Gotham Diary:
Ma Bohème cont’d
12 April 2013
Kathleen spent this morning at home, less unwilling to brave the dank weather than determined to finish drafting a document in the peace and quiet of our apartment. While she worked, I read. I read Persuasion, right to the very end. (I read almost half of it yesterday.) This was a great treat — more than a treat. No book could distract me from a real crisis, but Jane Austen never fails to intensify the felicity of actual tranquility.
Is Persuasion becoming my favorite of her novels? It is unlike all the earlier ones in having a very decided chapter-bound march step. There are two volumes, each consisting of twelve chapters: no arrangement could be more deliberate. Each chapter contains some very definite plot-advancing event. (In this, it is very unlike Mansfield Park.) There is a great deal of authorial impatience with the fools in her pages, an edge of contemptuous dismissal that is not softened by humor. Of Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliot at Bath, she writes that their “evening entertainments were solely in the elegant stupidity of private parties…” She writes a couple of quite heartless paragraphs dismissive of the Musgroves’s near-do-well son, Dick, lost at sea and transformed by his death into “Poor Richard.” What’s funny is the apparent impropriety of her candor.
If I had a better memory, I might not enjoy re-reading Austen as much as I do. Emma, which I have read more than all the others and actually studied, has few surprises for me now, but the complications of the other books always prove to be more extensive than my recollection of them; and then there are the movies to set aside. The generally excellent Roger Michell adaptation of Persuasion (1996), for example, sheers off the first two chapters of the novel’s second volume — a good decision, I think, in cinematic terms. By the same token, no movie in the world could begin to capture the wicked subtlety of third chapter’s beginning.
Sir Walter had taken a very good house in Camden-place, a lofty, dignified situation, such as becomes a man of consequence, and both he and Elizabeth were settled there, much to their satisfaction. [Emphasis supplied]
This reads like the introduction to one of the young Austen’s absurd little plays, its deadpan, just-so patness requiring no filigree but the smug, “happy-ending” coda. I can’t help feeling that “lofty, dignified situation” is meant to be satirical and ridiculous. Who inhabits a situation? Austen might have subordinated the phrase with a preposition, such as “of” or “with,” but she didn’t, as if to invite the charge of grammatical carelessness. In any case, Austen immediately rolls up her mockery and restores us to the passionate world of Anne’s feelings.
Anne entered it with a sinking heart, anticipating an imprisonment of many months, and anxiously saying to herself, “Oh! when shall I leave you again?”
To Anne, this bright sparkly bit of Bath, with its two drawing rooms and abundant mirrors, might as well be the castle of Otranto. But it is worse. Instead of dungeons and demons, Anne faces the unfeeling vacancy of her inane family.
***
In Montrose, at some point in early 1974, I moved in with the dear friend who had taken refuge in my garage apartment in late 1971. The landlord of the bungalow into which I had moved with my wife and my daughter, but which I had to abandon alone, put me through something of a ringer about finding a replacement tenant; I think that he thought that he was teaching me a lesson. (He was.)
My dear friend shared what was called a “duplex” apartment — one of two matching flats, the one atop the other — with a young woman whose family lived in River Oaks. They had the two bedrooms. I took the breakfast nook, which really was quite small, just wide enough for the length of my bed to stretch beneath the window, not much deeper. I can’t remember how long this jolly arrangement lasted, but shortly after I became friends with the man who lived in the duplex’s garage apartment, the two of us decided to share a flat in an apartment complex out in the part of Post Oak that lies just inside the Loop. I could and did walk to work from there, but the roommating didn’t work out — we soon became an odd couple, only without the laughs. By now, my dear friend had moved into a smaller apartment of her own, next door to the duplex in Montrose. In this building, there were four apartments. My friend lived on the bottom right, and I took the top left. I really think that I might have remained in this apartment forever, but the owner sold the building to buyers who planned to cancel all the leases and renovate. I moved a few blocks away, to an odd apartment walled with planks of wood. Not paneling, but planks. There was a story about the builder’s connections to the world of lumber. This would prove to be my last independent abode in Houston. By the summer of 1976, it was clear that my mother’s non-Hodgkins lymphoma was going to kill her — but of course it was the treatment that did that — and I moved back to my parents’ house to help out. I had been gone for five years, and everything was different.
For one thing, it is not true that I might have remained in that top left apartment indefinitely. That’s where I began studying for the LSAT. I had shown up to take the LSAT in 1970 or ’71, at my father’s behest, but I had walked out on the exam after about twenty minutes. I was really not equipped for the study of law at that time. By the time I took the LSAT more seriously, in 1976, the earlier score had disappeared, as if by the operation of a statute of limitations. I studied very hard the second time, and was quite proud of my respectable score. I had never done so well on a standardized test before.
My father wanted me to stay in Houston. He agreed to support me through law school only at a school in the South or Southwest. Happily, his alumnus’s pride induced him to make an exception for Notre Dame. It is difficult to imagine now, but Notre Dame really was my Window on the East.
The first letter of acceptance, from the University of Oklahoma, arrived a week after my mother died, in February 1977. So she never knew that I got in. I never knew how pleased she might have been, or even if she would have been pleased. She was very grateful for my help at home during her final months, and not shy about saying so. But I think that she had given up on my long-term prospects. Not without reason! I would practice law, in one way or another, for less than seven years, after which I would not work again. My father got something of a short end, too, because I settled in New York with Kathleen, whom I doted upon from the first day of law school, and not in Houston.
***
All that moving about — it’s oppressive and wearying to think of now. In the five years that I lived away from my parents’ house, I dwelt beneath seven different roofs. For the past thirty-three years, I have dwelt beneath the same one (albeit in three different apartments — but for nearly thirty years where we are now). As I said in an earlier installment, I could not take life in Houston seriously. And I’m glad that I didn’t, because it was much better to take it experimentally. This entailed a lot of jackass behavior, of course. But one of the experiments hardened into a viable way of life. I learned how to take women seriously.
It was a great decade for taking women seriously, because second-wave feminism was spreading out beyond its radical origins and engaging the lives of a lot of ordinary women. Women certainly took life experimentally in the 1970s — the ones I knew did, anyway. For one thing, they abandoned the veneer of respectability. This did not mean that modesty and virtue were thrown to the winds. Rather, modesty and virtue were newly grounded in personal conviction, and not fenced by appearances. Women continued to fall for the wrong guy. But they didn’t inevitably marry him. I watched a lot of women discover life apart from romance. Women would perhaps never become as detached from romance as many men manage to be, but they stopped defining themselves in exclusively romantic terms, with a man either at the center of things or glaringly absent. In a way, women discovered the freedom of nuns, even if they weren’t celibate.
Watching women become, in their own eyes, regular people was a serious business, because the meaning of “regular people” changed as they did so, requiring men to do some fixing-up as well. Attentive men, anyway. “Honey, I’m home!” became an ironic banner, because honey was no longer necessarily at home when her husband got off work, and there were cases — I am one — in which the honey at home was male. The domestic world that our parents had taken for granted was shattered. We are still rebuilding.
The other big experiment of my Houston years was the reconstruction of bourgeois stability. Every time I moved house, I became neater and more organized, my affairs more regular and less crisis-prone. I became a better cook of better-balanced meals. Every change of address really was a fresh start, and by the time I returned to Tanglewood in 1976, I was the tidy emptier of dishwashers that I am today. It turned out that I was not cut out for bohemian life. I was mistaken to think that it was an alternative to my parents’ way of life (which I must learn to describe); it was just another kind of meaninglessness. And ultimately inferior. Having been brought up in a bohemian household, I should never have had the habit of good manners. The habit may have been all that I got from my parents, but it was there to invigorate when I finally grew up.