The hibernating has me a bit worried. I can’t get up in the morning, and all I want to do is read. I don’t play music much. If I’m lucky enough, I congratulate myself upon the felicity of not having to go outside. I can’t say that I’m particularly tired, or otherwise afflicted. Kathleen, who is not, for the moment, concerned — if I’m still loitering in bed two weeks from now, then we’ll call the doctor — takes a retrospective view: I’m recuperating. Recuperating from what? Recuperating from convalescing from a holiday of colds and mourning? What I feel rather is that I’m storing up energy for something momentous. This is not a good feeling. I hope that Kathleen is right.

All about the apartment, there are signs of a stall: an unpacked shopping bag, a stack of DVDs that ought to be put away somewhere, an old picture frame that I have to ask Kathleen about (repair or toss?). In the bathroom this morning, I was confronted by a roll of toilet paper on the counter by the sink, and an empty box of Kleenex. In the kitchen, the ice bin was empty. These little jobs ordinarily have to wait until I’ve done my morning writing, but I didn’t trust myself to get to them later. I took care of them before I sat down. But I stopped short of replacing the shower-curtain liner, even though the replacement liner has been lying on the bathroom counter for nearly three months.

Yesterday, I came home from lunch with a friend, changed into dry clothes, and sat in the bedroom and read. I read for hours. I read an entire novel, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Spell. It put me under a spell, but I was a willing subject. The hero, Alex Nichols, is a very nice man. Although beautiful, he is buttoned-down and very shy. He likes his job overseeing pension funds at the Foreign Office. He is 36 or 37, and heartbroken by the defection of his boyfriend, who after a two-year relationship up and moved out, claimed, we soon learn, by another man. Alex is deeply demoralized at the beginning, but Hollinghurst makes sure that your pity never idles into contempt. At an awkward weekend house party, Alex meets somebody new, and falls under his spell. You know it can’t work, but, again, Hollinghurst steers you away from clucking disapprovingly and deriding Alex for not sharing your misgivings. You have to find out how Alex will bear up under the inevitable second helpings of wretchedness.

Here’s how:

This second failure was a shocking reinforcement of the first. And yet he had to admit that there was something ambiguously easier about it too: he already knew the lesson, he knew the bereft amazement of finding that you had unwittingly had your last fuck, your last passionate kiss, your last taxi-ride hand-in-hand in the gloom; and he knew too that on both occasions there had been signals, like the seen but noiseless drum-strokes of a tympanist checking his tuning.

In short, he bears up nicely.

***

 Here it is, Friday morning, and I ought to be at the movies, but that’s not happening. I was going to see W/E, Madonna’s movie about the Windsors. (In the trailer, Laurence Fox stutters at least as well as Colin Firth did in the same role.) I want to see if Andrea Riseborough is as superb as Anthony Lane says she is. And Judy Parfitt as Queen Mary — how terrifying is that! (In the trailer, her way with “a married woman!” all but curdles the film stock.) Also, there’s Abbie Cornish, who appeals to me for no special reason.

The Abdication Crisis fascinated me when I was a teenager, possibly because I was too young to understand it, but more likely because I was genuinely confused by the opposing pulls of duty and glamour. Without the glamour, there would be no story at all, nothing even as noteworthy as Prince Leopold’s dying of hemophilia and not marrying Alice Liddell. Running off to marry Wallis Simpson was clearly wrong, but what fantastic style! And then the abdication turned out to be best for England as well — probably. Had Edward VIII been a man of honor, his niece would still have succeeded him, but there might not have been a throne for her to sit on.

The one and only time that I consulted a microfilm as an undergraduate, it was to see what The New Yorker had to say about “the woman I love.” Nothing, actually — Janet Flanner’s piece (Jan 19, 1936) doesn’t mention Mrs Simpson. Here is the final paragraph, which seems to stand for the proposition that There Will Always Be An English Muddle:

Politically, the English are dualists in a manner fomerly confined to metaphysics. With their rational mind, they empower democracy, but with their emotional imagination, they still give credit, perhaps wisely, to that miracle-loving element in human beings which tends toward iconography, kings, prophets, and special beings in strange, lovely garments. This element in other lands has recently found its less monarchic outlet in Nazi trappings, Fascist fanfares, a Communism which makes a shrine of Lenin’s tomb, and, in America, a worship of cinema stars. King Edward has left the hierarchic for the romantic. He has been temporarily distrusted; it is possible that hereafter he will always be loved.

“Loved” is not quite the word for the spell that the Windsors cast.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2012 at 10:11 am.