The other day, I rattled on to Kathleen about an insight that I’d had during the day. It came to me to make a distinction between the problems that exist among human beings, on the one hand, and the problems that exist between human beings and the rest of the world, on the other. The problems in the latter set are serious, but almost impossible to deal with until those in the first set have been cleared up. Because otherwise you just make the problems already existing among human beings worse. The Protestant Reformation was the last sympathetic example of how trying to make people behave better (less sinfully) with regard to a force outside of humanity (God) so easily leads to persecution and atrocity. In the French Revolution, God was replaced by La Patrie; the Holocaust carried this obsession with abstraction to a point that (happily?) we cannot imagine exceeding.

There are two ways of dealing with the problems that exist among human beings, and the right way is to make sure that everybody’s dignity figures in the calculus. The wrong way is to devise solutions that impair dignity. Dignity isn’t the easiest thing in the world to understand (or, for that very reason, to respect), but I would venture a definition that comprised the right to sustain one’s life unmolested by human violence and unburdened by degrading conditions. (The main thing to bear in mind is that dignity is not an abstraction.) My sense of dignity is pegged to the dignity of others, as a result of which currency I sometimes have trouble looking at myself in the mirror.

And for a simple reason. It’s not that I spend a lot of time imagining the hard lives of people who live in the slums of Mumbai or Rio. But I do take a lot of taxis. And the system governing taxis in New York City has aptly been described as “feudal.”

“Now, taxis,” I said to Kathleen, “taxis are a problem that I have to read up on. I need to find out what to read.” “Let me check it out for you,” said Kathleen.

The next day, checking in at the computer, I was amazed to find 20 new items in my inbox. All from Kathleen, each one containing a link. Yesterday afternoon, I copied all the links onto a page that I then posted at my Web Site (but without navigational linking); this made following the links on the iPad a lot easier. I worked my way through about half of them, and even found one on my own. (Actually, I’d come across the New York Taxi Workers Alliance before.) I learned a few things. Simple repetition hammered home the number of medallions in New York’s taxis system: 13,237. I also learned, from Felix Salmon, why the price of a fleet medallion recently climbed to a million dollars. The most that a medallion owner can make in a year — this is set by law — is in excess of $80,000, but of course there are expenses.

But even if you bring the income down to $50,000 a year, that’s still a pleasant 5% yield on your money, and what’s more it’s a yield which behaves much more like a real yield than a nominal yield. Paying $1 million for such a thing doesn’t seem silly to me, especially when there’s a lot of room for capital gains as well. 

In today’s interest-rate environment, 5% is a lot of safe return. It makes a lot more sense to buy a medallion than it does to buy a bond. 

And of course I learned that the new rate increase was not accompanied by a raise in the lease rates. That means that the drivers are going to pocket the increased revenue, which is all for the good. The next improvement ought to enable drivers to do just as well with shorter shifts; in addition to making a more humane day for the drivers, it would end the maddening late-afternoon shift change.

Meanwhile, I continue to tip heavily.

***

 

All that sobbing over Mozart the other night left me feeling pretty rubbishy yesterday — the weather didn’t help — so I spent the day reading, and, penitentially, reading a book that has lingered in my pile for months. As long as I didn’t feel like doing much of anything, I would at least clear the deck of a dust-catcher. I also hoped that I would learn something about the background of modern Syria from James Barr’s A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East, but I didn’t; the Alawites (who seem to be at the bottom of the Syrian problem) are mentioned only once, early on.

Actually, background is missing overall from this book, which begins where there ought to have been an ending, in the wake of World War I. The Ottoman Empire (which was falling apart at its core, in palaces along the Bosphorus) had sided with Germany and Austria in that conflict, and this presented Britain and France with an irresistible temptation that they ought to have known would only bring tears and trouble. What might be done with the Levant and with Mesopotamia, the largely Arab provinces to the south of Turkey?

Barr is happy to tell us what was done, when, and by whom, but his account of events in the Middle East lacks coherence until you grasp that Barr, a former journalist with the Daily Telegraph, is reporting on a game played by bitter enemies. It would be wrong to say that “Britain” and “France” were the enemies, but they did sponsor the teams. The object of the game was to thwart the opponent’s projects in the region, and, if possible, to drive them out of it altogether. The British appeared to win when the French departed from Syria and the Lebanon in 1945, but, at least in Barr’s view, this was not the end of the game, which continued until the British were driven from Palestine by Zionist terrorists — backed by a vengeful France. What made this game more interesting than most such conflicts — a nifty handicap — was that Brtain and France were ostensibly allies throughout the period under discussion.

The book’s colorful tone is somewhat tendentious: the British are alternately naive and grandiose, while the French are snakes. Long before I got to the end, I was wondering what the other side of the story would sound like. I decided that it would sound much the same, only with the attributes reversed. Nothing could conceal the fundamental lunacy.

For the British, the object was to maintain maritime channels between England and India (and beyond). This meant controlling the Suez Canal; it also meant exploiting Iraq’s oil. After 1919, the British ought to have looked in the mirror and asked themselves why they were still maintaining an empire. In 1945, with the empire obviously about to shut down, trying to govern Palestine made no sense at all. But Britain had become a world power on the back of its far-flung possessions, and did not want to hear that what empire had given, it would also take away.

The French, it must be said, were even more deluded. They were still trying to build an empire in the Twentieth Century. Barr writes about “a small but thick-skinned group of imperialists, the Comité de l’Asie Française,” whose secretary general,

an aristocratic diplomat named Robert de Caix, reached for the history books to make his case. He argued that France had a “hereditary” right to Syria and Palestine because it was “the land of the Crusades … where Western activity has been so French-dominated since the beginning of the Middle Ages that all Europeans who live there are still called ‘Franks’.”

You don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

There is, of course, another story that goes untold, a story that puts the Arabs, the Turks, and the Persians in the foreground. That’s the story that I think we need to hear. Barr’s subtitle is almost laughably nonsensical, since his book shows how truly incapable Britain and France were of shaping anything ithe Middle East. It is not impossible to imagine a region that would be just as troubled as today’s is without either the French or the British having shown up to do much more than buy oil.

As it was, Britain and France were the principal parties to the Peace of Versailles, a pact comprised of nightmarish follies that was founded on the humiliation of Germany (which was not a party at all). Almost everything that James Barr writes about was an unintended consequence of that Peace. His book certainly shows how little like true allies the British and the Frednch were prepared to act.

***

 

Over the weekend, I read Christoff Wolff’s Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune: Serving the Emperor, 1788-1791. It is something less than a book but more than a collection of essays: surely it will inspire a younger scholar to write a thicker, more comprehensive study of Wolf’s thesis, which is that appointment to an official post in the imperial music establishment, something that Mozart had longed for ever since arriving in Vienna in 1781, altered the composer’s outlook and influenced stylistic changes. Wolff also debunks any idea that Mozart “knew that the end was nigh.” The major works of his last four years of life, far from representing the culmination of a career, were more likely to have been the preliminary efforts in an artistic shift that we can only guess at. The effect of reading Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune is to make his very untimely death even harder to take than it usually is. I stayed up way too late last night, listening to The Magic Flute and sobbing into my nightcap.

It is hard to find, let alone define, a common denominator for the musical style of Mozart’s last years, the years in the service of the emperor. There are some general elements that are prevalent in much of the music of this period: grand and sublime statements as realized in the last symphonies and an ambitious increase in the musical format of movements; a more restrained and mellow, yet no less effective approach toward concerto writing, as seen in the last two piano concertos and the clarinet concerto; and, generally, a more open, more adventurous, and more varied application of polyphonic designs as well as truly unusual and untested harmonic processes such as modulations gliding in and out of distant realms and creating shocking expressive effects. Above all, a zeal for innovative compositional approaches is notably dominant.

I have always found the last three concertos to be somewhat regressive, reminiscent of the simpler music of Mozart’s childhood, but Wolff suggests that Mozart was looking even further back than that, to the Augustan majesty of Bach and, especially, Handel. This would explain, too, why the Requiem, which was the first piece of classical music that I knew well (of all things!) never struck me as sounding much like anything else that Mozart wrote; Wolf devotes a chapter to the new style of church music that Mozart was developing in the Ave verum corpus and the Requiem, showing how rooted it was in the Saxon clarity of Protestant music the likes of which Viennese audiences had never heard.

But as we imagine the direction in which Mozart seemed poised to take off at the time of his death, we ought probably to bear in mind that its excitements would have remained enveloped in a charming surface appeal. It is almost impossible, now, to hear what might have struck Mozart’s contemporaries as “difficult” about his music; the handiest guide seems to be Joseph II’s famous complaint about “too many notes.” But there would never, I think have been anything as noisy as the beginning of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or as charmlessly severe as the opening of the Fifth. Mozart could be an awful egotist, and he was extraordinarily ambitious, but he kept these things out of his music. It is hard to imagine him setting out to express himself, as Beethoven was so overtly to do. In short, I can’t see how Mozart would have taken a place among the “romantic” composers, whose innovations were probably made somewhat easier by his premature passing from the scene.

Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune — the phrase is Mozart’s own, written in an appeal to Michael Puchberg for a big loan — is an enormous treat for me, because it tells me that most of things that I “know” about Mozart are wrong. It does no such thing, really, but in making me want to hear everything afresh it effectively gives me a new composer. I will at any rate stop saying that we don’t know if Mozart ever heard the last three symphonies.

Another reason for late-night tears: I was listening to the Karl Böhm recording that features Evelyn Lear as Pamina and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Papageno, two singers who died recently — in respectable retirement.  Poignant, that. No retirement for Mozart!

Sorry to be late today, and not to have any Commonplace offerings for the week. I do have a treat, though. Feast your eyes on this exquisite piano, a Pleyel made in 1890 (and yours, I’m told, for a mere $175,000) — an instrument that Proust might have seen and heard. You’ll have to take my word for it that the piano sounds at least as good as it looks; in fact, it sounded perfect, yesterday, at an informal lunchtime recital of French chansons (Ravel, Fauré, Debussy). Plans to make a recording of these beautiful songs, using this very piano, are in the offing, and I shall pass on the details as they emerge. For the moment, let the piano upstage the artists.

***

Why nothing for the Commonplace?  Looking back over the week, I recall a lot of magazines, beginning on Sunday. Also, I read Jane Gardam’s 1985 novel, Crusoe’s Daughter — which has just been published by Europa. I’ve read four of Gardam’s novels now, Old Filth (“Filth,” by the way, is an acronym for “Failed in London: Try Hongkong”), The Queen of the Tambourine, God on the Rocks, and this new/old one. I have not read Faith Fox or The Man in the Wooden Hat, both of which I have here somewhere. Gardam is an interesting novelist partly because she still has very little presence in the United States; you will not be reading about her in the book reviews or in The New Yorker. You will not be reading her in The New Yorker; if there is still some sort of house style at that magazine, then Gardam still doesn’t fit it. Having read nothing but British fiction for well over six months now, I shocked by the first few pages of Crusoe’s Daughter; they’re so unlike what one would encounter at the beginning of Elizabeth Taylor or Tessa Hadley. After a while, I began to be aware that the novel was not just set in Yorkshire but set there, on the marshy coast of the “German Sea.” I remembered that the author was born in Yorkshire. And I thought of Shirley, Charlotte Brontë’s irregular but satisfying novel for adults. I haven’t been to Yorkshire myself, but it has a certain literary reputation as a place of some wildness. The wildness of Crusoe’s Daughter (Defoe’s hero hailed from Hull, also in Yorkshire) lies all in the writing. It is the beautiful wildness of a lithe, dangerous animal. There is nothing sad or defeating in Gardam’s heartbreaks. They are, on the contrary, truly awful.

Here shortly before World War I, Polly Flint, the title character, is brought by a family friend to his large estate near the banks of the Ouse. His sister, Lady Celia, is, we will learn, a fierce aesthete, playing the hostess to the likes of Virginia Woolf and detesting the local Jewish magnates not out of anti-Semitism but because they’re philistines. It is difficult to tell, in the following introduction, which is the bird of prey.

          On a yellow silk sofa someone was lying. There was a blaze in the grate of a wood fire that never goes out, and there was also the smell of something else, very sweet. Pot-pourri — there was a heap of it in a great dish — but it wasn’t that. All I could make out on the sofa was drapery and a movement of white hands and a sense of eyes watching me. 
          “‘lo Celia. Back home. Polly. Polly Flint.” Mr Thwaite did the great harumming of the throat and moved to the window. There was a valedictory atmosphere about him. I have done what I have done. I have gone through with it. He looked at the sky. “Splendid day,” he said. “Very poor at Oversands. Continuous rain. Very disappointing.”
          “Polly what?”
          “Flint. Emma’s. Flint. Polly. Come for a little break.”
          “Flint,” said the voice. “Well — Arthur. On your own? Arthur ring the bell. Polly Flint. Come over here.”
          On the sofa lay a tiny woman dressed in silk. Pampas grasses in a tall jar bowed over her head like a regal awning. Her face was thickly painted — bright red mouth and cheeks. Her eyelids and brows were painted andher very black straight hair was pulled tight back across the skull like a Dutch doll, and looked painted, too. Her neck was not much thicker than a wrist and her ears glittering with round topazes were little and pretty like noisettes of lamb. 
          Her hands were very, very old and had veins standing on them but they were soft and unused, not as small as all that. Rather determined hands. She held one bravely out — it looked ready to drop with the weight of more topazes.
          “But do come nearer.”
          She examined my clothes one by one — hat to gaiters. She saw my pelisse, cut down from Aunt Frances’s and very special; I had worn it at the wedding. It was draped over my childish serge coat. She seemed to count the buttons down my calves and almost ate the big plate hat. She looked lower and I rememebered that there was an uncertainty about my left knicker elastic which I had meant to see to before I left.
          “Thought of cinnamon scones,” said Mr Thwaite. “About tea-time?” We arrive upon our hour.”
          “Polly Flint,” said (presumably) his sister. “How very interesting. How pretty Emma’s girl. Not at all like Emma. Very different — except perhaps for the cheek-bones. How very sensible of you Arthur. Has she come for a visit?”

 

 

You will recall that Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities begins with a mistake. Distracted by an argument with his lover, Maria, Sherman McCoy misses the Manhattan-bound exit at the heart of the Triborough Bridge (which is, naturally, a complex of three bridges) and barrels on into the Bronx, where he simply takes the next exit in order to turn around. Getting back onto the highway turns out to be difficult, and, in a panic, Sherman drives recklessly enough to hit a kid in the street. Thus begins the downfall of this Master of the Universe.

The mistake is not Sherman’s however. Sherman, we are told, is a born-and-bred New Yorker. No one raised in the Metropolitan Area would dream of “taking the next exit.” That may work perfectly well in Nebraska, but any expectation that the next exit will be anything like the one that you just missed is utterly foreign to natives of these parts. The mistake was Tom Wolfe’s. Although Bonfire is an extremely compelling read — or was at the time — it betrays its outsider’s viewpoint at the very beginning, and is manifestly not the purveyor of secret knowledge that it claims to be.

Amor Towles’s The Rules of Civility is a much better book than The Bonfire of the Vanities, and every bit as compelling, but it is haunted by an air of fantasy that is just as sharp as the superficiality of Wolfe’s cluefulness. Narrated by Kathleen Kontent, the daughter of Russian immigrants, raised in Brighton Beach (but a Christian), The Rules of Civility is in many ways a dream about New York City on the eve of World War II, an era that comes easily to mind because Ralph Lauren spends so much money trying to convince us that we’re still living in it (and ought to dress accordingly). The fantasy — the unreal part — is not a matter of gaffes of the “next exit” order, but something more subtle.

It was in an ivory envelope embossed with a scallop shell. On the front, there was no stamp, but it was addressed in perfect calligraphy. I don’t think I had ever seen my name so beautifully inscribed. Each of the Ks stood an inch tall, their legs sweeping elegantly under the other letters, curling at the end like the toe of an Arabian shoe.

Inside, there was a card edged in gold. It was so think I had to rip the envelope to set it free. At the top was the same image of the scallop, while below were the time and date and the requesting of the honor of my company. It was an invitation to the Hollingsworth’s sprawling Labor Day affair. From a a few hundred miles at sea, another act of grace by the right fine Wallace Wolcott.

The fantasy is that people like Wallace Wolcott (a WASP paragon too fine to be played by anyone but Gary Cooper) would find this sort of thing interesting enough to describe. Unlike Kate, Wallace would have seen his name perfectly inscribed before he knew how to read. He would take perfect calligraphy for granted — there was until recently a well-known service that would fill out all the addresses on your wedding-invitation list.  The only comment that Wallace might make, assuming that Kate, in her enthusiasm, has not overlooked the detail, is that the Hollingsworths would surely have requested the honour of her company.

***

The Rules of Civility is such a well-packed book (although not an especially long one) that it is hard to believe that it takes place entirely within the space of a year, 1937. Whenever Kate would return to her flat on 11th Street, I’d be amazed that she was still living there, after all this…. time. The novel is full of lively characters and clearly-drawn scenes, and something is always happening. (New York City demonstrates that the “small town” effect requires a population of many millions.) The action on the surface is in perfect counterpoise to the mystery below, which is a romance between two people who are themselves mysteries. Our narrator is one of these people; she is a fine study in hiding-in-plain-sight. We know a few things about her — very few. We have no idea how she covered the socio-economic distance between Brighton Beach and the typing pool at a venerable Wall Street law firm. We have no idea how or where she acquired the wit and panache to get an important job at a (fictional) Condé Nast start-up. Kate seems to know that it’s best to keep most of her personal history under wraps; if she’s mysterious, it’s for reasons that she’d like to put behind her. Let me be clear that there is nothing fantastical about Kate’s career, improbable though it might seem. New York is the natural abode of many such mysterious people, and it would be wrong-headed to expect Amor Towles to take Dawn Powell’s skeptical scalpel to them.

The other mysterious person is Tinker Grey. He’s so mysterious that he seems always to be enveloped in a slight but photogenic fog. We meet him in the novel’s frame, at the Museum of Modern Art, where an exhibition of Walker Evan’s photographs has opened, in 1966. The photos were taken on the city’s subways, with a hidden camera. Tinker, rather wonderfully, turns out to be the subject of two of them. In one, he is gaunt but lively; in the other, prosperous but world-weary. As Kate knows, the latter picture must have been taken first. So: what happened to Tinker? How did he get flushed out of high life? And was he, despite everything, Kate’s first and greatest love? You will find out the answers to these questions, which Towles has the skill to make urgent, when you get to the end of The Rules of Civility. And you will almost certainly have a good time getting there.

This is a frankly elegiac book, a backward glance at the excitement and uncertainty of young people scrambling about the city. There is a finely-dampered sense of doom (Wallace Wolcott sails off to fight in the Spanish Civil War), of things coming to an end; but what is really coming to an end, of course, is youth, not a way of life. What’s over, at the end, is Kate’s innocence about the glamour of rich people’s lives. She marries one of thoese people, and finds happiness with him, but the awe that her tough-girl patina barely conceals at the beginning of the novel is evaporated by what 1937 has to teach her. The Rules of Civility would have been a better book — a truly great book, I suspect — if Amor Towles had written it in the third person, and not tugged at us to gape sympathetically at the bits and bobs of Red Book snazziness that — more or less attractively — litter Kate’s tale.

When dinner was over, I helped Wallace carry the gifts to the back pantry. Lining the hallway were photographs of family members smiling in enviable locales. There were grandparents on a dock, an uncle on skis, sisters riding sidesaddle. At the time it seemed a little odd, this back hall gallery; but running into a similar setup in similar hallways over the years, I eventually came to see it as endearingly WASPy. Because it’s an outward expression of that reserved sentimentality (for places as much as kin) that quietly permeates their version of existence. In Brighton Beach or on the Lower East Side, you were more apt to find a single portrait propped on a mantel behind dried flowers, a burning candle, and a generation of genuflection. In our households, nostalgia played a distant fiddle to acknowledgment of the sacrifices made by forebears on your behalf.

A third-person narrator could have told you more than Kate is willing to divulge, while recasting the pangs of envy so that you would not feel uppity for not sharing them.

As for mistakes of the “next exit” order, I did find a very small one. There have never been any “once tony brownstones” in Washington Square.  

Pamela Werner seems to have been an interesting girl even before she was murdered in 1937 — almost certainly in a brothel near Peking’s Legation Quarter, almost certainly by a crew of Anglophone sportsmen led by an American dentist. Born, probably to a White Russian refugee in 1917, she was adopted two years later, at the Portuguese orphanage, by a once-prominent couple, E T C Werner and his wife, Gladys Nina née Ravenscroft. In 1922, the adoptive mother died of an overdose of Veronal, but the ensuing scandal yielded no evidence of foul play. (It was probably suicide.) Pamela grew up to be as pretty as the run of blonde Hollywood chorus girls of the day (if her pictures are any guide), and she chafed within the confines of her scholarly father’s respectable house. She seems to have been thrown out of almost every school she attended, and was still going to school when she died, at nearly 20. (To be precise, she was home on winter break.)

Four days before her death, Pamela Werner was photographed at Hartung’s, a studio photography shop in the Legation Quarter. She wore a stylish black evening gown, elegant sandals, and an expression of ironic disdain. It was not the outfit of a schoolgirl. Unremarkable in itself, the photograph tells a familiar story, once you know Pamela’s fate. It’s the story of a girl who yearns to be a sophisticated, independent woman, and who grabs a chance at it without understanding the terrible risks to which acting without family support expose any attractive young woman even to this day. She thinks that she can handle it. She is wrong.

The case of Pamela Werner’s murder was never officially solved. Pamela’s father, strangely passive during the early investigations, began an impassioned and arduous search for justice only when it became clear that Chinese and British officials were not going to identify the culprit or culprits responsible. Years later, Werner and the man whom Werner believed to be guilty were both interned in the same prison camp on the Shandong Peninsula. Other prisoners would remember Werner pointing a finger at that man, Wentworth Prentice, and saying, “You killed her. I know you killed Pamela. You did it.” This is how the movie version would begin. At the end, the scene would be replayed, and now we would see Prentice.

The story of the investigation into Pamela Werner’s death is an interesting one, because its many contingencies dangle from the strange state of China at in the twilight of the warlords, on the eve of Japanese occupation. Because the dead girl was found outside the Legation Quarter, the British authorities, such as they were, lacked effective jurisdiction. At the same time, there was a presumption that the suspect would be a criminal type. At one point, a broken-down former bodyguard of North American background, called Pinfold, was brought in for questioning, He was released, against the investigators’ urging, by a consul who insisted that the evidence against him was inadequate. Properly pursued, Pinfold would have led directly to the murderer, but the higher authorities instintively protected this man — it would be better to say that they protected themselves from finding out anything incriminating about him — and the trails of evidence were ignored, the connections left unmade.

***

At the end of Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, author Paul French tells us how he came to write it.

It was when I came across a photo of [Pamela], on a cold morning in the British Library’s newspaper archives in North London, that I knew her story had to be told. I started writing. And then, by chance, while tying up the loose ends of some research in Britain’s National Archive at Kew, I stumbled across an uncatalogued file in one of several dozen boxes of random correspondence sent from Peking during the years 1941-43. The letters in the file had been recorded, acknowledged, filed and forgotten. There were some 150 pages of close type, with handwriting added by the author in the margin.

It took a while to work out what it all was: the details of the private investigation E T C Werner had conducted after the official one was halted. Peking was by then occupied by the Japanese, yet Werner’s search uncovered more than the detectives had found; it answered questions that they had been unable to, settling nagging doubts and bringing more light than the official inquest ever did. It took these lost letters of Werner’s to bring Pamela’s murder into focus for me.

Perrhaps this would be the first scene.

As those paragraphs suggest, Paul French writes in a style that is both straightforward and supply atmospheric. There is nothing lurid about his tale, no heavy breathing — not even when, in the early pages, Pamela’s mutilated corpse must be described. French’s tone is, on the contrary, inclined to the understatement of film noir. There is much that can’t be known, especially the answer to the question, “What was Pamela Werner really like?” She was almost certainly not like someone who had murder coming; at the same time, she was pretty clearly defenseless once she stepped outside the confinement of propriety and accepted the invitation to a party that her father, had he known of it, would not have permitted her to attend. The setting is exotic; it was thought to be exotic at the time, by the expats who knew it up close. But the crime, far from opening a window on imaginative depravity, is the all-too-familiar confrontation of inexperience with lust and desperation. No: what makes the crime interesting is the fecklessness of the official investigation. To call it a “cover-up” would be a gross exaggeration. But it was infected with all of the ambiguities and misunderstandings that made Beijing into yet another Chinatown.

Possibly because of a superficial resemblance between Werner and Edmund Backhouse, subject of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking, I’m going to have to hunt down that very wild “Old China” story.

 

What goes around, &c: Over the weekend, a friend called me up, to ask if I could pick him up after a procedure. When he’d scheduled it, he hadn’t known that his wife was going to be out of town — so, would I be free? Of course I was free. It tickled me that I’d get to do what Ray Soleil did for me just last Wednesday. I took a taxi to the hospital and met my friend in the waiting room. I’m not quite sure that anyone checked him — or me — out, but in two shakes we were having lunch at Demarchelier, which I intended to be my treat. When the time came to settle, though, my friend insisted on paying, and I could tell that he would be angry if he didn’t. So I had no choice, after we parted warmly on the sidewalk, but to head down to Crawford Doyle and spend my lunch money on something penitential: the quatercentenary edition of the King James Bible, published last year and in stock at the bookshop for about four months. I hadn’t noticed it before.

It is not quite a facsimile; the black-letter typeface has been replaced by something Roman from the early Nineteenth Century. But the new edition is otherwise a perfect copy, misspelled word for misspelled word, line of verse for line of verse; and all of the ornamental capitals have been preserved. Never having seen a King James Bible before, I was hypnotized by the genealogical charts at the front, beginning with GOD and ending, thirty-odd pages later, with CHRIST. The edition is somewhat smaller than the original, with pages of about eight by eleven inches.

The LORD said vnto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand: vntil I make thine enemies thy foote-stoole.

2 The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.

3 Thy people shalbe willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holinesse || from the wombe of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth.

4 The LORD hath sworne, and will not repent, thou art a Priest for euer: after the order of Melchizedek.

That’s the first half of Psalm 110, set by Vivaldi and Handel (and many other composers) in Latin, as Dixit Dominus.

***

If the King James Bible has a peer, I don’t know what it is. It seems blasphemous somehow to suggest that it is comparable to the Tanakh (the scriptures in Hebrew); the King James is a translation. But its importance to the English language has no correlative in another language. Because of the tensions that were pulling English society apart when the translation was made, the Bible, “appointed to be read in churches,” was the only universally recognized text. And because Modern English was still developing, still in transition from Chaucer to Johnson, there clings to the translation something of the chthonic murk of the Iron Age original. We can understand it, for the most part, but we haven’t spoken its idiom for a very long time. There is a secular power in the King James Bible that is bottled in the genius of its language.

And the New Testament, for which we have only Greek “originals,” found in English a language that took it seriously. From I Corinthians:

11 When I was a childe, I spake as a childe, I vnderstood as a childe, I thought as a childe; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12 For now we see through a glasse, darkely: but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know euen as also I am knowen.

13 And now abideth faith, hope, charitie, these three, but the greatest of these is charitie.

It is impossible to say which benefits more greatly from the translation: Paul’s meaning or the English language.

The other day, David Brooks finally came out and said something that I’ve been shouting for years: “The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.”

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

That’s very well put, even if it does suggest that we do have to make a choice between today’s incompetent justice and yesterday’s bigoted stewardship. The WASP élite was rather like the Indian Civil Service of British Empire days, an incredibly small number of professionals overseeing the higher civic functions of a teeming mass of hoi unwashed polloi; in the United States, however, it was the WASPs who were the natives.

They weren’t very good leaders, the WASPs. Men like FDR, patricians who were comfortable standing up in front of the people and exhorting them to be their best selves, were quite rare; duffers like Taft, Coolidge, and Hoover were much closer to the norm. After Andrew Jackson, men from “nice” families tended to keep their families out of the political muck. They ran things, yes, but they did not lead. We still haven’t figured out the leadership thing in this country. It’s arguable that no society anywhere has ever actually “figured it out.” We can grow plenty of corn, but we don’t know how to grow leaders.

So there’s no reason to wax sentimental about the WASP ascendancy, just a few things to learn (the virtues of  a relatively Spartan adolescence prominent among them). We need to take stewardship at least as seriously as the best of the WASPs appear to have done. Beyond that, though, we have to tackle this altogether new problem, which is, essentially, a refusal to take civic responsibility. In the public sphere, everything is somebody else’s fault.

***

If you went looking for leaders today, you would be whistled into Davos or Sun Valley or some other conclave of “business leaders” who would be happy to share their insights into high-minded motivation. But the term is oxymoronic; in business, there are only dictators. Large businesses today are run just as the courts of Europe were run five hundred years ago.  Maurizio Viroli, in a new book about Silvio Berlusconi, describes a court system thus:

any arrangement of power whereby “one man is placed above and at the center of a relatively large number of individuals — his courtiers — who depend on him to gain and preserve wealth, status, and reputation.” Viroli calls the person at the center of the court system the signore.

(Yascha Mounk in The Nation, March 5/12 2012.) When you cut through all the Economist-spun crap about corporate structure and governance, the signore is what you’re left with, and the courtiers include both the subordinate executives employed by the corporation and the ranks of “independent” professionals — lawyers, lobbyists, and even elected officials — who serve the interests of the signore and his interests only. The signore is hardly omnipotent; his power derives from dense networks of mutual obligation that overall tend to favor his assumption of the throne. Failure to honor these obligations will surely lead to a coup. In that sense, the signore is indeed the head of an institution, and not a capricious individualist. But whatever you may say about the virtues and vices of courtly institutions, the simple truth is that the educated amongst us came to the realization, about 250 years ago, that they do not produce model governments.

Maurizio Viroli argues that Italy, looking for a leader, has settled for a signore. Getting back to David Brooks, we conclude that Americans are looking for scapegoats.

We’re running a little late this morning. Just a little. I thought that I’d be in bed early last night, after such an early start, but I was too elated by the two final episodes of Call the Midwife that I watched after Ryan took Will home after dinner. It took an hour to wind down, for lively memories of Jessica Raine, Miranda Hart, Judy Parfitt and the others to subside sufficiently to allow me to pick up Tessa Hadley’s new novel, The London Train. When I got into bed, I wondered if having been knocked out with genuine anaesthesia earlier in the day would blunt Lunesta’s power, but it didn’t.

Call the Midwife was one of those discoveries peculiar to the Internet Age (a fatuous term, I hope, for the rest of human time). It’s the kind of discovery that you make because it’s so effortless. Having been tipped that Miranda is a a very funny show, you see what “people who bought” it have also bought. The buying, by the way, has been going on at a site run for British consumers; miraculously, it is possible for you, a New Yorker, to buy things there, too. (I still can’t quite believe that, fifteen years in.) You have no idea what Call the Midwife will be like, but you’re willing to give it a go because this Miranda person is in it. Something, some unconscious neuronal app, assures you that the show will be interesting at least.

It takes a few weeks for you to get round to watching it. In the end, you select it from the pile in hopes of being distracted from the inadequacy of a Jell-O diet. And, boy, does it ever come through on that score.

***

Let me tell you the shameful thing first: Call the Midwife made me burstingly proud, at least during the first two episodes (there are six), that I had never yielded to the (very slight) temptation to follow Downton Abbey, because instead of wrapping myself up in the sociologically sordid mixings of aristocrats and their servants, back in the day when aristos had not only had servants but also much more interesting wardrobes, I was hooking myself on a paean to the National Health Service (in its early days, at least, when there was so much less that medicine could do for people, beyond keeping them clean and comfortable and deploying a few new antibiotics), cloaked in a well-oiled drama about well-brought-up young ladies serving as nurse-midwives in London’s East End in the late Fifties. It is, in effect, an inversion of Downton Abbey, because it’s the East Enders who are fortunate: despite their poverty and their ignorant ways, they have all the babies, and they have them right on the show, with an explicitness undreamable in 1957. At the appearance of each newborn, everybody laughs and cries, and so do you. It really doesn’t get more uplifting than that, not on television anyway. 

In this upside-down version of the typical Masterpiece Theatre offering, it is the proper young ladies who serve the working class. They are guided by nuns of an Anglican order who mission is the delivery of children. These nuns are a devout but worldly lot, mostly former proper young ladies themselves but not exclusively: we have the great Pam Ferris to leaven the language (which is very much, by the way, the language of Shakespeare and Keats; instead of prayers and metaphysics, the good sisters spout an English that is more robust than the vernacular without being flowery). Call the Midwife is stocked with many familiar characters, but the deck has been dealt out in a new way. Not entirely new, perhaps; you could argue, I suppose, that the show mixes EastEnders with Brother Cadfael, and tells the tale from the perspective of Pride and Prejudice. But you don’t turn to dramatic series for genuine novelty. Call the Midwife ends with a marriage, but it is a mésalliance. And yet this mésalliance, instead of being unspeakably secret (as indeed the bride’s mother would prefer it to be) is a triumph of love and courage, a marriage that might just impress Aunt Jane herself. It is the only kind of happy ending that does not involve the safe delivery of a healthy child.

Call the Midwife ran in Britain in January and February, I believe; whether it will be broadcast on this side of the Atlantic I have no idea. The DVD is already available at Amazuke, and, according to IMDb, some sort of Christmas Special is promised for the end of the year. If you have an all-regional DVD player, I urge you to order a copy of the show at once.

No comment!

***

Well, a little postscript won’t hurt. The procedure didn’t, either. Not that it ever has, really, but this time I was completely anaesthetized. Knocked out. It wasn’t the stuff that they’d used on the two or three previous colonoscopies; I could feel myself sinking into oblivion. But it was very short-term. The procedure was scheduled for 8 AM, and that is precisely when it began: I looked at the clock on the wall, moments before losing consciousness. When I came to, it was quarter-to-something; I thought that it must be ten, but, incredibly, it was 8:45. I don’t recall things happening anywhere near that quickly before, but then I haven’t ever actually looked at the clock before. When it was time to get off the gurney and put my clothes back on, I was a little wobbly for a few steps, but that was hardly surprising, given my age, the anaesthesia, and the fasting. By the time Ray Soleil picked me up, I was fine.

The prohibition on patients’ leaving the clinic on their own is very annoying. We are in Manhattan, after all, where taxis and car services abound. I have snuck out several times before, but this time it would not have been possible: a nurse saw me to the street door, and made sure that the passenger in the taxi knew who I was. Poor Ray — I’d told him that I wouldn’t need him for another hour. But the clinic asked for his number, and they called him while I was in recovery. He scrambled up quickly. As it turned out, Kathleen could easily have picked me up; she was still at home when we got back to the apartment. But we thought, as I say, that it would take longer.

As a veteran of umpteen colonscopies, I want to insist that there is only good reason for dreading the procedure: fasting is a great bore. A great bore. But about the procedure itself there is simply nothing to complain. Not any more. If only a visit to the dentist could be half as comfortable!

***

I hadn’t seen Ray in a while, so we had a lot of catching up to do. During lunch, at the Seahorse Tavern, we indulged in the favorite pastime of redesigning Fossil Darling’s apartment. If only he would listen to us! (But, as Mrs Grimmer says, “People are so queer!“)

***

Later on in the afternoon, I went downtown to fetch Will. Something had come up for his mother, and his father couldn’t get away. Of course they would have managed to get him if I hadn’t been around, but I was around. The car was waiting for us when we came outside, and the driver was by now familiar, having taken us uptown two times before, and we all shook hands in the driveway of our apartment building. Even (especially) Will, who had to transfer a toy bus from one hand to the other. 

Will likes to have a quiet time when he gets home, his mother tells me, and I took full advantage of this when we got to the apartment: I filled a bottle with milk, put on Sean the Sheep, and sat him on my lap. And there we were when Kathleen came home. Kathleen’s arrival signaled the end of Will’s rest period; now he led her on a merry dance throughout the apartment, now out on the balcony, now coloring on the living-room floor. When Ryan arrived after work, Will pulled out a story book about a “shark” and demanded that his father read it to him. Trouble was, the book is in Dutch, it was Ted van Lieshout’s Ik ben een held, with great drawings by Silvia Weve that do, in fact, make the eponym of the third story, “Blauw vis,” look like a shark. I am going to have to work up translations.

We had a quick dinner at Viand, the coffee shop on the corner across the street. When it was time to go, Will picked up his plate of French fries, to take it with. Kathleen worked out a compromise, and wrapped up the fries in a napkin. A few of these, transferred to a small bowl, were actually eaten back at the apartment.

What will it be like when the day no longer begins with fishing up the Times from the floor of the hallway outside our front door? I wondered about that yesterday morning as I looked through the Business section. (That’s how I begin, giving Kathleen first crack at the First Section.) There was a piece by David Carr on the latest mudslides in the newspaper business. The bottom line appears to be that newspapers have been as badly run as most American industries, and suffer from underfunded pension plans and scary debt service. (Close those goddam business schools before the country goes completely broke!) The peculiar problems of print journalism — competition from Internet media both for readers and for advertising dollars — don’t help, but one imagines that, without those generic business problems in the background, solutions might be more hopeful.

What will take the place of what is now called the “Sunday Review,” the weekly think pages of the newspaper, replete with editorials Op-Ed commentary? That’s what I used to wonder. This weekend, I felt that the replacement had arrived: thinking was giving way to nonsense. The lead story, “Don’t Indulge. Be Happy,” begins with a subtitle announcing that $75,000 is all the income that most people need to be satisfied with life. When you follow this piece into the heart of the section, two other equally dubious items appear: “The New Elitists” and “Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals.”

While the “Happiness” piece is loaded with tidbits of good sense, the $75,000 figure looks very odd in a periodical aimed principally at upscale Manhattanites, most of whom would have to find somewhere else to live on a five-figure income, abandoning, in the process, the restaurants and dry cleaners and health clubs and food markets that currently employ thousands of people to serve the neighborhood, not to mention museum memberships and theatre subscriptions. I’m not saying that happiness can’t be found on $75,000. Not at all. I’m just saying that the mass search for it would kill Manhattan. When I see a story like this one, I imagine writers and researchers who either have not or would not care to share the excitement of living on this island; I suppose that we are lucky, here, that more people don’t. What beggars belief is seeing the story printed in the Times, and not in the Styles Section where it belongs, but in the Sunday Review.

Shamus Khan’s essay on “elitists” reads like something sourced by Wikipedia and a content farm, with perhaps some hasty review of university-level history texts. It is hugely wrong on one major point, failing as it does to recognize that audiences for the city’s vibrant classical-music establishment were nurtured more by the public schools, which used to make a much greater use of the city’s artistic resources, than by any socialite philanthropists. (It’s worth noting that those public schools also transported generations of students from low-income backgrounds to six-figure careers — miserable wretches!) Khan falls for a widespread solecism about culture: that it is always “popular” and that people find what they like on their own. This is a picture of the arts in which education has no role — a very convenient premise for conservatives who wish to reduce education to vocational school. Printing such stuff is a disgrace to the Times.

***

By the time I got to the rubbish about conservatives and liberals — no wonder conservatives dislike paying taxes, if they’ve found happiness on $75,000! — I had run out of indignation. I didn’t have to read the piece to be shocked; the byline took care of that. Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute! To grasp the utlity and reliability of such a person’s remarks on this issue, I ask you to imagine my devoting the rest of this week’s blog entries to the Greatness of Me. I will tell you how super I am, and I will back it up with findings from studies that I have personally conducted. I have never met a happy conservative man in my life. Smug and anxiously sarcastic, yes. Happy, no. (It’s like a bad cologne.) There are many conservative women, right here on this island, who maintain an appearance of happiness, but it depends too much upon disciplined disregard for the happiness of others, not to mention colorists’ fees that would easily gobble up a quarter of that $75,000, to strike me as genuine.  

One thing that the “Happiness” piece got right: Happiness and generosity — open-heartedness — are constant companions.

This Fourth of July, I spent the day reading. All of it. I did not watch the fireworks; I did not leave the apartment. I scarcely left my reading chair.

The book in question — for it was one book — was Wilkie Collins’s No Name, a novel that I’d never heard of when Kathleen found it on the shelves at the London Review Bookshop in May. She read it in one go, mostly on the plane coming home, absolutely unwilling to put it down. It took the book longer to hook med; the First Scene’s idyll cum catastrophe seemed to involve a lot of  stuffy Victorian attitudinizing. But once Magdalen made her escape, and the story got rolling, it carried me along as gleefully as any amusement-park ride.

For sheer fun, the Fourth Scene can’t be beat. Set at Aldborough (Aldeburgh) on the Suffolk coast, it is a high-pitched match — liken it to tennis or to chess as you will — between two wily plotters whose schemes are so fast and furious that they often blow up, or fall completely flat, with the sardonic levity of Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs Spy” feature. Collins is of course the arch-plotter himself, and his shamelessness is exceeded only by his plausibility. You could argue that a novel as entertaining as No Name can’t be a very great one, but I’m not interested in that kind of talk right now. I believe that anyone my age ought to have read a novel three times before getting carried away by greatness.

And in any case what interests me most about the book, quite aside from the fun of it, is its ending, and what I like about the ending may be proof, to some readers, that No Name is not even a very good novel, much less a great one. I’m not sure that I’d have grasped why I found the ending so satisfying if it hadn’t been for editor Mark Ford’s introductory remarks.

Many, however, have found No Name‘s last chapters unsatisfactory. That Magdalen’s brave odyssey should collapse into such a morass of clichés — rescue by a seafaring strong man, a penitential illness and a sickbed conversion — seems a frustrating elision of the many powerful questions the novel has hitherto posed, though to such as Mrs Olyphant, even this dramatic reversion to the ideals of hearth and home was too little too late.

Were we reading the same book? What “deathbed conversion”? I missed that. Nor did I see Magdalen’s illness as “penitential.” But the “rescue by a seafaring strong man,” now, that didn’t strike me as a cliché at all. D’you know why? From the moment that Captain Kirke made his brief appearance in the middle of the novel, I knew that Magdalen was going to end up in his arms, or at least that’s where I wanted her to end up, because without being entirely conscious of what I was going on I did something that lawyers call “incorporation by reference.” Captain Kirke was a reference, whether Collins intended him to be or not, to Jane Austen’s Captain Wentworth, and when things did indeed work out as I’d hoped, the last thirty-odd pages were charged with all the power of Persuasion, an effect greatly intensified by the fact that I hadn’t just read Persuasion.

Let me be very, very clear about one thing: I have no idea of Collins’s influences. I don’t know that he ever read Persuasion. I’m fairly certain that any reminiscence is unintentional; that, in fact, Collins would have cloyed the ending if he had undertaken it as an homage to Austen’s last novel. The simple truth is that both novelists fastened on a type of English hero that, while not overly common, is instantly recognizable. Collins describes the type very well, seeing him through Magdalen’s eyes and thus capturing the particular flavor of the hero-worship:

She sat listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful stories — made doubly vivid by the simple language in which he told them — fell, one by one, from his lips. His noble unconsciousness of his own heroism — the artless modesty with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed — raised him to a place in her estimation so high above her, that she became uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again, which she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she rigidly exacted from him all those little familiar attentions so precious to women in their intercourse with me.

You can’t imagine Anne Elliot exacting attentions from Captain Wentworth, but then Anne is like Magdalen’s sister, Norah — patient. Magdalen has, in the course of the novel, exhibited plenty of “dauntless endurance” herself, and plenty of courage as well. She deserves more than a happy ending; she deserves an apotheosis, and that’s what she gets in Captain Kirke. An apotheosis is nothing but a cliché seen in an unflattering light by someone in an ungenerous mood.  

***

An even guiltier pleasure is imagining what Anthony Trollope would have made of No Name. Thrown it into the fire, he would have. Magdalen Vanstone, insofar as she is the heroine of a novel who finds happiness in the end, stands as a repudiation of everything that Trollope believed about young ladies. The catechism is set forth in The Small House at Allington, in which Lily Dale plights her troth to an unworthy cad, Adolphus Crosbie, and thereafter refuses to acknowledge that Crosbie’s withdrawal from her life permits her to entertain the affections of the worthy man who really loves her, Johnny Eames. Readers begged Trollope to bring Lily and Johnny together in a later book, but he steadfastly refused to do so, because his belief that a good woman can love only once was an article of personal religion. It was also an article of his artistic practise, and that’s why I had to stop reading Trollope: he was prescribing his romances, not describing them.

When Magdalen Vanstone falls in love with Frank Clare, it’s puzzling, because Magdalen is such a strong girl and Frank is such a wuss. You wonder: is Magdalen going to be the making of this young man? Even if you’re clever, like me, and foresee that Frank’s path will cross Captain Kirke’s (how could they not? they’re both in China; and, yes, that’s a joke of sorts), you don’t know what Collins is going to do with Frank when it comes time to tie up all the knots. In any case, Magdalen outgrows the boy. He behaves badly and she gets over it. Frank’s father writes, at the end, to tell her what has become of his son. “The time when it could have distressed her, was gone by; the scales had long since fallen from her eyes.” Scales don’t exist, somehow, for Trollope, and this makes his love stories awkward, because nobody can ever grow up.

No Trollopean heroine would ever dream of embarking on Magdalen’s vengeful adventure, either. Trollope must have hated the very success of Magdalen’s bold impersonations. Nor could he have believed in rehabilitation for a swindler like Captain Wragge. It is impossible not to imagine Trollope waxing mighty indignant. Presenting a minx and a scoundrel in a warm, favoring light: how awfully immoral he must have found it!

He probably had the sense not to read it.  

***

The question raised by my positive feelings about the ending of No Name is this: what kind of literary criticism am I practising when I “incorporate by reference” the whole of one novel into the body of another, giving the second a kind of experiential credit? By insisting that No Name gave me great pleasure because I was singularly well-reminded of Persuasion? Does my report have any value? Or is it the unhelpful equivalent of saying, “I really liked it!”

I believe that it does have value, that it is extremely important to be candid about the pleasures of fiction, howsoever they derive. I note that Captain Kirke reminded me of Captain Wentworth in a way that I would not see Captain Wentworth’s reminding me of Captain Kirke. Reading Persuasion, I might well be reminded of the example of Captain Kirke, as another “seafaring strong man.” But I would not say that Persuasion is like No Name. This connection runs one way only, and it ought to be clear that the point of my remarks is not, certainly not to propose an equivalence between the two novels. No Name is, one might argue, a lesser novel precisely because Persuasion can be read into it. Nothing can be read into Persuasion, or into any of Jane Austen, except perhaps shreds of Dr Johnson’s cadences. Jane Austen needs no help from me.

But if Wilkie Collins does, if he can use that help — if No Name becomes a more satisfying book if you’ve read (and loved) Persuasion — then I’m happy to give it. I’m happy to help myself, in short. No Name might not be a better novel, but it becomes a more engaging one because of what I bring to it. The matter interests me very much as a function of age. I read, as it were, ensconced on an ever-growing and now rather massive cloud of prior reading. There’s no telling or how it might adapt my reading posture, or what I might reach in and pull out of it.

The idea of evaluating a novel in isolation, judging how well it functions as a self-contained contraption, is by now vieux jeu. We read for pleasure, not for liturgical exercise. In the end, “I really liked it” must be the (unstated) premise of every critical response; “I didn’t like it” ought to warn the writer to stop right there, for nothing that follows will be of any serious interest (however rib-tickling the take-down). If you want to tell the world that you liked something, then you must be as fully honest as you can be, and admit to accidental attractions aong with the high-minded ones. In the case of No Name, I don’t see anything particularly accidental about my being reminded of Persuasion. It can be taken as understood that, at this point, I’ve read all of Jane Austen three or four times at least. (Just as it can be taken as understood that I’m unable to finish Moby-Dick.) And how keen the pleasure, in such a jolly book, to feel the warmth and generosity of a novel so much more austere.  

What I never got quite round to saying, the other day, was that I don’t have the time to watch things on television. I really don’t! My days are full. Rather than watch two people have an interesting conversation, I’d prefer to read a transcript; not only can I do that more quickly, but I remember the insights much more precisely. The effort of netting useful information from the wide televisual datastream is a distraction from actual understanding. Also, most of that data is not only irrelevant but tedious.

As for watching television to pass the time, this, I assure you, is a capacity that can be relinquished, and once you let it go, television becomes a maddeningly pesky irritant. It’s raison d’être is to attract attention, for whatever reason. Usually the reason is dubious. One of the great things about iPods and smartphones is that televisions in public waiting rooms are now on the way out. Now we can expect everyone, and not just readers, to come equipped with personalized (and silent) means of passing the time.

I love watching movies at home, but this is not watching television. This is slipping a DVD into a player and watching a self-contained work of cinematic art. I don’t have as much time for it as I’d like; I seem to have less time for it than I used to do. A movie, unlike a TED talk, can be inherently transporting. The movie is not a medium but an end in itself, and the thoughts that watching a good movie inspires are not like the thoughts that one carries away from an enlightening lecture.

So my objection to TED talks in particular and to audiovisual presentations of information generally is two-edged. First, they take too much time. Second — and this is what’s wrong with being transported by a slideshow — they convey an illusory mantle of expertise. The bad thing that you take from a satisfying lecture is the half-conscious sense that you now understand something that you didn’t before. But this is to beggar any meaningful conception of “understanding.” What you learn from a truly good lecture is that you understand very little. If you want to understand more, you’re going to have roll up your sleeves and make a lot of decisions: whom to ask for advice about what to research, how to find out about useful projects that might be able to use your help, or whether you ought to pursue an advanced degree. Chatting agreeably with friends afterward over a glass of wine does not constitute understanding.

Kathleen and I have only one political difference: “Just once,” Kathleen moans, “I’d like to vote for someone I really liked.” I, for my part, can’t imagine such a development — as a matter of principle, anyway. As a matter of fact, I’ve always liked Michael Bloomberg, as mayor. I don’t really care to know him, or any other elected official, any better than that. I believe in impersonal politics! Once, over at the Lexington Candy Shop, Rudolph Giuliani, then a district attorney, walked in to canvass  the joint, and I couldn’t bear him from that moment on. I would be horrified to learn that a friend (or, more likely, a friend’s child) was running for office.

Thinking about the transports into which TED talks propel enthusiastic audiences, I can only imagine the shudder with which the Founders would have responded to the discovery, not yet made in their time, that highly-educated men (and women) of property can be swayed by savvy political appearances. Would it have mitigated or intensified their horror to know that very few people are ever transported across party lines?

***

Whenever I try to think of ways to fix the United States, I always bump up against states, and the preposterous meaningless boundaries with respect to population. History advises me that no one is ever going to redraw those lines. Montana will always be a big emptiness in the middle of nowhere, with two votes in the Senate.

It occurred to me yesterday that we might tackle the problem from the other direction. Create six to ten superstates, each centered on a major metropolitcan area, and give each one a clutch of extra senators. Work out the details and put the proposal into one tidy Constitutional Amendment. See how it goes. Most Americans would see their voting power shoot up, and swing states would be a thing of the past. Along with a lot of other headaches.

Happy Fourth!

The first thing that I read when I got this week’s New Yorker up to the apartment was  Nathan Heller’s “Listen and Learn,” a report on TED. If you don’t know what TED is, I am not going to help you. (Not here. If I ever make more considered use of this entry’s material, I will at least throw in a link.) It just seems that explaining TED in a blog entry, at this moment in time, is much like reminding you to turn on your computer. 

I haven’t watched much in the way of TED talks, partly because the ones that I did see were powerful contributors to my decision to resist all visual aids in the development of my fach. Aside from the photographs that decorate this site, and that have nothing to do with the written contents, perhaps even offering a haven of carefree purposelessness from the sea of memory and interrogation that pours out of me — aside from them, nothing. I’m like The New Yorker itself in the old days: no photographs and few drawings (aside, of course, from the “drawings”). That’s because I believe that visual display is profoundly distracting from the enterprise of sharing and parsing ideas. To grasp an idea, you must close your eyes — close your eyes, that is, in the act commonly known as “reading.” You must, in the course of bringing words to life in your brain, imagine an environment other than the one in which you’re reading. Sometimes it’s fun; often it’s hard work. There is reason to believe that there is a correlation between hard work and real learning. Learning is put to the test by doing. Where ideas are considered, writing is doing. As you’re no doubt aware, writing is even harder work than serious reading.

Watching someone tell an interesting story (which can be about anything in the world) is never going to be hard work. There is only one thing to learn from a TED talk: that you did or did not enjoy yourself while it lasted. As with sex, learning is slightly beside the point.

***

Heller is brilliant about TED.

The TED talk is today a sentimental form. Once, searching for transport, people might have read Charles Dickens, rushed the dance floor, watched the Oscars, biked Mount Tamalpais, put on Rachmaninoff, put on the Smiths, played Frisbee, poured wine until someone started reciting “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.” Now there is TED.

Transport. Yes. No thanks.

***

My disaffection with TED talks began long before I ever saw one, back in the mid-early days of The New Yorker Festival. Over three years, I attended ever more events, beginning with one and ending with six. Most of the events were literary in nature — or were billed as such. The first that I attended was a reading Edward T Jones (and was Jonathan Lethem there, too? I don’t remember.) At the last one, John Ashbery read some of his poems. It was at the New York Public Library, shortly before the Ashbery reading, that I came to the end of my Festival line. The hall was packed — not that this was a discomfort — and someone was interviewing Calvin Trillin, who of course was making the audience laugh a lot. (I remember a string of jokes about the “wily and parsimonious Victor Navasky,” then the publisher of The Nation.) Something about the laughter began to put me off. I was as entertained as anyone, but was the search for entertainment what had gotten me out of the house early on a weekend morning? Did I regard Calvin Trillin as an entertainer? No, as it happens, I didn’t, and I don’t. He is a writer — a very amusing one, certainly — whose presence adds little to the zing of his written words.

If I am going to see Calvin Trillin, then I want to meet Calvin Trillin, to sit down and talk with him. I realized two things at the Library. First, much as I enjoyed Trillin’s writing, I did not feel an urge to know him better. Jonathan Franzen — now there’s someone I’d like to talk to. I think. I have always wanted to have a conversation with Sigourney Weaver — about her father, perhaps the most deeply disappointed man in the history of television. (That is my inference, at least. I’d like to hear what she thinks, and what she saw growing up.) I did once have a sensationally fun conversation with Kate Christensen; I was able to tell her that I’d read all her books because my daughter and her first editor were college chums. In the aftermath of Netherland, I’m afraid that Joseph O’Neill might have come to fear that I was stalking him, but he very graciously granted my eccentric request for a signature on page 135 of my copy of his novel. And I cannot deny that bandying a word or two with Colm Tóibín has colored my reading of his work; it most certainly has done, and I’m grateful. I no New Critic, determined to reject any and all information about an artist extrinsic to the artwork itself. Heavens, no! But in each of the foregoing instances (all of them retailed pretty much the next morning, long ago in these pages), there was a personal encounter in which the writer, however forgettably, met me. The exchange was two-way, and we are the only two people who had it. The twinkle of that kind of memory was entirely absent from the experience of watching Calvin Trillin be witty.

***

I completely agree with Sir Ken Robinson’s views on public education. “I think you’d have to conclude that the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” Education, as it’s dished out today, almost anywhere, is wasted upon most of its reluctant recipients, and the university professors aren’t going to notice or care. Functionally, public education amounts to little more than day care for older children. A school that provides more than day care, and provides it consistently even to a quarter of its students, is a marvel. I may look up Sir Ken; I’ll certainly look out for signs of his impact on public education. But I am not going to look at his TED talk, which Heller says is “the most-viewed TED talk of all time.” I’m not in need of transport.

***

It appears (see yesterday’s entry) that I am not going the way of Nora Ephron, whatever the state of my platelets. Not yet. I’m slightly abashed about having brought the visit up at all, and I’ll try not to say anything about next week’s (routine) colonoscopy.

Later this morning, I’m due at the doctor’s, to have blood taken. The blood that was taken when I had the infusion of Remicade two weeks ago showed an abnormally low (but just abnormal) platelet count, which could mean, as the rheumatologist put it on the phone, “nothing,” or it could, I surmise, mean that I’m going the way of Nora Ephron. Life is so exciting!

I wonder if anyone one finds it strange that I have not mentioned the Affordable Care Act in these pages, not once, I believe. I am certainly not opposed to its provisions, and I was as pleasantly surprised as anyone by Chief Justice Roberts’s unexpected support for the Act as a tax. But ever since “health care” was very prematurely rushed into Congress for its peculiar brand of intensive care, in the early days of Bill Clinton, it has been so clear to me that charging for health care properly must precede paying for it that I can take no interest in the schemes that have been unrolled over the ensuing two decades. They’re all definitively stupid, in that they attempt to bandage bruises from the knockings of a congeries of medical practices that was never designed to work smoothly or consistently for a large number of patients. On the contrary, it was designed, to the extent that it was designed at all, to provide the executives of large corporations with free health care: a classic example of American socialism for the rich.

But no one seems at all interested in the history of our medical plant. How did it become what it is? I don’t think that arrangements for the equitable payment of doctors’ and hospitals’ bills can be made by people who have never given that question much thought.

Taking a walk after lunch the other day, I was arrested by a forgotten but instantly familiar sight: a truck painted orange and emblazoned with the Auer’s logo. Not surprisingly, the truck was parked along Gracie Square (the last block of East 84th Street, between East End Avenue and the East River); the firm speicalizes in upscale moving.

Two houses down Hathaway Road from our first house in Bronxville (Eastchester really), in a much prettier little house (Nº 23, if you want to stroll along in street view; we were at 29), lived the Auers, Mr and Mrs, an elderly couple. I would guess that Mr Auer was the founder, or co-founder, of what is still the family business; by 1955, when we moved to Hathaway Road, he was retired, and the moving company was run by his son — I am also surmising. I so surmise because of the occasional appearance of the Auers’ grandson, known as GJ. I suppose GJ came to spend the odd week with his grandparents, perhaps because his parents still lived in the city — probably not far from where I’ve been living all this time. GJ was a bit older than I was, and taller and leaner, as I remember, and very lively; and I remember getting into trouble for doing something with him. I was about eight years old at the time, and the world of forbidden things was immense, but doing anything at all with GJ would probably have been enough. The Auers were “from the city.” This was not a class problem but a “ways” problem. Our ways were not their ways.

My mother’s fear and loathing of New York was one of the differences between us that I never understood while she was alive. That’s to say that I didn’t see it. When she complained about the city, I imagined that, if whatever she was complaining about were fixed, then she would stop complaining and start enjoying the place, because how could you not? She could not. Her childhood was spent in Wilmette, a suburb of Chicago comparable to Bronxville in many superficial ways, but ultimately quite incomparable because of the difference, not really measurable to my mind, between Chicago and New York. You hear a lot of talk about New York versus LA (or you used to do), but LA is just another Long Island sprawl populated by thinning ranks of overlooked locals by the vacationers from New York. New York and Chicago are the American antitheses, or would be, if New York were really American. Chicago is really American.

My mother eventually found happiness in Houston. Even then, I didn’t see her fear and loathing of New York for what it was. I was confused by her readiness to jump on one of the company planes at the drop of a hat for a jaunt to the Big Apple. I didn’t understand that she liked going because what she liked even better was coming back, and coming back loaded with goodies. Kron’s chocolate — that was a big deal for a while. Tortellini were another. My mother had a dish of them at Barbetta (natch) and “found out” where to buy them “wholesale.” I wasn’t paying a lot of attention by this time, so I can’t say from memory how many dozens of boxes she flew down to Houston, but I’m sure that the number was exaggerated.

My mother loved visiting New York. But she hated living anywhere near it.

***

My father, I think, was indifferent to New York. It didn’t bother him. He was where he was. Until he felt that his game was falling apart, he liked best being on a golf course. I didn’t understand this, either, but that’s another matter. My father’s fears and loathings remained unknown to me. He seemed naturally confident always — a fine Midwestern bluff. There was one exception, in the last years at the Hathaway Road house, when as part of his job he began to have to address the security analysts on an annual basis. Did what I just say mean anything to you? It sounds Egyptian even to me. Security analysts? Who were they? How to describe them in today’s terms? I must ask Fossil Darling. In any case, I expect that my father was addressing the New York Society of Security Analysts (they seem to be CFAs now). Not a natural public speaker, at least in his own mind, my father rehearsed his speeches by delivering them into a microphone attached to a cassette recorder (new at the time, and “cheap.”) He stood at the tall dresser in his bedroom and pretended that it was a lectern.

My memory of these rehearsals is corrupt and contradictory. Did I ever try to listen to one of the speeches all the way through? If I did, I wasn’t allowed to do it again — or would I have wanted to? I had no idea what my father was talking about, except that in some extremely obscure way he was making a sales pitch. He was touting the stock of the company for which he worked — but of course I wouldn’t have known to put it that way then. But it was the one time that I actually watched my father work. So this was what he did! Well, it was something. Everything else that he did was done in an office in the city, to which he was not unhappy about commuting every day, invisible and impalpable.

(He was very fond of telling a story about his father-in-law, who, after the War, decided to cut down on commuting time and get to work earlier by moving into the city. He took at an apartment in Sutton Place shortly before I was adopted. After two years or so, he gave it up and moved back to Bronxville. It turned out that he was spending the commuting time by sleeping late and lounging over breakfast. I don’t think that he cared for the city much, either. I think that my father liked this story because it cautioned him against suggesting anything of the same to my mother.)

I remember asking my father what a sinking fund was. It wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and it still isn’t.   

 

We don’t have the word. In French, formation can mean “training.” Déformation professionelle is therefore a clever description of the ways in which a profession, especially an inward-looking one, can warp an exponent’s outlook. I’ve been inspired to take the idea a step further, to suggest that an élite can fall into the trap of mis-training its cadets, going in as it were. Instead of teaching them what they’ll need to know, it teaches them — something else. Something like Latin, Greek, and rugby. That the thesis behind Kwasi Kwarteng’s intriguing examination of six colonial muddles, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern Age. Even today, Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan and Nigeria all bear the unhealed wounds of imperial interference and mismanagement (the sixth case, Hong Kong, makes a wickedly ironic contrast). Another thing that they have in common is the overwhelmingly public-school background of the Englishmen responsible. Kwarteng is not wrong to see a connection.

Instead of developing an overarching imperial policy and making sure that it was implemented, Whitehall relied on the holders of a narrowly-defined set of credentials to run the Empire. Anyone capable of surviving the rigors of the great public schools and of earning a decent degree at Oxford or Cambridge — and especially anyone who could add to these achievements the glory of a “blue” — was deemed the best candidate for an administrative position, and administrators were vested with vast discretion. Kwarteng talks of “individualism,” and that may be appropriate in a British context, but, as an American, what I see is widespread uniformity of outlook coupled with a rather naive faith in “initiative.” To complete an education that was at least as demanding athletically (and socially, as in “team spirit”) as it was academically was regarded as proof of all-purpose good judgment. And why not? The British Empire did not include England itself. Nor did it include the Anglophone Dominions that were established in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand with a view to avoiding further mutinies on the American model. The British Empire included only lands inhabited by human beings thought to be ineffably inferior to the cream of civilized manhood skimmed from England’s venerable schools. Anyone from that class of gentleman was surely entitled to govern the rest of the world.

The frequent reversals in local policy that Kwarteng laments — the most ruinous, probably, was effected in Sudan, where a “Southern Policy” was reversed after sixteen years of thorough implementation — resulted not from an excess of individuality in imperial staff but from the accidents of personal outlook (which may be what Kwarteng means by “individuality”). One man might be attracted to Islam, and another hate it; neither disposition would be the result of their studiedly aloof schooling. Such differences appear to have been regarded almost as hobbies, as innocent and inconsequential eccentricities. But such was the power vested in imperial administrators that slight irregularities in the overall uniformity of their background could produce sharp contrasts. In Hong Kong, a governor capable of speaking several dialects of Chinese was succeeded by one who could manage no more than “the easy parts of a newspaper.” Any genuine individualists, it seems to me, would have been weeded out in the vetting process.  

Kwarteng’s conclusion about Hong Kong encapsulates the whole book.

Hong Kong’s history goes to the heart of the nature of the British Empire. In reversion to China under a regime of “benign authoritarianism,” the term Chris Patten used to describe British rule, shows a remarkable continuity. Hierarchy, defence, government by elite administrators, united by education in the same institutions, in largely the same subjects, were all features of British imperial rule which were also characteritic of officials in imperial China. The story of Hong Kong also confirms the enormous power wielded by colonial governors. If Sir Mark Young had been succeeded by administrators who shared his vision, the history of Hong Kong might well have been very different. Lastly, Hong Kong showed, in many ways, how changes in Britain were not reflected by changes in the wider empire. Patten was a child of the liberal 1960s and blindly believed a version of his country’s history that presented the British Empire as an enlightened liberal force, spreading democracy and freedom to the furthese shores of the earth. Margaret Thatcher had grown up through the Second World War, listening to, and believing, Churchill’s late Victorian rhetoric that invoked Shakespeare’s “sceptered isle” imagery; she genuinely shared the Whiggish notion that British history, with its Magna Carta and Glorious Revolution, was the story of the development of “freedom” and liberal democratic ideas of government. So far as this idea was true for Britain, it did not apply to any real extent to the administration of the British Empire, which was always a wholly different political organization from Britain itself. The British Empire had nothing to do with liberal democracy and, particularly in Hong Kong, was administered along lines closer to the ideals of Confucius than to the vivid, impssioned rhetoric of Sir Winston Churchill, or even Shakespeare.

I harp on “individualism” not because I disagree with Kwarteng’s thesis — I don’t — but because I believe that there are lessons in Ghosts of Empire that Americans need to learn, and that “individualism” will get in the way of the learning. Not only does a preponderance of leading business executives share advanced degrees from a handful of elite institutions, but the training provided by these schools is itself blinkered by elitism — by the conviction that their faculties know best what they ought to teach. As a result, few professors at our great law and business schools have anything like the practical experience that we insist upon for doctors and engineers. (Many of the former, I would venture, have never spent any significant time outside the academy.)

We learned long ago, from A Jewel in the Crown, that the Empire provided an exalted way of life to Englishmen and -women of unremarkable middle-class backgrounds. Kwasi Kwarteng shows that it also provided an outlet for their autocratic impulses. Perhaps the empire came to be seen as a perversion of British life precisely because it filtered out upstarts and grandees from the sceptered isle.

***

TK

Last week, Felix Salmon published an essay about the Jonah Lehrer kerfuffle — which I haven’t followed. This gist of it seems to be that Jonah is “guilty” of (self-) plagiarism, by virtue of repeating himself at The Frontal Cortex. Felix’s suggestion is to treat the blog, whether as author or as reader, as a notebook. It ought to record the blogger’s thoughts on his reading; it ought to link to online material wherever possible, and it ought to engage with comments and blog entries elsewhere that its entries have inspired.

Wonderful advice, and, oh! how I’m going to try to follow it. But I already know how difficult it is. How difficult, that is, to override the impulse to compose — to think of — entries as essays, or, at a minimum, as carefully-written letters to attentive correspondents. I’d like nothing better than to pile up my daily observations on this and that, but the effort of making them coherent to myself a week later would paralyze me with unrealistic obligations.

As to linking and following comments, this is far from convenient, even at this stage of the blogging project. Perhaps it is difficult for me, because of my age and the self-conscious nature of my endeavors here. (Not that they feel self-conscious to me.) I can imagine a number of technological advances that are unaccountably not being made, but then it’s very likely that I’m a market of one. I was thinking, over the weekend, how handy it would be to dictate into my smartphone throughout the day. When I sat down to prepare an entry, the words would meet me on the screen, already laid out more or less comprehensibly, and a little light editing would finish them for blogging purposes. (A podcast might also be generated as a byproduct, again automatically.) This would spare my writing energy, the time that I spend composing sentences and paragraphs and, yes, essays for the Web site writing that I never seem to get round to. It is maddening that this facility is not to hand.

Nevertheless, I shall renew the effort.

***

One problem that I have never solved is the matter of when a daily entry ought to be written. At the moment, I am writing entries the day before publication, so that I can begin the day without any distracting urgency. It also allows me to add to the entry as the day goes on, before anyone has seen the whole; it is only at the weekends that I’m willing to ask readers to look at an entry a second or third time, to see if I’ve added anything (how conceited this sounds!). What I do on the weekends is an uneasy, but to date the most agreeable, compromise between my desire to present fresh material every day and my need to have a life, especially on weekends.

***

I seem to be reading a dozen books all at once. Out of the blue, madly seeking a slim volume that I might carry along to babysitting the other night, I grabbed the latest edition of E H Carr’s very important 1961 lectures, What Is History? I’ve had the book for a few years now, on the recommendation of I forget whom; I feel awfully stupid for not having read it sooner. In the first two lectures, Carr deals with the problem of “historical facts” — what are they? — and sensibly concludes that they are facts that have become interesting to historians.

The layman imagines, as indeed the early nineteenth-historians believed, that the historian unearths facts from archives, more or less as a matter of looking things up, but anyone with a real interest in the subject knows that this is barely the beginning. One of the most curious books in my library is Eleanor Shipley Duckett’s Death and Life in the Tenth Century (Ann Arbor; 1967, 1988), a very readable account of the pivotal century in European history. Readable, yes; reliable, no. Duckett simply copies out monastic annals, and takes every document at face value. As a convenient account of the surviving writings of the time, Death and Life is probably invaluable, but it is not what we mean by history. I should venture that the number of historical facts pertaining to Europe in the Tenth Century is frightfully small.

As an example of the larval historical fact, Carr mentions the demise in 1850 of a ginger-bread vendor, kicked to death by a mob, at a place called Stalybridge. This event has, Carr notes, been picked up and examined by a colleague, Kitson Clark. Whether or not it becomes a historical fact is entirely a matter of other historians’ agreeing with Clark that it is noteworthy. (On the strength of the Wikipedia entry for Stalybridge — later swallowed up by Manchester — it appears not to have done so, for what that’s worth.)

The second lecture, “Society and the Individual,” thrashes out conundrums that are still being thrashed out today — one wonders what is keeping them alive. Like “nature” versus “nurture,” the distinction between society and the individual is profoundly bogus; there are no individuals acting apart from and outside society, and there are no inchoate “vast, impersonal forces” driving society. Anonymous, perhaps, but not impersonal. Is it difficult for many people to bear these fatally simple-sounding dichotomies in the reciprocity that makes sense of them?

Carr is a very good writer, and must have been an entertaining speaker. The odd thing about his little book is that we still need it.

***

In the late afternoon, three boxes of books arrived, almost all of them from across the sea. Many were purchased at the instigation of Diana Athill, so let’s blame her. How else would I have heard of Timothy Mo, whose An Insular Possession promises to be a good read about Hong Kong. Gitta Sereny I mentioned yesterday; today she appeared. Also, Tessa Hadley’s The London Train, which I mean to read in light of Elizabeth Taylor’s fiction. Kathleen had asked for some one-volume histories of England, and I seem to have covered the range; last week, the Oxford History of Britain, edited by Kenneth Morgan, arrived in its imposing thickness (the British do thick paperbacks so much better than we do), while, today, Simon Jenkins’s very pretty (and pretty insubstantial A Short History of England came in. You might think that I’d have had a good history of England on the shelves, but I was much too cool for that; I required volumes on reigns and epochs. The Oxford is a collection of ten chapters, each written by a different historian, running from 55 BC to the present. Until a few minutes ago, I was lost in Paul Langford’s discussion of Walpole.

Also, and this from Alibris, Robert Liddell’s The Last Enchantments.

Is it me, or is it the newspaper? Some days — most days — there’s nothing much worth reading; the headlines and lead sentences serve to reinforce my awareness of issues and personalities, but provoke no commentary. Every once in a while, though, the Times seems to burst with good stories. Now I think of it, this is most likely to happen on a Sunday.

There were five good pieces in yesterday’s Times. There was the Gitta Sereny obituary, more interesting than it might have been, perhaps, because I was just reading Diana Athill’s memoir of working with Sereny on the publication of her first big book, Into That Darkness, about the conscience of a Holocaust functionary. In the final paragraphs, Sereny’s “secret” — the power that enabled her to stare into “that darkness” — was revealed.

“I know this is difficult to believe, but I’m really, in the old sense of the word, quite a gay person,” she told the newspaper The Scotsman in 2000. “I’m very optimistic. About the world. About people. I believe the majority of people are good.”

Though Ms. Sereny chose to spend her professional life steeped in evil, she said that her calling had little effect on her own temperament.

I’ve got a copy of Into That Darkness on order. 

Then there was Ken Johnson’s essay on LeRoy Neiman. Why, or in what way, was Neiman a “bad artist”? What does that mean? And how come the art world has no widely-respected figures comparable to Wes Anderson in film and Richard Ford in literature? Johnson puts his finger on it: “But there was nothing in his work to upset the couch potato’s televisual worldview.” But why is it important for fine artists to disturb viewers? Contemporary art has a commitment to discomfort that I expect will be seen as somewhat perverse by future generations, much like the Mannerist penchant for masculine bodies with notional female breasts. I don’t care much for LeRoy Neiman’s subject matter, but (much to my shame) I consistently found his pictures exhilarating.   

***

The long story about Sandy Springs, Georgia, couldn’t have been more timely — for me. I’ve made an almost everyday habit of querying the business organizations around me and asking, why can’t they be not-for-profit? In what way do investors improve the way a given operation runs? Well, they’re the source of cash, obviously, but what do they contribute beyond that? Not much that I can see. A one-time grant might serve just as well. The grant might come from the government, or it might come from a philanthropist, but, either way, the undertaking — an apartment house, a movie theatre, a dry-cleaner, a grocery store — could thereupon go about its business without any distractions from its core objectives of providing services at prices that brought in sustaining revenues. There would be no need to grow. The original grant might be repaid over time, like bond debt, and then retired forever.

The same goes for many “governmental” functions, and the Sandy Springs story underlines the other improvement that I have in mind, which is that business operations — especially those the provide fundamental services such as power and water supply and waste disposal — ought to be run by people who have been educated to run them. The outfits that provide Sandy Springs with its outsourced services may or may not be any good at what they’re doing; I’m not as willing as Georgians are to trust the free market to maintain quality. I don’t like those pesky investors lurking in the background, with their itch to maximize profits. And I don’t know anything about the people who are doing the work. How have they been trained? The more I consider the matter, the more clearly I see the enormously stabilizing insitution most hated by modern economics: the guild. The more attractive price-fixing becomes.

In any case, you can see that I did not draw the usual conclusions from the Sandy Springs story.

***

I even read Thomas Friedman’s column, something that I never do. “The Rise of Popularism” is, for the most part, the usual huffenpuff about abstractions. Friedman doesn’t even run with the story that ought to have popped out at him when he typed the words, “generational shift.” That’s probably because, as one of the Baby Boomers whose wastrel ways he decries, he doesn’t care to consider generational shifts that might succeed him. Instead of lamenting the absence of truth-telling leaders in his own generation, he ought to have exhorted those who have grown up with all the new modcons, those who have never known a world without keyboards, screens, and touchpads, to consider the practical merits of candor and honesty in a deeply connected world.

***

Finally: Tek Young Lin, a highly-esteemed, retired English teacher and cross-country coach at Horace Mann, about whom “whispers” arose in the wake of the newspaper’s recent account of long-ago sexual predation at the school. “In those days, it was very spontaneous and casual, and it did not seem really wrong,” Mr Lin now remarks. Breathtaking, no? No denial, no regret. It appears that Mr Lin never forced himself on any student (whatever that means), and that while at least one student may have been scarred by his preliminary advances, no one who consented to have sex with him (if we can allow that to be said for the moment) regretted it. These factors purify the object lesson, because even without the abuse of power that’s surely the most revolting feature of sexual predation, Mr Lin’s conduct remains objectionable.

“In those days,” of course, any kind of homosexual contact was very wrong indeed, by most accounts. It can only have seemed otherwise in the elite atmosphere that Mr Lin breathed — an atmosphere that would shortly bring about a revolution in our judgments about other people’s carnality. A great many things that were forbidden then are tolerated now, and not just tolerated, but formally overlooked, as of no account. But one taboo has taken clear and definite shape, as if drawing into itself all the power shed by abandoned proscriptions. That is the ban on pedophile sex, a ban that takes on an even sharper point where those charged with the upbringing of children violate it.

Tek Young Lin is no longer one of those so charaged; he has been retired for over twenty-five years. It seems that he won’t be prosecuted for his “indiscretions,” and I’m comfortable with that, because the gift of Mr Lin’s story is the insight that it gives into the nature of history itself, and of how things change. What he did was never all right, but the nature of its being not all right has changed. The only thing that would have improved the irony of the story would have been Mr Lin’s teaching history.