Sluggish in yesterday’s rainy weather, I slouched in a chair with two books that I hoped might restart my drudge-addled brain. The first was Pankaj Mishra’s book about three anti-imperialist Asian thinkers of the Nineteenth Century, In the Ruins of Empire. I have always liked Mishra’s reports in The New York Review of Books, and his book is as well-written as one would expect, but I am waiting to encounter something I don’t know. That’s fatuous; there’s lots that I don’t know. But I’m waiting for a genuinely counter-Western viewpoint to develop. In the meantime, I’m meditating on the emergence, in a remote, weatherbeaten peninsula (Europe) of the organizational acumen that made industry and empire possible. And I’m wondering just how prosperous Asia was, before the red-faced barbarians arrived.

Then I turned to Bad Blood, Colm Tóibín’s first book, or his first book of nonfiction, anyway. This was much more congenial, possibly because it traces the backside of empire, as it were, in the form of a walk along the border between Northern Island and the Republic, and intellectual rhetoric does not figure at all. Tóibín blends understated references to the friction between the two nations (not so much North and South as Protestant and Catholic) with gruff travelogue. He writes about himself with an astutely-measured level of detail that is revealing without being self-absorbed. About thirty at the time of the journey, Tóibín was young enough to withstand the hardships that he was old enough to spare himself from time to time. Thus he makes the pilgrimage to Lough Derg’s Station Island, submitting to its rigorous round of pentitential self-denials, even though he is not a believer, only to skip the last step because, well, enough is enough.

They dropped me in the real world, in front of the Railway Hotel in Enniskillen. It was a Sunday morning, almost midday. I bought the newspapers and sat myself down in the Railway Hotel with a pint of Lucozade, soft drinks being permitted on the last day of the pilgrimage, but nothing else until midnight except black tea and dry toast. The Lough Derg spell was broken, however, and the age-old system of self-mortification meant nothing now. I didn’t feel even slightly guilty as I sat among the Sunday drinkers and ordered chicken sandwiches. I devoured them when they came and when I had finished them I ordered more. After a while, I asked for the lunch menu and got through an enormous lunch in the dining room: soup, roast beef, mashed potatoes, chips, carrots, cauliflower, fresh fruit salad and coffee. The pilgrimage was over.

Tóibín is as stoic as the son of any respectable Irish family would be, but he is not ashamed to tell us that he comes to feel very sorry for himself tramping through deluges of rain on the way to Clones, a once-prosperous railway junction that has been put to sleep by the partition. He seems to want to see how far he can go in pursuit of the unmediated chthonic power of dumb rural Ireland, and he seems to know that he will not get much more than wet clothes, sore feet, and the more-than-occasional encounter with armed officers and angry partisans. (That he will get a book out of it is almost unmentionable.) At the same time that he is taking an arduous hike, he is also flirting with disaster. Colm Tóibín has long shown himself to be expert at amusing himself with and in difficulties.

Tóibín writes of a land in which zealots have exercised a baleful control on civil life, and he is tacitly aware that zealotry is what it takes to survive the inhuman hardships of the native Irish experience of English dominion, which lingers on in the North because so many radical Protestants were transplanted there from the island across the Irish Sea (mostly from Scotland) in the troubled times of the early Seventeenth Century. What had been bad enough got much worse. By the Twentieth Century, it was hard to say what “Irish” might really mean. Was Oscar Wilde Irish? Certainly not in the way that James Joyce was. But Wilde and Shaw and Beckett looked Irish enough in London. In Bad Blood, Tóibín reports being shocked to see that some people from Omagh (a town in the North) have signed a guest book identifying themselves as “British.” That’s what the partition of the island has done: Protestant Northerners see themselves as Irish no longer.

When Bad Blood came out, in the mid-Eighties, I wouldn’t have touched it. I had a “rule” about Ireland and Israel: for literary purposes, they did not exist. I have held on to the rule as regards Israel, but it was Tóibín who changed my mind about Ireland. And he did so very craftily, with a wonderful novelization of the life of Henry James. I still can’t do justice to The Master, to Tóibín’s successful appropriation of the sensibility of a writer whose style he does not begin to attempt to emulate, capturing him not in the Master’s own densely-woven prose but instead in the persistent hesitancy that inspired it. James could never make up his mind to do anyting, so he devoted his art to writing about that, and to making it riveting. Almost all of his books (there are a few comic exceptions) creak with gothic anxiety — what was that? Who made that noise? The ghosts of bedtime stories, however, are replaced by self-interested, occasionally malevolent characters who are very much alive. What is the second half of The Golden Bowl but a prolonged dual haunting, with each of the women, Maggie and Charlotte, a noxious phantom in the other’s life? Neither can be quite certain of the other, and this uncertainty is what Tóibín lodged in his own novel.

Having loved one book by Colm Tóibín, I had to read another, and so it has gone until now, with only two titles remaining, one of which I am halfway through. (The other is his next book, Homage to Barcelona.) Earlier this year (I think it was), I read The Heather Blazing, Tóibín’s second novel, and immediately fell into the confusion of regarding it as his latest. I wished that I knew how to pronounce Gaelic, and thanked the Internet for help with “Fianna Fáil” and “Taoiseach.” I wish that Bad Blood came with a map, but I still have the Esso map of Ireland that I used to drive from Dublin to Limerick (my first time on the wrong side of the road, and I drive across a whole country!) in 1977. (The map is in very delicate shape, and it does not show Station Island.) Without ever having actually changed my mind about Ireland (beautiful, but something of a theme park), I have been an eager reader of whatever Colm Tóibín has to say about it.

There has been another Irishman, too, who, like Tóibín, has written a very fine (I think great) novel about New York: Joseph O’Neill. O’Neill, of course, is not just Irish. If anything, he makes the problem of deciding what “Irish” means exponentially more complicated than it already was. His mother belongs to a Syrian family living in southern Turkey, and he himself grew up primarily in The Hague, from which he went to university in England and then into the Temple, of all places.  But his paternal grandfather, as he tells in his superb family memoir, Blood Dark Track, was imprisoned for belonging to the IRA. Where is home? For Tóibín, it is Enniscorthy, a cathedral town in Wexford that often appears in his fiction.

Have they met, I wonder. They must have done. But it seems impossible, somehow.

***

Good grief! What I took to be the blister of an improperly healed incision turned out to be a squamous cell, ballooning from the back of my head. I’ll have it off in no time, but — lordy!  

What is it about waiting that reduces me to low wretchedness? I agree with Pascal that most of human misery could be forestalled if people were better able to sit quietly in a room, but sitting quietly in a room waiting for a knock or a telephone call that may or may not come at any minute is a rare and pure kind of misery in itself, all the more painful for lacking any kind of objective manifestation (broken bones, severed arteries, masked gunmen). And when the sitting quietly goes on for an entire day, beyond hope of knock or call, until about 5:30, when the repairman finally shows up, and spends the next hour and a half on the floor of my kitchen, muttering quite audibly about the difficulty of the job, only to stand up and announce that, although the new motor has been installed, there is “a little piece” that he’s having a hard time with, is afraid of breaking, so, I’m sorry, our chief tech guy will come tomorrow, if anybody’s home, and get the job done — actually, I was relieved to hear it. It didn’t bother me in the least that the dishwasher hadn’t, after all that, been repaired. The waiting was over!

The worst that can happen is never as bad as waiting for the worst that can happen.

I won’t be spending today sitting quietly. I told the repairman that I would have to be out of the house until three in the afternoon. That was not a problem, he said. (I have my doubts, of course, about his power to fix appointments for his superiors.) Ray Soleil is going to help me tidy up the last bit of balcony evacuation, and, after lunch, he’ll cover for me while I run to Fairway and Gristede’s.

***

While sitting quietly, I read the second half of Zadie Smith’s new novel, NW. The conditions were not conducive to full literary appreciation, but I read avidly, as fascinated as I could be by the unfolding of Natalie Blake, one of Smith’s quartet of principals, all children of a housing estate in Northwest London, three of them strivers of varying degrees of success. Natalie’s achievement is the most spectacular, but she knocks about emptily in it until she begins, as earnestly as any drug addict, to destroy herself.

170. In drag

Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.

Natalie (née Keisha) reminded me of a character from another one of this seasons new books, Ian McEwan’s Serena Frome, from Sweet Tooth. Serena comes from near the other end of the social scale; she is a bishop’s daughter; and she is nowhere near as driven to succeed as Natalie is. The two women aren’t alike at all, except that their top-drawer educations leave curious holes in their minds. Both are untouched by the humanism in which higher education used to be grounded. It is true that this humanism was soiled by an unthinking paternalistic sexism, a rather mindless division of humanity along anatomical lines. But that, I think, was an accident; it could have been torn away and discarded. Instead, humanism itself was discarded. Serena Frome, thanks to her maths major, was never properly taught how to read a serious novel, with the result that she was incapable, as an adult, of reading her own behavior. (Sweet Tooth is essentially a novel about novels, and as wonderful as anything out of The Arabian Nights.)

Natalie Blake is a more familiar failure-in-success. She has worked her way to the top of the legal profession without ever grappling with the problem of living in the legal profession — of inhabiting success. What happens when the challenges run out, when accomplishment is achieved? Zadie Smith is not really interested in this problem — the problem of fitting human aspiration to human limitations — but her novel does a better job of presenting the issue than today’s universities do.  

On Saturday night, after dinner, Kathleen remarked that she never heard anyone other than an infant addressed as “baby” until she was in her teens — what a proper upbringing! I knew that “baby” was not used by the nice people among whom I grew up, and was vaguely disturbed by the suggestion that a man who called his wife “baby” was still overtly in love with her (that is to say, adolescent). “Babe,” however, happened to be the nickname of one of my parents’ cocktail-circut friends. Like the famous batter, Babe Shea was a man; unlike him, a very tall one. I remember Babe Shea as looking something like Gregory Peck; he was certainly that nice. He and his wife, Hope, lived in an old stucco house a few streets away — just outside the Village but quite close to Siwanoy, the country club — that was notorious for its flooding basement. A sump pump had to be run at all times. This was regarded by my mother as a deep tragedy, worse than childlessness. A leaky foundation was something like untreated cancer, you’d have thought.

I had been looking for something in the afternoon, and the blue room was a tumult of ejecta from the closets. It so happened — I remembered, as we talked in the evening — that one pile of stuff was topped by two silver trays, the trays that I can’t use and can’t think what else to do with. One tray was presented to my parents when they moved from Bronxville to the Texas, in 1968. The other was given to my father on his sixitieth birthday, in 1974, by a new group of friends. Both trays are covered with engravings made from my parents’ friends signatures, surrounding (in each case) a big gothic “K.” I remembered, mentioning Babe Shea, that he and Hope were represented (in her hand, I’m sure) on the Bronxville tray. Sure enough.

My sister and I are the only people in the world who could possibly recognize any of the names on both trays. There are perhaps two hundred people at the most who would recognize most of the names on either — possibly far fewer. The Bronxville tray will be fifty years old in a few years, and, given the American penchant for moving about the country, the network that connected my parents and their friends has largely broken down. Someone for whom the names of Edna and Johnny Caesar might ring a bell would probably not have a clue about Jeanne and Matt Leckey. Already in 1968, there were two widows, Kay Schramm and June Black. (I’d gone to grade school with Kay’s son and June’s daughter; years later, I ran into the latter at a party, and learned that she had pursued a successful career as a hands model.) And the Clearys didn’t sign, because, dear as they were to my parents, they had perished ina plane crash thirteen years earlier.

The autographs on the Bronxville tray bring back most of the signers with great clarity, because I cannot really remember a time at which I was put to work, on New Year’s Eve, passing hors d’oeuvres to them in our living room. I was not much of a reader as a boy, but I remember Johnny Caesar very much as if he were a favorite character from a story book. (It’s no wonder that I’ve always been inclined to drink more than I ought.) Grace Byrnes, who with her husband had moved to Southern California before my parents went to Texas (we visited them once), did not sign the tray, but she comes to mind along with the people who did, because she was my idea of a fairy godmother, and I would bring her special plates until my mother put a stop to such foolishness. These were the characters who decorated my childhood. The tale is not one that I would pull down from the shelf and read, but the tray is like the spine of a thick book. I suppose that, for the tray to have any continued meaning after I’m gone, I should have to write out the text.

It would not make for hours of reading. A few of the names mean nothing even to me. And, aside from the fact that he worked for JC Penney, which nobody in Bronxville had ever heard of (at that time), I’ve already told you everything I know about Babe Shea.