Gotham Diary:
If I Do Say So Myself
14 March 2013
The great novels that make you think and stretch your feelings and excite your compassion are probably best read quietly, alone. Hearing words is not at all the same thing as reading them, and I, at least, retain what I’ve read far more richly than what I’ve heard. When I listen, it’s not for content so much as to the speaker. That’s probably why being read to is such an intimate pleasure — when it’s a pleasure at all. “Tell me a story” masks a deeper request, “share yourself with me.” Kathleen loves having me read to her even more than I love reading to her, but probably not by much. I play to my longstanding audience of one with the greatest relish. But there is no planning to my reading. I don’t pick up where we left off last night — I don’t read to Kathleen every night. Quite often, what I’m reading does not lend itself to being read aloud. Most of the time, perhaps!
But a few weeks ago, we discovered that Caroline Blackwood is great fun. I read almost all of The Last of the Duchess aloud to Kathleen; that’s what got me on my Blackwood kick. The more we read, the funnier it got, because we were getting closer to Blackwood herself. She’s said to have been madly fun to listen to, once she got going on some topic, piling exaggerations on understatements. One of these days, I shall pull out Great Granny Webster for a re-read, and see how it goes over with Kathleen. For the moment, we’re having the most delightful romp with Corrigan.
Seeing that I was coming to the end of Nancy Schoenberger’s biography of Blackwood, and about to run out of Blackwood-related materials, I perused the offerings at the Kindle Store and came up with Corrigan, a novel that has recently been reissued by the NYRB press. I’ll buy the book eventually, but I had to have the Kindle edition now, so that when I finished the one book I could pick up the other right away. I’ve found that the three or four days that elapse between ordering and receiving even the most expeditiously sent books can be fatal to the fever; and, given as I am to free delivery, I often find myself opening boxes full of expired obsession.
Schoenberger lays out the plot of Corrigan, so I knew pretty much what was going to happen. A widow would be gripped by a con man, while her daughter tried in vain to pry her free — only to learn that her mother was on to the con but still enjoying it. I don’t know how far I’d got before I insisted on reading aloud, but it wasn’t very long. The widow’s speculations about the plight of the wheelchair-bound visitor who elaborately declines to accept her charity (on his first visit, that is) correspond in their kitey dartings to Blackwood’s own speculations about the Wallis Windsor in The Last of the Duchess. Even funnier is the rhetoric of the con man, Corrigan. Or it became so, as I infused my delivery with tones learned from Ruth Draper’s monologue, Doctors and Diets, and from Steve Martin’s oleaginous sob stories in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Without thinking about it, I was also mimicking the late Tom Bell, from (among other things) the earlier Prime Suspect episodes. I also put my peripheral vision to work by scouting ahead for the brash commentary of Mrs Murphy, the Irish cleaning lady who is forever assaulting the widow’s delicate eardrums by interrupting her flights of fancy with earthy remarks.
I couldn’t wait to finish dinner last night, and to get the washing-up out of the way, so that we could settle down for more. At some point in the evening, we passed the 25% mark, so there’s plenty left to read, but I managed to read the bulk of three chapters. In one of them, the daughter, Nadine, has lunch with her schoolfriend, Sabrina. Nadine is the mother of twins, and Sabrina is a sought-after model, so there’s little competition between them. In no time at all, I found myself reading as though Nadine were Sandra Bullock in one of her more impatient states, and borrowing Sabrina from Rosamund Pike’s performance in An Education. The clearer these characters became for me, the more seldom did I slip into error. I seemed to catch a rhythm that underlined all the little words that are so easily missed when you’re reading aloud.
Looking just now for a passage to copy, I couldn’t find anything that was intrinsically funny out of context. Blackwood’s writing is fairly flat on the page — just as Henry James’s is incomprehensible. It’s by being read aloud that their narratives spring to life. When I get to the end of Corrigan, I’ll be able to talk about it better. For the moment, though, I’m having a blast reading it aloud. If I do say so myself, I deserve a Tony.