Gotham Diary:
Flirtation
7 March 2013
For the second time in a few months, I lost a notebook yesterday. Like the other, it was a small Field Notes item, and I lost in at our about the same place, and under more or less the same circumstances, which leads me to suspect that it may have been stolen and/or thrown away. One response would be to use a different notebook — something larger and more colorful, less likely to be overlooked or dropped from a pocket. Mine will be to type up my notes every day. That’s what they’re for, after all. I made this resolution the first time a Field Notes went missing, but now I’ve got religion on the subject.
My notebook had four or five (small) pages scribbled with page references to Starting Out in the Evening — which is not the sort of thing that you remember just because you wrote it down. (Not I, anyway.) Now I’m left wondering if, even if I reread the book right now, I would find the passage in which Schiller, talking about his own youth, describes Heather’s predicament. I remember seeing a reference to this in the notebook as I was adding to it at lunch yesterday, but not the page number, and just now, having glanced through all the conversations that Schiller and Heather have (there aren’t all that many), it eluded me. But wait! Looking for the bit that I mean to write about at greater length today, I’ve found what I’d given up on!
“It’s very hard to write a good novel when you’re young. You’re changing too fast. The central subject of a novel has to be something you care about deeply. And when you’re young, it can be hard to care deeply about one thing for a long time. I started my first novel at twenty-four; by the time I finished it, three years later, I was a different person.”
As Schiller is saying this, Heather is having trouble paying attention, because, even though she doesn’t quite know it yet, her interest has shifted away from Schiller, and away from the appeal of “discovering” a forgotten writer, to the downtown thrills of connecting with an important Village Voice editor who has urged her to be honest about her lack of affection for Schiller’s third and fourth novels. The rich irony, which any careful reader will appreciate, is that Heather decided to write her dissertation on Schiller before she read those books; she was certain, in her youthful stupidity, that her love for the first two would carry through; it did not occur to her that the second two would be intentionally different. Like Schiller, she has outgrown an old self in the bloom of youth. But if Schiller were to turn to her and say, “I think that you may be finding what I’m saying to be true in your own experience,” she would self-importantly, vainly deny it.
Which reminds me of another passage that I wanted to mention before getting round to the main topic. But I really can’t find it, so I’ll go on.
***
In Chapter 10, when Schiller and Heather have their second meeting — he has decided to cooperate with her project after all, moved to do so not by the chilling deprecation of modern-day publishing that he hears from a former editor at the 92nd Street Y (a scene invented for the movie) but by a visit to a dying friend — we learn something slightly off-putting about Heather. (It’s important, for those of you who have seen the film, to bear in mind that Heather is no Lauren Ambrose. Schiller is captivated by her “radiant ugliness.”)
Sitting at his kitchen table, she took off her sweater. She was wearing a sleeveless shirt; she wanted to show off her bare arms. She had muscular arms for a woman, from years of working out.
This is what a seductress is, she thought.
It wasn’t that she wanted to seduce him — not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people — male or female — was one of the supreme pleasures of life. Ever since she was in high school — ever since fifth grade, really, with her failed poet of an English teacher — intellectual communion and intense flirtation had grown from the same root. She’d always had a love of learning, a love of knowledge, but it was always an embodied love: she desired this man’s learning or that woman’s. The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them. Heather didn’t merely want her teachers to teach her; she wanted them to single her out.
She had always broken a few of her teachers’ hearts with all this.
I read this with a stalled heartbeat. It’s one of those passages that I come across, not very often, in which I feel that I have been captured. If only I had understood this about myself when I was younger, how much simpler life might have been. Perhaps not: flirting is flirting, and what distinguishes flirtation from seduction is that neither party knows where things are going. For me, that’s the point: there’s no knowing where flirting about intelligence is going to go. It just keeps going, on and on. Knowledge never comes to an end. The tragedy is that minds get tired; so that flirtation carries on, faute de mieux, into a bedroom, which is really nothing more than a category mistake. I have always done a good job of avoiding this. I have never, well, hardly ever, taken off my sweater. But I’ve seen a lot of confused faces.
Heather is the most daring character in Starting Out in the Evening, in that Brian Morton runs the fill risk of making you hate her, as some kind of monster, almost. But she’s only young. And her encounter with a Schiller is a gold-plated learning experience. I would quote from page 303 of the paperback edition — if I had not already done so, back when I wrote up the book the first time. (Scroll down to the end.) The passage that I still can’t find relates to this: novels are not about monsters, good guys and bad guys. What Morton doesn’t say (how I’ve grown up since my “Mr Morton” days) is that novels — the best novels — are about society at its smallest scale, describing the interrelations (and responses to same) of interrelated people. The point of such a novel is not to excite the reader’s “identification” with a character, but to knit the reader into the network of friends and enemies and strangers and lovers that it embodies.
An example. Ariel, Schiller’s daughter, accompanies him to the JFK to see him off on a sentimental journey to France. While waiting, Ariel stands on line at a cafeteria. Her father, seated at a table, pulls out a novel and reads.
She could make out the title from here. The Ambassadors, by Henry James.
When she was little, about eight or nine, she had a big reputation in her family as the girl with the eagle eyes. If her mother or father lost their keys, she would always find them. She could still remember how good it felt to hear her mother praise her.
Her father looked content, serenely absorbed in the book. He was a Zen master, thought: not because he’d only brought one bag, but because he lived in a kingdom of purely spiritual struggles and purely spiritual rewards. He didn’t care that he was sitting at a table in the smoking section, and that two nerdy guys next to him were chortling like goats. He didn’t care that his body was falling apart. He was somewhere far away, taking a walk with Henry James.
Even with her eagle eyes, all that Ariel can see is Schiller’s mantle of impassivity. We know how to see through it. Not twenty pages have passed since we learned of Schiller’s great professional heartbreak, the Edmund Wilson review that never was. We know that Schiller is no Zen master; his spirit is roiled by storms. Ariel and her father, although loving, are not simpatico, and they will perhaps never understand one another. But in a social novel as good as Starting Out in the Evening, we cure that defect with our own understanding of both characters. Their differences are resolved within us.
***
A final word about the movie version: it’s an excellent vehicle for a great actor, Frank Langella. That’s an excellent thing for a movie to be! As such, it is not to be faulted for leaving great chunks of Brian Morton’s novel by the wayside. I can’t imagine the film that, within a feature-format time frame, could possibly capture even the broad complexities of the book. (Movies often compensate for this by seizing on tiny details, such as, here, the phrase “bounded entity,” which Frank Langella gets to intone but which Schiller only feels.) There are two questions that I’d like ask Brian Morton: as the author, which invented scene in the movie annoyed him the most? As well as which “faithful” scene? He very well might not have answers: his only comment would be, as mine is: read the book.