was too unlikely to invite scrutiny, but it isn’t anymore, and I think that we can now agree that a world without remunerated occupation would be a nightmare. Much worse than that.  

Worry about the environment is idle and premature if we’re short on ideas about social objectives. We don’t even know how to talk about social objectives without sounding like socialists. It seems that no one can envision a future in which the organization of affairs is not imposed by blind bureaucrats. We understand almost nothing about pathologies associated with the exercise of personal power over other people — we’re just under the impression that most bosses are terrible. We do not understand the relationship between control and responsibility in business operations. And we still think that bigger is better. Raw size, mere arithmetic pile-up, continues to dazzle us. I should say that our grasp of what’s important about political economy is barely at the stage of pre-modern physicians, those quacks who believed in bloodletting.

This is not good.

 

Good grief, is it ever gloomy here in New York. Dark and cold and soon to be rainy. I am dying to see Hyde Park on Hudson, despite reviews that are tepid at best, but I am not leaving the neighborhood in weather like this — not to see a movie, anyway.

As I was leaving the neighborhood last night — a friend from out of town treated us to dinner in the Village (we had a very jolly time, and were out quite late) — I heard a long toot, and thanked my lucky stars that I’d crossed Second Avenue before the intersection was closed to traffic, as it always is, briefly, when there is a blast. The two toots weren’t sounded for a long time, it seemed, but when they were, an explosion quickly followed. It sounded like a great burst of thunder, only somewhat more three-dimensional, if that makes any sense; unlike thunder — or a “regular” explosion, not that I have much acquaintance with such things outside of a movie theatre — the racket stops on a dime. It does not die out, it simply and completely stops. Then the three toots are sounded. As they were last night, I was passing a trio of young women, one of whom was doubting the wisdom of continuing in the direction from which I’d come. She hadn’t liked the sound of the blast — natural enough! She obviously didn’t know that the MTA is excavating a new subway station at the corner of Eighty-Sixth and Second, and I silently applauded her caution. I thought about saying something to allay her fears, but I decided to leave the sorting-out to some other good soul, someone less likely to strike her as a dithering old grandpa.

On the subway, I looked over the shoulder of a young man, not academically accoutered, and saw that he was reading a book about Kant. It was very distressing. Of all the things to read in the world, this young man, like so many smart young man, was wasting his time — I am now convinced that the reading of Kant is a dangerous waste of time — on the confections of a crabbed old bachelor who spent his entire life in a city even darker and colder than New York in December. I do not think it trivial that Kant had no normal social life. It suggests to me that his speculations amount to little more than a very slowly-paced, pre-industrial video game. I consoled myself with the hope that, after a brief illness, the young man would put the virus of metaphysics behind him.

Plato and Kant make appealing reading because they claim to know what they’re talking about. In fact, there is nothing more to their work than that claim. They fill the space of ignorance not with genuine learning but with rigorously-phrased daydreams that both sparkle before the young and appease the disappointed. In the end, even they both declare that we don’t really know anything, but they’ve decked out the darkness with theories about reincarnation and ontology that are complicated enough to distract otherwise intelligent minds. And they are both formidably antisocial. Women, I find, return the compliment — with silence. Had I looked over the shoulder of a young woman and seen a book about Kant in her lap, I should have been very surprised.

Meanwhile, directly across the car, an elderly lady was reading a Chinese newspaper. I felt a surge of regret, never to have learned Chinese well enough to make out a headline. (Or to have learned just enough, briefly, only to have forgotten it.) Among the things that I now see that I will never do in this life, a mastery of foreign languages is one of the most regretted lacks. I suppose I owe the failure to a certain unsociability of my own: I certainly could have gotten out more. How are you going to speak Chinese, or any other language, if you never leave the neighborhood?

***

If anyone knows how to sever relations with Spotify, I’d be grateful to learn. Suddenly, my inbox is full of notices that such-and-such a Facebook friend has updated a playlist. As I never, ever use Spotify myself — like Skype and Twitter, it quickly turned out to be Not For Me (I have yet to cancel Twitter, but I’m getting there) — these updates are useless individually and annoying en masse. But! We interrupt this rant to announce that emails have been received, the answers to which will probably close the account. When I filled out and submitted a “contact form” yesterday, I got an immediate boilerplate reply that referred me to “community support” and FAQ lists. Thanks for nothing, I thought. But just now, real people, in Cambridge somewhere, have asked for some vitals, having supplied which I can expect to see the account closed with 72 hours. That’s soon enough.

Why did I get so worked up about Spotify? Pushback, I think — displaced pushback. Between the subway-station construction and the balcony-replacement project, I’ve been left feeling invaded and powerless. A little harmless self-assertion was in order. I’m marching through my Outlook inbox, unsubscribing to update notifications right and left.

Bon weekend à tous!

 

Last night, at the coffee shop across the street that Will calls “the dinner store” — an insight of genius for which I would praise him to the skies if I were certain that it’s altogether his own — I needed to break a bill for the tip. I told Will to sit still and went to the cash register at the front of the shop. When I came back to the table, in the rear, there was no Will. There was no nobody. A dust cloud of panic swirled up, and the only definite concern that I can retrieve from it now is that Will might somehow have been abducted into the kitchen. (Self-abduction being a possibility.) Regular readers will recall that I had a dreadful nightmare along these lines just a few days ago. Awake, it seems, I’m not so easily dread’s captive. It hit me that I was dealing with Will. A glance under the table revealed a number of potentially moving parts. “You little stinker,” I snorted. Later, his mother would tell me that he’s been doing this a lot lately, hiding “too well.” So it will be more out of concern for myself than from fear for Will’s safety that I’ll be keeping closer tabs on him when he’s in my charge.

For the time being, it is possible to entice Will into almost anything if pressing an elevator button is involved. Just one button, mind. Although he’s delighted to push the button for your floor, if you ask him. He has to be shown which one to push; what looked a lot like numeracy six months ago turned out to be a (familiar, well-documented) mirage.

Do you remember the Jane Austen action figure that I picked up a while back? I had to have one, after Rachel Brownstein used one for the dust-jacket of her recent book about Austen. Will never fails to pick this up when he passes by it, because he can tell that it is an action figure. He also thinks that it’s a guy — you know what superhero drag is. I’m disabusing him of that. I told him last night that Jane Austen was a “writer,” but then, worrying that this sounded far too much like “rider,” I said, with painstaking enunciation and emphasis, that “she wrote books. And the quill pen was her weapon.” I think that I’d better buy another action figure, just to have in a drawer when something action-related happens to the one I’ve got. (But wait! A replacement will cost a fortune!) The beauty part, was hearing him repeat her name, as he does almost every new word that he hears, softly but intelligibly. Hearing him breathe “Jane Austen” made me feel very — silly.

***

I complain all the time about going out in the evening: it’s something that I don’t want to do anymore. That’s why I felt almost honor-bound to get myself over to the Museum yesterday for an afternoon concert in the musical instruments galleries. Wei-Yang Andy Lin gave an erhu recital to a packed audience — well, forty or fifty folding seats, arrayed at one end of the long and narrow Mertens gallery, were packed. Andy Lin is perhaps the best violist that I’ve ever heard (I’ve written about him somewhere, perhaps at Portico), and it’s not surprising that he makes the erhu sound lovely, too. To be perfectly blunt: he plays the instrument with such skill that its exotic qualities (read: limitations) are swallowed up by a thoroughly Western musicianship. Had Mahler heard Andy play, there would be an erhu part in Das Lied von der Erde.

My knowledge of Chinese music is as limited as you like; I really know nothing about it save what I’ve heard in the movies. But I gathered that the seven pieces that Andy Lin played are part of an ongoing, evolving tradition that has not been uunaffected by the pull of Western diatony. Composers were not identified; it may be that there are none, as such — that pieces such “Birds Singing in the Empty Mountain” and “Parting after the Newly-Married” are closer to jazz standards, musical concentrates that the performer fleshes out in his or her own idiom. (I must look into this!) I will say, though, that while it might have been reasonable to fear forty-five minutes of Chinese-opera screeching, the gallery was filled instead with the sounds of music both mellow and engaging. There was a fair amount of bravura trompe l’oreille (“onomatopoeia” wouldn’t do it justice) — those “Birds,” the horses in “Horse Racing” and “Horses Running on a Battle Field.” But “Loved Lonely Flower” sang a song that was almost Central European in its post-Romantic melancholy. And “Parting after the Newly-Married,” which captures the dismay of a bride whose husband has been conscripted the day after the wedding, was a dramatic scena without voice. Or, rather, with the voice of Andy Lin’s erhu. This was sophisticated but accessible music. Not the faintest whiff of broccoli.

***

Two items in this morning’s reading had me mulling over the conundrum labeled “nation.” One, in the Times, concerned the “often overlooked” role of the oligarchy in Greece’s fiscal woes. Two years ago, Christine Lagarde, then French finance minister, compiled a list of over two thousand Greeks thought have bank accounts at a Swiss bank. In Greece itself, this list was “swept under the rug,” writes Rachel Donadio. (Surprise, surprise.) In the other piece, in The Nation, Gary Younge writes about “Secessionist Fantasies,” here and in Europe.

In Europe, it is partly history’s revenge on rhetoric. The emergence of the nation-state as the single most effective economic and political unit over the past two centuries necessitated a confected patriotism that sought either to iron out or ignore regional differences. This meant reimagining countries not as the product of regional alliances, wars or necessity but as an incarnation of innate genius born from essential characteristics. “We have made Italy,” said Massimo d’Azeglio at the first meeting of the newly united Italy’s infant parliament. “Now we must make Italians.” But while those differences were eclipsed, they were rarely eliminated.

That’s putting it mildly. Tara Zahra, in a review appearing in the same issue, explores the postwar ethnic cleansing that attacked the Volksdeutsch, German-speakers living outside the (new) German border, reminds us of the American role in the disasters of which this was only the latest:

But for the victors’ calculations to be understood entirely, we actually have to turn back the clock even further, to the end of World War I. Woodrow Wilson arguably bears as much responsibility as Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt and Czechoslovakia’s president, Edvard Beneš, for the postwar spree of ethnic cleansing. In 1918, the remnants of the multinational Habsburg and Ottoman empires were carved into sovereign nation-states, in accordance with the Wilsonian ideal of “national self-determination.” As Hannah Arendt perceptively argued, the world stood convinced in 1918 that “true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, and that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights.” 

The problem with this principle was that borders and nations were not neatly aligned in Eastern and Central Europe. Citizens of the Habsburg Empire’s many linguistic, national and confessional groups were hopelessly intermingled. In many cases it was not even clear who belonged to what nation, because so many citizens of the empire were bilingual or indifferent to nationalism. Equally important, in spite of the rhetoric of national self-determination, the frontiers of the new successor states had been drawn with geopolitical imperatives in mind. Even though German speakers formed an absolute majority in the borderlands of Czechoslovakia (which would come to be known as the Sudetenland), and most wanted to join the Austrian rump state, the region was forcibly annexed to Czechoslovakia for the sake of the state’s economic viability. 

The fact is — and citizens of the United States ought to appreciate this better than most — that the idea of the nation has never had much of a foundation outside the realm of sentiment. As a sentiment, it works pretty well: American children are (or used to be) brought up to respect the nation’s symbols, which are by and large inclusive and free of identity baggage. “Born in the USA” is all it takes. (Geographical isolation helps.) Strong national sentiment (“patriotic” is the preferred synonym; “nationalism” is for other people) made it easy for generations of Americans to overlook the ugliness of slavery and segregation — but then so did skin color. The toxicity of European nationalism springs from the difficulty of detecting “the other,” someone who might look just like you, giving himself away when he opens his mouth and speaks Walloon instead of Flemish. (How long does it take a Sunni Muslim to spot a Shiite?) American oppression of blacks was dreadful, but the status quo was largely free of the hate that fear of the invisible promotes.

It will be interesting, if we get to live so long, to see how future generations of Muslim immigrants assimilate into the textures of Northern Europe’s populations. There is every reason to expect that the lucky educated few will shed sectarian fervor, while the disadvantaged many will cling to Islam for the same reason that American immigrants supported Tammany Hall and tolerated protection rackets. But that overlooks any new wrinkles that might be in store. How long, one wonders, will the Maghrib and the Middle East remain pervasively unprosperous? Longer than it will take the Greeks on the Lagarde list to cough up? 

Most of the time, I have a strong desire to outlive the construction and repair projects that have erupted in my corner of the world. But some times, I want to disappear right now. One way or the other, the intrusive racket is wearying. I can’t say that the workers and their machines are uncivil, but they’re not quite civil, either, and of course they don’t belong to the neighborhood.

But the noise that’s on my mind is something else. Yesterday, after lunch, Ray Soleil and I sat up and down in the blue room trying to figure out where to move a large stereo amplifier. It’s very much in the way of one of the bookshelves where it is. After about an hour, during which I rejected all of Ray’s ideas (having had them myself), Ray proposed moving the unit to the other side of the room. I wasn’t keen on the exact spot that he had in mind, but his suggestion achieved what I’d given up as impossible, opening up a new field of possibility. Now I think I know where the amplifier will go. It’s a question of marshalling wire and other supplies so that, once I start unplugging things, I’ll be ready to hook them up again as soon as things are in place. And yet it remains to be done, to exhaust other hours. Why not just get rid of the whole thing, I thought to myself, aware at the same time that I couldn’t possibly do without the beautiful music that was filling the room.

That’s where the afternoon went, more or less. When Ray left, I wrote a few letters and then hunkered down to my heure française, and the further exploits of various revolutionaries and adventurers in Central America selon Patrick Deville. I got very hungry — my gastrointestinal wobbliness seems to have moved upstream — and, to keep myself entertained while fixing some dinner, I watched Jack Black in Bernie, which turned out to be a less strange, more satisfying movie than I’d expected, and funny in a very familiar, Texan way. It has been been more than twenty years since I was last in Houston (or anywhere else Lone Star), and I generally assume that things have moved on since then; but, according to Bernie, apparently they haven’t changed much.

And so another day passed without my spending any time on my writing project. It has been so long since I looked at it that all I want to do is read what I’ve got, and perhaps to type up some notes. But the moment doesn’t arrive. It won’t today, either. After lunch, I’m going to head over to the Museum for a small concert in the musical instrument galleries: a Facebook friend (and gifted violist) is going to play on the erhu, or two-stringed Chinese fiddle. After that, I’ll read until it is time to head downtown, to help Megan and Ryan out with a scheduling problem. All day long, I’ll be thinking about Kathleen, who, all day long, will be flying home from Arizona.

It has been an extraordinarily noisy fall, and perhaps the subway construction and the balcony railing replacement projects have indeed undermined my peace of mind. As I write, two Latino workers are swabbing what appears to be a sealant on the balcony floor, chattering away while a transistor radio twitters in the background. Because all of our rooms, and all of our windows, give onto the balcony, it is impossible to flee this distraction without leaving the apartment altogether.

On the library front, progress has been very slow, but there has been progress. The worst part, unless it’s the best, is that I interrupt the stacking and the sorting and the shelving to open books and read them. Garrett Mattingly’s Catherine of Aragon, although published in 1941, is far more readable and intelligent than Giles Tremlett’s 2010 entry, which I gave away ages ago.

Henry needed, however, to trust someone. Behind his bluster there was still the timidity, the uncertainty of a boy who has seen little of the world, who wants to be reassured, to be encouraged, to be told delicately and tactfully what he ought to do next. He never quite outgrew the need for someone to lean on, some affectionate, admiring mentor and guide to protect his self-esteem, and help him to his desires, someone who, living only for him, would embrace his sense of life and still his inner doubts. He was to turn to one such image after another for most of his life, only to fling away from each in outraged indignation when he found the image had a life of its own. That was a great part of his tragedy.

In the first flush of his kingship, he found Catherine, and for a while it seemed the quest might end at its beginning.

That still seems to stand up to scrutiny, and it does not jangle with speculation.

***

 

A few years ago, I read Per Petterson’s highly-regarded novel, Out Stealing Horses, and while certain scenes stayed with me, and the writing was not careless, the book as a whole seemed trivial. The central character, Trond Sander, has undergone some powerful, potentially meaningful experiences, but he floats in the existential limbo of his severely withdrawn life on the shores of a dead sea of memories. He exists, it seems, only as a vehicle for these memories, which we, as readers, will find more or less interesting, like photographs in an album or after-dinner anecdotes. He himself is not interesting at all. Not only that: he does not wish to be interesting. What is he doing at the center of a novel?

Since reading Out Stealing Horses, I have decided that I don’t want to spend my few remaining years in the company of such characters, and I have learned that I am far less likely to encounter them in the pages of novels written by women. This may be adventitious — it may simply be a matter of the women whose fiction I’ve been reading. But I’m very careful about picking up a novel written by an unfamiliar man, to the point of disinclination. 

I am very keen on the thoughts of critic James Wood, however, so I read his piece on the new Per Petterson novel, I Curse the River of Time, with close attention. Wood made it clear to me that I would not enjoy the book, but he gave me more than that. He gave me one of my crazy ideas.  

It is one of the most mysterious effects of these novels, which push the reader sideways, in the manner of an unexpectedly sourceless wind. Like Petterson’s sentences, his heroes are hard to hold on to and yet hard to let go of. Wherever and whenever they announce themselves, they are actually somewhere else, lost in dream. “I ate my lunch standing at the counter still asleep and cycled the whole way to the exchange with my body full of dreams,” the narrator of “To Siberia” says. It’s a characteristic Petterson sentence, beginning in solid realism and ending in lyrical suspension. A body full of dreams is not quite present, and not quite present to the reader. Thus it is that Petterson’s characters often seem to be living two lives, two versions of heroism: the actual and the ideal, the slightly fuzzy present and the sharply etched past.

“Heroes who are hold to hold on to and yet hard to let go of”: isn’t it odd, I asked myself yesterday, that male novelists create such heros. Although I’ve never read one, this sounds like the description of the dreamboat in a Harlequin romance. Aren’t men  supposed to go in for clear-cut action? Isn’t it the girls who are lost in dreams? I’m being vulgar, I know. But it occurred to me that the difference between popular and literary writers is that the latter swap gender-linked inclinations. Male literary writers explore what it is to be — and this is, naturally, tantamount to showing what it is to remember. Women, in contrast, downplay feeling in a display of doing.

I mean, think about Jennifer Egan. Think about Tessa Hadley.

There are certainly men who avoid the preoccupation with existential stasis. Jonathan Franzen, Colm Tóibín, Joseph O’Neill, Peter Cameron. (I have not read much fiction by David Foster Wallace, but I find that, when I do, I read it as journalism.) Alan Hollinghurst and Edward St Aubyn. Ian McEwan, of course. (But not Julian Barnes or Martin Amis.) Then there are the literary detectives, like Henning Mankell. (But I think that women are much better at this sort of thing: Ruth Rendell, Donna Leon. It’s not that they go about it differently, but rather that they play the genres better, and are lighter on their feet.) For the most part, though, men these days seem to go in either for “lyrical suspension” or for the style of an adolescent who tosses soiled clothes wherever he happens to be.

Dave Eggers: I’ve just read the first chapter of A Hologram for the King, and decided that it is worth a go. There’s a promising Egan tang to the opening.  

***

In local news, I have cut a flap in the window-covering tarp in the bedroom. Yesterday’s weather was too pleasant not to breathe indoors. This morning, the gondola men stopped by to apply a sealant of some kind to the balcony floor. They swept first, and, thoughtfully, closed the bedroom window from outside. Unfortunately, they chattered incessantly while I was trying to write the foregoing. At one point, I broke down and called Kathleen in Arizona, even though it was only 7:30 out there. When she answered neither the room phone nor her cell, I was in a pretty state, I can tell you. But she called back almost at once, drugged by a very bad dream that she was grateful I’d roused her from. We spoke again an hour later. By then, the gondola had descended on its merry way.

At least there is sun this morning. Yesterday was only rarely bright. Overcast weather has suddenly become much harder to take, because, presumably in order to protect us from the dust that removing the balcony railings will kick up, our windows have been covered with “clear” plastic tarp. (As it happens, each of our three windows gives out onto the balcony.) I took a larding needle to the tarp in the blue room window, and shall do the same in the other rooms, lest we perish of dead air. But there is nothing to do about the light, or the blurred view, which seems unreal, as though dummied up for a movie set. To complete the deflation, Kathleen has taken her golden apples to Arizona, for an annual conference.

When I talked to Kathleen yesterday morning, she said I sounded as if I were coming down with a cold, and that is indeed how I felt for most of the day, which I spent in my chair. Beyond a midday congestion that has begun to seem normal, as if I were suffering an allergy, worse symptoms did not ensue. But I had to cancel plans to joing Ms NOLA on a visit to the Cloisters. When I talked to Kathleen in the evening, she said she could understand why people retire to Arizona. I can, too. Last year, for the first time, I felt a fear of the cold that was altogether new and obviously an adjunct to the general feeling of old feebleness that, in a less health-conscious age, would not be surprising in someone my age. (The miracle to me, of course, is that I’m still here. I never thought that I would live to be eligible for Medicare.) This year, I’m also afraid of the dark, and not only the dark at night. I no longer find it “atmospheric” to have to turn on the lamps in the morning.

And then this morning, I had a nightmare about losing Will — thinking that he was playing in a fenced-in yard that turned out not to be so. His playmates and the grown-ups in the house all thought that he’d been very bad to wander off — which meant that they didn’t want to help me find him. Most bad dreams, you wake up and sigh with relief. But there are two exceptions, both involving loss. When I dream that I’ve lost my wallet, I can fly to the blue room and see it in its bowl. But I dream that I’ve lost Will, I have to wait a little while for concrete proof that he’s okay. (How do I love thee, Gchat?) The dream did make it imperative to get out of bed, although with a heaviness that made me wonder if I was in for a second day of inanition.

Two books arrived in the same box the other day, one a biography of Susan Mary Alsop and the other the memoir of Benoît Mandelbrot. You might think that these books have nothing in common, but you’d be wrong, and not just because both mention Raymond Aron and Pierre Mendès France. Alsop (1918-2004) and Mandelbrot (1924-2010) were, roughly, contemporaries, and they lived actively transatlantic lives. Each was a very superior exponent of his or her sort of person, and both of them invented greater parts of their lives than most people manage to do. And both of their careers began shortly before I was born, in 1945. That’s when Mandelbrot entered the École Polytechnique, and that’s when Alsop arrived in Paris to take up her place beside her first husband, William Patten, an economist at the US Embassy. It is not inconceivable that they were in the same room, and not just once. It has to be admitted, though, that neither would have been much taken with the other. Well, they share that in common as well.

I doubt that many of my readers need to be told about Mandelbrot. I think that Megan was still in high school when she wrote a program that allowed me to explore the Mandelbrot Set on my computer. And then I read something about Mandelbrot in James Gleick’s Chaos. Nothing, however, prepared me for the excitement of reading his posthumously-published memoir, The Fractalist. I can’t put it down! But I’ll wait to finish it before saying more.

The Alsop biography, American Lady, was written by a Frenchwoman, Caroline de Margerie, with some vague but palpable personal connections to her subject, but it reads like a sound book, and it doesn’t have a thesis. No extravagant claims are made for this well-born girl who grew up to be the darling of French aristocrats and a doyenne of Georgetown politicos. And while the course of Alsop’s life is made intelligible, de Margerie keeps speculation to a minimum. Alsop’s two adulterous affairs, with Duff Cooper and Gladwyn Jebb, are treated candidly but discreetly, with a few extracts from surviving letters and a minimalist discussion of William Patten, Jr’s paternity. (He would discover at the age of 47 that Cooper was his father.) Alsop’s marriage to heavyweight columnist and Vietnam hawk Joe Alsop, which was much more than the marriage of convenience that it might have appeared to be to those who knew him to be homosexual (of whom she was one), is also discreetly surveyed, with indirect references to unpleasant scenes that were undoubtedly perfectly generic — he’d have too much to drink, with the usual sequela. Indeed, it’s her drinking that takes up a surprising number of pages; a social drinker all her life, she did not know how to stop when age made it impossible to hold her liquor, and she took a lot of falls. For all that, she really was very much an American grande dame, as is made crystal-clear in the one paragraph of judgment that de Margerie permits herself.

By dint of her personality, exceptional talent as a hostess, and intelligent exploitation of her past, Susan Mary made her salon one of the centers of Washington social life, a place that evoked older, more civilized times, when money stayed in its place, political party affiliations were less important, and America got along with Europe. Becoming a legend has a price, and it was one that Susan Mary paid willingly. By inviting only those who were well known or hoped to be, by entertaining only success and amition, she deprived herself of the other, gentler kinds of company that these strict criteria often cast aside. No matter her mood, she allowed herself only corseted perfection, sacrificing spontaneity, emotional sincerity, and repose. Even among her close friends … she was rarely willing to take off the smiling mask she removed only in the presence of Marietta [Peabody FitzGerald Tree]. One of her friends said that she was never sure which Susan Mary to expect, “one’s old pal or the Duchess of Buccleuch.” This remark would have probably pleased Susan Mary. 

What makes American Lady an interesting book is its invitation to ponder the power of resisting the casual and the spontaneous — as well as the price. We tend to believe that the repression of “natural feelings” invariably produces cancerous personality disorders, or at least deep unhappiness. Alsop would not have agreed, and her life does not suggest that she was misguided. We ourselves are learning to be more thoughtful, attentive, and self-disciplined. We have the benefit of working pretty much from scratch, but it’s instructive to see how an intelligent woman could make her way in a world of unexamined propositions. (Her success in keeping the carrying of another man’s child a less-than-total secret seems remarkable now.) I’m not sure that I’d have found Alsop to be as interesting as her Washington guests did, and I can’t quite forgive her the long stint at Architectural Digest. But I’m glad to have read her story, and I feel that it helps me to understand my world a little better.    

***

The other thing that I did yesterday was finally to watch L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie, the Romain Duris movie that I didn’t catch in the theatres earlier this year. Rashly, I ordered a DVD from Amazon in France, one that came unencumbered by subtitles. I didn’t understand a thing that was said for the first twenty minutes. (Like Mrs Fisher, in Enchanted April, I don’t know the word for “castor oil.”) And very little of what followed, although by then I had an idea of what was going on. I’ve never known a movie to end quite as this one did, and I was very shaken by it. I just sat and let the outgoing credits unspool, rousing only when the root menu reappeared. I thought of watching something else, but nothing came to mind, so I returned to my book. Romain Duris carries the movie easily, pretty much as Melvil Poupaud carried the emotionally similar Le temps qui reste (2005), but I wish that there had been more scenes with Catherine Deneuve. If you know what I mean.  

In the afternoon, I went to see Anna Karenina, Joe Wright’s film of Tom Stoppard’s dramatization of Leo Tolstoy’s novel. The Stoppard part is the most important, although Wright is to be praised for capturing the circus magic that makes Stoppard’s bigger plays, such as Jumpers, so thrilling. Stoppard doesn’t stop at writing a screenplay, with lines for actors to deliver in front of various deployments of the camera. He creates a contraption, rooted in vaudeville, of sliding screens and stylized gestures, that deconstructs and recomposes a dramatic problem in terms of spectacular ballet. It goes without saying that, what with Stoppard’s being the presiding genius, this ballet is anything but mute. Just as important, it is neither precious nor hermetic: Stoppard has no intention of bewildering or boring his audience. His play is a thinking machine (a machine in the antique sense — more ingenious toy than mechanized tool) that invites you to ponder Anna Karenina’s story and the world in which it was shaped. We all know how Anna’s story ends, but this rather grim detail, while it is stylistically foreshadowed, does not haunt the telling. Anna Karenina may be light-hearted or it may be heartless, according to your taste, but it is certainly densely-headed. Stoppard wants you to deal with what’s going on, not to worry about what’s going to happen. He steers you away from Anna’s doom, helped immensely by Keira Knightley’s furiously vital performance. When the time comes, the Anna who throws herself beneath the train carriage is no poor creature. Her face has just brightened with a slight, faint smile, for she has grasped a solution to her problem.

Ms Knightley’s performance plays out over a counterpoint of glittering high life in which Society is presented as gorgeous and graceful and caged. We can expect someone to write something brilliant about the way Stoppard and Wright have hit upon using the backstage machinery and lumber of a conventional theatre to signify confinement — not to mention doing the same with the boxes and stalls out in front of the proscenium. All but two of Tolstoy’s characters are content to live in this virtual prison; they have worked out deals that keep them in silks and soufflés in exchange for the observance of a more or less rigid decorum. The two exceptions are Levin (a very keen Domhnall Gleeson), who understands the cage to be an alien import from the West, foreign to true Russian values (about which, however, he is visionary when he is not sentimental: don’t try this at home), and Anna, who ceases to be able to live in the cage when  she is surprised by a romantic passion that is, certainly in this production, intensely erotic. When Levin and Anna are happy, the camera moves out of the theatre set and into the countryside. (Wright is to be applauded, again, for exterior shots that harmonize with the rest of the movie; they could so easily jar.) The difference is that Levin’s happiness is built on a foundation of property and masculinity — men are allowed to leave the cage from time to time, to philander or to shoot birds — while Anna’s has no foundation at all. Hers also lies beyond a range of burned bridges: when her life with Vronsky fails (Vronsky is played by the protean, here almost beautiful Aaron Taylor-Johnson with an authority beyond his tender years), she can’t go back to any other. You might say that the burned bridges are the broken bars of the cage: the prison life is supportable only if you’ve not, having stepped outside of it, considered never stepping back in. By showing us a bedroom that is little more than a gigantic crypt with an open coffin, the filmmakers leave no doubt in our minds that Anna really cannot go on living with Karenin. (Jude Law plays Karenin with what at first seems to be an august reserve, but as the camera continues to play over his face, you are reminded of his ghoulish performance in The Road to Perdition.) But there’s more to it than that, of course. Anna besots herself with the notion that Vronsky has become her true husband. This delusion overlooks the fact that Vronsky is going to have to become someone else’s husband. The only true husbands are the actual, legal husbands. This is, after all, the ancien régime: property rights trump personal claims.

All of this is beautifully illuminated by what I have called Stoppard’s contraption. Far from being a sob story about a beautiful, passionate lady who is crushed by a repressive society, this Anna Karenina is above all an entertainment. It is about the way people live, not die. It may be the most beautiful movie that I’ve ever seen; that’s certainly how I felt while I was watching it. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, who choreographed the dances (and perhaps the entire film) and costume designer Jacqueline Durran both deserve Academy Awards.

***

In the evening, I went to see the George Bellows exhibition at the Museum. I shall have to see it again before venturing to say much about Bellows’s very distinctive impressionism, which manages to be post-impressionist at the same time; all I can say for certain is that his two portraits of “Mrs T,” an elderly society woman in Chicago, are Old Master stunners that would not suffer by hanging next to Sargents or Lawrences. There are many wonderful things — the presence of snow in Blue Snow, the Battery, which could have been painted only by somebody who knew how to put the chill of winter on canvas; the rock pool, lit as from within, at the bottom of the picture of the fisherman at Carmel Bay; the heavy but jolly ladies in their pastel dresses, climbing the park steps in Easter Snow — but I don’t know quite what to make of them, which is another way of saying that this exhibition of Bellows is obliging me to adjust my thoughts about the art of painting. His premature death (of appendicitis) at the age of 42 is deeply regrettable.

Aaron James, we’re told on the “About the Author” page of his new book, is a surfer, and he is not an asshole — the subject of same, Assholes: A Theory. There. I hope to be done with the unpleasantness. I find the word hideously unpleasant to write in this space, although like everyone else I find it an enormously effective emollient when in need of invective. Although only midway through the book, I am heartened to find that, in general, I use the epithet in conformity with James’s theory. It is also a great relief to learn that, if I worry about being one of James’s subjects, and would be ashamed to be so regarded by anyone else, then, no matter how foolish my behavior, I am probably not one myself. Modified rapture.

But I fasten on the surfing in the author’s CV, which I’d already gathered from the text, since the bad behavior of some surfers provides an inordinate number of examples. (I had no idea that Brazilian louts had made themselves detested on the north coast of Oahu.) Surfing is incomprehensible to me: I cannot imagine devoting so much attention to the swells of the sea, particularly since my idea of a thrill is walking into a cloud of freshly-baked bread. (Actually, my idea of a thrill is a very funny line.) It is all too primordial, to at-one-with-unchanging-but-unpredictable-nature. Nature, as is well documented, I find to be a great bore, at least in its untamed avatars.

So, I am going to attribute the failings in Theory to an excess of sun, saltwater, and perhaps a concussion. These failings are two. (So far!) First, the preoccupation with philosophical argument. I think that it’s possible to study human failings without getting caught up in the conundrum of free will. I hope that it is, anyway, because free will is not going to established or disproved anytime soon. My eyes glazed over as James’s struggled to draw a bright line between psychopaths and his subjects. If society at large is responsible for the creation of assholes — and I believe that it is — then the question of culpability ceases to be interesting. We’re left with a problem — the pains-in-the-neck are still with us — and we have to figure out what to do about them. Not how to think about them.

One of the worst failings of philosophy is its complete ahistoricism: it dismisses changes in circumstances as “accidents,” and deems “essence” to be eternal. There’s no question that James is going after the essence of his subject, and there’s no question (in my mind) that he might as well be pondering the zodiac. The simple fact is this: assholes are a modern problem, an after-effect of the dismantling of structures of birth-determined status. (Once upon a time, in the ancien régime, affairs were so managed that assholes were a protected class, the aristocracy.) This is the other error of the book at hand. It is fatuous in the extreme to appraise a figure such as Cecil Rhodes in terms of the Theory, because the terms of James’s three-pronged test don’t translate meaningfully back into the Nineteenth Century. Or to any earlier time, or to any culture that isn’t, officially at least, “liberal democratic.” There were moments, as I read the book last night, when I expected James to come out and declare a correlation between the phenomenon that interests him and the individualism and obsessive personal autonomy that flourish particularly among Anglophone males. (He does share a brilliant, highly localized hypothesis: Anglophones prefer to line up in orderly queues because they dislike touching and being touched by strangers.) So far, alas, the connection has not been made.

Here is the Theory, Aaron James’s three-pronged test: An  asshole is someone who

(1) allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically;
(2) does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and
(3) is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.

In the ancien régime, this sense of entitlement was legally protected. It is true that we have moved on, or tried to move on, but it seems to me more useful to consider the asshole as a relic of historical conditions, a would-be member of an extinct social class, and bear in mind that his now annoying behavior used to be conventional, than it is to tramp through the semantic swamps of personal responsibility.

I have a third problem with this book, but it’s not a shortcoming on James’s part. It’s an uneasiness about the egalitarian claims that underlie it. We learned, over centuries of experience, that status based on birth is a terrible idea. So we got rid of that, or thought we did. But it has been shown in case after case that the children of wealthy people are more equipped to cope with life’s ups and downs (especially the downs, which are heavily upholstered) than other people, and also better able to manipulate circumstances in their own favor. Taken too far, egalitarianism gives these unofficially privileged children the power, if not the right, to pursue separate and superior trajectories, and they seem to do a good job of taking their money with them. As France’s miserable record with the assimilation of outsiders proves, the declaration of equality, without more (much more), is an empty thing. We have to be more candid about our inequalities, many of which are the result of circumstances beyond human control — if only to determine which them aren’t.

But Assholes: A Theory is a helpful, timely book, simply for having inaugurated a conversation about civility and socialization. We all tend to think that we’re nicer than we are (and than other people), and smarter, too; and yet we’re all jerks now and then. A firm grasp of Aaron James’s three-pronged test will go far to help us from thinking too highly of ourselves while being jerks as a matter of course.  

This picture is not only worth a thousand words; it sucks them right out of my head.

The multicolored bulldozer in the foreground is, like the semi-cum-backhoe rig in the box, a Bruder Toy. It is also, plainly, a toy. I bought it for Will last summer, to play with on the beach. Will likes to plow it around the sandbox at Carl Schurz Park, and so do the other boys, most of them older if no taller. I thought that it might be nice for Will to have another vehicle to go with the “digger,” as he calls it — something to share, so that two could play. Now, if I were Will’s mother, I’d have done some research, and (possibly) discovered that the bulldozer comes from Bruder’s Roadmax range. Instead, I spent about ninety seconds glancing at Amazon pages before making a selection and breezing through checkout. You behold the result. Instead of a toy, a 1:16 scale model of a Mack truck and a JCB 4XC. The good news is that Megan says that Will is ready for the “more advanced” stuff.

Another nice thing is that, if we give the big rig to Will for his birthday, on New Year’s Day, he’ll be officially old enough to play with it safely. Almost every toy that I’ve seen in the past couple of years that isn’t intended for newborn infants carries the “3+” mark. (Lawyers!)

Still, it does look daunting. It’s obviously a lot more truck than I bargained for. It was somewhat, but not much more than twice the price of the bulldozer. Which made sense — it’s two trucks, after all. What I wasn’t factoring in was the great difference in prices at Amazon and at the toy shop in the East Village where I bought the bulldozer. At Amazon, the bulldozer is less than 30% as expensive as the Mack rig.

You may wonder what I’m doing with Will’s digger. It’s one of his toys that lives here. The big truck will stay uptown as well. (“Where are you going to put that?” Kathleen fairly wailed.) Megan says that, while Will would be happy to have it in his bedroom, there is no more “parking space” at his house. This is very true. Will is the very enthusiastic owner of a fleet of cars and trucks of all shapes and sizes that already has an air of serious Interstate commerce. He likes them big, and he likes them small,  and he likes them to make noise, although he’s happy to provide that part himself. The big trucks can sometimes be “heard” telling the little trucks that they’ll take care of them. 

Now he will have a truck that carries another truck.

***

For the second day in a row, I read a French novel for an hour in the afternoon. I am hoping to make a habit of it. I was certainly more fluent this afternoon than I was yesterday. I figure that I can spare an hour of reading in English. I read all day long — whenever I’m not writing or working round the house — and that goes a long way to explain what I flatter myself to consider my fluency in my native language. (Merely writing in English wouldn’t be very helpful.)

The difficulty isn’t in reading French (the tedium of looking things up in the dictionary, because I’m not quite sure what the author has in mind with such-and-such a phrase); it’s in scheduling the day. I’m not good at that at the best of times, and, lately, I’ve let myself go completely, doing just what I like and nothing else. I exaggerate, but it’s not wrong to say that I do most things when I want to do them, and not because it’s time to do them. I’m hoping that spending an hour reading in French will become, if not a habit, then something that I want to do — something unmixed with oughts. The more I read, the more fluent I’ll become, and the less dico hunting there will be.

The book that I’m reading is Patrick Deville’s Pura Vida: La vie et mort de William Walker. Walker was an American adventurer in Central America who was executed in Honduras in 1860. A great deal of the early narrative takes place in present-day Managua, and references abound to people and places that I’ve heard about from Fossil Darling, whose mother was a native. On page 29, there’s a reference to La Marseillaise, the French restaurant (run by a Swiss) where Fossil hosted a party for his extended family in the Nineties. It’s this topicality that is getting me through a book that might otherwise fail to appeal.

I’ll know that I’m fluent when I stop having embarrassing little moments like this afternoon’s with one of the chapter headings,  a remark by Bolivar: Celui qui sert une révolution laboure la mer. I had to check it out on Google, with the search “He who serves a revolution” “the sea.” Because I couldn’t really believe that laboure was to be taken literally as plows. The worst of it was that I’d seen the line before, and pondered the futility of revolutions that Bolivar learned the hard way. What was clever in English was incomprehensible in French, because I lack the metaphorical reach in the latter tongue. Nobody plows the sea actually. My blunder, my literal inelasticity, renders up close and personal the difficulty that many people have in reading in their own language. That’s the one and only time that I’ll allow myself that excuse.

I had expected something somewhat more lighthearted, more of a caper film, than what Ben Affleck’s Argo turned out to be. And maybe that’s what I’ll get when I see it again, as indeed I shall, possibly in the theatre, probably on DVD. But the first time round, even though I knew the happy outcome — the successful rescue from Tehran of six men and women who escaped from the American embassy just as it was being stormed in 1979 — I found Argo difficult to sit through at times, and I watched the last ten minutes or so standing up, to relieve some of the vulnerability that came with being seated. (I always sit at the back of movie theatres.) Without much in the way of hitting or shooting (and no actual killing that I can recall), Affleck has given us one of the most violent of films. Its violence is not rooted in criminal psychopathy, as movie violence usually is when it’s not about military battles, but in emotions familiar to everyone: anger and dread. Argo simmers with the dread of the six American escapees, hiding out in the residence of the Canadian ambassador; and it boils over with the anger of revolutionaries, the ferocity of which is focused on the United States and its representatives. In Argo, Tehran appears to have been the site of an ongoing carnival of rage. Without the slightest show of overt disrespect to American policies, Ben Affleck persuades us to sympathize with this outpouring of hostility, which always retains — in the case of mass demonstrations — an element of civil respectability.

As for the six Americans, their ordeal is primarily captured as restlessness before the camera. Their faces do not settle within their close-ups. They look confused, slightly out of focus — as people often do in documentaries. The illusion of mortal fear for one’s life is compelling. You can tell yourself all you like that this is just a movie or remind yourself that it has a happy ending, but these forebrained observations are nullified by what passes before your eyes. (Mirror neuron theorists are going to have a field day.)

I read somewhere that the actual escape, from the Canadian ambassador’s house to the airspace beyond Iran’s borders, went pretty much without a hitch, but that Affleck and his team could not resist the temptation to enliven it with hair-raising checks. If so, I did not feel that there was anything gratuitous about the interpolations. Dipping into the modern mythology of checkpoints, of passports and other papers that must be evaluated by functionaries who are never as mechanically predictable as either side would like, relieves more pressure than it creates, simply because we all of us believe in it now, and we find the narrowest escapes the most satisfying. It doesn’t change the original story; it connects it to ours.

On Saturday, while Kathleen had her hair done, went to see Lincoln with friends, and then had dinner with them at Shun Lee West, I read the two latest issues of the London Review of Books. I would finish one piece and then start in on the next, whatever it was about. In this way, I plowed through David Runciman’s pellucidly outraged response to the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. I couldn’t care less about cycling or Armstrong or doping — I’m never quite sure what’s wrong about “enhancing” the performance of inherently idiotic and dangerous sports — but Runciman’s excoriation was a blast to read.  

The testers did have one thing in their favour. A cyclist only had to make one mistake, or be unlucky once, and he would become damaged goods. The code of omertà, which guaranteed that the riders on the Tour never discussed what they all knew was happening, also meant that if one of their number got caught, he had to be ostracised. The only way to keep up the pretence was to pretend to be outraged by any evidence of cheating. And over the course of a long career, it was almost impossible for the top riders to keep out of trouble. This became Hamilton’s private motto: ‘Sooner or later, everybody gets popped.’ Not because, as he puts it, ‘the testers suddenly became Einsteins, though they did get better. I think it has more to do with the odds over the long run. The longer you play hide-and-seek, the more likely it is that you’ll slip up, or they’ll get lucky.’ Hamilton got his own comeuppance in 2004, when a test showed that he had another person’s blood in his system. By this point most of the top riders were using ‘blood bags’, storing samples of their own blood taken at a time when their hematocrit level was high, and then re-injecting it into their bloodstream during a race to give themselves a boost. Somehow, Hamilton had been supplied with the wrong bag.

He was outraged, and protested his innocence, because this was clearly a mistake: no rider would deliberately boost with another athlete’s blood. He had the sense of injustice of the perennial cheat who finds himself accused of the one thing he never tried. A doctor must have screwed up, making Hamilton the victim. But Hamilton couldn’t win, either under the official rules or under the unofficial ones. He took his case to court and lost, because the scientific evidence against him was overwhelming: the blood really wasn’t his, a fact for which there could be no innocent explanation. He had also fallen foul of Armstrong’s unspoken rule for the sport, which was that you have to be better at breaking the rules than anyone else. If your doctors screwed up, you were at fault for having hired the wrong doctors. Armstrong knew that the medics who ended up servicing cyclists were there for two reasons: first, to make money (some were charging hundreds of thousands for their services); second, because a career in conventional medicine had somehow passed them by. These people were not to be trusted: had they been, they would have become regular doctors. Armstrong never stopped monitoring the men who were monitoring his body, because he knew his fate was in their hands. Hamilton took his eye off the ball, and paid the price.

And after all those years of earnest-puppy poster pictures of the bent cyclist, my Schadenfreude meter registered dangerously red when I learned that “Hamilton’s memoir establishes beyond doubt that Armstrong is not a nice person to be around.”

Kathleen reported that Lincoln is a very good movie, with great performances by a very large cast, and she couldn’t see how it would rub me the wrong way, as Steven Spielberg’s movies never fail to do unless they’re comedies. I shall wait for the DVD just the same.

Yesterday, after what I called a “review” of the kitchen and the larder — straightening up shelves and bins and reminding myself of what lay in the freezer — I turned to history bookshelf in the blue room. I hoped to cull some more books, but the main objective was to group books by time and space, to the extent that this made sense. At the back of the bottom shelf went the Hitler and Stalin books, of which I accumulated a few when Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of the Nazi leader came out. At the back of the next shelf up went big books of American history, such as Sean Wilentz’s Rise of American Democracy, which I’m not going to read anytime soon, and several Civil War books that I’m equally disinclined to read. The only sympathetic book of American history that I’ve read (possibly ever) is Jonathan Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation, which sounds the depths of the failure of the American experiment in “freedom” in the decades after the Civil War. (That book was not consigned to the back of the shelf.) Other categories included “Ancient,” “Asia,” and “Economic.” Histories of Great Britain filled both rows of a single shelf — no surprise — while histories of modern (national) Europe fronted two shelves. There was also a stretch of “Medieval” histories, into which I tipped a number of books about sixteenth-century matters, such as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation.  

But before I could do any arranging, I had to adjust the height of the bottom shelf. Part of the task of shaping up my library is making it more accessible, which means keeping books off the base shelves unless they’re very tall and can be reached without kneeling. History books don’t fall into this category, so I lowered the bottom adjustable shelf so that it would not longer be a “short” shelf, incapable of accommodating all books within the (admittedly wide) range of normal height. (For the base shelf, I hope to find or to have made a bin or basket or drawer, easily pulled out and lifted up without kneeling, to hold opera CDs.) I had the devil of a time moving the little pins on which the shelves rest; between the odd angle and my immovable back (which made it impossible to see what I was trying to do with my outstretched arm), I began to despair of making progress. In the end, I had to get out the drill and widen the bottom hold a bit. All this involved a lot of kneeling, which I try to avoid, and I worried about inflaming the right knee, which is still a bit swollen from an escapade in the early summer in which I walked down a dozen flights of stairs in order to be on time for a movie. And when it was done, I had one less shelf. The displaced books are lined up on the easy chair; as I reorganized the books, I began to distinguish intellectual and scientific histories from the more conventional national and institutional ones. Who knows where these brainier books will wind up.

Before getting round to all this housework, I read the paper with Kathleen. At one point, Kathleen said, “You know, I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen Cool Hand Luke.” “Neither have I,” I said. Then I picked up my phone and had the Video Room send it over. We watched it after dinner. Now we’ll never have to see it again. Ostensibly the agony, in the formal sense, of an antiauthoritarian young man who forces his Dixie jailers to crush him, Cool Hand Luke blends nouvelle vague existential despair with intimations of its real-life counterpart in the senseless misadventure of the War in Vietnam. There is also a certain curious homoeroticism. It is not intended to appeal to any kind of viewer, but rather to suggest, what is widely acknowledged today, that men in confinement learn to make do. (I was arrested by the sight of two men closely jumping rope together in the background of a shot of Paul Newman’s Luke going to say goodbye to his mother.) In the end, however, the film is more unpleasant than engaging. Like most Hollywood films made during the height of the Cold War, it is harshly over-lighted. George Kennedy’s character is cartoonish and confused, as if intended to take the place of a black prisoner (there are no black prisoners). The sadism of the guards is so disgusting that at one point I expostulated, “I wonder why the women of the world don’t just rise up in the night and slaughter all the men.” Paul Newman looks great, though, when he smirks, which is most of the time. And great for 42, too.

***

 

The napkins and tablecloth have been washed and pressed, the tableware washed and dried and put away, the wine bottles drained and tossed. Only the vase of flowers, arranged by one of the guests, remains. That, and a lot of turkey in the refrigerator.

A lot of turnkey. We ate most of the white meat, amazingly, but the wings and legs went untouched. Next time, I’ll add the drumsticks to the back and neck to make the broth (it will be richer and darker that way). I’ll also buy a smaller bird. But I don’t think that I’ll ever roast turkey again. Browning the meat and then braising it (for about two hours) produces a succulent treat, moist and springy but fully cooked. Gravy made from the braising liquid intensifies the flavors.

Browning the very large pieces of turkey made a dreadful mess of the stove, and all the pots and pans hanging on the pegboard around it, as well as the utensils in their pitchers, will have to be washed. We had to open the windows and set the front door ajar, just to clear the air of aerosols. Otherwise, the cooking was straightforward. I made sweet potatoes the way I do every day, steaming them in cubes and then running them through a ricer, and adding a bit of cream and maple syrup to the purée. I boiled the baby Brussels sprouts for about six minutes, and then reheated them later in a pot in which I’d browned two slices of bacon, diced. The dressing baked alongside the turkey, and it was fine. I thought that I had plenty of food, in case the O’Neill family joined us, but, turkey aside, this turned out not to be the case. The six of us gobbled up all of potatoes and the sprouts, and there wasn’t much dressing, either. I still have a bit of mushroom soup, and plenty of gravy. But there was nothing left of Ray Soleil’s scrumptious chocolate mousse. Three bottles of wine were emptied, along with at least two of champage.

It was delicious, everyone insisted; I couldn’t tell. I didn’t have much of an appetite by dinnertime — I rarely do after a long spell of cooking. But I had a very good time. I went straight to bed when everyone left, and didn’t think of cleaning up until this morning. The stove is still a fright, but I didn’t mind seeing to the rest. I managed not to grumble too loudly when the old Black & Decker iron refused to heat up (it had been dropped recently); I ran over to Basics Plus and bought a Rowenta model with a retractable cord. All cords ought to be retractable.

It has been a long time since I’ve used “the best stuff,” our fine wedding china, my mother’s crystal goblets, my mother-in-law’s sterling and linens. I had got into a bad habit of regarding use of the finery as stressful and imposing — just as I’d been running away from Thanksgiving dinner. The substitution of fricasee for roast appears to have reconciled me to both the fancy crockery and the holiday, which, after all, were meant for each other. Having put the turkey’s flavor ahead of its presentation (the dinner was completely plated in the kitchen), I found it easy to observe all the other pieties of the day.  

Photograph by Kathleen Moriarty

This is a souvenir of Will on Fire Island. Kathleen, who used the picture for this year’s desk calendar, confesses to fiddling “very slightly” with the arrangement of the toys, but she insists that they’re lined up as Will put them there. There’s a deadpan quality to the blue car that makes me wonder if Johnny Depp or Philip Seymour Hoffman is going to get out of it for a closer look at whatever has captured the attention of the dinosaurs.

I don’t know how long it has been since my last Thanksgiving — one cooked by me. In some ways, it is just a dinner party like any other, with old friends and family and no need to impress. On the other hand, you should see the turkey pieces in the crisper, covered with ice. They are very large. I have never cut up a turkey before, much less a seventeen-pound behemoth. I will save the space below for an account of the fricassee that I hope to enjoy this afternoon. (I gather from James Beard’s American Cookery that I can call the dish a turkey fricassee.)

The soup is all but finished (eggs and cream at the last minute, for “enrichment”). The stuffing’s half-made, needed only to be tossed with croutons and shoved in the oven. Wild rice, sweet potatoes, and Brussels sprouts will start keeping me busy at about 1:30. By then, the turkey will have been browned and prepared for braising. At three, I’ll set the table. Oh, and cranberries. I suppose I ought to do them sooner rather than later, so that they’ll be cool.

Everything is under control: I am official ready (although not prepared) for catastrophe.

***

Aside from a slight catastrophe, which Ray Soleil dealt with swiftly (my bad, though), the evening was warm and delightful, and braising is definitely the way to go with turkey. More anon.

It seems that I’m going through one of my sporadic music blackouts. It’s not that I don’t want to listen to music; I simply can’t decide what to hear. It makes sense to me that I’m going through this now, because a number of things are up in the air (in the best sense) and music seems to be an unwanted distraction. Actual silence, however, can be oppressive, and this is where audiobooks come in handy. At least when I’m managing the household chores, I’m happy to listen to a story — preferably a story that I already know. Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, read, unabridged, by Kirsten Potter, has seen me through hours of bed-making, magazine-sorting, book-culling, and other jobs. It came to an end yesterday afternoon. I came away from it with quite a different response to the ending.

The first time through, I felt that the story of Eilis Lacey was almost tragic. As the youngest child of a provincial Irish family, she comes of age without any propsects for job or marriage, and is shipped off to Brooklyn by an obliging priest who arranges for her immigration, her employment, and her housing. Once she’s there, he gets her into Brooklyn College, where she takes nights classes in accounting. The priest also keeps her busy at parish functions, which eventually include popular dances. The crowd at the dances is almost exclusively Irish, but Eilis catches the fancy of an Italian gate-crasher who swiftly falls deeply in love with her. Eilis’s own feelings are ambivalent at best; she likes Tony well enough, and is deeply gratified by his masculine companionship. But does she love him? All she knows is that she’s not ready to get married. Nevertheless, when, owing to a sudden death, Eilis has to return to Ireland for what’s to be a short visit, Tony persuades her to marry him in a civil ceremony that only the two of them will know about. All of this, so far, is charming, one of the sweetest, gentlest books ever written. Although the characters are sharply observed, and the limited horizons of the respectable Fifties are carefully delineated, Eilis’s adventure in America is a success, with no more than a normal allotment of unhappy hours.

It is when Eilis returns to Enniscorthy (yes, the author’s home town) that Brooklyn becomes uncomfortable. The discomfort — our discomfort — has two sources. On the surface, there is the difficulty of Eilis’s secret marriage, which she feels unable to share with her mother, or with any of her friends (who would tell their mothers, who would tell hers). To all appearances, she is an unattached young woman with a degree in accounting (a job is actually thrust upon her), and a young man whom she was happy to leave behind on account of his cloddish behavior turns out to be as taken with her as her secret husband. Eilis’s position is excruciatingly false; Tóibín’s gift is to compress the unspoken tensions of a novel by Henry James within the limpid, accessible prose of the Brontës.

Beneath the surface, there is the problem of love itself, love being something that Eilis has seen little of in her life. Perhaps the word that I want isn’t “love,” but “generosity.” Eilis’s mother, sister, and brothers (her father has died before the novel) all love her dearly, of that there’s no doubt; but their love takes the form of an unexpressed, inexpressible commitment. Her two years in America have exposed her to more openhearted ways of life, especially, of course, Tony’s, and although her reaction is to back away, because such displays would signal depravity or worse back home, she becomes accustomed to them just the same. She is almost insulted, on her return visit, by her mother’s persistent refusal to inquire about or even refer to her experiences in faraway Brooklyn. We know what the old lady thinks of them, because of her understated disapproval of Eilis’s colorful American clothes. Eilis has not been home for three days before she realizes that her mother expects her to stay on forever.

Gradually, what with the job and the young man’s attentions and the general familiarity of Ireland, Eilis begins to entertain this prospect herself, thus turning the screw of her deceit. Just when she realizes that there is never going to be a good time to explain her situation to her mother and to her would-be boyfriend (they have kissed!), Eilis is saved — that’s how it seemed this time, not tragic at all — by a local harpy who intimates that she’s in the know about Tony and will share this knowledge with her neighbors if Eilis doesn’t skedaddle, which Eilis very promptly does. The End.

Well, not so fast. Eilis proceeds from her interview with the harpy to the Post Office, where she writes a number of letters, and then to her mother’s table, where she makes an abrupt confession. Mrs Lacey (never called so in the novel) contains her shock in a remarkable manner. She asks Eilis if she loves the man, and when Eilis says that she does, her mother replies that he must therefore be a good man. In this way, she gives her blessing to the marriage. But this blessing, although very sincere, is also terribly repressed.

“And tell me something: if you hadn’t married him, would you be going back?”

“I don’t know,” Eilis said.

“But you are getting on the train in the morning?” her mother said.

“I am, the train to Rosslare and then to Cork.”

“I’ll go down and get Joe Dempsey to collect you in the morning. I’ll ask him to come at eight so you’ll be in plenty of time for the train.” She stopped for a moment, and Eilis noticed a look of great weariness come over her. “And then I’m going to bed because I am tired and so I won’t see you in the morning. So I’ll say goodbye now.”

“It’s still early,” Eilis said.

“I’d rather say goodbye now and only once.” Her voice had grown determined.

Her mother came towards her, and, as Eilis stood up, she embraced her.”

“Eily, you’re not to cry. If you made a decision to marry someone, then he’d have to be very nice and kind and very special. I’d say he’s all that, is he?”

“He is, Mammy.”

“Well, that’s a match, then, because you’re all of those things as well. And I’ll miss you. But he must be missing you too.”

Eilis was waiting for her mother to say something else as her mother moved and stood in the doorway. Her mother simply looked at her, however, without saying anything.

“And you’ll write to me about him when you get back?” she asked eventually. “You’ll tell me all the news?”

“I’ll write to you about him as soon as I get back,” Eilis said.

“If I say any more, I’ll only cry. So I’ll go down to Dempsey’s and arrange the car for you,” her mother said as she walked out of the room in a way that was slow and dignified and deliberate.

How extravagantly important it is, not to cry! No wonder Eilis can’t be sure that she loves Tony: his declarative mode of love is forbidden. This time, however, I came away more confident that Eilis would find happiness in her Long Island doom.
 

***

In the evening, I was cooking. I was making a puttanesca sauce (one of Kathleen’s favorites) for dinner, and I was cutting up the Thanksgiving turkey so that I could fit it into the refrigerator. (I’ve decided to brown the turkey parts in butter and then to braise them in a broth — ninety minutes in the oven — inspired to do so by a piece in the Times Magazine.) Have you ever cut up a turkey? A seventeen-pound turkey? It’s almost gruesome! The kitchen felt a veritable abbatoir! I remembered Julia Child’s trick for cutting butternut squash: with a cleaver and a mallet. That’s how I finally severed the drumsticks from the thighs. Next time, I’ll ask the butcher to do it.

All the while, I was weeping my head off. Couldn’t stop. I was listening to the old Karajan recording of Falstaff, and it was the music, not the comedy, that reduced me to tears. The music is sublimely funny — a true statement, but so inadequate! Just knowing that Verdi was in his seventies when he  discovered how to be as fleet as a magician (not that he was ever a dawdler) is funny. And sublime. The music is occasionally comic (I can think of at least two raspberries), but it doesn’t sound like comic opera, not at all. It is very serious, the music. It is very serious about being funny. There are crashes and booms that could be lifted from Verdi’s darkest melodramas. There may be something about the lovely song that Nanetta and Fenton are always singing that announces, covertly, that no one is going to die in this opera, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Then there is the genius of the sight gag: the merry wives of Windsor tip the hamper in which Falstaff cowers into the Thames. Wagner would make us hear the splash, but Verdi is scrupulous. His score does not hint at what we’ve just seen. Instead, it accompanies the climax with a purely musical response to the frenetic build-up that precedes the toss:  as everyone laughs (music or not music?), the orchestra shimmers and smiles in tonic resolution.

And the dense, coruscating fugue at the end, Tutta è burla — THAT is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.