As I was lying in bed, waiting to fall back asleep after a trip to the bathroom, the word “Alhambra” floated into my brain, and whatever current brought it there was broken by a sharp sense that I shall probably never see the Alhambra, nor, for that matter, set foot in Spain. The desire to do either has never been appreciable. It seems much harder that I might never make it to Italy, but, upon examination, the desire to visit Italy melts into an obligation, and quickly falls back further into a duty neglected in the past: I ought to have been to Italy by now. Now, with my stooped shoulders and rigid back, with my shortish stride and my disinclination for long walks, Italy would be rather wasted on me. In the night, the thought of never seeing the Alhambra was sentimentally sad, in a life-is-over sort of way that I had to snap myself out of. (Else I’d never have gone back to sleep.) This morning, I see the matter more clearly.

Physically, travel has become uncomfortable for me. But so has the very idea of “adventure.” I find myself wondering just how long ago it was that my willingness to play along with other people’s penchant for adventure became wholly inauthentic. Did I ever like adventures? Looking back, I see them as either frightening or disappointing. But then, I should never call walking around Paris or London or Amsterdam an “adventure.” I do not expect surprises in those cities any more than I expect them in New York. I rather dislike surprises, and will go out of my way to avoid the likelihood of being taken by them. I’m speaking of surprises in the street, as it were. I am ambushed by surprises in my mind every day. Some are more exciting than others, but collectively they satisfy my appetite for the unexpected.

There is, periodically, talk of another trip to Istanbul. Kathleen and I went there in 2005, and we were treated royally by our (business) hosts. Wasn’t that an adventure? How can I even think of saying that it wasn’t? I had such a good time that I was exhausted at the end of the week, or sick, actually; I came down with an allergic reaction to some medicine that I’d been taking — nothing to do with being in Istanbul, except that I was on the go every minute. (Up in the middle of the night, for example, blogging from the hotel’s business center; our wing had not yet been connected to the Internet.) Everything was extraordinarily interesting — everything! And it was all very comfortable, too. I learned a little Turkish, and daydreamed about living in a flat in BeyoÄŸlu, right around the corner, perhaps, from Orhan Pamuk, whose novel Snow I was reading.

I dream of living in flats in European cities all the time. That has nothing to do with travel.

***

Last week, I picked up a book that turned out to be a quick and pleasant read, Stephane  Kirland’s Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City. The transformation of Paris in the Second Empire is an abiding interest of mine, possibly because there has never been anything like it but probably because it really did make Paris the most beautiful city on earth. Not necessarily the city with the most interesting monuments and landmarks — but then, I’m not interested in monuments and landmarks. I don’t want to see the ruins of the Parthenon because that’s all they are, ruins; the Athens that the Parthenon crowned disappeared well over a thousand years ago. I will admit to a strange desire to see how small the Roman remains are, and how small the baroque churches built alongside them. But civically, a monument interests me only to the extent that it is well-sited, and almost everything in Paris is right where it ought to be, thanks to its web of boulevards. The original boulevards took the place of the old city walls during the reign of Louis XIV, but they were by their very nature peripheral. Until the Rue de Rivoli was undertaken by Napoleon I, there were no such thoroughfares in the center of town. New streets were developed throughout the early Nineteenth Century, but it was under Napoleon III that the city that we know began to appear. Thousands of families were displaced by slum clearance, and crony capitalism created thousands of dubious fortunes. Georges Eugène Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine for all but the last years of the “carnival empire,” was responsible for the heavy construction — the roads, aqueducts, sewers, and so forth. He had nothing to do with the design of the vernacular city buildings that still line the inner boulevards and give Paris its look of eternal serenity, which everyone attributes to him. There was nothing serene about Haussmann, a tyrannical workaholic. Haussmann was entirely Napoleon’s creature — that’s the point that Kirkland wants to make. The transformation of Paris was the Emperor’s doing. Kirkland is prevented from making his case with complete persuasiveness by a happy determination to avoid being tedious.

What I itched for, when I got to the end of Paris Reborn, was for a modern-day Plutarch to compare and contrast the careers of Georges Eugène Haussman and Robert Moses. Having said that, I see that I have something else in mind. Moses, even more dictatorial than Haussmann, and nobody’s creature, made large-scale urban renewal projects politically unthinkable, but we’re going to have to think again if New York is to continue to develop. It seems obvious to me — only to me, I’m afraid — that the future of New York lies in a reconception of Queens County as a more highly concentrated residential quarter, with buildings of “Haussmannian” proportions replacing single-family homes and larger apartment buildings lining the thoroughfares. Where is the vision to come from for this? Whence the political muscle? Whatever happens, the stories of Haussmann and Moses are replete with cautions.

The most pronounced symptom of spring fever this season is that I’m reading like a teenager. All I want to do is curl up with a good book. The difference is that I’ve read the books before. I’m not reading anything new. For the first time — and about time! — I’m going through the library in search of books that I’ve liked if not loved, and replacing a vague sense of my own taste with something clearer, something more like a reading list.

The same friend who warned me off the new Claire Messud (“too women’s studies”) has been reading Barbara Pym for the first time, so I thought I’d read something for the second. I chose the most unfamiliar title, The Sweet Dove Died. I couldn’t remember a thing about the book, and I had no feeling of having read it before. It is certainly not Pym’s strongest effort, partly because it spends too much time in the head of a James Boyce, a very good-looking but rather dim and confused young man. A bored young man, really. We spend even more time with Leonora Eyre, a fiftyish matron (maiden, more like) with beautiful taste, especially in clothes, and a cool elegance that comes across as frosty and repellent. She is given to mild bouts of scheming and self-deceit that bring Emmeline Lucas (“Lucia”) to mind, but nothing ridiculous befalls. James, whose sexual identity is palpably unclear to everyone, pays court to Leonora, which she likes very much, because he is very respectful and, with her, carnally inert. James meets a girl, Phoebe, and falls into bed with her a couple of times, but the principal yield of this liaison is Phoebe’s disappointment and Leonora’s jealousy. (In Leonora’s eyes, the youthfully shambolic Phoebe is undeserving of James.) Then, on holiday in Spain, James is picked up by an American grad student called Ned. Ned is a nasty piece of work, and it’s a pity that Pym doesn’t do more with him.

“Oh, Jimmie, that conscience again! So you’re still fond of her — what does ‘fond’ mean? So you hurt her — but that’s what loving is, hurting and being hurt. Believe me, I know.“

They had had this conversation before and it had occurred to James more than once to wonder whether Ned had ever been hurt himself or whether he had always been the one to do the hurting.

“I’ve had to hurt people so many times,” Ned went on. “Oh, Jimmie, it tears one apart!”

“It might tear the other person apart too,” James observed, with a cynicism unusual in him. “I’ll go an see here tomorrow.”

For a moment Ned looked almost anxious but the shadow soon passed from his face. James would be no exception to the rule that nobody tired of Ned before he tired of them.

It would have been great fun to read the story that showed Ned up.

Pym’s eye for detail carries her away, giving the novel the texture of a series of to-do lists. and second thoughts about same, that damps the sparks of humor.

Christmas was no almost upon them. It had come round again in its inexorable way, with its attendant embarrassments which this year seemed even more numerous than usual. Ned was going to have to spend it in Oxford with his friends, who were rather hurt by his neglect of them. The evening before he went James took him out to dinner to give him his Christmas present, a pair of expensive cuff link.s This had been comparatively easy to choose, for all Ned asked of a present was that it should cost the giver a lot of money. Leonora’s had been much more difficult. The Sunday paper colour supplements offered no advice on what to give an older woman towards whom one was conscious of having behaved badly. Anything like the Victorian ‘love tokens’ of the past seemed inappropriate, so James eventually chose a picture book of reproductions of Victorian paintings. He knew that Leonora would be disappointed; even if she did not show it in her face, her tone of voice when she thanked him would betray it, as Miss Caton’s had when he opened the book of poetry Phoebe had sent him for his holiday. Books of presents were somehow lacking in excitement and romance. He was relieved when he learned that Humphrey was giving her a pair of amethyst earrings and hoped that his uncle’s present would in some way make up for his inadequacy, though he really knew it would not. James himself was going to winter sports as usual with what Humphrey called “a pretty group of young people,” making them seem something very remote from himself and Leonora.

From this busy surface life of engagements and things, all deep feelings (if any) are bolted away. Every now and then, Leonora sheds a tear for the loneliness of her life, but she is always in bed when she does so; when she is up and dressed, she embraces her way of life with iron determination and plenty of contempt for weaker souls. She is something of a monster, still hale and hearty enough to keep up the bluff of being an attractive woman — but to what end? To Humphrey (James’s uncle), she is simply a tease, all dolled up but unresponsive to his amorous advances, as though they were in bad taste. As for James, Ned puts it well: “Jimmie was a sweet boy, but as time went on the innocence and naîvety which had first attracted Ned became tedious, even pitiful, and they seemed to have less and less in common. Jimmie was not very intelligent, had little sense of humour and was always ‘around’ in a way that began to be irritating.” The reader cannot feel much different.

When the book was over, I felt that Pym had not played her cards very well. The characters had not been dealt out properly. The plot depends too heavily on shifts in James’s living accommodations: his furniture is moved about a great deal. This occasions scheming, as I say, but not much interest. If James were to work at the center of the novel, he would have to be a mystery, closed and silent, his thoughts unknown to us. Phoebe and Ned — I should have liked to throw them in a box and see who came out alive. Leonora is mildly dented at the end, but still an half-hearted vamp, doomed to become ludicrous. Things might have worked out with Humphrey, but the timing was off; he comes to see her as ageing and tired, and he gives up on her as a prospective lover.

The writing, too, seemed flat, almost pedestrian. I was often reminded of Ruth Rendell’s less thrilling stories about odd people in London (Portobello, for example). The everyday psychopathology of Pym’s bored and boring characters left me dispirited. Needing a tonic, I remembered a story by Elizabeth Taylor that made a powerful impact when I read it last summer, “The Ambush,” so I went and found that.

It was like following a clavichord sonata by CPE Bach with one of his father’s great organ toccatas. Pym’s washed-out pastels gave way to gorgeous beauty, pregnant with constrained passion. “The Ambush” is set at an inviting old house on the banks of the Thames. Taylor sets many of her stories in this part of England, but none is so enchanted. A young woman returns to the home of her boyfriend, about a month after his death in an automobile accident, at the invitation of the young man’s mother. Catherine has been bottling up her grief, trying not to yield to scenes and sobs, and in general making everyone around her nervous; when she goes off to Mrs Ingram’s, her parents are relieved to “come down from their tightrope and relax.”

We care about Catherine because of the very uncertainty of her situation.

Uncertain, during those weeks, how much grief was suitable to her — for she and Noël had not been officially engaged and in the eyes of the world she saw her status as a mourner undecided — she had shown no sign of sorrow, for one tear might release the rest and one word commit her to too many others. Her fortitude was prodigious…

Noël’s mother, Mrs Ingram, is something of a sorceress. Catherine, we are told, “had wanted to be her daughter-in-law and part of the enchantment.” But the two women do not spend much time together, and Catherine wonders why she has been asked to the house. She spends most of the time, when she is not alone, with the brother, Esmé, whom she only met at Noël’s funeral. Esmé lives abroad and seems to have a life apart; he is visited by a Ned-like creature called Freddie. (Taylor’s biographer, Nicola Beauman, calls Esmé “the only obvious homosexual in Elizabeth’s work,” but I’m not so sure that anything is obvious.) Esmé and Catherine boat up and down the river, just as Catherine used to do with Noël. “Another thing about the river,” Esmé says, “we can quite safely bring our unhappiness here. No one can each it or be contaminated by it, as on dry land.” This is enchantment, too, and Catherine is within the spell.

Near the end of the story, Catherine accompanies Mrs Ingram to the graveyard, to freshen the flowers at Noël’s grave. In a long, beautifully written paragraph, Taylor deftly shifts between the summer afternoon on a shady lane and Catherine’s apprehensiveness about encountering “some overpowering monument,” resolving the two with the transcending image of “groves of Ingrams.”

Unlike most of the other riverside families, this had kept its bones in one place for at least two hundred years.

Noël’s grave, upon which the earth has not settled, is marked only by a wooden cross.

Catherine took a step back, as if she might otherwise sink with the earth. She felt obscenity, not peace, around her.

“Obscenity” comes as a bit of rude surprise, but then we realize that Catherine is, for once, not fretting but feeling.

“The Ambush” ends ambiguously — but powerfully, as powerfully as it has been throughout. Quite unable to go on reading, I was reminded of Wallace Stevens’s line: “This is the barrenness / of the fertile thing that can attain no more.”

But I must pick a better Pym next time.