29, 30, and 31 May

Tuesday 29th

The most interesting thing about Donald Trump, I’ve concluded, is his abstemiousness. The man doesn’t drink. And what’s really interesting about this is that nobody comments on it, neither friends nor foes. Nobody exclaims that the president is bold because or reckless even though he avoids alcohol.

Like everybody else, Trump acts on a braid of conscious, intuitive, instinctive, and deeply learned impulses, and there’s no saying which are more important than the others, no point in trying to trace the intentions behind his behavior. But whether Trump is a teetotaler by taste or by prudence, it’s a simple fact that he is never “incapacitated,” not even “under the weather.” He’s all there, all the time. It’s amazing to me, with my very different bundle of impulses, that he manages to be himself all the time without seeking some sort of chemical relief, but he is apparently untroubled by it. His bundle of impulses works for him.

And, I mean, it really does work: the man is in the Oval Office! What does Trump have that other presidents haven’t had? My theory is that he has an unerring sense of what doesn’t matter, and that his not drinking reflects some awareness that he has to be stone cold sober to keep this sense alive. When you’re drunk, nothing matters, everything matters — things get all mixed up. Trump is never mixed up. He is probably ignorant of many things that a normal person of his background would not want to be caught not knowing, but he is not confused. His decisions may be inconsistent over time, but they are always the right decisions for the moment, or at least never the wrong ones, because, really, how could a businessman with his history of bankruptcy and general lack of verifiable financial success get a roomful of people to support him? Much less win the Collegiate vote?

It’s not that bankruptcy doesn’t matter. It’s that it doesn’t matter that much. As much as other things. Trump can calibrate to a fine degree the context of self-presentation in which other things outweigh bankruptcy to the point of making it vanish. Building a wall, draining the swamp. Compared to these, bankruptcy is just a less-interesting abstraction.

And he also knows who matters. Right-thinking people were genuinely shocked by his dismissal of Rex Tillerson by means of a tweet, but Trump knew that neither the position of Secretary of State nor the person of Rex Tillerson meant very much to most Americans.

Rather than produce further examples of Trump’s unusual discernment — tedious if not vomitrocious reportage — I suggest that we examine what he does in the future as so much evidence that he understands the world that we’re living in better than we do, and that we can learn from him what really matters in the United States today. Instead of deploring his grandstanding, follow him as if he were a Geiger counter.

When he attacks something, we add it to our list of things that need to be fixed. It’s going to be a long list.

***

Wednesday 30

In yesterday’s Op-Ed column, David Brooks wrote about what’s wrong with the meritocracy. Having written a few things about this myself, I read it with the greatest interest. Here follow some quibbles.

Exaggerated faith in intelligence. By “intelligence,” Brooks seems to mean IQ, and he also seems to suggest that we put too much stock in aptitude and raw brainpower. This overlooks the extent to which the humanities have been denatured by ideas of efficiency. I don’t just mean tests and language labs. I mean the buzz words and the jargon that reduce intellectual effort to dog whistles. When too many teachers want to hear students say the right things, students learn to say the right things without understanding what they mean.

The best teachers learn from their students. I don’t mean that they learn anything much about the syllabus, but rather that students, as a result of the best teachers’ prodding, reveal the limitless variety of human possibility. The best teachers, in other words, do not have an exaggerated faith in their own intelligence, and this is what they teach their students.

Sometimes, I’m reminded of the medieval disconnect between theory and practice, wherein scholars drew their schemata but never handled a tool, while masons erected cathedrals without the benefit of physics equations. Americans today distinguish between a higher learning that is pursued in classrooms and an everyday commonsense morality that is picked up in cafeterias and on playing fields. Crabbed and fustian as it was, the old public-school curriculum of studying classical literature not only for mastery of Greek and Latin but for moral exemplars seems comprehensive in comparison.

Why, I wonder, does Brooks make two points out of one? Misplaced faith in autonomy and Inability to think institutionally are the same thing. The old WASP élite enjoyed a proprietary interest in its institutions and its society: it quite literally owned almost everything. Meritocrats aren’t invested in society. We haven’t learned how to replace the old ownership equity with a moral equity, with a collegial authority by which the meritocracy is enabled to judge itself. The medical and legal professions’ attempts at self-regulation are pale and often ineffective copies of the powerful back-room councils that ran things in the bad old days.

Finally, Brooks’s paragraph about the Misplaced notion of the self fails to make it clear that character is a social phenomenon, not a spiritual one. Too often, character is regarded as a sort of Superman costume that is revealed only in crisis. In fact, character is revealed by every gesture, every statement, every smile, every frown, every angry word, every kindness. Character is not a sash of merit badges but a messy array of inconsistent behaviors. The good news is that most of us behave better when surrounded by others who behave well. The central flaw in the current version of meritocracy is its postulation of individual merit. On any truly meaningful test — testing the members of a class — cheating is impossible.

***

Thursday 31st

Just when I was wondering what was going to push Philip Roth off the screen, along came Roseanne Barr with her tweet about Valerie Jarrett. It’s still too soon, I think, to comment on that — although I must say the President, with his demand that ABC apologise for all the HORRIBLE things that it has said about him, didn’t disappoint — so I’m grateful to Dara Horn for her piece in the Times‘s Sunday Review, which in its online version is entitled “What Philip Roth Didn’t Know About Woman Could Fill a Book.”

Roth’s three favorite topics — Jews, women and New Jersey — all remain socially acceptable targets of irrational public mockery, and Roth was a virtuoso at mocking the combination of all three. “What are they, after all, these Jewish women who raised us up as children?” Roth’s narrator asks in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the 1969 novel that made his reputation. “It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech — look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic. Yes, yes, maybe that’s the solution then: think of them as cows, who have been given the twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg.”

One could generously say that jokes like this haven’t aged well, yet they were just as cruel in 1969 — and the misogyny isn’t really the problem. After all, if one policed literature for bigotry, there would be little left to read. The problem is literary: these caricatures reveal a lack of not only empathy, but curiosity.

**

Philip Roth’s works are only curious about Philip Roth.

To which I would add that the snippet of Roth’s prose reveals the disregard for grace that’s typical of impatient, unpleasant men. “[T]he twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg” might sound funny when you say it, but it falls flat on the page.

When Dara Horn says that Roth’s curiosity is limited to Roth, it sounds like a put-down. We’ve come that far, at least. When Roth was writing Portnoy’s Complaint, though, it would have been praise. In those days, Hamlet was the greatest work of literature, and what does Hamlet do but think about himself? The language in which he does so is grandiloquent, possibly immortal, but I prefer it in extracts. As I play, Hamlet is simply depressing: the cogs of a revenge tragedy grind in their inexorably noisy way, and the only thing slowing them down is the prince’s introspection. Hamlet was the perfect model for the Postwar school of alienated, existentialist writers convinced of the absurdity of existence. As also for the school of writers who dared to subject themselves to their own variants of Freudian analysis. This was a struggle that had nothing to do with women, except insofar as women were trophies, carried off in victory. The enemy was the vast phalanx of men who cooperate in soulless routines of bureaucracy and commerce, who plot to exterminate meaning. Only by studying himself could the author find freedom.

So many things that made sense during the Cold War — that made so much sense that men developed whole personalities around them — don’t make sense anymore.

As a young man, I watched this battle, you might say, from a point outside its Overton Window. I could root for neither side. I felt a moral — aesthetic? — obligation to stand up for the writers, because they were, after all, writers, artists, thinkers, and so forth, whereas their opponents were duped robots. But I wouldn’t have wanted to see the writers put in charge of things, either. If the conformists were boring, the writers were disagreeable. They had terrible manners, and were proud of this. They were very greedy, and not just for attention. They were terrible, terrible listeners. And they were not very nice to the women who were attracted to them. And women were attracted to them. That was the worst of it.

Has that changed? Perhaps we can say that the attraction has been infused with … complications. I can’t see Dara Horn fluttering on a park bench if Philip Roth sat down beside her with a Mr Softee and eventually, like Lisa Halliday’s Alice, in Asymmetry, retiring with him to his apartment for “Operations” sex. No. I hear her saying, you always use the language of possession when talking about love. And then standing up and walking away.

In time, the old battle faded away, as antagonists grew old and died, women entered the workforce, and Hamlet began to sound solipsistic. I got rid of a lot of novels. None by Philip Roth, though. I’d never had any.

Bon week-end à tous!

22 and 25 May

Tuesday 22nd

The anecdote appears on page 59 of Andrea Barnet’s new book, Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World (Ecco), in the chapter about Rachel Carson. After Carson’s The Sea Around Us appeared in the summer of 1951, a fan sent a properly-addressed letter but  began it with the salutation, “Dear Sir,” explaining that he (the fan) had

always been convinced that males possess the supreme intellectual powers of the world

and he could not now change his mind about that.

How jolly it would be to know that this sort of thinking no longer sprouted, much less flourished, in the minds of males. How nice to live in a world in which James Damore and Jordan Peterson had nothing to say!

As regular readers know, I’ve been plowing through books by and about women, if only because two very good ones, Michelle Dean’s Sharp and now Barnet’s Visionary Women, have just been published. I found myself asking just what sort of gifts women bring to the table. What special contributions do women make to the counsels of power? And how to evaluate these contributions? By the criteria established by men? By the criteria that men would endorse if they actually learned a thing or two from women? Do women fit in, or are they, as I think Peterson has it, “chaos”? Where to establish a point of view?

Probably because I sensed that I was proposing a very tedious project, I looked hard at the initial question and realized in a flash that women bring the table. Men bring the expression, the cliché, but their accessory is much more likely to be a handsaw, the better to facilitate taking away parts of something. Let’s not push the conceit. I’ve answered the question to my own satisfaction. Women bring people together, and the world with them.

Remarkable women, that is, women endowed with great critical intelligence. Women in our time, the first that has allowed women to speak. Women addressing the men of our time, who, in response to fear and uncertainty, have throughout the past century adopted the intellectual habits of the professional engineer, the applied scientist who insists on linear exactitude and dispassionate analysis. Men as gifted as the women, but men in whom the spark of humanism has been almost extinguished.

Whether the women bring something peculiar to women, or whether they insist on restoring humanist priorities, I can’t say. It doesn’t seem to be important anymore. Barnet quotes Wendell Berry’s distinction between nurture and exploitation.

The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health — his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of number, quantities, ‘hard facts,’ the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind. (444)

Women, perhaps only because they have not surrendered to the engineering outlook, understand that the gains of exploitation are, if nothing else, soon exhausted. Remarkable women remain unmoved and unimpressed by things that are done simply because they can be done, and they are disgusted by men who cannot be bothered to take care of what they have done. How much more admirable engineers would be, if, instead of designing new and “superior” airliners, they concentrated instead on reviving the vast web  of railroads in this country, and improving everything about it. Such a conversion might make America great for the first time.

On page 439 of Visionary Women, Barnet begins to present a panorama of the United States in the 1950s. It is a familiar picture, and every detail is important, so I won’t even summarize it. It’s enough for me to say that I was a child in those days, and that I remember them well, even if I didn’t understand them at the time. There seemed little to look forward to, if Walt Disney’s cartoon of Tomorrowland was anything to go by. In my town, few of the houses were genuinely old (only one or two were more than a hundred years older than I), but all were built in styles that echoed the past, and I was drawn to what had been far more than to what was to come.

The brutalism of the Fifties, happily, did not long survive the decade, and I agree with Barnet that, for all our failings and disappointments, for all the unpleasant consequences of good intentions, our world is a much better place than that of my childhood. I try to resist giving all the credit to women, but it is difficult. I wish I could be sure that the trend would continue, but the very wicked fairy who currently dominates the scene makes the techno-conformists of sixty years back look appealing by comparison. What’s clear is that women saved civilization, or at least kept it alive; now men need to learn from them how be of help. Men must become humanists.

***

Friday 25th

News of Philip Roth’s death was more interesting than I would have thought it could be, had I given it any thought. I’d have expected no more than a sigh of dismay, that Roth’s kind of writing could make anybody famous at any time. That his “themes” and “subjects” were generally — among literary journalists — could be considered the supreme American ones. Sex, death, rage, resentment, nitpicking. Well, no one praised him for nitpicking. But he did seem to be rewarded for having just been his neurotic old self, compulsively scribbling, writing in the voice of a discontented man muttering to himself. I had no use for Philip Roth.

But Ezra Blazer — I won’t go so far as to say that I found Lisa Halliday’s fictional recreation of her former lover much more appealing than his model, but Halliday at least made reading about him interesting. Had Philip Roth recommended Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness to the general public, in a Paris Review interview, say, I’d have half-guiltily shrugged it off, but when Ezra Blazer recommended the book to his girlfriend, Alice, I did think about looking for it my library, and then, within a day or two, when I came across it by chance, I did read it. Ezra Blazer’s wisdom never manifested itself to me in Philip Roth. In her very absorbing novel, Asymmetry, Halliday did what Roth could never do, making it conceivable that any woman (or other human being) could love him, even if only for a little while. The man as he presented himself was simply repulsive.

Daphne Merkin told a story a few years ago, in The New Yorker I think. She mentioned spending the night with an eminent writer at his place. I forget whether this was in the middle of an affair or just a one-night stand, but it would seem to have been the latter, because, when she was dressed and saying her goodbyes, he told her that, on her way out, she would find a box of books by the front door. His latest. Feel free to take one. Later, through the grapevine, I heard that the writer with whom Merkin had consorted was Philip Roth — no doubt about it. When I told the story to Kathleen last night, she scoffed at Roth’s self-promotion. Self-promotion? I disagreed. If ever there was a writer who needn’t promote himself, it was Philip Roth. The world took care of that for him. Largesse, rather, I thought. Even worse, said Kathleen. Once again, though, the man’s behavior is filtered and made bearable (or at least amusing) by a woman’s attention.

Philip Roth has been a large literary fixture for my entire adult life, and commensurately irritating. He was not alone. He stood in a grove of sex-addled Americans. Hemingway, Mailer, Bellow, Updike. But as the last to go, Roth bore the concentrated residue. How can I be sure that I am a man, and not just a sack of flesh with male generative equipment? What does having sex mean? Why do we have to die? With the exception of the fatally-glib Updike, these figures seemed to medicate such puerile anxieties by writing in self-important, often rather scraping tones. It is a relief to know that they are gone.

The basic question is this: are men undone by women? Or — the same question rephrased — are men undone by civilization? In the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, there was a great deal of worry about this, a reaction, so they say, to the over-upholstery of bourgeois life. Muscular Christianity and organized sports were conjured to the rescue. So was World War I — a calamity of chivalry in trenches of rotting muck. After World War II, the model was updated, and stoic knighthood yielded to the capable engineer, a man of few words. A bad fit for the men of many words who aimed for the Nobel in Literature! But an opportunity to recycle all the old fears. The only challenge was this brave new world in which women were getting used to speaking for themselves.

Also new, after the two wars, was the collapse of respectability as a barrier to what young people now call hooking up. In Kafka Was All the Rage, Anatole Broyard writes beautifully but painfully about how hopeless men and women were in the dawn of this freedom. Nobody knew what to do, beyond the tab-and-slot part. Nobody knew what to say, and only women had a clue about listening. On bad days, things don’t look any better now, what with boys learning about sex from degrading videos. Incels may be the heirs of the late literary giants, raising their fists to heaven and demanding the love of beautiful women.

I find my ironic eulogy for Philip Roth in Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel, The Friend:

And not to be too cruel, she doesn’t say, but you will not be missed.

Bon week-end à tous!

16, 17 and 18 May

Wednesday 16th

The weather got very hot yesterday, and then very windy: it was clear even without reference to meteorology that we were in for some storms. And they came, says the Times, as if on a conveyor belt, wreaking havoc on power and transportation. (But not in Manhattan itself, of course.) The temperature dropped twenty degrees in their wake, and we are now back to the cool and somewhat gloomy weather that has marked this month of May. All in all, the perfect climate for learning of the death of Tom Wolfe.

One had rather forgotten about him. Although I consumed The Bonfire of the Vanities as quickly as my eyes could travel, I was never a fan. I looked at From Bauhaus to Our House, but I did not read it. I gave up on A Man in Full after five or ten pages. Wolfe’s excited prose made me suspect that he was one of those men for whom the word “people” doesn’t include women — a very common failing, to be sure, but unforgivable in a writer. (In a thinker, that is.) I was astonished, even somewhat embarrassed, by the Times’s two-page obituary, much of it taken up by a photograph of Wolfe leaning against a lamppost. Wolfe lived two lives, the necessarily solitary one of the writer, for which, however, he seems to have dressed like a dandy, and then that of the dandy. The writer could be savage; the dandy was by all accounts courteous. Somehow, that strikes me as completely backwards. Shouldn’t the dandy be flamboyant, and the writer sympathetic? Either way, Wolfe cut an unusually public figure for a writer, and I daresay that’s what earned him the spread in the Times.

In an op-ed piece, Kurt Andersen says that he was inspired to become a writer by Tom Wolfe — he discovered him in ninth grade — and that a great deal of his own career was spent in open imitation of the older writer. He claims that Wolfe was a great inspiration for his work at Spy Magazine. I can see what he means, but I must insist that the inspiration could only have been partial. Tom Wolfe never made me laugh, while Spy very nearly laughed me to death. There was something anhedonic about the pile-up of words in Wolfe’s prose, something never sweetened by the giggling self-ridicule that gleefully topples David Foster Wallace’s mountains of clauses. Wolfe was a satirist, Wallace a comedian; the difference is that comedians never scold.

The style of Wolfe’s dandyism was of course the particular style of the Southern gentleman, the planter. This allowed Wolfe to wear his roots as a Virginian, as an outsider in the Big Apple, while looking much more presentable than most New York writers. Of course, if he had grown a beard, he would have risked comparisons with the colonel of fried chicken.

***

Back in 1968, the word “students” still meant “men”; I had to remind myself of that as I read Mavis Gallant’s “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook,” which was published in two instalments in The New Yorker in the autumn of that year. I ordered a copy of Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews, at the recommendation of Lisa Elkin’s Flâneuse, an interesting book that I may have been a little hard on in the other blog. Gallant, a Canadian, was already an established Parisian by 1968; what’s more, she lived around the corner from the university. The violence did not touch her immediate neighborhood, but the disorder did, and that is the subject of the Notebooks. Although the water never stopped running, the power was only intermittently cut, and the phones usually worked, most urban amenities were suspended, as workers, inspired by students, went on strike. Although deeply upset by this uncertainty, Gallant hoped that “the events” would lead to improvements in French affairs, if only by clearing the scene of the elderly de Gaulle, and she was very depressed when everything went back to normal. In fact, she left Paris as soon as she could, for her usual vacation in Menton, on the Riviera, and she declined to cover the conclusion from afar. But the Notebooks do not end on an abandoned note.

Bouleversante conversation with woman in travel agency, Rue de Rennes, where I cancel my auto-couchette reservation for last Friday. She begins by asking what I think. We both pussyfoot around the subject, and she then says, “Don’t you think that le social followed upon something perhaps more lasting and important?” Answer, “Yes, of course.” She becomes excited, says that she, for one, will never be the same again — that she will never accept anything at its face value, that “no one can stop her now” from asking herself questions. She pulls out from under the counter two morning papers, Le Figaro and Combat, and cries what may be the justification, finally, for the massacre of the trees: “Regardez! Je lis!” She says, “Je traîne, je lis, je pense.” Says she goes to the Sorbonne, to the Odéon, to a Catholic discussion group on the Rue Gay-Lussac: “J’écoute.”I say to her, ”What did you hope would happen? What did you want?” Seems taken aback, stares at me, says, “Je ne sais pas. Quelque chose de propre.” Can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this. Say, “Une merveilleuse abstraction?” She shakes her head. Doesn’t know.

The “massacre of the trees” is indeed the most heart-rending detail in the Notebooks. Gallant cries when she comes upon trees that have been cut down to make barricades, to improvise armor. So do most of the other women who appear in the Notebooks. This felling of slow green life is regarded as a crime that only thoughtless, ignorant young men could commit, emblematic of youth’s horrifying appetite for terror. The massacre of the trees is the very opposite of quelque chose de propre — something decent. But Gallant is prepared for forgive the students, amazed as she was to hear them chanting, Nous sont tous des juifs allemands!

Musing on Gallant’s memoir, Lisa Elkin decides that it all comes down to immigrants. The events of 1968, after all, were sparked by the insolence of a stateless foreign student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. If Elkin is right, we are all soixante-huitards, on one side or the other, even down to this day.

***

Thursday 17th

In the current issue of The Nation, which arrived on Monday morning with the Times, I read Bill McKibben’s review of Visionary Women, by Andrea Barnet. I ordered it, and it arrived yesterday afternoon. Sometimes I think Amazon knows what I’m going to buy before I do.

There are four “visionary women” in Barnet’s book: Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters. Add to these the ten women in Michelle Dean’s Sharp — Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm — and a trend emerges, a trend away from a movement. Few, if any, of these women were (or are) notable feminists. Reading about them has led me to conclude that feminism, formerly known as women’s liberation, has nothing to do with remarkable women.

The other night at dinner, Kathleen mentioned “incels,” which she had just read about somewhere, and then, without a break, told me about a show that she had sat through in the back seat of a taxi. After a moment’s difficulty trying to turn off the news feature, she gave up; at least she could mute it. Presently she saw Jennifer Lopez modeling inappropriate outfits inappropriately — striking poses that could most kindly be described as “kittenish.” We agreed that some women’s lack of judgment might be a good explanation of some men’s depravity, and that in fact it might be a case of depravity on both sides. Depravity is the belief in rationalizations that make misconduct permissible. The incels, as a group, have made misogyny normative among themselves, claiming a totally spurious entitlement. The behavior of women who imitate harlots is more puzzling. I can attribute it only to a lack of self-respect.

None of the fourteen women whom I have named suffered from a lack of self-respect. Although they made the most of such opportunities as presented themselves, they did not really require any kind of liberation. They made the most of what they had (minds, mostly), and the results were impressive enough to win admiring attention.

We have recently been treated to the appalling tale of the Washington Redskins’s junket to Costa Rica. During this pleasure trip, the team’s cheerleaders were advised to go about topless and to make themselves available for friendly encounters with rich hangers-on. Do we draw a line? Or ought the line have been drawn long ago, when cheerleaders’ outfits were downsized to their current skimpiness? And who would draw that line? Something tells me that it would not be any of my fourteen smart women. I can’t imagine any of them bringing herself to comment on cheerleaders, any more than correlatively smart men would take notice of drug lords.

The smart women and the cheerleaders do share the fact that they are not common. Now that people routinely marry for love, it may be that there are more beautiful people than smart people in the world, but beautiful people — beautiful people who are also just the right shade of young — are still unusual. (Psst! Have you seen Celeste Sloman’s extraordinary photograph of Gloria Steinem?) But beautiful people have much more in common with each other than smart people do. This may explain why beautiful people face such powerful challenges to their self-respect. Consider Pauline Kael. Kael was lured into a film-production partnership with Warren Beatty that nearly cost her her professional credibility; it was a terrible mistake to swallow this bait. But the bait was unique. It would have been neither offered to nor registered by the other women in my group-that-is-not-a-group. Whereas beautiful people in general are asked, sooner or later, to take off some or all of their clothes.

The object of women’s liberation, or feminism, is to develop the self-respect of ordinary women. Extraordinary women have nothing to contribute; on the contrary, their example may be discouraging — to ordinary women. In the forty odd years since the feminist movement became impossible to ignore, beautiful women have been so many spanners in the works, terrible distractions, insoluble conundrums. Smart, sexy, or both, unusual women make it difficult for an ordinary woman to figure out how to live. It would be nice if their presence on the Internet and in other media were more muted, if they were not presented as Kewpie dolls for the incels to shoot down.

***

Friday 18th

Reading about the shootings in Santa Fe, Texas — a town not far from Galveston, which my daughter and her family plan to visit this summer —I wonder if the modern public high school is not inherently unsafe. It seems to me to create an atmosphere of hostility. I say this even though I have not set foot in a school — any school — in many years, so feel free to ignore me.

High school used to be a place in which to grow up, to come to maturity. Few people went to college, so it was expected that high school graduates would be ready to take their places in the adult world as soon as they handed in their rented gowns. High school was a rehearsal for adult life in that learning was the student’s job. Ideally, among all the facts and figures that had to be mastered in different courses, students learned about the world that they would soon be entering. Perhaps it would be better to say that they were taught a vision of what the world might be if everyone brought his or her best to bear on it. By the final year of high school, students were expected to behave, at least, like adults.

What is high school today but a ghastly holding pen? Nobody takes a place in the adult world at the end of senior year anymore. The adult world is open only to college graduates, and its full richness is foreclosed to all but those who make it through postgraduate professional training. The high school student’s job is to get into a good college. This is not a job that all high school students may be willing or prepared to undertake. The postponement of adult entry postpones the end of childhood; instead of a rehearsal for “real life,” there is only a prolonged playground. The inevitably sexualized atmosphere of high school, no longer contained by the imminence of respectable adulthood, poisons the interactions of adolescents at different stages of development. Instead of appearing to be grown up (and self-controlled), kids in high school fall back on the quixotic project of being experienced.

The supposed collapse of educational standards is not what bothers me. It’s the collapse of educational seriousness that’s frightening. High school is a bad joke.

That solution that I propose is to insert a gap of three to five years between high school and college, and to overhaul business enterprises to welcome cohorts of high-school graduates with suitable jobs, jobs that today are reserved for college grads as a matter of employers’ convenience, not because college coursework is prerequisite but because a college degree indicates workplace virtues that used to be signalled by a high-school diploma. I am not arguing that fewer people ought to go to college, but rather that no one ought to go directly to college from high school except those few students who are probably going to spend their careers in the higher reaches of academia or professional expertise. (And even those gifted ones would probably benefit from a year out of school.)

There is nothing inherent in modern life that makes it take longer than it used to do to grow up. Keeping young people in elementary school until the age of eighteen is a vast civil mistake.

Bon week-end à tous!

8 and 11 May

Tuesday 8th

Lady Susan, an epistolary novel, appears to be Jane Austen’s first complete work of mature fiction. She made no attempt to publish it, however; her nephew appended the text to his 1871 memoir. So it exists in a limbo, between Austen’s juvenilia and the canon of six novels that begins with Northanger Abbey and ends with Persuasion. The Penguin edition, edited by Margaret Drabble, packages it with fragments of uncompleted projects, The Watsons and Sanditon. Austen abandoned The Watsons, but work on Sanditon was, in Drabble’s incisive phrase, “interrupted by her death.”

Although formally finished, Lady Susan ends with an abandoned air, too. There are 41 letters in all, but I suspect that there were a few more, which Austen scuttled with a Conclusion. Having brought her tale to its climax, she may have lost interest in laying out the dénouement in letters that could no longer shock or surprise. There was also the problem of a nice young man’s affections. Like those of Edwin in Mansfield Park, these required time to shift attention, from one lady to another, and the Conclusion informs us of this with a similar caginess as to how long it took. However long, it was time that the quick short term of Lady Susan didn’t have.

Lady Susan Vernon is a widow. Her father’s title is never disclosed, a detail that encompasses the mystery of how she came to be what she is. Still beautiful at 35, and more accomplished at coquetry than ever, she is in the middle of a torrid, adulterous affair when she writes the opening letter to her brother-in-law, announcing her intention to visit him. The reasons behind her decision to pay the visit are suggested in the second letter, written to a a bosom buddy in London, but Lady Susan is too intelligent to incriminate herself explicitly, so the full extent of her misconduct with Mr Manwaring, the tranquillity of whose home she has disturbed, emerges only at the end, when this lover, who like almost all the men in the novel does not write letters, is seen to be entering Lady Susan’s abode. In the third letter, we learn that Mrs Vernon, the wife of Lady Susan’s brother-in-law, is unhappy to receive her, given her notorious reputation, but feels obliged to yield to her husband’s generosity. Thus Lady Susan is marked as an eighteenth-century fiction. In the Victorian era that followed, Mrs Vernon and her real-life counterparts would not suffer such oppression. We don’t know if Jane Austen lived to see the full transformation; it is, after all, Sir Thomas Bertram, and not his wife, who refuses to take the disgraced Maria back to Mansfield Park.

In the fourth letter, Mrs Vernon’s brother, Reginald de Courcy, writes to his sister to “congratulate you and Mr Vernon on being about to receive into your family, the most accomplished coquette in England.”

… but by all that I can gather, Lady Susan possesses a degree of captivating deceit which must be pleasing to witness and detect. I shall be with you very soon …

Reginald’s leering, sneering tone is designed to set him up as a target of Lady Susan’s conquistatorial ambitions, and so rapid is his tumble that his father, in the twelfth letter, feels obliged to intervene. Sir Reginald’s formal understatement is almost funny.

You must be sensible that as an only son and the representative of an ancient family, your conduct in life is most interesting to your connections.

Just as almost-funny the outrage in Reginald’s climactic letter to Lady Susan:

But since it must be so, I am obliged to declare that all the accounts of your misconduct during the life and since the death of Mr Vernon which had reached me in common with the world in general, and gained my entire belief before I saw you, but which you by the exertion of your perverted abilities had made me resolve to disallow, have been unanswerably proved to me. Nay, more, I am assured that a connection, of which I had never before entertained a thought, as for some time existed, and still continues to exist between you and the man, whose family you robbed of its peace, in return for the hospitality with which you were received into it!

This from the thirty-sixth letter. In response, Lady Susan briskly dismisses Reginald with the expectation “of surviving my share in this disappointment.” The four shortish letters that follow make it clear that, with Lady Susan’s conquest of Reginald undone, the story has run out of air. Was Austen too squeamish to compose an  ending similar to that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, upon whose Marquise de Merteuil Lady Susan seems at times to be so clearly modeled (in the tone of her ruthlessness, especially)? In that book, the beautiful villainess is disfigured by a horrible pox that, together with her public disgrace, force her to retire entirely from the world. Her partner in crime is killed in a duel. Lady Susan has no partner in crime. Austen simply does not believe in melodramatic finales: the wicked, in Austen’s world, are made ridiculous. But none of her correspondents, save perhaps Lady Susan herself, has the wit (or the malice) for ridicule. If Lady Susan is to be condemned to marry the rich and foolish Sir James, whom she intended to foist upon her daughter, Frederica, whose dullness may be attributed to Lady Susan’s mistreatment and neglect, and if Frederica is to capture the affections of Reginald, then Austen is going to have to step in and tell us all this herself, as she does in the Conclusion.

In the Conclusion, almost-funny gives way to funny.

This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer.

One is put in mind of a powerful nanny who is breaking up a tiresome children’s game and sending her charges to bed, or at least to dress for dinner. The crack about Post Office revenue is pure Austen, as we know not only from the established novels but from her youthful sketches as well. Exploding the artifice of dramatically offended respectability, it is the joke of a well-behaved lady who has taught herself to write down what she cannot say, so that when the reader laughs, she is not in the room to scold. The satisfaction of Lady Susan lies in seeing how long Austen can carry on writing prose that, like her correspondents, does not seem to know what is really going on — the enrichment of the Post Office — and in enjoying how almost-funny the temptation to tell the truth occasionally makes her.

***

Friday 11

Duly, then, we watched Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Lady Susan: Love and Friendship.

It is, above all, a Whit Stillman story. The principal characters are attractive and at least apparently affluent young people, or youngish. (The only older woman, Lady de Courcy, is meltingly played by Jemma Redgrave; she sounds almost exactly like her aunt.) They are clever. Their manners are polished beyond effortlessness, to the point of unconsciousness. They regard enthusiasm as a bore. Aside from Frank Churchill, there is nobody like them in Jane Austen’s novels, not even the Crawfords.

A fair amount of the conversation is lifted from the letters, although, so far as I could tell, all the almost-funny bits were replaced by realistic remarks that weren’t even mildly amusing. Indeed, all of Love and Friendship‘s fun was invented especially for the movie itself, and put in the mouth of Sir James Martin. In Lady Susan, as I recall, we’re not given much in the way of examples, even indirect ones, of this man’s allegedly foolish speech; his boorishness is evidenced simply by his uninvited arrival at Churchill. He materializes with equal spontaneousness in the film, but then he never shuts up. He goes on and on about getting lost on the way to the Vernons’ house, because he could see the church, but not the hill; that this might be intended as wit is suggested when he collapses into mention of the great family of Blenheim, mumbling “no connection,” presumably but not certainly with reference to the Vernons. Later, when corrected about the number of Commandments — he thinks there are twelve — he wonders, then, which ones will have to go. Personally, he’d be happy without the commandment to honor the Sabbath, because it interferes with his hunting. Tom Bennett, the actor who impersonates him, punctuates Sir James’s fatuities with a perfect whinnying laugh, the likes of which I haven’t heard since Alice Brady. He’s really marvelous, but. It is impossible to surmise Jane Austen’s reaction to the cinema, but I really cannot imagine her sitting through the show.

I do wonder what she would make of Kate Beckinsale, whose Lady Susan is fetching enough but really rather harmless. She is obviously Stillman’s favorite character, and he can’t treat her harshly. The film’s sympathies turn to Lady Susan as flowers to the sun. It is she who breaks with Reginald de Courcy (an interesting, but possibly dim, Xavier Samuel). Far from suffering with Sir James, she imports the strong, silent Manwaring (upgraded to a lordship) into her immediate circle. There he is, standing alongside her, rather like — but in key ways not like — a Wooden Indian, at her daughter’s wedding reception. One wonders if the husband will ever learn that his favorite interlocutor has made him a cuckhold.

We rented Love and Friendship, and felt glad that we hadn’t bought it. It’s handsome and reasonably entertaining, and it has its funny bits. But it hangs uncertainly, like one of those rickety rope-and-plank bridges in action movies, between two aesthetic realms. Whit Stillman is no cynic; his beautiful young people face genuine moral problems, and try to do their best, even if the lamp that he burns for virtue is not as steady as Austen’s. But he is a filmmaker. No filmmaker since the Thirties, arguably, has filled his scripts with such intelligent badinage, but the point is that this badinage pours forth from men and women even more self-confident, and possibly better looking, than Myrna Loy and William Powell. As for Austen, the ruler of the land on the other side of the bridge, she is a writer. And the tale that wobbles over the chasm is the last one that she will allow her characters to dictate. Henceforth, she will tell the story, impersonal, invisible, neither rich nor beautiful perhaps but in complete command of the English language, and with a great deal more to say than any of her inventions. All that can be said for Lady Susan is that it is a milestone in Austen’s development, tremendously interesting as such but only as such. The true climax occurs only after she has rounded up all the quill pens, poured all the ink down the drain, and stated her regrets — her regrets, not those of Lady Susan or Reginald or anybody else among her correspondents — for the Post Office revenue.

Love and Friendship is the title of a late entry in the catalogue of Austen’s juvenilia; like Lady Susan it is epistolary in form, but its tone is entirely mock-gothic, and it was apparently intended to be read to the Austen family, provoking choruses of laughter. I think that it was a mistake of Whit Stillman to borrow this title for his Lady Susan — possibly a curse. The more I muse on the difference between the achievements of his film and her novella, the more like Sir James he looks. Had he consulted me, I’d have urged him to call his movie Finding Churchill instead.

Bon week-end à tous!

Friday 4th

Of all her many novels, Penelope Fitzgerald’s Heat Wave is my favorite. Although on its surface an unremarkably representational narrative, generously supplied with the telling details of an accomplished English fiction, its starkly troubled depth is never out of view — or out of touch, perhaps. It vibrates off the page like the wheat that “hisses” in the summer heat; later it hums like the harvesting combine. It takes possession of the principal character, Pauline Carter, as she worries about the state of her daughter’s marriage.

Keeping this worry on the boil, Pauline, Teresa, and Teresa’s husband, Morris, are spending the summer together in a pair of attached stone cottages. The cottages stand in the middle of a field, somewhere in the South of England. Pauline bought them some time ago. She uses the smaller one, and has given Teresa the larger. This summer, Maurice, who is finishing up a book (a cheeky interrogation of local tourism), has decided to decamp to the cottage for the entire summer. I ought to mention that Teresa and Maurice have a little boy, two year-old Luke. Never has a child filled any novel with so much vivid but unconscious vulnerability.

It does not take long for the reader to discover that Pauline, who knew Maurice for several years before inviting him to a party, where he met her daughter, is not keen on her son-in-law.

Only when you know Maurice well — when you have had occasion to observe his habits over time — only then do you see that he practises a system of relentless manipulation. (20)

Pauline knows Maurice well. She does not trust him at all. She watches intently as he flirts, discreetly but unmistakably, with his editor’s girlfriend. Pauline is reminded of an earlier self, a young mother whose husband, Harry, an ambitious university professor, seemed to feed his career on the attention of female students. It is a tale that is possibly the most oft-told in modern fiction, but a great part of the pleasure of Heat Wave is watching Lively make it new. Pauline’s suffering and anger ought to be dispelling, but the genius loci keeps it fresh and cool, even as the cottages and the wheat bake in the ever-hotter sun. I don’t know how she does it, but Lively pins up against the oppressive brilliance of her setting a negative image, black as a starless night, that keens with the outrage of a Medea. There is no reason to fear that this will infect Pauline; she was long ago inoculated by it. She longs to spare her daughter the experience.

Because of other things that I’ve been reading, a line at the end of Chapter Twelve stood out in blinking bold-face. It is nothing but what guilty husbands tend to say, but this time it carried, for me, immense moral, as distinct from narrative, freight. When Pauline finally asks Harry why he’s unfaithful, “he shrugs.”

“These things happen, Pauline,” he says. “There isn’t anything I can do about it.” (154)

And I thought: that is depravity. What Harry says (as well as what he does) to Pauline is inhumane: no human being ought to be treated as he treats her, no matter how common such nastiness might be. But what he says to himself, implicitly — that he can’t do anything about it — is, to the extent that he takes it to be a true statement, depraved. Depravity is what happens when you stop treating yourself as a human being. Please note: Harry’s infidelities are not the issue here. The issue is the collapse of his responsibility for them. These things happen.

I am more and more convinced that the very idea of evil is thoroughly childish, and that adults ought to outgrow it. Evil is a thing, a blob, a vampire maybe, that can turn you into a monster. The ease with which people allow themselves to dismiss other people as monsters seems to me to be on the same order of moral turpitude as Harry’s exculpation. Evil is — exciting. The terrible things that happen in real life are rarely that. They’re grim and monotonous and wretchedly familiar. I am not talking about the horrors of psychopaths or other organically defective human beings. I’m talking about healthy men and women who let themselves get away with things, and who do it so carefully and successfully that they almost lose sight of the fact that they’re doing wrong. There is nothing monstrous about it. If they do, finally, lose sight of right and wrong, then their connection with themselves becomes depraved, a matter of lies. The difference between depravity and evil is merely poetic: we like to make evil out to be bigger and stronger than we are. Depravity is nothing but diminishment.

In the final pages of Heat Wave, Maurice says much the same thing as Harry, and what happens next is the climax.

Bon week-end à tous!