Gotham Diary:
Death at a Distance
17 January 2013
Yesterday morning, I learned that an old friend had just died. Although we never lived in the same town after Kathleen and I graduated from law school, he had been a boon companion for over twenty years, and he was Best Man at our wedding. Many years later, we drifted apart, our friendship abraded by deeply different responses to the Clinton impeachment and to the triumphalism of George W Bush. Illness intervened: at about the time that I was returning to normal life with the help of Remicade, my friend was sinking into horribly premature dementia. I did not experience this directly, but heard about it when, five or six years ago, I had a call from friend of his who tracked me down through the school connection. There was no diagnosis at the point, but my old chum wasn’t doing very well, and the caller thought that I ought to know. (Perhaps I ought to have done something, but I never could think what.) Yesterday, that same friend called with sadder news. Four years ago, my friend had been flown out to his hometown in the West, where he passed his last years in assisted living.
We will be in Cincinnati this weekend, attending the wedding of a young woman whom we’ve known since she was born, to parents who lived next door to us in the lakeside woods where we had a weekend house for ten years. They will certainly ask after my late friend, who spent a good deal of time at the house. Instead of stammering ignorantly about having been out of touch, I will be able to tell them that he passed away just a few days ago. I wonder if it would not be better to stammer, and keep the news to myself.
A very crude way to map the fading of my friendship with the deceased would be to align it with the remodeling of my life that was effected by the Internet, beginning in 1996. My late friend never got to be a “computer person”; I can’t recall a single email exchange. He did not belong to the new era in my life. So my regret, for the loss of our friendship as much as for my friend’s death, is dampened by a sense of the irrevocable. What I mean is that it is very difficult for me to miss anything about those old days. I was just passing the time, kicking cans as it were, until an amazing technological wrinkle charged the way I read and wrote (and wrote and wrote) with everyday purposefulness. When I do look back, it’s with the simple wish that I’d been younger when, on a holiday weekend more than sixteen years ago, I joined a listserv and passed through the most important door of my inner life, and, although I didn’t know it right away, my previous life came to a close.
But the past is the past. What has happened to my old friend makes me feel awfully low.
***
I’ve been catching up on books by James Wood and Daniel Mendelsohn that I missed when they were new. Chewing my way through How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken and The Irresponsible Self has been great fun; also, it has been centering. I am learning not so much about familiar or unexplored corners of literature as I am about what, after years of reading and writing, really matters to me. What is important, and, more to the point — I’m trying to slim down my library, remember — is not. And I’m learning to talk about it. This is very hard work, because it is truly personal and possibly embarrassing. I am always, for example, in dread of appearing to be shallow or lazy. Take my rejection of modernism, for example: it would be easier to speak of if I had ever accepted modernism. I would know, that is, what I was talking about. Instead, I see modernism only from the outside, as a shelf of difficult and unappealing texts, or as a canon from which I exclude a handful of writers whom I like, Virginia Woolf, say, or William Faulkner (for whom, however, I no longer have youthful patience). I fear that I would appreciate Kafka and Borges much more if I were a really fluent reader of German and Spanish. But for the most part I am put off by the sour stench of modernism’s degradation of heroism into solipsistic masculinism. The befuddlement of unwitting misogynists bores me to death.
James Wood talks at several points about “the social novel,” and I’m trying to figure out exactly what he means. I take it to signify novels that consider “social problems.” Whether or not that’s correct, it helps me to understand why I’m not interested in novels about social problems — why I’m interested, rather, by novels about societies. Human life is problem enough. Ethan Frome appears to be a novel about a social problem: Ethan can’t run off with Matttie because he would leave Zeena destitute. It’s tragic in its way, but with the advent of Social Security and a somewhat more caring set of social arrangements, it becomes pathetic, a tale of bad timing. Looked at more closely, however, it is a novel about a society, a very small and cramped society, but a way nonetheless of living together. It is instructive to the extent that Edith Wharton arouses our sympathies. When we re-read Ethan Frome, we re-enter that strange little society with a richer understanding, and we find that it is not quite the same society. It is natural to wonder “what it would be like” to be somebody else; the power of the novel to bring us so close to this experience is almost miraculous.
In too many books, mostly written by men, there is no society at all. There is just the lump of wounded manhood. I have never managed to read widely in Philip Roth, but I have never read a passage that was not in the clutch of a man in difficulties. John Updike gives us many pictures of societies, but he never enters into them; he just tells us how annoying his alter egos find them. Roberto Bolaño — how is his work not anti-social? Do we need novels that pander, as Cormac McCarthy’s do, to would-be Jack Merridews? Wood has a marvelous essay on Tom Wolfe, concluding that it’s important to recognize that Wolfe’s novels are not literature. Which is to say: they’re not important. It’s unlikely that serious readers disagree. But serious readers remain inclined to venerate Roth. So there’s work to be done.