Having decided to replace my disintegrating copy of Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake with a paper book, but wanting to keep her voice in my ear while waiting for it to arrive, I turned to America Revised, her essay on the textbooks that have been used to teach American history to public-school students since the 1890s. (Before then, students were provided with poetic sermons, long on invention and short on fact.) It’s a very funny book, in its sardonic way. because, instead of bellowing indignantly at the pusillanimous mediocrity of the textbook business (which is, after all, a business — one wonders if it need be), FitzGerald writes with a winking equanimity that I should like very much to praise as ladylike but for fear of being misunderstood. (Few share my belief that civil life affords no more admirable characterization.)

As might be expected, the texts of the forties give emphasis to political history, or, rather — since in many ways these texts deny the very existence of politics — to the history of government actions. The word “democracy” is not, as it was in the thirties, a call to social action but simply the name of the American system, and the opposite of Fascism and Communism — which are not themselves very well defined. The curious thing about these books is that all of them insist upon the right to vote as the foundation stone of democracy. They do that in spite of the fact that this right exists in the Soviet Union and provides no real impediment to the rule of the Communist Pary bureaucrats.

That “curious thing” is like a speck of dirt on your cheek that, slipping you her compact under the table, FitzGerald discreetly helps you to see.  

I read America Revised in The New Yorker, where it appeared in 1979, and only bought the book a few years ago. I’ve read bits and pieces now and then, but not the entire book, as I’m doing now. As with Fire in the Lake, time has smiled on FitzGerald. Although her account necessarily makes no mention of the Internet, her discussion features an array of problems upon which the development of Internet society has had, so far at least, little impact. (That textbooks are available online does not mark a material change in the regulatory environment that FitzGerald sketches.) The sloppy thinking that she politely deplores has not abated, and our educational practices still turn out legions of students who believe that bigger states are represented by more senators than smaller ones. Ideas about making schools better tend always toward the ill-considered. “Attacked for being too intellectual,” she writes of the proponents of the New Social Studies drive in the Sixties, 

the reformers were in fact not intellectual enough. Nearly all of them … lacked philosophical training. Not only did they fail to develop any original ideas about the structure of knowledge but they actually confused the social sciences with science. Some wasted a great deal of time making and unmaking meaningless conceptual schemes. Others … would explain a few elementary points of logic and then disappear into a cloud of pedagogical or social-science jargon. Finally, they did not do what really had to be done if the schools were to make any advances in the art of training minds — and that was to define new purposes and set new standards for the curriculum.

The only thing that has happened since FitzGerald wrote that is that the business of defining purposes and establishing new curricula has been detached from any thought of training minds. Nationalist thinking still curtails the ability to learn from history — in most public schools.  

***

On Friday night, we were introduced to the Latin jazz of Eddie Palmieri and his Afro-Caribbean Jazz Octet, and came away persuaded by Mr Palmieri’s claim that it is the fusion of the Twenty-First Century. Never has jazz sounded like so much fun, and never has Latin music been so interesting. As was pointed out, it is the percussion section that distinguishes Latin jazz from jazz with a Latin accent, and complex but imperturbable rhythms generated by the timbales, the congas and the bongos supported the trio of horns on flights of amazing virtuosity. Reading Nat Chinen’s rave review in this morning’s Times, I learned a lot of new words, and wished that I could have known the titles of the four jazz pieces while I was listening to them — I don’t know how people get by without knowing the names of things. As it is, I can’t say much more about the jazz half of the concert than “Wow!” (I’ve ordered a couple of CDs, too.) The dance-band half that followed did not catch our fancy. The three numbers that we sat through consisted of two minutes of song and five minutes of coda, full of dazzling riffs that left us dazed. The extremely festive, somewhat blaring music seemed out of context in Rose Theatre; at least to my gringo ears, there was a want of atmospheric licentiousness — smoking, drinking, and adultery were not much in evidence. I call attention to these clichés in my head simply to underscore their absence during the jazz set.

***

My sensitivity to bad weather is almost debilitating. On Saturday, I slept late but not too late, and was busy all day. Yesterday, I could not get out of bed, and, when I finally did, it was only to move to my reading chair, where I spent the rest of the day. In the evening, I watched A Royal Affair, with Alicia Vikander and Mads Mikkelsen. It was gripping even though I knew (from history books!) how it was going to come out.

During the afternoon, I read most of Jim Sterba’s Frankie’s Place: A Love Story. It’s a genial sketchbook of Sterba’s holidays in Maine, on Mount Desert Island. (The French origin of the name, bestowed by Champlain, is semi-preserved in the pronunciation of “Desert,” with the accent on the second syllable.) Sterba came relatively late in life to the island, paying his first visit not long after he became friends with the “Frankie” whom he later married — Frances FitzGerald — and he sees the place with a reporter’s eye honed in long professional tours of Southest Asia. He sizes up the flora, the fauna, and the tribal customs with humane attentiveness. A great many good stories are told, mounted lightly on a narrative that follows, with no particular insistence, the memorable events of one particular summer. Threads are picked up and put down gently; we never do find out the name of the local eminence who puts a dent in Frankie’s parked car only to deny it, because that’s not the point of the intermittently developing story — the point is that the collision was widely witnessed. Sterba is enormously discreet: Peabody uncles aside, visiting friends and relations are identified by first name only. (Brooke Astor is the exception who proves that Sterba knows better than to be coy.) The love story of the subtitle is hardly the portrait of a marriage; we’re shown, rather, the place where two simpatico people of widely different backgrounds discovered not just love but genuine companionship. You have to think that the marriage, a late, first one for both parties, changed the island for the girl who had summered there all her life.

Each chapter abounds in jolly moments (also featuring a tempting recipe or two), but the funniest moment in the book comes in the middle. Sterba has been on the lookout for “High WASPS.”

I had met my share of run-of-the-mill WASPs in Northeast Harbor over the years. Their names are usually a giveaway: Schofield, Minturn, Hamilton, Bradley, Whitney, Warrington, Denholm, Burnham, Crawford, Crompton, Stockton, and Granville. Those were their first names, their given names. Their given names, middle names, and family names all looked like last names. Hardly a Bob, Bill, or Dick among them.

But something leads Sterba to believe in the existence of an über-WASP species, one variety of which is the “snooty Philadelphian.” He goes a party, sure of tracking his quarry, but he is so charmed by a long chat with Mrs Astor that he forgets his search. Finally, he asks a “third-generation Northeast Harbor veteran” to identify someone who “qualified as the quintessential High WASP.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “You’re living with her.”

By this point in the memoir, you are aware that discussing the taxonomy of WASPs would not be a subject of any interest whatsoever to Frankie FitzGerald. She would never help out her husband with this particular quest. QED!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2012 at 2:18 pm.