A friend of mine broke her foot the other day, so I offered to bring her lunch. I didn’t cook it myself; I walked up the street to Demarchelier late this morning, and ordered to go. Coq au vin for my friend; seafood ravioli for me. I didn’t have to wait too long for a taxi, and despite tangled traffic caused by cement trucks trying to get to the subway-station site, everything was still quite hot when I reached my friend’s apartment, so there was no need to reheat anything. We put the food on plates, poured ourselves glasses of wine (supplied by us), and sat down at the coffee table. The coq au vin looked good, and my friend tucked into it with relish. The ravioli were scrumptious. Stuffed with shrimp and other not-fishy morsels, they were coated with the lightest of sauces — butter, mostly, with diced tomato and flecks of herb. It was a generous serving, and I certainly got enough to eat, but when the ravioli were all gone, I wanted more. It was an odd dish to order to go, but I knew that it would be easy to eat. I didn’t think that it would be so tasty, though. I always order the same old things that I love at Demarchelier, and they’re great, but I forget that everything on the menu is usually very good.

Later in the afternoon, I found myself walking up 86th Street again, but this time I went only as far as Barnes & Noble. I was looking for a copy of The Glass Menagerie, having given upon finding one at home. (Having made a big mess, pulling books out of the case that is hardest to reach — the case where I really ought to put novels — and not put them back, so that I can hardly think in this room, it is such a bordel.) A cheap paperback would have been great, but I didn’t even look for one when I saw the Library of American edition of Tennessee Williams, Plays 1937-1955.

Amanda: That’s right, now that you’ve had us make such fools of ourselves. The effort, the preparations, all the expense! The new floor lamp, the rug, the clothes for Laura! All for what? To impress some other girl’s fiancé!
Go to the movies, go! Don’t think about us, a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job! Don’t let anything interfere with your selfish pleasure! Just go, go, go — to the movies!

Tom: All right, I will! The more you shout about my selfishness to me the quicker I’ll go, and I won’t go the movies!

Amanda: Go, then! Then to the moon — you selfish dreamer!

What ‘selfish pleasure’? What selfishness? Who could live with such a parent?

***

My attention was called to a series of entries that Tim Parks has been posting at NYRBlog. I’ve read two of them, and read them again, and I still don’t know what they’re about, beyond Tim Parks’s unhappiness with “traditional” novels. At the end of one, Parks retails a truly sad story.

To conclude: in 2011 I had occasion to visit an old university tutor, a rather severe and demanding professor, who nevertheless played a generous part in encouraging me to write. He read my first attempts at fiction and introduced me to writers who would later be important to me, most notably Henry Green. I had not seen him in thirty years. Long since retired, he was now restricted to a wheelchair and, with time on his hands, had been re-reading old favorites, all the great novels that had inspired a lifetime’s career in reading, writing, teaching. We talked about Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Henry Green, Elisabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell.

“How did they hold up?” I asked cheerfully.

“Not at all,” he told me. “They feel like completely empty performances. Like it wasn’t worth it at all.”

It’s a sad story because it highlights a terrible want of imagination. Why, once the sense of emptiness took hold, did the professor continue reading the books that “had inspired a lifetime’s career” — hadn’t they done enough? Why not read new things? Is the professor even remotely aware of the extent of his self-indictment? Does either he or Parks have any idea how childish the old man looks, whining as though there were something wrong with the books?

I often hear that old people lose the taste for novels, sometimes from the old people themselves. It makes a certain sense, but I don’t care to spell it out, lest I tempt fate and wind up with a plate of words. I hope that such a loss of appetite doesn’t happen to me, but I don’t suppose there’s anything that can be done to insure against it. What, I wonder, is it about novels that fails for these older readers? Is there a connection between story and hope? If you’re not much interested in the future, do you lose interest in how the story comes out?

Any danger of losing my taste for fiction seems remote at the moment. I am literally enchanted by The Transylvanian Trilogy. I’ve reached the final book, They Were Divided, but despite its rather grim title I’m having a great old time, and so are Miklós Bánffy’s characters. Why, there has just been a Bal des Têtes in Kolozsvar.

The occasion had been eagerly awaited by all those who would attend, by the men because they would not have to make themselves ridiculous in some idiotic costume, and by their womenfolk because they could go in a classic ball-gown and not spend a fortune on some elaborate fancy dress, and also because they would be able to dazzle their friends, and hopefully outdo them, with some amazingly original and magnificent and hitherto undreamed-of ornamental head-dress.

For weeks before there had been to-ing and fro-ing and thought and planning and much pleasurable secrecy as to what all the fashionable ladies would wear. While everyone tried hard to find out what the others had chosen each was determined to keep their own ideas secret lest anyone should try to imitate what they had planned, thus leading to that social disaster when two or more women were dressed alike.

Nevertheless, in spite of, or perhaps because of, all this manic secrecy several women found themselves in just the situation they had most dreaded. There were eight Turkish turbans, five Dutch bonnets, three Andalusian head-dresses complete with high tortoiseshell combs and lace shawls, six country maidens from the Kalotaszeg district, two Cleopatras and four Little Red Riding Hoods. Not a few extremely cross society ladies had to console themselves with the thought that they had been first in the field with their wonderfully original idea and that somehow and with low cunning the others had stolen the idea from them. The one to be blamed was always their closest friend — that two-faced snake in the grass!

Someone with a brain at Random House ought to arrange for Part II, Chapter Two to appear as a short story in The New Yorker, as “The Anti-Duelling League.”

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 14th, 2013 at 7:10 pm.