Gotham Diary:
Rounds
4 November 2013
Kathleen was up bright and early this morning, packing for a week-long conference in California. This is what comes of educating women. In protest, I played bits of Princess Ida. Kathleen, being educated, just sang along. She asked for the great pompous anthem near the end, “This helmet, I suppose.” That is her favorite number. It’s all about the futility of educating men.
Remicade infusion today — early in the afternoon, for a change. (I seem always to be walking out of the hospital into the darkness.) Then I have to go to Crawford Doyle, where they’re holding a copy of Joe Sacco’s The Great War for me. Which reminds me: today would have been my mother’s ninety-fifth birthday. But as she died at fifty-nine, she has been dead for more than half my life. She was born on what came to be known as “False Armistice Day.” The fighting stopped a week later. My daughter was born on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the actual Armistice.
My father’s centennial falls in January, not long after my sixty-sixth birthday.
Time! Oh!
***
And now I have just come home, having been out for about nine hours. There was lunch; there was getting to the hospital. I was at the hospital for a bit less than four hours, two of which were spent connected to the pump. Then there was getting to Crawford Doyle during the taxi down-time that stretches from four until six. I managed to get one, having hauled myself all the way to Park Avenue (from the river), and I have never been more grateful for a cab during dry daylight. From Crawford Doyle — where I picked up the Sacco and an interesting book about manners — I moseyed over to Demarchelier, where I had an early dinner. The delicious roast chicken was wonderfully fortifying.
Then it was two blocks to our local Barnes & Noble, to hear Artemis Cooper talk about her new book. Hearing her was very nice, but looking at her was even nicer: she is beautiful in the way that Vanessa Redgrave is beautiful — transfiguringly. (Her grandmother, in my opinion, was the most glamorous woman of the Twentieth Century, but I kept this bit of gush to myself when Ms Cooper signed my copy of the book.) She is also lively and droll. She told a few little stories that weren’t in the book but that would have given it a more bracing quality.
My favorite was the one she told about getting things out of her subject. Patrick Leigh Fermor completely approved of the idea of her writing his biography, but he simply wouldn’t tell her anything that he wouldn’t have told any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a press pass, and she knew it. What opened the sesame was the disorder into which his house had fallen after the death of his wife, Joan. Cooper’s offer to tidy his office was warmly accepted, and the very minute he sat at his desk, he began longing for distraction. So, while Cooper folded and shelved, Leigh Fermor opened up. After a particularly saucy story, he would quail: you’re not going to use that, are you? Cooper invariably assured him that she wouldn’t, but she assured us that she had: “Biography is an act of betrayal.” Indeed. As an envoi, she told a questioner that she was working on a biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard — and that she planned to interview Martin Amis (Howard’s stepson) tomorrow.
Tomorrow, if the past is any guide, I will feel curiously listless and “on the edge of something” — and I won’t think why, until somebody (Kathleen, on the phone from California, where she is safe & sound) reminds me that I always feel that way the day after an infusion. But I do hope to get a word or two in about Janet Malcolm and Sylvia Plath. Here’s the terrible thing: I’ve read just about every book that Malcolm has published. I am sure that I will enjoy re-reading them, but the thrill of raw discovery is coming to an end. In the early Nineties, when Malcolm’s pieces about Plath were serialized in The New Yorker, I couldn’t be bothered to read them, because I thought that they were about a poet in whom I had little interest. I hadn’t yet learned that Janet Malcolm writes, more elementarily than anyone else except perhaps Borges, than whom she is far more cogent and intelligible, about the darker problems of reading and writing. When Artemis Cooper made that remark about biography as betrayal, I almost shouted Ay-Men, as if I’d just come from a revival meeting where that truth was vouchsafed by an enthusiastic congregation. All of Malcolm’s books are such meetings.