A package in the mail the other day brought Season 6 of Lewis. Also: Endeavour (the Origins of Inspector Morse). The first and the last — the latest, anyway — but no middle. I never imagined that there would be as many as twenty-three episodes of Lewis, but I’m delighted that it has caught on. For all the echoes of Morse, it’s a different show, partly because it reflects changes in society. Young people are less innocent but more vulnerable. Old people tend to behave better, as if grateful to have been allowed to stay alive. And there is none of Morse’s explosiveness. Kevin Whately’s Lewis is not a haunted man. He is a much better boss that Morse was, and his fights with his boss (Rebecca Front) are reasonable, not hormonal. Some may sense a loss from the excitement of John Thaw’s presence. I’m more intrigued by the durability of narrative.  

 “Endeavour,” it will be recalled, was Inspector Morse’s never-mentioned-except-once Christian name, given to him by his Quaker mother. Women were always asking him what his name was and he was always too shy of being ridiculous to reveal it. Endeavour tells the story of how a disaffected young detective, stationed in some back-of-beyond hell-hole, comes into his own when he is detached to a murder investigation in Oxford. It is 1965 or so. I ought to be able to say just exactly when, but I can’t, precisely because I lived through all of that, pop music and Viet Nam, and I was bored to death by it.  What a cheesy time! The only good-looking thing in all of Endeavour (thing, that is;  Flora Montgomery was lovely) was the Jaguar driving by Morse’s sympa temporary boss, Fred Thursday.

Thursday is played by Roger Allam, whom I always recognize but can never place. I rather lazily decided that I’d seen him one of the Jane Tennison mysteries with Helen Mirren. Not too far wrong: the character whom Ms Mirren was playing when Mr Allam addressed her as ‘ma’am’ was in fact Her Majesty the Queen. (He was her press secretary.) Way back in 1997, Mr Allam appeared in one of the last episodes of Morse, “Death Is Now My Neighbour.” Born in 1953, he still looked young in 1997. He has a magnificent, almost singing voice, although of course the role of DI Thursday doesn’t call for much of that.

The young Morse is played by Shaun Evans. You may remember him from Being Julia, in which he played the callow American opportunist, Tom, the boy who has a rejuventing affair with the great actress played, greatly, by Annette Bening. Among many other things that he rejuvenates is her capacity for nuclear humiliation — one of the grandest finales of any movie ever. Mr Evans is a lot leaner now, and not at all puppyish. He brought to Morse a rangy, unleashed air that, if it never brought John Thaw directly to mind (Thaw was Morse), was never a discredit to the late actor’s work. At the end, Friday asks Morse where he wants to be in twenty years, and Morse, driving the Jaguar, adjusts the rear-view mirror. I burst into tears at what he saw, but I was well primed by a story that skillfully wove Morse’s well-known passions (opera, crosswords) together  with his ambivalence about the University and his aversion to police routine.

***

M le Neveu is in town. We haven’t seen him in a long time. (He has been working in Frankfurt and in Montreal.) It’s hard to believe that eleven years have passed since he embarked on his advanced degrees at Columbia! (But it was even harder for him to imagine my holding him in my arms, when he was just a few weeks old, way back in 1979.) He came for dinner on Sunday night, and yesterday afternoon he and I had an open-ended, all-afternoon lunch. I can’t believed that I lived to write about it! I do miss having him around. Who else would make me sit up straight by calling me (as he once did, at the dinner table, at the climax of a heated discussion) “a radical and a fool”?

The other night, waiting for dinner, I embarked on a reading of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s fiction by opening her 1935 novel, A House and Its Head. This has recently been republished, with an afterword by Francine Prose, by NYRB. I wanted to start with something that I hadn’t read before, not that I’ve read very much. I’d like to rediscover her, if that’s possible, in light of Elizabeth Taylor’s enthusiasm.

I made my way through the first chapter without two much effort. We are introduced to the Edgeworths, in a fashion that strikes me (in my limited knowledge) as typical of Compton-Burnett, at the beginning of a meal, in this case breakfast on Christmas Day, 1885. Duncan is the irritating paterfamilias; I can’t tell yet how much of a tyrant he is, even if he does toss someone’s present, a book whose atheistical subject-matter offends him, onto the fire. Ellen, vaguely, is his wife. Two daughters, each on the other side of twenty, are Nance and Sibyl. Nance demonstrates a certain outspokenness. Their cousin, Grant, is their father’s heir, so far as the estate’s entail go; I believe that he is something of a reprobate.

It is not until the second chapter (which I didn’t finish) that we meet the butler, a woman called Bethia. Her position is explained in a paragraph of one sentence: “The family income had lessened with the depression of the land, and the house was run on women servants.” Bethia’s appearance is preceded by a plethora of new characters, who gather outside the church after morning service. i think that I’m going to need a diagram. There is Oscar, the (unbelieving) vicar, his mother, Gretchen Jeckyll (did ICB know Gertrude Jeckyll?), his sister, Cassandra, who is still governess to the Edgeworth girls and who still lives in their house, although she must have spirited out for the holiday in order to miss breakfast in the first chapter. There is the local doctor, Fabian Smollett, and his “cousin and wife,” Florence. Then there’s the Burtenshaw contingent: Alexander, his daughter, Rosamund (a provider of religious tracts), and his niece, Beatrice Fellowes, who is “more generally seen as cousin to his daughter.” Finally, Mr and Mrs Bode, and their children Almeric and Dulcia. Almeric and Dulcia! What is Compton-Burnett thinking? You have to work out who everyone is — I wouldn’t swear to it that Florence is the doctor’s wife — and in the end the novelist’s descriptions of each new face have melted into a puddle of not very helpful terms. Take Rosamund’s “high, set colour.” What’s that supposed to mean?

And the things they all say: platitudes and commonplaces with razor-sharp frankness.

Dulcia entered this room in a hearty manner.

“We are fortunate to have something to fill up Christmas afternoon. It is an occasion which seems to partake of the nature of an anticlimax. We know it will anyhow not do that today.”

“I believe we have offered ourselves,” muttered Almeric.

You must be fiendishly attentive. If you miss “this room” and read it as “the room” instead, you’ll miss that the scene has changed from the dining room to the schoolroom, and you’ll wonder why Duncan, who shortly before Dulcia’s arrival (in the schoolroom) made a trenchant remark, is suddenly complaining, from the next room, about the noise being made by the young people.

It all reads like A rebours, as reconceived by Edward Gorey in The Curious Sofa.

I read on through the fourth chapter. Nothing happens; Ellen dies. That’s one of Compton-Burnett’s tricks, to make non-events of things like death. It seems that Ellen has been wasting away, and that no one in the family has noticed. (Duncan’s disregard for Ellen is marked from the very beginning.) I suppose that you imperceivably waste away in 1885; certainly nobody expects Dr Smollett to do much of anything, beyond officiating, as if death were a ritual to be overseen by a medical man instead of a priest. Duncan is ghastly, grudging his wife her illness and then simpering with self-condolence. (He will remarry soon, doubtless with a view to displacing Grant as his heir — and solipsistically unaware of running the risk that Grant might displace him.) The other thing that happens, sort of, is the round of Miss Fellowes’s proselytizing visits. The tedium of these occasions is amply demonstrated without, however, burdening the reader with much in the way of Miss Fellowes’s actual message.

That’s another one of Compton-Burnett’s tricks: she conjures the densely dull atmosphere of late-Victorian gentility, not, as you might expect, out of an excess of verbiage, but rather from its opposite, an insufficiency of supply. It is our straining to follow her exiguous clues to the narrative that makes us feel as oppressed as her characters. That’s the essence of her sly modernism, set entirely as it is in the puce twilight of a century that was tired of its own ambition. You’re both alienated from her people, and unable to escape them.

Of course, you could always put the book down, but for another trick: even without a pulse, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s fiction is electrifying.

***

 

Over the weekend, I read two very strong passages that collided with high impact. The first comes from early in Gillian Flynn’s, Gone Girl, a novel about a very unfortunate marriage. Nick, the husband, has come home, the previous day, to find his house in disarray and his wife unaccountably absent. By page 72, where the following passage appears, it is clear that Nick is no innocent babe, but then it’s also pretty clear that his wife isn’t, or wasn’t, either.

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child’s boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The second experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies; we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

This is what I was thinking about, yesterday, when I wrote about the degrading effect of television commercials. It isn’t just advertising, it’s the overwhelming power of modern media generally. I agree with Nick that it’s at least arguable that abuse of the visual cortex has sapped our humanity somewhat. I would go further, to my favorite conundrum, which is that reading, a subversion of vision, has precisely the opposite effect upon the imagination. And Diana Athill would be right there, with her memory of visiting Trinidad & Tobago.

That whole holiday was a joy, not only because it was my introduction to the beauties of tropical seas, shores, and forests, but because I knew the place so well. Of course I had always been aware of how well V S Naipaul and Michael Anthony wrote, but until I had stepped off an aeroplane into the world they were writing about I had not quite understood what good writing can do. There were many moments, walking down a street in Port of Spain, or driving a bumpy road between walls of sugar cane or under coconut palms, when I experienced an uncanny twinger of coming home, which made the whole thing greatly more interesting and moving than even the finest ordinary sightseeing can be.

This reminded me of my walks in Amsterdam last month. As usual when walking, I looked mostly at the pavement. Every now and then, I paused and looked around or ahead. It wasn’t terribly important; like Athill, I wasn’t sightseeing. I can’t point to a specific source of literary inspiration corresponding to Naipaul’s writing about Trinidad, but the atmosphere was clearly charged with the aftermath of words read and savored. I did have a moment that might have seemed to pop out of Nick’s catalogue of disappointments, my “Munt moment,” when I stand on a bridge over the Binnen Amstel and survey the scene that was displayed in a jigsaw puzzle that I worked on years ago. My Amsterdam cliché. I’d have to agree that the puzzle’s image is sharper and clearer, but it leaves out a lot of interesting noise that you have to be there to hear. How did you get there? Where are you headed? Those are just two of countless invisible details of the actual view.

Reading makes us think that we’re seeing things that aren’t there, but that’s not what’s happening. We’re not seeing anything; we’re assembling bits and pieces of images from our memory banks in an attempt to make sense of the words. And when we’ve made sense of the words, we’ve created new memories, thatched out of the words and what old memories they’ve prompted. It feels effortless to the experienced reader, but it is brain work all the same. It’s because of that work that the “real thing,” when we finally encounter it, will seem all the richer for the preparation. For writing tells us something that raw images never can: what it is like to live in a place. Images tend, if anything, to pre-empt that experience. All experience.

So I would say to the Nick Dunne’s of the world: turn off the TV and stop watching clips on the Internet. Cut back, anyway. And give reading a try. Reading about the Mona Lisa or the Pyramids will probably restore some of the freshness. Put your eyes to a better use.

Just two weeks ago, within the space of five days, I sat in a taxi that turned from Houston Street onto the Bowery. In the late afternoon light, the Empire State Building rose up in all of its simple but solid elegance, almost too good to be true, in the windshield. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen it before; it was that I was seeing it now.

***

 

For a Monday, the Times was downright exhilarating. Mind you, the news wasn’t all good. There’s an item right on the front-page fold that touches bottom for political cynicism, but I’ll come back to that. The real fun is on the last page. Now, I am far too old to respond to anything published on the Op-Ed page with even a flutter of hope, but I felt a puff of something very like hope when I read Bill Keller’s challenge to Cardinal Dolan: grant generous severance packages to nuns who must in good conscience leave the fold of Peter. Keller’s langauge is, as always, polite, but his proposition is brawling.

Thankfully, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York has offered us one possible remedy for this problem. As Laurie Goodstein documented in The Times recently, when he was archbishop of Milwaukee Dolan authorized payments of up to $20,000 to predator priests if they agreed to leave the clergy without resisting. He described this as “an act of charity.” Bill Donohue calls it “a severance package.”

I suggest that any long-serving nun who has come to find church teachings incompatible with her conscience should be offered a generous severance. We could call these acts of charity “Dolan Grants.” Surely a church that offers a lifeline to men who brought disgrace on the institution can offer a living stipend to women who brought it honor at great sacrifice.

The Cardinal’s almost certain disregard for such a scheme will only serve to underline the point of Keller’s piece.

Much as I wish I could encourage the discontented, the Catholics of open minds and open hearts, to stay put and fight the good fight, this is a lost cause. Donohue is right. Summon your fortitude, and just go. If you are not getting the spiritual sustenance you need, if you are uneasy being part of an institution out of step with your conscience — then go. The restive nuns who are planning a field trip to Rome for a bit of dialogue? Be assured, unless you plan to grovel, no one will be listening. Sisters, just go. Bill Donohue will hold the door for you.

As I say, I can’t hope that an Op-Ed piece will make any difference. But how wonderful it would be if Catholic readers took it to heart, and stopped complaining about an institution that can never be fixed, only abandoned. The priests and their acolytes have no intention of letting go, so they must be left behind. How significant they might remain is not really the question; the question is, how to participate in a just Church. Bill Keller is right: progressive Catholics can’t have their cake (Peter’s rock) and eat it, too. They’d have to break it first, and they haven’t the leverage for that operation. Let them stop whining. Let them stop fanning false hopes. Let them leave.

***

The cynical business appears in Peter Baker’s story about the problems of campaigning on foreign-affairs issues (which couldn’t interest American’s less at the moment) in a time of superpower shrinkage. Baker gets an expert on the phone.

“Both candidates have to pretend that the U.S. presidency is far more influential over events than it really is,” said Stephen D. Biddle, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. The obvious example is the European economic situation, which has profound implications for the American economy but is largely out of American hands.

“But to admit this is to look weak or to seem to evade responsibility,” Mr. Biddle said. “So both candidates tacitly agree to pretend that their policies are capable of righting the American economy while their opponent’s would sink it, when the reality is that both are in thrall to foreigners’ choices to a degree that neither would acknowledge.”

In other words: democracy for dummies? No. Democracy for people who have listened to too much advertising. Democracy for people who are used to hearing a tone — all’s right with the world — even when they don’t believe a word they’re hearing. Who shows up to hear Mitt Romney portray Barack Obama as a weakling? People who want to hear him say it, that’s who. People who need reassurance that someone is out there trying to make them feel good. That’s what advertising does, really. How bad can the world be if every other television spot features a low-slung automobile, hugging with its quiet roar a curvy road in the middle of nowhere? That you’re not in the market for cars, or couldn’t afford the one in the ad — that’s not the point, in the end. As long as major manufacturers spend wads of money on commercials (making them as well as broadcasting them), there’s nothing to worry about.

It’s the same thing in politics. As long as both sides “tacitly agree to pretend,” nobody has to worry about the sharp flying objects of genuine political upset. The only genuine issue in this year’s campaign is the constitution of the federal courts, which, should the Republicans regain the White House, will continue its slide into Gilded-Age obstructionism. How I wish I had the wherewithal to underwrite a political ad so beautifully crafted that it would mobilize Americans to vote to save the courts. It would be a dreadfully cynical step, but I’d stoop. Just the once.

The other day, a copy of Nicola Beauman’s biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor, arrived, and I have been wallowing — there is no other word — in the pleasure of reading it. How glad I am to have read all the novels, because they light up one by one behind the narrative. Taylor insisted that she made everything up but in fact she made up very little; almost everything in the novels appears to have been taken from life. Some people, such as her close friend Maud Eaton, were put to (very different) use in two novels, neither character particularly recognizable in the other.

The great question, of course, is why it has taken so long for Taylor to achieve the eminence that now seems fairly assured. A partial answer is that she stayed outside the literary world. She lived what looked like an upper-middle-class county life in Buckinghamshire, the wife of a prosperous businessman, raising two children and cooking meals. With defiant resolution, she undertook to unite the career of the writer with that of the homemaker. Even she herself thought that the experiment was crazy; a league of women writers living conventionally irregular lives in London rose up to denigrate her, to dismiss her as a writer for women’s magazines. (Everyone is a writer for women’s magazines.) In the end, she did not find a solution to the problem (which at one point Beauman calls reconciling modernism with “the woman’s novel”), but she wrote up the experiment, faithfully and fascinatingly, in book after book. Regular readers of this site ought to have no difficulty understanding why I find Elizabeth Taylor so compelling an artist.

Beauman’s praise for A Game of Hide and Seek, Taylor’s fifth novel, is so great that deprecates all the others by comparison, and precipitates Beauman’s conclusion — unstated so far — that Taylor was better at short stories than at novels. Since I haven’t read the stories, I can’t have an opinion; I can afford to be patient, because the stories are all coming out in one big book at the end of the month.

***

At the barbershop this morning, the radio — Pandora, Spotify, whatever — was set to play Greatest Classical Hits. When I took the chair, someone was playing Chopin’s best-known Nocturne (the second one), and then we had the “Meditation” from Thais, also nicely played. Then the bottom dropped out, with a shrill and mawkish adaptation of the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria.” Yikes, it was awful! Then a strange sequence of two bits from the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, separated by a mindless pause. Only a half-witted computer would have selected the next item in the sequence: the opening of Carmina Burana. This was followed by the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. I was gone before it ended. Lord ‘a’ mercy.

Every now and then I pick up a thick box of CDs to peruse the contents of some bargain-priced compilation of greatest hits. Or someone sends me a link, thinking that I might round out my collection without spending much money. It is rare that a so-called “Greatest Hit” would make my list of greatest hits, especially in excerpted form: it is utterly barbarous to listen to monumental finales such as the one to Beethoven’s Ninth without having heard the work that precedes it. (This is not to say that there are not symphonic movements that meaningfully stand alone. But the ones that do never seem to make the Great Hits cut.) I conclude that the “Greatest Hits” aesthetic, aside from being a contradiction in terms, takes shape in the minds of people who don’t know and don’t care much about serious music; what they’re after is the hookiness of pop. Hits are only rarely longer than the typical pop song, and for the matter of that they tend toward the songlike — see the Nocturne, the “Meditation,” and the “Ave Maria” above.

While this was going on, another patron, about my age although possibly older (who can tell at this point; we all fall apart at such wildly different speeds) was nattering on about baseball games in a way that betrayed a preoccupation with winning. A Yankees fan, he joked a fair amount about the treachery of his grandsons, who favor the Mets. The jokes were phrased in terms of fear and trembling: when their team was losing, for example, the grandsons “went into hiding.” It was all very good-natured chit-chat, and I’m sure that the gentleman had no conception of the unconscious but relentless violence or the pathological obsession with competition that, for any attentive mind, poisoned his description of relations with young men whom he must in fact treasure. Why would anyone want to talk like that? Why is so much of what men have to say so utterly unconsidered?

From the pit of my lassitude I roused myself yesterday afternoon, to transact some overdue business. Renewing our Orpheus subscription, for one thing. (Ouch-makingly pricey.) And then, a call to renowned gastroenterologist Dr P* M*, for a slightly overdue you-know-what in July. (Cue the NuLytely infomercial!) Now all I need to worry about is the dentist. I really can’t talk about the dentist; legal issues might arise. The dentist himself is a perfect gent, but his technician — I think she hates me. She certainly makes me more uncomfortable than I’ve ever been during a routine cleaning. So I keep putting off going, and my inquiries about other dentists don’t go very far, because mine could hardly be much more convenient. Kathleen’s dentist, for example, is in Rockefeller Center.

Of course I immediately felt that I was to be commended for these bureaucratic exertions. Encore du champagne! I mean, I did put a lot of work into putting them off for so long. That was some arduous procrastination!

***

Because we dine on the late side, I’m not only ravenous at the end of the afternoon but obliged to do something about it. Every now and then I try to find a “healthy” snack, something that fills me up a bit without raising the cholesterol or salt levels. I should say at the outset that Fruit Doesn’t Work. Not by itself, anyway. So when I stopped in at Fairway after lunch yesterday, I looked over the bags of “mix,” as in “trail mix.” I bought a “health mix” that consists largely of soy nuts. And a small tub of Siggi’s plain yoghurt. I have always been mad for plain yoghurt, probably because I started eating it when the idea of swallowing housepaint would have been appealingly naughty. The sheer chalkiness is wonderful — medicinal, if in an entirely different way from Laphroaig.

And Siggi’s is the best yoghurt that I’ve ever eaten. If it were any thicker, you’d have to cut it with a knife. (It’s as thick and heavy as buttercream — but fat-free, of course.) I think that I shall stir a smidgeon of the health mix into it. Soy nuts are very small, aren’t they? (I’d never seen one.) Very easy to drop on the floor. Together with a dozen delicious red cherries, the snack was agreeable and sustaining. It’s what a truly health-conscious person would have for lunch.

***

The bad news about the layoffs at the Times-Picayune, following so fast on the bad news about printing cutbacks, has made me wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to get it over with and stop newspapers altogether. I’ve been so demoralized by the Times that I’ve wanted to crawl back into bed. The stories that weren’t downright dismaying — sexual predation on the Scout app; Maureen Dowd’s report from the Sandusky trial — make me feel old. Or rather, they make me feel that I don’t want to play at being young anymore. Too much work!  Being old is fine; it’s feeling out of it that rankles, and the Times has taken to rewarding my years of faithful attention by rubbing my nose in out-of-it-ness.

I took refuge in Philip en de anderen, the first novel of Cees Nooteboom. I can’t really read the text fluently, but I can make out a lot more than I thought I could; my French was almost this bad ten years ago. But even when I can make out the words, the meaning eludes me.

Ik was toen nog erg klein en ik kon niet bij de bel. Op de deur bonzen of met de brievenbus klepperen, soals ik anders altijd deed, durfde ik hier niet. Ten einde raad ben ik toen maar rond het huis gelopen. Mijn oom Alexander zat in een manke crapaud van verschoten paars pluche, met drie gelige antimakassars, en hij was inderdaad de vreemdste man die ik ooit geziet had.

I was very short at the time and I couldn’t reach the bell. To bang on the door or clap the letter box, as I would do anywhere else, I didn’t dare here. At my wits’ end, I walked around the house. My uncle Alexander sat in a lame squat armchair upholstered in faded purple plush, with three yellowing antimacassars, and he was indeed the strangest man I’d ever seen.

There’s something about the walking around the house that I must be getting wrong. Is Alexander sitting outside? And why would an armchair be “lame” (or “limping”)? I had to look up crapaud in Robert, where I found that it is indeed used with fauteuil to mean “squat armchair.” It’s all rather dream-like. I can’t find a copy of the English translation published in 1988, but I did find it in French at Alibris. Until it arrives, I’ll content myself with Nescio, who, after all, is said to be the “most beloved” Dutch writer, and whose stories I have in their fine NYRB trasnlation.

I’m this close to re-reading Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn.

This was probably not the best time to be reading about Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association broadcaster who has forged opposition to same-sex rights into the sharpest brand in the evangelical attempt to institute an American theocracy. I’m feeling wobbly enough as it is, and panic attacks are not helpful. That’s my first reaction to people like Fischer: panic. Monsters of wrong-headed self-assurance, they seem designed to prove the ancients right about the impracticability of democracy. I can only echo Fischer’s charge about President Obama, “who, I believe, despises this nation.” I certainly despise this nation, insofar as it endows Fischer’s organization with tax-free status and allows him to argue, on the airwaves (which are allotted in public trust), that, for example, First Amendment rights are available only to Christians and that men are superior to women. His ideas are ridiculous or treasonous or both — so why am I reading about him in The New Yorker? 

Having worked in radio myself, I am not surprised by the pile-up of talk celebrities with checkered pasts in other lines of work. Fischer, according to Jane Mayer’s profile, has consistently strained his relations with the organizations that employed him by insisting upon male supremacy. He simply refuses to subject himself to the authority of a woman. In this, he accords with most pious observers of the Abrahamic strictures. I panic because I grew up in a time when such piety was marginalized (as I believe it ought to be). This isn’t the place to consider how and why that changed, but of course it did change, and now there is only one reason for progressive optimism: opinion polls that align rigorous conservatism with age. Eventually, according to this prospect, the supporters of Bryan Fischer and others like him will die off. I should like to rest my hopes for the future on more positive developments than mass-mortality.

The nation seems divided between people who want to be left alone to do their thing, and who are willing to leave others alone to do theirs, on the one hand, and zealots who wish to impose Iron Age laws on everyone. The division is very far from equal, but the people who want to be left alone, are, ipso facto, unmotivated to take public action. Many of them are too busy following interesting HBO series to pay attention to the Fischers at work in the land. (Everyone who tells me how much “fun” Downton Abbey is seems bemused and wishful, as if things would be better if we could all live like that.) The hipsters who pipe up at The Millions and The Rumpus are preoccupied by job prospects, naturally, but I sense that, like sharp young people everywhere, they’re disinclined to engage with people who have invested in deeply uncool policies. Fischer’s evangelicals think there’s a war on, that the country is about to burn — and they’ll be happy to light the match. Who is going to stop them?

One thing that isn’t going to stop them is the passage of laws that they don’t like, laws permitting a fully equal distribution of civil rights among all citizens. That is only going to encourage them. Passing rightful laws is not enough. It is the beginning of the progressive project, not the climax. What follows the laws is the behavior that, over time, makes the laws unnecessary. But if no one is paying attention to good behavior, what then?   

***

Happily, the antidote to my panic attack, the intellectual Xanax, as it were, lay close to hand: Stuard Firestein’s Ignorance: How It Drives Science.  Science, as it has developed over the past four hundred years, begins with a proposition of general ignorance: nothing is known unless it has been tried. To put this even more sharply: nothing is really known until it has been disproven. We know that there is no such thing as phlogiston. What we know about oxygen is subject to further refinement. We may know all that we need to know about oxygen for the time being, but we don’t know everything about it, and we probably never will. Which is grand, because, as Firestein explains, scientists “don’t get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don’t care all that much for facts. It’s not that they discount or ignore them, but rather that they don’t see them as an end in themselves. They don’t stop at the facts; they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out.”

Bryan Fischer and people who regard him as an intelligent speaker clearly have an opposed view of knowledge. They believe that everything worth knowing was handed down to us long ago, in a book inspired by God. It’s a very attractive idea, and, because the Bible is actually a complilation of mutually inconsistent texts written over a long time and from changing points of view, its complications keep happily puzzled minds busy. It is no wonder that fundamentalist Christians try to discredit what I’ve just called Science, because Science insists on a complete disavowal of the Bible as a compendium of facts. There is, in fact, not one single fact in all of Scripture. That is the point, you might say; it is a work of faith. But the Bryan Fischers of this world want more than faith. They want knowledge. And they are right to discredit Science in this pursuit, for all that Science can give us, truly, is, as Stuart Firestein argues, Ignorance.

It’s because we don’t know right from wrong that we have worked out a number of conventions, most of them backed at one time or another by supernatural claims. In fact, it takes nothing but the modern imagination to understand that murder is wrong, and that no one occupies a position of inherent authority. It would be convenient if these conventions yielded compelling exceptions, but they don’t, ever. Murder is always and everywhere wrong. No one human being — and certainly no gang of human beings — has the right to take the life of another. (I believe that the complete denial of personal liberty known as modern incarceration is almost always wrong, too; prisons, I hope, will one day be seen as no less wicked than the machines of torture. But perhaps the world is not ready for that convention.) Most of our convetions are trivial, involving nothing more obscure nor less arbitrary than which side of the road to drive on. They change and improve along with our understanding. No divinity gave us a road map at the beginning of our journey, and nobody’s talk of one ought to impede our halting progress in reforming and recreating conventions that more closely answer our needs — one of which, certainly, is to live in a world without certainty. It’s precisely for that reason that the electric power must always spring on when summoned, and the water flow from the faucet. These sophisticated simplicities are the price of our everyday agnosticism, a negative capability, as Keats put it, to live with our very limited knowledge of the world. Those without the capability will have to find happiness in caves.  

Scouting through a short pile of books on Saturday, I came across one that I’d forgotten about, Colm Tóibín’s collection of essays about the family lives of writers, New Ways to Kill Your Mother. The title is taken from that of the essay on JM Synge.

If a writer were in the business of murdering his family, then the Synges, with their sense of an exalted and lost heritage and a strict adherence to religious doctrine added to dullness, would have been a godsend.

I am not sure that I understand this, especially given Synge’s extended periods of living at home (in the latter part of his short life, ill with lymphoma). I felt a bit unsteady with most of the pieces in the first half of the book, which is dedicated to Irish writers (Yeats, Synge, Beckett; Brian Moore, Sebastian Barry, and Roddy Doyle); I was on surer ground in the second half, headed “Elsewhere,” where the writers are mostly gay (Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and James Baldwin). Although of Irish extraction, I find the Emerald Isle a very mysterious place on both sides of the border between north and south. I have some idea of what Irishness is made up of, but I don’t know how the bits interrelate. I can’t imagine what being Irish and Protestant must be like, but at the same time I know that I have no idea of what, until recently, it was like to be Irish and Catholic.

Even when I didn’t quite grasp Tóibín’s talk of murder, though, I was tremendously entertained by his trademark atore of magisterially sifted gossip.      

The story begins in Geneva where, it is said, Borges Senior asked his son, then aged nineteen, if he had ever slept with a woman. When Borges said no, his father arranged “to help the youth negotiate the usual rites of passage to manhood,” as Williamson puts it, by giving him the address of a brothel and telling him that “a woman would be waiting there” at an appointed time. It was, of course, a disaster. Borges Juniior was shocked at the idea that he was sharing a woman with his father. Afterwards, according to Williamson, the adolescent Borges was taken to see a doctor who recommended a change of climate and fresh air and exercise. Williamson’s footnote for this points us to page 50 of María Esther Vázquez’s Borges: Esplendor y Derrota (1996). Vázquez had known Borges well, but this is no excuse for her account of the aftermath of his visit to the brothel. “He had such a terrible crisis that he cried for three successive days; he did not eat nor sleep….he only cried.” She goes on: “With the stoicism of a monk, this healthy young man seemed to give up the necessities of the body to find in literature the only source of satisfaction and enjoyment.”

Even had Vázquez written that Borges cried for merely two days and then rose on the third, I would not believe a word of it.

Does it get better than that, tittle-tattle about artists’ lives? I don’t think so. The joke about rising on the third day is too priceless. The essays on Borges and Cheever especially are replete with a kind of affable, smiling cattiness that is enormously pleasurable.        

Each half of the new book responds to an element of Tóibín’s makeup, but neither to all of him, and only a few of the writers are (or, rather, were) happy about any of it — about being Irish or gay. What everybody shares is marginality, and this interests Tóibín quite as much as family life. Some of the Irish writers, such as Samuel Beckett, were doubly marginal, because they felt a need to escape the conditions of Irish life, thus putting them at a distance from their own families, and no more at peace with them than the run of gay writers from “elsewhere.” And then there’s religion, which generally plays a larger role in the lives of people from the margins of Western culture, troublingly so for writers. But there is no system at work here. There is arguably, a general truth that covers most of Tóibín’s subjects:

What Lorca was doing became for Borges and his friends in Argentina, as it would for writers in every country on the periphery, a working-out of a serious dilemma: whether to adopt a full European Modernist identity or to describe Argentina (or Trinidad or Ireland) in all its colour and exotic variety to the world.

Marginality — writing “on the periphery” — is quite comfortably an aspect of family life. A variation that’s often added to the story is lost grandeur. We’re reminded that John Cheever was “a snob”; indeed, Cheever’s rough detachment from the world around him was so thoroughgoing his that writing was his only reliable connection to other people. Tennessee Williams, in an adjacent essay, comes across as much more “well-adjusted,” which is surprising.

Something else than many of the writers share is fatherlessness of one kind or another. Yeats, for example, supported his father — who kept his distance by living in New York City. Cheever’s father simply failed. Most of Tóibín’s subjects lost their fathers the normal way, to early death. Some of the writers, such as Borges, resolved to outstrip their fathers. Others ran from their mothers. Kathleen Synge and Leonor Borges are two of the memorable moms who managed, remarkably, not to be murdered by their creative sons. Of Edwina Williams, we’re told in a parenthesis that “The mother in [Glass Menagerie] was, according to Williams’s younger brother, so accurately based on their mother that she could have sued.” Few of Tóibín’s writers became fathers themselves, and of them, neither Thomas Mann nor John Cheever could be hailed as a successful parent.

Cheever’s relationship with his children was very close, and mostly difficult, partly because he had nothing much to do all day except lounge around looking at them in a state of half-inebriation and total dissatisfaction. Towards the end of his life, he told colleagues that once, after a row with his wife, he woke to find a message written in lipstick by his daughter on the bathroom mirror: “Dere daddy, don’t leave us.” When it was pointed out that such a scene occurs in his story, “The Chimera,” with the same misspelling, Cheever replied: “Everything I write is autobiographical.” But this was not so. Like a lot of writers, everything he wrote had a basis in autobiography and another in wishful or dreamy thinking. His daughter later denied that the scene took place. “I know how to spell,” Susan Cheever said, “and I think what we wanted was for him to leave us. One thing about my father was he was always there, you could not get rid of him. He worked at home, he ate at home, he drank at home. So ‘don’t leave us’? That was never the fear.”

This anecdote, with its wonderful “lounging around,” goes to the heart of Tóibín’s take on Cheever, which is that he was a sentimental liar about things until he “straightened out” and wrote his best piece of sustained fiction, the overtly queer Falconer.  

New Ways is headed by a wonderful essay that I remember gobbling up when it appeared in the London Review of Books. I believe that it had another title there, something involving aunts. Now it’s called “Jane Austen, Henry James, and the Death of the Mother.” It’s a beautiful meditation on Persuasion, and the derelictions of Lady Bertram and Aunt Norris, that trails nicely into Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, and the pervasvie motherlessness shared by so many daughters in Henry James’s novels. As such it makes an elegant counterpoise to the book’s focus on the problem of manliness, which leads Tóibín finally to consideration of “the American Confusion”: “the shame, the lack of pride sons in a society moving onewards and upwards felt at their fathers.”

As a sort of bonus, Tóibín tosses in an intriguing compare-and-contrast piece featuring James Baldwin and Barack Obama. After quoting a passage from Dreams of My Father set in Kenya, Tóibín writes, “This passage displays the differences between Baldwin’s sensibility and that of Obama. Whereas Baldwin sought to make distinctions, Obama always wants to make connections; his urge is to close circles even when they don’t need to be closed or the closure is too neat to be fully trusted.” That passage embodies the wisdom of a writer who has quietly established himself as a major man of letters. 

Well, I’m up bright and early this morning! That doesn’t comport with diagnosis of Remicade run-out. It’s a bother talking about this (reluctantly rather than coherently), but I seem to have been experiencing some sort of physiological disorder that has gotten in the way of my work here, and I don’t like leaving the disturbance entirely unexplained.

I realized the other day that it is summer once again, and that I promised myself last year that I would “take the summer off,” or at least lighten the work load. It seems that I’d already done so: where’s this month’s Beachcombing entry? The strange fact is that I haven’t encountered anything worth linking to. This is clearly a reflection of my abnormally detached state of mind, but I do feel that the sites that I follow are settled into rutted pathways from which nothing new can really be seen. Not that I claim to be different.

Over the weekend, I think it was, Thomas Friedman bloviated on the inadequacy of Facebook and Twitter as substitutes for political action. (I didn’t read the column; I never read Thomas Friedman anymore. But Kathleen read the remark aloud.) The astuteness of this observation is exceeded only by its fatuousness. I think that everyone is aware that liking something on Facebook or posting a link at Twitter isn’t going to change anything. I’m not sure that anybody wants to change anything. Everyone would like a good job, and everyone would like to owe less. The rabid idealists among us would like everyone to have a good a job and to owe less. I don’t see a call for change in that, but an order for more-of-same. Once everybody has a job and owes less, then we can start worrying about making the world a better place.

Such is life in an age utterly devoid of capable leadership.

***

The movie that Ray Soleil ended up seeing on Friday — well, we wanted to see Shanghai, a cool-sounding movie, set in Shanghai “on the eve of Pearl Harbor,” starring John Cuasck and Gong Li and made, according to IMDb, in 2010. What happened? And why was Shanghai opening in one Manhattan theatre only? I wonder if it ever did open. We gave up after fifteen minutes, having arrived in plenty of time only to be told that the showing had been canceled — a status that was almost immediately changed to “working on it.” I was in no mood to be standing on street corners waiting for shambolic cinema exhibitors to do their job. As it happened, I was carrying the Arts section of the Times — which, it turned out, contained no mention of Shanghai. Too good to be true, I suppose. We decided to go uptown (back uptown in my case; and did I mention that I’d gotten my act together for a ten-o’clock showing?) to see Bel Ami, a picture with two directors.

I could make sharp and nasty use of the “two directors” aspect of Bel Ami, wagging that it would explain the very different levels of competence exhibited by the three ladies in the cast, on the one hand, and the jeune premier, on the other. But I don’t have do anything of the kind. I can simply paraphrase a speech delivered by Uma Thurman, in the role of Madeleine Forestier, to Robert Pattinson, in the title role. “I tried to teach you how to think, how to write, how to be a man of substance, but your emptiness surpasses anything I’ve ever seen.” Ray leaned over to me, when she was done, and whispered, “She’s talking about his acting.” It was never clear, in this opulent romance set in Belle Époque Paris, what sort of monster Mr Pattinson was supposed to be playing. His canines remain his strong suit, but the only blood in Bel Ami is coughed up by a consumptive. 

Robert Pattinson does have a great face for the movies. In one scene, he slowly descends a staircase after having been humiliated. You may not feel particularly sorry about the humiliation — who does this jerk think he is, after all? — but you will probably be riveted by the sense of menace submerged behind his impassive face. It’s almost enough to make you forget wondering if Bel Ami is supposed to be about revenge, or if it’s just a lot of sumptuous twaddle with boffo performances by Ms Thurman, Christina Ricci, and Kristin Scott Thomas. (Also Colm Meany.) Almost, but not quite. What were they thinking — those two directors? 

The weather was so lovely, yesterday morning, that I was tempted to trot down to the Shake Shack for an early lunch. I had planned to stay in and get a lot of paperwork done, but by 11:15 I’d taken care of the first and most important item of business, and my spirits tended outwards.

The problem was, I had nothing flat to read. I was caught up on the litloids, and more or less completely put off The New Yorker by the double science-fiction issue. Books are an ordeal to read at the Shake Shack; there’s nothing to weight down the pages. And then of course there’s the occasional mess. So I had a bright idea: I’d stop next door at Barnes & Noble and pick up an unusual periodical. (I’d stop in at the CD department as well, to find something suitably odd for my Spanish Songbook playlist.) Bingo.

But by the time I’d picked up a copy of Port, the new British magazine about which I can remember reading something, but not what, and dawdled over CDs (selecting a box of Schumann chamber music, a disc of Debussy and Ravel from the Seoul Philharmonic, under Myung-Whun Chung, and a Simone Dinnerstein recital), the Shake Shack had gotten very crowded. Getting a table and holding onto it would be tricky. It was at this moment that I realized that I’d forgotten to bring a napkin. The only way to keep the mess “occasional” at the Shake Shack is to bring along a stout cloth napkin.

What to do? Tough it out at the Shake Shack? How about heading to the Seahorse Tavern, for one of their very different burgers? Virtue prevailed: I stopped in at Fairway, where I had to get a loaf of raisin bread anyway, and picked up a Cobb salad. I came home and read the next chapter of Kwasi Kwarteng’s examination of six imperial muddles, The Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World. Having staggered through Iraq, Kashmir, and Burma, I’ve arrived at Sudan. Together with the fifth section, on Nigeria, these are all accounts of modern hotspots that might be more stable if it hadn’t been for the Union Jack.

If the little thwartation at the Shake Shack had occurred on any day earlier this week, I’d have run home panting and weeping. I don’t understand why, but I’ve been rather a mess this week. Monday was awful, and Tuesday wasn’t too much better, until I fetched Will and forgot about myself with him. On Wednesday, I coped evenly enough, but I still felt tired and inane. I spent much of the afternoon and evening piling things up to deal with yesterday. Kathleen and I did have a nice little dinner of veal chop with steamed potatoes and corn on the cob.

***

One of the week’s many site-related disorders was yesterday’s somewhat truncated entry. I dashed off the final sentences before heading to the dermatologist’s office, and somehow thought, when I came back home, that I’d finished the piece. Perhaps I had. There was no more to say about Randy Paar. We never did meet, which I regret only because it would have been amusing to talk about Ra-Ra — although maybe not. I’m genuinely grieved to learn of her death, which seems untimely or accidental. It appears that she lived in Greenwich; that’s why she was on a platform at Grand Central at eight in the morning, on her way to work presumably. She fell, off the platform and onto the track, and was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where she died a few days later. Is that what happens if you’re in an accident at Grand Central Terminal? Next stop: Bellevue? It makes one shudder.

Miss Nelson retired while I was still in school, and moved back to Portland. I stayed in touch with her; I still have, I hope, some of her carefully-written letters. At some point, someone wrote to tell me that she had died. I have no idea how old she was, but she was certainly beyond middle age. Nelsy could be dreary; a medical humorist would have taken no time to pronounce her melancholic. Her face was fixed in a worried frown. You’d have thought that she’d have been naturally drawn to the Bach organ fugues that I was asked not to play when she was in the house, but no. I was fond of her anyway. I wasn’t fond of Ms Rogers. She had a nasty edge, and she was also the first older person in my life who believed that the world is going to the dogs. I thought that it was just her idiosyncrasy at the time, but the power of her disagreeableness has checked my own inclination in this direction, now that I am at least as old as she was when she couldn’t hide the disappointment of having to spend an evening with my sister and me, instead of with Randy Paar.

When my sister and I were very little, we were watched over, on our parents’ nights out, by a lovely girl called, I think, Betty Dwinnell. She was connected somehow to the drycleaners along Palmer Road. She was sweet and pretty, as I recall, and of course she got married and that was that. The rest of our childhood, with few vacations, was overseen by a pair of dragons, Miss Nelson and Mrs Rogers. Or, as we called them, Nelsy and Ra-Ra.

They were not really dragons, but they were certainly the alternative, in unmarried womanhood, to Betty Dwinnell. I’m not entirely sure, at this remove, about Ra-Ra’s “Mrs” — whether that’s how she was known and whether it was meant honorifically. We were told that she had driven amubulances during the First World War. Although Ra-Ra was not seen to drive in our day, this wartime career did not seem implausible. She had lived in the city, too, in Manhattan, and, like everyone who has lived in Manhattan and left it for somewhere else (no matter how close by), she declared that it had become too dangerous for honest people to live in. I didn’t doubt it, because for a very long time, all I saw of Manhattan was Hell’s Kitchen, as it then really was, through which we would drive on the way to parking garages near the theatres.

Also, like dragons, Ra-Ra and Nelsy never worked together. Heavens, the thought! Nothing really unattractive was ever said, but I certainly learned that saying something admiring about Nelsy was an invitation  to be looked at as an idiot by Ra-Ra.

The third thing that these ladies had in common — and it was probably the most dragonish thing of all — was that each of them babysat for one other household, a household containing a child or children that each vastly preferred to my sister and me, as neither tired of telling us. In Nelsy’s case, the other household had been broken up: the parents had been killed in a plane crash. (This was in 1955, and I remember my mother rather strangely waking me up in the middle of the night to tell me the awful news. She and the Clearys had been very good friends, and no one we knew had ever been killed in a crash. For years, my parents flew separately whenever they were traveling together.) The children so beloved of Nelsy went to live with cousins in Ohio, where they effectively grew up. Nelsy tried to stay in contact with Maury, but he was really too young, when the awful thing happened, to remember her across a great distance. Nelsy’s gifts, a few of them at least rather too expensive for her budget, had to be put to a stop. I was sure that Nelsy, good-hearted soul that she was, would have sealed us in a barrel and sent us over Niagara Falls if doing so would have reunited her with little  Maury.

As for Ra-Ra, her other charge was Randy Paar, whose obituary in the Times I was shocked to read yesterday.  

***

If Nelsy’s regrets about the Cleary children were necessarily mournful, as if they, too, had been killed, Ra-Ra’s reports about Randy Paar could have served Jane Austen as drafts for Aunt Norris. The difference was that we never actually saw Randy. I don’t think that either of us met her once. We lived in a very small village, but it was a village inhabited exclusively by ambitious professional people, and there was enough density for several circles to fail to overlap. My family was part of the business-executive crowd that played golf and bridge at Siwanoy. One heard that a few more artistic people still lived in Bronxville. Brendan Gill of The New Yorker, for example (although by the time I find out what that really meant — who Brendan Gill was — my Bronxville days were long over.) Durward Kirby, Garry Moore’s sidekick, lived around the corner. Jack Paar, whom I don’t think I ever saw live on television, lived in a little red house on Studio Lane, in one of the village’s more Alpine recesses. It was out of the way, oddly situated below street level, and, aside from being red, it had nothing remarkable about it except its owner, who was in any case a mysterious name to children.

Thanks to Ra-Ra, Randy Paar was my first paragon. She was everything that a child ought to be — obedient, diligent, sweet-natured and cute. In addition, she was possessed of a wisdom beyond her years, and routinely turned up her nose at foolish pastimes. (There’s no need to specify, as everything that my sister and I wanted to do was foolish.) In Ra-Ra’s hagiology, Randy was all the more a princess for having no yothful companions; other children did not figure in Ra-Ra’s updates. Randy Paar appeared to spend her life, very happily, among adults. I didn’t understand much about life, but the picture that Ra-Ra painted of an irreverent media prince (going by “Jack,” professionally, was iconoclastic enough; see “Durward Kirby,” above) and his clever handmaid daughter was so luridly exotic that I was never inspired to compete.

My parents didn’t know, and never mentioned, the Paars. Not even Ra-Ra mentioned Mrs Paar. I was free to believe that she was making it all up.

***

It would seem, from the sequel, that she wasn’t. Randy went off to Harvard and NYU Law, and seems to have done very well as a corporate litigator with actual courtroom victories. Her field, it is true, was hardly sensational: she represented businesses against insurers who weren’t sufficiently recompensatory.

Let’s start with the attractions. The Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of David Auburn’s play, The Columnist, was very well cast, and the actors never failed to entertain. John Lithgow’s impersonation of Joseph Alsop, one of the most powerful columnists in the history of American journalism, was great fun while also engaging sympathy for an unsympathetic character. Grace Gummer, playing Alsop’s step-daughter (here called Abby), brought all the sharpness of changing times to Alsop’s stuffy house. Margaret Colin (as Susan Mary Alsop, briefly Joe’s wife) and Boyd Gaines (as Stewart Alsop, the younger, far more likeable brother) did the very best with their roles, and then some. Brian Smith evoked an appealing young Russian with a wry sense of humor. In supporting roles, Stephen Kunken (David Halberstam) and Marc Bonan (Philip) were unexceptionable. 

John Lee Beatty’s sets for the outdoor scenes were memorable as well as appealing, capturing the verdant formality of the nation’s capital with textured rectangular abstractions backed by the tops of Washington’s distinctive lampposts.

***

Mr Beatty’s sets for the indoor scenes were of a piece with the play itself: Grade A Undergraduate. The interiors — a library and a living room — did not even remotely suggest one of the most gracious and well-appointed homes in Georgetown; what they did suggest was a shoestring budget. Alsop’s desk was a tiny oval affair, barely the size of a boudoir table, and the wall of books behind it soaked up half of everything the actors had to say. What the actors had to say teetered between standard expository theatre talk — the familiar but stylized intercourse in which playwrights convey loads of background information through what pretends to be a conversation among intimates — and urgent arguments about love and politics that sought to make a connection between the two, all coated with the dulled gleam of formerly conventional manners of speech. It was all pretty fusty.

I never could decide whether David Auburn was trying to tell us that Joe Alsop went all out in support of the Vietnam War as a way of compensating, with masculine bellicosity, for being a rather unloving closeted homosexual; or whether, in the alternative, the message was that even a semi-closeted gay man could put the patriarchal power structure to personal use if he were ballsy enough. Insofar as playwrighting is like ballroom dancing, Mr Auburn was an uncertain leader, wavering between these two approaches to his central character. He ought to have taken greater pains to avoid the first impression altogether, as it was not supported by the facts — the facts presented in the play itself. He ought to have resisted the allure of a blackmail scenario, setting the audience quaking with dread of the dire damage of revelation. Joe Alsop was never afraid of blackmail — it turns out. That’s the big surprise in the climactic scene. Knowing that he’d been photographed in bed with a young man by Russian agents, he took the photographs straight to the American ambassador; he made sure that everyone knew what low and dirty tricks the Russians would stoop to. His timing must have been perfect, because this brazen defiance actually worked. That it did work would have been something meaty for a play to chew on, but not, perhaps, in a climactic scene. In the climax of The Columnist, the audience realizes that it has been had.

The problem with the alternative message is that it leaves a big question untouched: why would anybody, gay or straight, have wanted to support the Vietnam War? How could so many establishment types have been so gung-ho about so profoundly a misinformed project? The answer to that question has nothing to do with blackmail, or sexuality, or whether Joe Alsop could allow himself to be lovingly intimate with anybody. The answer is to be found not between the sheets but behind the desks — the desks at Groton and all the other elite Anglophone academies on both sides of the Atlantic, where no end of arrogant racist sexist WASPy hoo-haw was poured into the ears of privileged boys, deforming generations of bright and powerful men.

That would have been one way to put Joseph Alsop to good dramatic use. An even better one might have focused on Alsop’s marriage to Susan Mary Patten, widowed mother of two. The essence of this might-have-been play was crammed into one awkward scene in The Columnist — awkward because we needed more. Susan Mary thought that she knew what she was doing when she married Alsop; he was clear about his carnal circuitry. But she found that she was wrong. She found that she did not care for life with a man who had no real use for a woman except as social fixtures at the other end of a long dining table of luminaries. She wanted more. I’d have liked to see a play about her. I hope that Margaret Colin gets another, better chance. I also hope that she gets better dresses.

***

O joy! O rapture unforeseen! I just found the lid to Will’s teapot. Less than an inch in diameter, the lid blends in well with the rug in the blue room, and I must have missed it five or six times while poring over the floor in search of it. Then, just now, as I was folding a T shirt, there it was. Ecstasy, really.

I can’t tell whether progress is being made. In the old days, I misplaced things all the time, and was miserable about it, for a while; but, hey, I was always losing things. I managed to live with it. Now, things are different. I do not misplace things. What never? Well, hardly ever — and it’s much harder to take when I do. In the past week, I’ve suffered a streak of numbskull droppings, such as leaving my wallet on a dark bookshelf where I’d never put it if I were conscious. As a rule, though, I’ve gotten very good about knowing where things are. Lately, that includes Will’s toys, of which, suddenly, there are lots.

While Will plays with his toys, I entertain myself by picking up after him. The secret is understanding that healthy boys crave disorder. I am not entirely in on this secret, but I act as though I were. I do not groan when Will overturns a basket or evacuates a box. No, that’s what they’re for! So! Here are four of his five little VWs; where’s the green one? Got it! All the pieces of the stegosaurus jigsaw puzzle accounted for — bravo! I kept on eye on the teapot lid for most our time yesterday, but at some point my vigilance must have slipped. It was the first thing that I looked for this morning, and not being able to find it was disheartening. It was only after I’d put everything away, and even carried what was left of the teaset (everything but the lid) into the kitchen to wash it —

I should explain that, at first, we pretended that the teapot lid wasn’t removable, because, as Will’s mother reasoned, he would only want to fill it with water if he knew that he could. So we put that off as long as possible. But by the time he realized that the lid wasn’t a dummy (even though he needed help pulling it out — tight fit!), he’d moved on. Why fill a teapot with water when you can fill it with raisins? It’s likely that I didn’t see the teapot lid on the floor because I was still training my eyes for stray raisins.  

Yesterday was a bleak day, and somehow the bleakness got under my skin. I could think of nothing to say or do. The sense of inanition was so frightening that it kept a truly depressed state of mind at bay. I wondered if I’d suffered a stroke of some kind, so empty did I feel, so deeply bored by every thought. 

It was imperative that I do something. I could pay the bills, but paying the bills never takes very long, and it always fills me with guilty resolve: spend less. Even when I do. The main thing, though, is that it doesn’t take very long, so I put off paying the bills and did the ironing instead. I had a great pile of ironing, accumulated since our return from Amsterdam and London. Nothing but napkins, handkerchiefs, and pillow-cases, but massive. I thought: I’ll watch something that will take me out of myself. In the end, though, I went for something that I hadn’t seen before, a much safer bet in chancy moods. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, you never have that awful sinking feeling that this isn’t going to do it for me. There wasn’t much in the basket that I hadn’t seen, but one promising item featured Maggie Smith in a STEPHEN POLIAKOFF production called Capturing Mary.

I capitalized the writer/director’s name because, on the jewel box artwork, it appears in much larger type than that of the title, and in much much larger type than “Maggie Smith.” It’s quite as if Stephen Poliakoff were Alfred Hitchcock. Which he may be, for all I know. Because I watch television — not even the latest round of Mad Men —I can’t say if Capturing Mary has ever been aired here. I bought Capturing Mary when I bought Glorious 39, also by Mr Poliakoff, which bristles with stars (Bill Nighy, Eddie Redmayne, Romola Garai, Julie Christie, and Jeremy Northam). What both films have in common is a backward glance at sinister doings in the highest echelons of English wealth and power. In Glorious 39, a young woman discovers that the family into which she has been adopted are keen to appease Hitler. In Capturing Mary, the wickedness is more subtle, or vague in a Henry James sort of way.

Maggie Smith plays a woman who returns to a great house in Mayfair — empty but scrupulously maintained — to exorcise a demon. Long ago, back in the Fifties, she was an up-and-coming journalist, the “voice of youth,” someone who had taught herself to talk posh at university — and who thought that she could take on the establishment, or at least meet it on her own terms. Invited to choice soirées at the home of a very rich man, she became aware of Greville White, an insidious gentleman who would sidle up to the famous guests and express his regret that their latest novel or cabinet move was not up to par. Eventually, he cornered Mary herself in the kitchen, and regaled her with some gossip. Then he took her down to the wine cellar, where he spilled out truly appalling stories about famous figures — bishops who thrashed boys until they bled, magnates who kept girls as personal slaves; derisive clubland chitchat about Jews and “niggers.” Appalled, Mary fled. At another party, sometime later, Greville presented her with the key to his house, of which she should avail herself at her convenience. Very creepy — because it was clear that carnality didn’t come into it.

Mary rebuffed these strange advances, only to witness the collapse of her journalism career. Assignments were canceled, contracts dropped, new jobs closed to her. Mary knew that Greville was behind it — but was he? (And why?) You’ll have to see for yourself. Greville is played by David Williams, a smooth talker who sounds exactly like Simon Callow if you close your eyes, and Young Mary by Ruth Wilson, whom I’ve never seen before. The Fifties settings are luscious, but the women, aside from a few beauties, are dependably dowdy, dressed to the nines but looking like Mamie Eisenhower just the same. You do not wish that you could have been there. Maggie Smith plays one of her soiled, disreputable personae (which reminds me: I need to see The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne again), making you shudder ever time she takes a pull from her silver flask. It’s conceivable that her footage was shot in two days.

In any case, Capturing Mary pulled me right out of the doldrums. Plus: all the ironing done.   

When I was a kid, “gross” was the term of all-purpose disgust. (“Disapproval” would be a better word, but teenagers do not experience anything so mild or distant or reasonable as disapproval.) For all I know, it’s still current. In the phrase that I’ve quoted for the header, it means something more specific.

“Men and their grossness” comes from a passage in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, The Sleeping Beauty. Isabella, a widow, is out for the evening with Vinny Tumulty, a friend whom she has expected to ask her to marry him. Instead, he has declared his love for someone else; but he continues to do the offices of a good friend, keeping Isabella company on the eve of an auction at which the contents of her suburban-London home are going to be sold off. (Isabella will continue to live in her seaside house, in a town wonderfully called “Seething.”) Vinny and Isabella dine in Soho. After dinner, Isabella’s heel is caught in a grate, and she notices that the women in the street are staring at Vinny, right through her. Her revulsion comes back to her the next afternoon, when she discovers the rudiments of Vinny’s secret.

She felt a miserable separation and embarrassment with Vinny, having caught him out in what she supposed was something shady and unsavoury. A distaste for men and their grossness put a distance between them which she had felt the evening before in Soho when women had glanced at him from doorways and street-corners. She had once thought him such a fastidious, tender man, and now she saw that she did not know him at all. Over and over she made her explanations for being in Market Swanford and he listened courteously and smiled.

The grossness of men is, I’m pretty sure, the ability, if that’s the word, that men have to enjoy sex without love, or at any rate without the accoutrements that Isabella deems necessary. It ought to be borne in mind that Vinny does nothing to encourage the staring; he is simply a well-built gentleman minding his own business. He also happens to be in the first throes of real love — but not for Isabella. Isabella is a “silly woman” — in the eyes of her creator as well as those of any fellow-character in the novel. She’s endearing, once you realize that the novel is not going to be about her, and she puts her finger on her shortcomings very ably when she reflects, whilst in the company of a woman friend who shares her desperate faith in anti-ageing creams and slimming massages, “For we never grew up.” Men and their grossness, Taylor implies, is something that bothers girls, not women.

Taylor gives us a fine taste of women and their grossness. The penultimate chapter begins with Isabella and her friend, Evalie, trying out a new skin cream.

Their faces were caked with a white clay, which, drying, had drawn up their skin beneath so that they could hardly part their lips to speak; from this frightening pallor their discoloured eyes looked mournfully out.

The women are awfully surprised when Isabella’s son, Laurence, walks in unexpectedly.

The vision of those two leprous faces in the greenish gloom, his mother’s absurd confusion, Evalie’s frenzied eyes rolling at him above a piece of red knitting, made Laurence feel the victim of a monstrous joke. He was so thrown-out by the scene that he could not think how he was expected to behave, and from awkwardness walked unsmilingly across the room, forced Isabella to take the little package and said in a cold and angry voice: “Some wedding cake for you.”

Isabella is at first terrified that this is Laurence’s way of telling her that he has gotten married, but the cake is Vinny’s.

The other day, Maureen Dowd complained about the authoritarian attitude of the Roman Catholic Church. Let’s breeze right past whatever it was that inspired a woman brought up in a pious Catholic family to imagine that such complaints might not be a complete waste of time, and proceed to a letter that a former Jesuit priest wrote in agreement. Ms Dowd had said,

So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting.

To which Tim Iglesias, of Oakland, California, responded,

… I believe that they are pursuing a very deliberate strategy. They have decided that a smaller, more unified and fervently doctrinally focused church community is preferable to a welcoming, diverse and unrully one. All of their actions are consistent with this strategy. I mourn the loss of the catholic Catholic Church.

This exchange seemed as good an occasion as any for teasing out what might lie at the center of the purer church’s doctrinal focus. But first, a little history.

The Roman Catholic Church emerged from its near-death experience at the end of the Eighteenth Century with an appearance that seemed to go back for centuries but a severely altered interior. Beneath the preserved and even refreshed decorative fabric — the church buildings, the vestments, the liturgies, the religious orders, and of course the Apostolic Succession itself — the Church was not at all what it had been. How could it be? Like everything and everyone, it had been cast out of the ancien régime, and obliged to make its own way on its merits. Stripped of properties and the administrative power that went with them, as well as morally authoritative alliances with the governments of Catholic powers (far fewer in number when the commotion subsided), the Church ceased to be a temporal ruler with the unification of Italy. It became a sentimental operation, dispensing pastoral care and comfort to a secular world ever less interested in traditional ideas of the sacred.

This isn’t the place to consider the role played by the industrial revolution in causing huge shifts in how educated people imagined the universe, but I think that we can safely claim that the intellectual energy formerly devoted to working out fine points of metaphysical dogma was now harnessed to understanding the material mechanics of the universe. God, as it were, was left to take care of himself, dogmatically speaking. It is sobering to see how completely such issues as the Trinity and Transubstantiation lost the power to rile up civil discord; matters for which people had been prepared to kill (and die) no longer meshed with anyone’s intellectual outlook. It was against the background of this general indifference to speculative certainties that the Papacy pushed through two dogmatic alterations that would have been hotly contested in earlier times: the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and of papal infallibility (1870). The most conspicuous exercise of the latter power concerned the Assumption of Mary (1950). This isn’t the place to assess the drift of ecclesiastical concerns from the core beliefs that were shared by Paul and Augustine, nor to tease out the misogyny implicit in making one woman, the mother of Jesus, alone in holiness of all her sex. It’s enough to note that bodies and sexuality were promoted as matter of doctinal concern, while no attempt was made to alter the institution of the priesthood.  

Inevitably, Church leaders would find themselves confronted with ever-louder complaints from the likes of Maureen Dowd. The Augustinian settlement of Christian sexuality, in which laymen were permitted to marry and procreate but religious men and women were not, dedicating their lives to God, no longer made sense. The Church was no longer functionally above and apart from the secular world of the faithful; as the Protestants had demonstrated, spirituality did not suffer when prelates took wives. (And as for the unspeakable alternative, sought out by too many priests under the benighted protection of bishops whose allegiance to the confraternity was far stronger than any pastoral concern, we shall not speak of it.) While there might not be any objection to retirement from the world, insofar as it remained in and of the world, the Church’s insistence that it was nevertheless apart transformed it into what it has become: a hierarchical confraternity of celibate males that claims to have the first word, the last word, and every word in between on the subject of the Church’s constitution. If you are not a member of this confraternity, you have no standing to engage in a discussion — not that discussion is encouraged among those who are. This is the unlovely organization that, according to Tim  Iglesias, Church leaders would like to purify.

The only object of doctrinal focus, therefore — at least, for Roman Catholics who are not priests — is the identity of the Church as an organization run and officiated by unmarried men. That is what being a member of the Roman Catholic Church has come down to.

At MoMA last week, I picked up a copy of The Complete Untitled Film Stills, because I’ve liked this work by Cindy Sherman ever since it was new, even though I found the women that Sherman impersonated to be unattractive and sullen, and I can’t say that I really like any individual photograph. What I do like is the fragmentary suggestion of complete movies that I am free to create and re-create as effortlessly as I please. In this, the Film Stills remind me of Edward Gorey’s The Awdrey-Gore Legacy (so thrilling, when it was new, because one had never seen Gorey do color before — just as Sherman’s stills were in a gloriously dated black-and-white). Gorey’s book is like a board game discovered in an attic, missing important pieces as well as a set of instructions. You make what you can of it.

I did not buy the catalogue accompanying the Sherman retrospective, though. I knew that I would never look at it. There are a couple of images that I would like to have as postcards, all three of them featuring New York City backgrounds (two at the Cloisters, one at the Bethesda Fountain). All three feature women who appear to be rich and powerful, however ravaged by time; their contempt is complacent, if not content. As such, they differ from the run of portraits and other images in the show, which display every kind of wretchedness. I would never look at Sherman’s clowns, or her sexually compromised girls, or her parodies of Old Master paintings. These pieces are almost too immediately not interesting; I must be afraid of them as well. If I were drawn to them, I would find out eventually what it is that I feared.  

That’s the point, I concluded. It’s a test: can you be happy with the fact that these pictures have been mounted on the walls of an important museum? Can you take an interest in their exhibition? It was a test that I failed, at least in several galleries that I could not wait to exit. At the same time, I protested (to myself) that Sherman wasn’t telling me a thing I didn’t know. About shock. About self-display. About the yearning to be found gloriously, miraculously, and, against all the evidence, beautiful — a yearning entwined with a venomous determination to deny its gratification. Cindy Sherman’s recent work appears to be about unsuccessful responses to the problem of ageing, but what I see, as I wrote the other day, is “the misery of a plain, somewhat doughy adolescent girl whose brains were of no interest to anybody. (Least of all to herself.)”

At the same time, Sherman lays out an interesting challenge: where’s the male equivalent of this show? Where is the man who would flay his complicated identity as Sherman has done? And is there a call for such a demonstration? If nothing else, Sherman’s pictures shout to tell us that women are obliged to be unpleasant in order to be heard; if  they are not unpleasant, they’re catnip, and whatever it is that they have to say is baffled and silenced. Is there a masculine correlative of this oppression? I believe that there is; the manly version of Sherman’s show that I conjecture would concern itself with failure: the failure to perform, the failure to fit in, the failure to lead, the failure to be memorable. It is not clear to me how self-portraiture would be involved, but it would be involved; there is no other way to file Sherman’s report on degrading shame. I suspect that it would also make use, as Sherman has done, of the image factory’s tropes of cinematic glamor and advertised allure.

In the New York Review of Books, Sanford Schwartz writes, “But then Sherman’s work is engaging no matter what we think of it as art.” There’s the muddle. What does thinking of something as art entail? The question has bedeviled me ever since Sherman and her cohort of conceptual artists set out to replace disegno with critique. Before that, Duchamp’s fountain and the other sports of Dada were impish tricks, subverting nothing but the art-admirer’s pouter-pigeon posture. Conceptual artists have produced objects that work like texts, that mean to tell us something, but without being readily legible. I think of them, these objects, as icons of a civilization that the artist, in any case, cannot bear to understand. When I look at the grotesquely large panels of Cindy Sherman, I see someone confronting an awful world in which genuine kindness does not exist. I am sorry that she has had to go there.

John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a movie about getting used to change. That is what we see the characters do — or not, as in the case of Jean Ainslie (Penelope Wilton), a soi-disant realist with a nasty habit of saddling every situation with the worst interpretation. The indignities of the other characters’ adjustments are barely hinted at; it is expected that the film’s most interested viewers will prefer to conjure these at some other time. As Ivy Compton-Burnett used to say, “I do not wish to be speaking of it.” We do not need to be watching it, either. All we need is that gentle reminder: you can get used to anything, so don’t be afraid of change. Worry instead about the alternative: imprisoning yourself in the block of familiarity.

That’s what Graham Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson) realizes that he has done. Growing up in Jaipur, he fell in love with Manoj, an Indian friend; the ensuing scandal disgraced the native’s family, but Graham escaped the brunt of it by going to university in England. At the beginning of the story, he is a High Court judge who can’t wait to retire; we’re not told that some bad news about a heart condition has resolved him to Do It Now. He has always intended to return to India to find his ruined former lover and perhaps do something to help him out, but he hasn’t gotten around to doing it. “Until now,” Evelyn Greenslade (Judi Dench) whispers, when Graham tells her his tale. “Until now,” he agrees. The moment of reunion is a cinematic triumph, capturing muddle along with resolution in an unsimplified whole. Manoj’s life has not, it turns out, been at all wretched; it is Graham who, dithering in England, has done without.

It’s no surprise that Mr Wilkinson and Ms Dench (not to mention the superb Rajendra Gupta, as Manoj) bring their characters completely to life; what’s commendable about Best Exotic Marigold is the filmmaker’s skill at staying out of their way, and punctuating their “big” scenes (most of which are actually quiet) with razzle-dazzle pans of “chaotic” urban life. The teeming disorderliness is what the characters have to get used to, and we see that each of them has a different approach. Graham tries to track down Manoj. Evelyn gets a job, coaching young Indians working at a call center. Muriel Donnelly, a retired housekeeper whose hip replacement has been “outsourced,” takes a professional interest in the hotel’s housemaid, an untouchable. Norman Cousins (Ronald Pickup) and Madge Hardcastle (Celia Imrie) go forth in search of fresh romantic conquests, refusing to affix “finis” to their sex lives. Jean Ainslie’s husband, Douglas (Bill Nighy) goes in for garden-variety sightseeing, while Jean herself, never having forgiven Douglas for investing their nest egg in their daughter’s Internet start-up, works up fresh belittlements to inflict upon him. She also humiliates herself royally by making a garish pass at Graham, who gives her a very cloudy look when, having heard him use the word with reference to himself, she tries to make a joke of it: “Is that ‘gay’ as in ‘happy’?”

The hotel itself is a comic device of Shakespearean vintage, like the Forest of Arden: it embodies the marriage plot that arrives at a happy ending only when the inmates — the handful of ageing Brits seeking comfortable retirement on the cheap — take action. The action that they take is varied; it includes dying. It commits them to change, even in Jean Ainslie’s case. More than that I cannot say. The lovers (Tena Desae and Dev Patel) are appealing stock characters, blocked by an intriguing stock dragon (Lillette Dubey), and the magic word turns out to be “love” after all. When the young people take the spotlight, it is never without a faint melancholy awareness that they, too, will one day confront the problem of being old. It’s the hotel that does it, the crumbling hotel that was old when the oldsters were born. Change is the bottom line.  

***

What’s this? Yesterday’s mail brought a new Sharper Image catalogue. I couldn’t believe that the operation was still going! And still selling the same sort of gadgets, only now what modicum of cool its wares exuded twenty years ago — nearly thirty years ago, really — has evaporated in the austere Applesphere of today, where the ideal device count always tends toward one, and not in the opposite direction that will make the Sharper Image’s investors happy. There is also a certain rather blowsy overlap with the always-whimsical offerings of Hammacher Schlemmer. Take, for example, the Golf Club Drink Dispenser on page 18. What looks like a driver turns out to have a little red button and a little white spout. “This ingenious and discreet ‘club’ is a great way to quench your thirst while on the course. Holds 48 oz…” Are we slipping? The idea of buying this gift as a gag for some golfer friends really did flash across my mind, but the afterburn was deep shame: what, short of murder, could be as immoral as paying for this piece of junk and having it shipped across several state lines to unsuspecting nice people? (Surely not the use that I suspect one of them might put it to — once.) Here’s where I started laughing out loud, though: on page 36. “Smart Organization While On the Move.” You could call it a geekolier: worn like a sash of nobility, from shoulder to hip, it is in fact a wallet with pockets for mobile phones, keys, and — ball point pens! Yes! The pocket protector of old on steroids! It’s not a bad idea, I have to admit, for urban hikes, but those pen clips! Has someone done a study showing that men are turned on by pen clips? That they feel thereby empowered, weaponized? I can’t begin to understand the wearing of writing equipment.

Then there was the Science Fiction Issue of The New Yorker, compleat with a Daniel Clowes cover entitled “Crashing the Gate.” Crashing the gate is one thing; the whole point of attending a party, invited or not, is to get someone to talk to you. I don’t see that happening, and if you’re wondering how antediluvian my judgment is, just turn to China Miéville’s “Forward Thinking,” on page 80. I surmise that this piece is meant to be funny. It had always struck me as odd that, as a child, I had no interest in reading at all, aside from the odd Hardy Boys mystery; the desire to read passionately and all the time began with and somewhat pre-empted puberty, and I never read books that weren’t meant for grown-ups (although it would be years before I understood them). Now I understand that I was simply keeping myself safe. “Of course,” writes Miéville, “the stories that got you all to hush, in kindergarten, were the ones that contained exactly the elements which you still seek out. In that class full of six-year-olds, everyone was into dinosaurs and/or magic and/or Saturday-morning monsters, just like you.” Not just like me; I was over there in the Nuisance Corner, incapable of being quiet through any kind of story.

Of all the scenes that I recalled from my week abroad, I found myself for the most part stuck, last week, on memories of creeping along the Uxbridge Road through Ealing and Southall on the way out to Heathrow for the return flight. If the driver had told us that we’d be taking a five- or six-mile detour, and that it would take nearly a half hour to get from the North Circular Road to the Parkway, I’d have been much less disturbed than I was. Perhaps because I was disturbed — not because I was afraid that we’d miss our flight but because I hated being in a car on a congested suburban road, with stoplights every three feet and no end of buses. What I hated was the open-endedness of it: it promised to go on forever, just as my mother’s shopping expeditions used to do and there was nothing for her to do but park one or both of us in the back seat of the car. What made it unbearable, it seems, was the recurrence of something to which I was no longer at all accustomed — traffic in unfamiliar surroundings.

The people on sidewalk appeared to be of South Asian background, but otherwise the setting seemed to come straight out of an old English film. There were a few modern structures — St Bernard’s Hospital, sprawling on its verdant slope, could have been anywhere in America — but the shopping areas were what I remembered from before the days of malls and parking lots. We might have been in Westchester County somewhere, but the scale of everything was smaller, shorter, narrower — pinched, somehow. I imagined Celia Johnson in a trenchcoat, carrying a string bag of turnips and looking utterly worn down by cares. The colors were green and brick, but I saw them as shades of grey.

This was not the part of London that I wanted to be in or to know, but it is the part that stuck. It was foreign to a degree that Bloomsbury couldn’t be,  and yet it was unpleasant simply because it grabbed me like an impatient parent and reminded me of my childhood. Eventually, we came to the end and, spinning round a roundabout, pulled on to a proper motorway. It was a deliverance.  

***

This morning, I awoke at six, and meant to get up. Lowering dreams left me washed with depression, though, and I felt very safe where I was. I decided to think things over, but since there was nothing on my mind, I drifted into a series of dreams. In one of these, I was stretched out on a mattress in an apartment downtown that contained no other furniture, just the bed and my baggage. I didn’t want to be there, and I thought that I really must gather my stuff together and head uptown to where I really lived, but I was sleepy and drifted off. When I woke up, I was in my bed at home, both awake and still in the dream. It was deeply luxurious. Just like that, things had worked out perfectly. There were more dreams, most of them not so nice but none troubling. Then, for some reason, I was reminded of Maggie Smith and Rowan Atkinson in Keeping Mum, in which a murderous mother-in-law gives her daughter’s husband some useful pointers on public speaking. Something inside me giggled, and I could no longer stay in bed.

In yesterday’s Times, Amartya Sen wrote about the disconnect between European voters and the experts who disdain them. I wish that he had said more — a great deal more. The two points that he did make were important, certainly.

Europe cannot revive itself without addressing two areas of political legitimacy. First, Europe cannot hand itself over to the unilateral views — or good intentions — of experts without public reasoning and informed consent of its citizens. Given the transparent disdain for the public, it is no surprise that in election after election the public has shown its dissatisfaction by voting out incumbents.

Second, both democracy and the chance of creating good policy are undermined when ineffective and blatantly unjust policies are dictated by leaders. The obvious failure of the austerity mandates imposed so far has undermined not only public participation — a value in itself — but also the possibility of arriving at a sensible, and sensibly timed, solution.

What goes unstated here is the source of the pressures that motivate experts and inspire leaders to dictate unjust policies. Why have governments across Europe called for “austerity”? Because it is the only way to keep credit lines open. The alternative to spending less is having nothing to spend. That is because governments typically borrow against anticipated revenues. There is no use clucking about the imprudence of this. Large-scale government borrowing was until rather recently determined by and limited to meeting the expense of military exigencies. That is probably sound. Certainly an armed force that is dependent upon the commonwealth is preferable to the kind of self-supporting operation that has sprouted in China. Military expenses always tend toward the urgent and unforeseen; borrowing to pay for them is unavoidable. Paying off loans reasonably incurred to fight wars (defensive ones, anyway) is unlikely to be very unpopular with stable democratic electorates.

But what about other types of expenditure? What about schools and health care and (what we call) social security? What about infrastructure — everything from sewer pipes to air-traffic controllers? Has anyone been working on a systematic overview of how these are paid for? The items that I’ve mentioned are funded in very different ways, at least in the United States. They are also funded at different levels. In Europe, administration is more centralized and unified. But the foundations of public expenditure suggest a lack of overall design and a prevalence of ad hoc makeshift, with a hefty contribution from uncritically adopted traditions. And because of their public nature, economists interested in free markets ignore them. The American health-care apparatus is paid for by as shambolic a mix of charity and premium prices as can be imagined. It does not even attempt to make economic sense.   

Democracy works only when voters are informed. By “informed” I do not mean “free from ‘prejudice” or “not bigoted.” I mean: informed. A look round today’s Western democracies quickly shows how unlikely it is for even the brightest and best-educated voters to be informed about anything except at the most local levels. That’s a start. People tend to know what’s going on in their neighborhoods; they don’t have to be prodded to read footnoted reports about the immediate environment. (They’re likely to demand reports that are clear and easy to read.) As the scale of affairs passes beyond the local, however, it takes on an abstraction with respect to which it is difficult to engage on an everyday basis. Highly general matters affecting the nation as a whole (such as immigration law) are left to experts. The link between vote and policy is becomes tenuous, easily disavowed by experts and voters alike.

In his book about going back to school in middle age, David Denby reminds us that the Great Books have to sell themselves anew to every generation. Nobody reads Jane Austen because everyone’s grandmother read Jane Austen; and nobody reads Sir Walter Scott period. The same obligation falls upon public services of every kind. Western democracies have all been founded upon express repudiation of the idea that whatever has been done in the past must therefore continue to be done in the future. And yet the besetting sin of meritocracy is a hearty disinclination to explain complicated matters to the uninitiated. In a very real sense, meritocrats cannot be leaders.

Finally, what Mr Sen neglects to mention is that democracy is still very much in its infancy. Whatever its beginnings, its adumbrations in ancient republics, the truth is that full-franchise democracy is hardly anywhere even a century old, given that, a century ago, women were denied the vote as a matter of course. We don’t really know what we’re talking about when we talk about democracy.    

***

 

During last week’s trip, I squeezed in quite a lot of reading. I was running around as much as I could, seeing things — being places, mostly — but that left plenty of down time in which there was, for example, no housework to be done. I also got through a book on each flight. Going over, it was Paul Torday’s More Than You Can Say. Coming home, it was Denis Judd’s biography of George VI. In between, there was of course Nescio, which I wrote about at the time; Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library, which I hadn’t read in over twenty years, and Joseph O’Neill’s The Breezes. The Breezes, an affable but sophisticated entertainment, read like the missing link that I hoped it would be, showing how the author of This Is the Life became the author of Netherland.

***

If I am wrong in saying that Paul Torday is unknown in American, then it is time to take my readerly radar in for major repairs. Having seen the movie on which his Salmon Fishing In the Yemen was adapted, I ordered it from Amazuke; but I also ordered another title, More Than You Can Say, despite knowing nothing about it. Despite knowing nothing about it, I grabbed it for my book bag as we were heading out the door. It turned out to be a fun read, but I could see why it hasn’t been brought out over here.

One of the satisfactions of British fiction is the much higher reach of genre: even novels of the best quality like to let you know, early on, what kind of story-time you’re in for, as well as what sort of other stories you’ll be reminded of. Torday is open, in his brief afterword, about the intention to honor the memory of John Buchan’s novels; what he doesn’t say is that he has also drawn on measures of Tom Sharpe and Ian Fleming. The resulting concoction is largely funny, but unafraid to be thoughtful and romantic by turns; and it spins a yarn of the finest wool. Aimed very much at male readers — our hero, Richard Gaunt, is an ex-army hunky hulk capable of great feats of prowess but also prone to witless blunders (Real Men are Dim) — the book exudes a faint but sly perfume, as of many effective tutorials at the knees of Harlequin Romance. We might also note that another of the author’s stated objectives was to make some noise about PTSD, at least as it has afflicted British veterans of the quagmire in Afghanistan; being British, Torday is able to deliver his doses of high-minded indignation in tiny shots of powerful implication, sparing us the pathological disquisitions that might have burdened a less talented writer.   

At the outset, Richard has lost just about everything — girl, money, family, career, self-esteem — but he remains sharp enough to win a pretty packet at a dodgy gambling club in Mayfair. One of the toshes whom he bests proposes a challenge that just might restore his losses, and our man is fool enough to bite: if Richard can walk to Oxford by lunchtime, his friend will double the winnings. Of course Richard can walk to Oxford by lunchtime. Or he could, if he were not ensnared in a nefarious terrorist plot along the way. (All terrorist plots are arguably nefarious, but this one sports a true Snidely Whiplash moustache.) By the end of the first chapter, Richard has been immured in the boot of a car, and the adventure is off an running. Whenever the author thinks that we need a little rest from the derring-do, Richard fills us in a little about how he came to lose his girl, his money, and so on. Torday works the formula for interleaving ongoing action with retrospective exposition as smoothly as if it had come to him in a dream.  The writing, while infused with Scout’s Honor, is self-effacing and expert. This is a great book for a transatlantic flight.

***

Denis Judd’s George VI was, I now see, an almost perfect complement to More Than You Can Say. It is also a crisply-written book about a shy and somewhat limited man whose determination to do his duty leads to heroic, if quiet, triumph. It’s been a long time since I dipped into Bagehot, but I found myself thinking that no one, not even the present Queen, so perfectly embodied the monarchical role that the famously unwritten British Consititution has left it to us to guess at. Judd is sympathetic to his subject but not indulgent, and he makes none of those claims, so tempting to writers about royals, of occult but powerful influence, tantamount to active political rule, that all sound minds must dismiss as daft fantasy. What happens, in the course of Judd’s portrait — which is also, implicitly, a portrait of Britain itself — is the development of an idea of monarchy that has nothing to do with power and everything to do with example. No one will deny that George VI, once he negotiated the hurdle of his stammer, set a fine example, but Judd tells us how he did it. “Although he lives his life in palaces,” Judd writes, “indulging aristocratic sporting tastes, he would have been perfectly content in a mock-Tudor semi-detached house with his family, his stamp collection and the radio.” But George did live in palaces, and he was a stickler for regalia and decorum, for proper uniforms and correct decorations, every inch the high priest of the cloudy creed of chthonic comfort professed by many Britons. That was his exceptional job, and he performed it exceptionally well. But as a man, he was just one of them.

***

Having just looked over the page at Portico in which I discussed Joseph O’Neill’s first novel, This Is the Life, several years ago, I see a few connections that didn’t occur to me as I read The Breezes, his second. There is the rebarbative romance, the love affair that seems all on one side — the man’s. (Indeed, even in the solid and richly accomplished Netherland, beside which the first two novels read like the work of a settled underachiever, the hero is engaged with a woman who has her doubts about his suitability for relationship purposes.) Then there is the domestic squalor that is scrubbed away at the end. In both novels, the big clean-up suggests not so much a resolve to create a new order as an acceptance of the old one: this is your world, mate, and you might as well keep it orderly. Dreams of being floated away to an easier life are abandoned.

What I didn’t need my write-up to recognize is that The Breezes also begins in Pooter-Carp territory. John Breeze begins by comparing his father to Wile E Coyote, in a tone suggesting that he, John himself, has his head more firmly screwed on. This is probably not the case, however, for, as we soon see, John’s life is going nowhere in a big hurry. I put it this way in 2008: “We have a narrator who at first seems ordinary and reliable but who presently betrays himself as not only unreliable but delusional.” If  this does not really describe John Breeze, it is not because John is more clear-sighted than James Jones (of This Is the Life), but rather because O’Neill has changed the nature of the game that John has to play. If John is not unreliable or delusional, that’s because the world that he lives in isn’t very reliable or realistic, either.

The Breezes, John and his sister, Rosie, and their Pa, live in Rockport, which I took to be Cork (only it’s much bigger). Mrs Breeze died of electrocution by lightning some fourteen years before the story begins (John Breeze is now 25, Rosie a bit older), but O’Neill steadfastly resists the temptation to make something of this catastrophe. I picked up a hint, which may have been my own invention, that the woman was struck dead in the middle of an attempt to flee her family, but it was the merest whisper, and it didn’t seem to matter much, not in the world of Rockport. The good people of Rockport suffer the same range of afflictions visited upon human beings everythere, but there is something about the city itself that conceals this. It is as if the local boosters had not known when to stop playing with the contrast and saturation settings while PhotoShopping their publicity. There is an absurdity about Rockport that can be sensed throughout the novel, only once surfacing explicitly, in the following passage.

I looked out over Rockport, a model congregation of six hundred thousand human beings. I remembered a history schoolbook illustration of what it had looked like in the olden days, a sea-threatened hamlet hulked over by rain and hills, with a boundary wall raised miserably against vehement casual forces — invaders, flood, wolves, sea gales. A large shanty stood at the centre of the village and a thread of smoke climbed through the hole in its roof. That was where hopeful sacrifices were made in appeasement of the gods, where the population slept together in a warming pack, their bodies each other’s radiators, dreaming of security. Now the boot was on the other foot, no Rockport bossed the elements. The earth, the waters, the fires and even the mobile air had been harnessed like a team of horses and made to run and run, towing the city like a quick chariot. Energy! The metropolis, hot and kinetic, growled and twitched and glittered with its mutations. The traffic moved constantly through streets teeming with dynamized citizens, themselves yoked and consentingly driven by the strong flow of money. Such unity, such output: I could smell them in the industrial aromas that drifted up to me from below. Yes, Rockport had the whip hand now, Rockport had the power. There were no more wolves. Any animals that were not milked or eaten or kept as pets were designated as wildlife and preseerved for our enjoyment. The dangerous heaths had been turned into football fields, the dunes splashed delicately with the greens of golf courses, the sea tamed by breakwaters and looted steadily for fish and gases. Invasions were history, and hunger was history. Subsistence was no longer the aim of the game now; by such fabulous cities, we had minimum standards of welfare and economic safety nets — now we had surplus, and from that hilltop it looked as though the dream of security had been realized and wondrously surpassed. It looked as though we were home and dry.

Funny on its face, this passage is hilariously but screechingly at odds with everything that the Breezes experience every day, from unremitting traffic jams to “decruitment” at work, sans safety net. (Like “dynamize,” “decruitment” is a fabulously awful coinage.) Written when the Celtic Tiger was rampant, but it is impossible to read without sensing that Joseph O’Neill knew how curled up in shame the poor beast would be today. How can John Breeze be delusional in a delusional world? We have moved from the Trollopean sanity of James Jones’s London to the absurdity of Kafka’s Prague or, better still, to the nowhere of Samuel Beckett’s stage.

Before reading The Breezes, I could not see how Joseph O’Neill grew from his first novel to his third. It seemed rather that Netherland was an outgrowth of The Blood-Dark Track, O’Neill’s deeply engrossing family history. Also background for Netherland, there is “The Ascent of Man,” in Granta 72 (Overreachers), the account of O’Neill’s pro-bono work, whilst a barrister in the Temple, on behalf of a Trinidadian forester, Ramnath Harrilal. But between the two works of fiction there was a lacuna. Without The Breezes, it seemed that O’Neill had scrapped his initial approach to fiction and developed an altogether new one; junking the mechanics of satire, he grounded Netherland in real-world complexities. I see now that this is not quite what happened. What the satire gave way to was not, initially, realism, but absurdity: the large absurdity of civilizations that take themselves too seriously (or at any rate drink their own Kool-Aid), and the smaller absurdity of trying to capture life in words. Unlike Kafka and Beckett, O’Neill has the knack — perhaps it’s nothing but the force of a lower center of gravity — of appearing to make sense of the senseless, and there is no modernist “difficulty” about The Breezes. But the novel is nonetheless saturated in meaninglessness. In Netherland, this sense of absurdity has been completely metabolized, and rendered no longer notable: “how things are” is “absurd,” and the thought that they could be otherwise has been abandoned. In The Breezes, absurdity is still remarkable, as readers will find in the tall tale of John Breeze’s career as an artist, about which I shall not say another word.

If I haven’t said much about the story that Joseph O’Neill tells in The Breezes, that’s because it is an entertainment, as I say, and easily spoiled by discussion. If you can get your hands on a copy, read it and we’ll talk.