At least there is sun this morning. Yesterday was only rarely bright. Overcast weather has suddenly become much harder to take, because, presumably in order to protect us from the dust that removing the balcony railings will kick up, our windows have been covered with “clear” plastic tarp. (As it happens, each of our three windows gives out onto the balcony.) I took a larding needle to the tarp in the blue room window, and shall do the same in the other rooms, lest we perish of dead air. But there is nothing to do about the light, or the blurred view, which seems unreal, as though dummied up for a movie set. To complete the deflation, Kathleen has taken her golden apples to Arizona, for an annual conference.

When I talked to Kathleen yesterday morning, she said I sounded as if I were coming down with a cold, and that is indeed how I felt for most of the day, which I spent in my chair. Beyond a midday congestion that has begun to seem normal, as if I were suffering an allergy, worse symptoms did not ensue. But I had to cancel plans to joing Ms NOLA on a visit to the Cloisters. When I talked to Kathleen in the evening, she said she could understand why people retire to Arizona. I can, too. Last year, for the first time, I felt a fear of the cold that was altogether new and obviously an adjunct to the general feeling of old feebleness that, in a less health-conscious age, would not be surprising in someone my age. (The miracle to me, of course, is that I’m still here. I never thought that I would live to be eligible for Medicare.) This year, I’m also afraid of the dark, and not only the dark at night. I no longer find it “atmospheric” to have to turn on the lamps in the morning.

And then this morning, I had a nightmare about losing Will — thinking that he was playing in a fenced-in yard that turned out not to be so. His playmates and the grown-ups in the house all thought that he’d been very bad to wander off — which meant that they didn’t want to help me find him. Most bad dreams, you wake up and sigh with relief. But there are two exceptions, both involving loss. When I dream that I’ve lost my wallet, I can fly to the blue room and see it in its bowl. But I dream that I’ve lost Will, I have to wait a little while for concrete proof that he’s okay. (How do I love thee, Gchat?) The dream did make it imperative to get out of bed, although with a heaviness that made me wonder if I was in for a second day of inanition.

Two books arrived in the same box the other day, one a biography of Susan Mary Alsop and the other the memoir of Benoît Mandelbrot. You might think that these books have nothing in common, but you’d be wrong, and not just because both mention Raymond Aron and Pierre Mendès France. Alsop (1918-2004) and Mandelbrot (1924-2010) were, roughly, contemporaries, and they lived actively transatlantic lives. Each was a very superior exponent of his or her sort of person, and both of them invented greater parts of their lives than most people manage to do. And both of their careers began shortly before I was born, in 1945. That’s when Mandelbrot entered the École Polytechnique, and that’s when Alsop arrived in Paris to take up her place beside her first husband, William Patten, an economist at the US Embassy. It is not inconceivable that they were in the same room, and not just once. It has to be admitted, though, that neither would have been much taken with the other. Well, they share that in common as well.

I doubt that many of my readers need to be told about Mandelbrot. I think that Megan was still in high school when she wrote a program that allowed me to explore the Mandelbrot Set on my computer. And then I read something about Mandelbrot in James Gleick’s Chaos. Nothing, however, prepared me for the excitement of reading his posthumously-published memoir, The Fractalist. I can’t put it down! But I’ll wait to finish it before saying more.

The Alsop biography, American Lady, was written by a Frenchwoman, Caroline de Margerie, with some vague but palpable personal connections to her subject, but it reads like a sound book, and it doesn’t have a thesis. No extravagant claims are made for this well-born girl who grew up to be the darling of French aristocrats and a doyenne of Georgetown politicos. And while the course of Alsop’s life is made intelligible, de Margerie keeps speculation to a minimum. Alsop’s two adulterous affairs, with Duff Cooper and Gladwyn Jebb, are treated candidly but discreetly, with a few extracts from surviving letters and a minimalist discussion of William Patten, Jr’s paternity. (He would discover at the age of 47 that Cooper was his father.) Alsop’s marriage to heavyweight columnist and Vietnam hawk Joe Alsop, which was much more than the marriage of convenience that it might have appeared to be to those who knew him to be homosexual (of whom she was one), is also discreetly surveyed, with indirect references to unpleasant scenes that were undoubtedly perfectly generic — he’d have too much to drink, with the usual sequela. Indeed, it’s her drinking that takes up a surprising number of pages; a social drinker all her life, she did not know how to stop when age made it impossible to hold her liquor, and she took a lot of falls. For all that, she really was very much an American grande dame, as is made crystal-clear in the one paragraph of judgment that de Margerie permits herself.

By dint of her personality, exceptional talent as a hostess, and intelligent exploitation of her past, Susan Mary made her salon one of the centers of Washington social life, a place that evoked older, more civilized times, when money stayed in its place, political party affiliations were less important, and America got along with Europe. Becoming a legend has a price, and it was one that Susan Mary paid willingly. By inviting only those who were well known or hoped to be, by entertaining only success and amition, she deprived herself of the other, gentler kinds of company that these strict criteria often cast aside. No matter her mood, she allowed herself only corseted perfection, sacrificing spontaneity, emotional sincerity, and repose. Even among her close friends … she was rarely willing to take off the smiling mask she removed only in the presence of Marietta [Peabody FitzGerald Tree]. One of her friends said that she was never sure which Susan Mary to expect, “one’s old pal or the Duchess of Buccleuch.” This remark would have probably pleased Susan Mary. 

What makes American Lady an interesting book is its invitation to ponder the power of resisting the casual and the spontaneous — as well as the price. We tend to believe that the repression of “natural feelings” invariably produces cancerous personality disorders, or at least deep unhappiness. Alsop would not have agreed, and her life does not suggest that she was misguided. We ourselves are learning to be more thoughtful, attentive, and self-disciplined. We have the benefit of working pretty much from scratch, but it’s instructive to see how an intelligent woman could make her way in a world of unexamined propositions. (Her success in keeping the carrying of another man’s child a less-than-total secret seems remarkable now.) I’m not sure that I’d have found Alsop to be as interesting as her Washington guests did, and I can’t quite forgive her the long stint at Architectural Digest. But I’m glad to have read her story, and I feel that it helps me to understand my world a little better.    

***

The other thing that I did yesterday was finally to watch L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie, the Romain Duris movie that I didn’t catch in the theatres earlier this year. Rashly, I ordered a DVD from Amazon in France, one that came unencumbered by subtitles. I didn’t understand a thing that was said for the first twenty minutes. (Like Mrs Fisher, in Enchanted April, I don’t know the word for “castor oil.”) And very little of what followed, although by then I had an idea of what was going on. I’ve never known a movie to end quite as this one did, and I was very shaken by it. I just sat and let the outgoing credits unspool, rousing only when the root menu reappeared. I thought of watching something else, but nothing came to mind, so I returned to my book. Romain Duris carries the movie easily, pretty much as Melvil Poupaud carried the emotionally similar Le temps qui reste (2005), but I wish that there had been more scenes with Catherine Deneuve. If you know what I mean.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2012 at 11:33 am.