We have had a visit, this afternoon, from Will and his mother, who brought him uptown on her new bicycle. Much easier than trying to get a taxi, she says. It certainly makes me wish that I were younger and fitter. Instead, I’m reminded of the story a doctor told me about an ace cyclist who was afflicted, like me, with ankylosing spondylitis. As he refused to give up his passion, his back gradually but inexorably fused in racing position. Walking across a room must have been incredibly awkward and painful.

Thoughts like that reconcile me to the slog of getting better, something that I’m not entirely sure that I’m doing at the moment. I’ve been thinking, ever since Megan and Will left, about crawling back into bed. It’s possible that I ought to be doing something a little more lively than perusing the London Review of Books. I read the Alan Bennett diary and Jenny Diski’s Short Cuts the moment I got my copy; now I’m down to Rosemary Hill on Capability Brown. The Bennett is, as always, a marvel of cutting away. In about as many entries as there are days in a month, the uncannily youthful Bennett gives us the flavor of his year, still rolling his eyes with barely suppressed enthusiasm at the droll folly of the world. Smack in the middle is a pearl of narrative concision concerning an RAF pilot’s emergency landing in a Yorkshire valley in 1941 — there’s a movie in there! Jackson Lear’s review of biographies of President Obama’s parents can only be called unsparing, but I quite agree with Lear that the president is a technocrat, not a politician; as with Jimmy Carter, we’re finding that we’re not best served by chief executives who not only would rather be somewhere else but positively dislike living in Washington. I don’t know what to make of the fact, noted by Hill, that Capability Brown filed his receipts as royal gardener under “K,” for “King.” All in all, an incredibly naive choice. Wouldn’t “HRH” spring more naturally to mind, or, failing that, “C” for “Crown”?

Yesterday was a bustle — perhaps too much of one for a convalescent. Paperwork, mostly. Throwing things away, mostly. V satisfying, as any number of diarists might put it — unsatisfactorily, in my opinion. Writing abbreviated prose, however convenient, is deplorable because reading abbreviated prose is never straightforward. I detest texting for this reason. The Nederlands word for “you” may be “U,” but this never occurs to me when I stumble across minor but reeking illiteracies of that kind.  The whole art of writing is to make what you’re doing look wonderfully easy without reminding the reader that what he or she is doing is wonderfully unnatural. Such idiotismes as “C U L8TR” have precisely the opposite effect: the reader has to work to translate what, in the end, seems wonderfully stupid.

Did you see Caitlin Flanagan’s piece about Joan Didion in The Atlantic? Flanagan’s latest can-you-top-this bit of retroshock is the assertion that “to love Joan Didion … you have to be female.” It comes at the beginning of what is actually a commendable appreciation of Didion’s early work and why it had such an impact on young women in the Sixties and Seventies. Flanagan is wrong to charge Didion with being “another tired espouser of the most doctrinaire New York Review of Books political opinions,” whatever that means; does anyone else remember Didion’s bracingly conservative take on the Terri Schiavo case? But that’s a detail. It’s harder to argue with Flanagan’s case that Didion was a less-than-compleat mom. However: do you really have to be a woman to love Joan Didion? I admire Joan Didion’s writing, and not least for its acuity about style and fashion — concerns which, in Didion’s view, you don’t have to be female to care about. (One senses that Flanagan feels v differently.) But do I love her?

When I get better, I want to return to one of my pet projects, which is a plot outline of Jane Austen’s Emma. (I do love Jane Austen.) When I read the book a few months ago, it struck me that there are three moments in the novel when the quality of the language undergoes a shift, with the result that Emma falls into four movements, not unlike a classical symphony, with a brisk and energetic opening, a languid slow movement, a comic scherzo, and a happy ending. (I have, however, outgrown the impulse to scout for correspondences to sonata form.) I want to show that this sequence of different inflections is what sustains the narrative and makes Emma the great read that it is. And I want to hammer home the difference between the joyfulness of Austen’s prose style and the cloudiness of her story, which, really, ought to be a lesson unto us. We oughtn’t to like Emma Woodhouse, and if you read the book multiple times, there will be at least one occasion when you’re tempted, at the very least, to hate her. But Charlotte Brontë did not write Emma. George Eliot did not write Emma. (Imagine!) Even Mrs Gaskell didn’t write Emma. Jane Austen did — and so we love Emma, because, as they say, she makes us laugh. 

We hadn’t seen Will since Christmas, and it was hard to believe how much development he had packed into two weeks. His vocabulary has exploded — it now includes my name, which he pronounces as “Dadoo.” (He says “Darney,” his name for Kathleen, quite clearly.) He is surprisingly agile: he carried his little wicker chair from the living room to the blue room without bumping into anything. (Though he did keep saying, “heavy!”) There was once dicey moment, when he discovered the train set, still in its box, that I never got round to setting up at the base of the Christmas tree; it had been resting against a wall for so many days that I’d stopped seeing it. The train set weighed even more than the wicker chair, but there were no remarks to that effect. Just a pssionate interest in the locomotive bneath several layers of plastic packaging. A distraction was successfully hit upon — Facebook friends will know what it was — one that had nothing to do with Will’s discovery, which I’m happy to pass on, that clementines are very agreeable balls for tossing around the house. They have a nice bounce and they’re very easy to spot when they roll under furniture. And then you can eat them.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2012 at 5:10 pm.