Dear Diary: Friendly
The Edith Wharton lecture at the Museum this morning was not disappointing, because I’d learned from last week’s lecture about Henry James what sort of thing to expect. David Garrard Lowe did lob a bombshell, though; perhaps you’ve heard that Edith Jones might not have been her mother’s daughter, but I hadn’t. It was impossible not to mull over this possibility for the duration of the lecture — it explained so much about the famously bad relations between the writer and the ghastly old beast who left her nothing when she died.
I hated being at the lecture. I was one of ten or twenty men in an auditorium crammed with women. For all of my life, I have viscerally disliked gatherings dominated by men or women. Left to themselves, men and women alike seem determined upon one object only: to validate all the stupider stereotypes entertained by the opposite sex. This weakness is above all things what men and women truly share, and it’s perversely why I believe that the differences between the sexes are essentially insignificant. La différence becomes interesting only when men and women try to make contact in spite of it. If you are comfortable in a room full of people of your own gender, then you and I shall never be friends, whether you’re a woman or a man. Ditto if you have to be the only person of the opposite gender — a charge that, I’m afraid, must be laid at Edith Wharton’s feet. Other women usually bored her. Consider her behavior toward Mary Berenson (this did not come up in the lecture, but Hermione Lee covers it well enough): indefensible! It was rudeness tout court.
Enough tittle-tattle. I was going to write a word or two about spirituality (and why lacking it bothers me — but not enough to pretend that I don’t absolutely lack it). I was also thinking of saying something about a discovery that I made today, which is that we dislike people only (or mostly) when/because they make us feel bad about ourselves. Sometimes friendships must be ended for purely pragmatic reasons — a divorce, a fatal indiscretion, an unbridgeable political divide — but dislike doesn’t enter into it in those cases. My thoughts on this subject were triggered by the prospect of seeing some friends of Kathleen who have always made me feel like an aimless slacker. The fact that, until seven or eight years ago, I was an aimless slacker does not work in their favor. Turning the aperçu around, I remember how many times people have told me that I make them feel bad because they haven’t (for example) read Proust. Kathleen’s friends, I’m sure, haven’t wanted to make me feel bad, and I know that I haven’t wanted to make the a-Proustians feel bad. But that’s not how it works, is it? I’ve felt bad, and they’ve felt bad, and we’ve made up our minds that we’d rather spend time with people who don’t involve feeling bad. Once stated, the observation is ridiculously obvious.
And I think of an exchange at Crawford Doyle a few weeks ago. I went in with a purchase in mind — I usually do, these days; otherwise, my house would go Collyer — and I asked for it at the counter. While someone fetched the book of poems, I remarked to the other staff members that, even though I had come across the author’s name forty years ago or more, when I first read The Alexandria Quartet, I didn’t know how to pronounce “Cavafy.” That they didn’t, either, was only minutely disappointing. It would have been nice to find out, but I couldn’t fault anyone for ignorance on this point. (After all, I didn’t know!) But how much more intelligent it would have been of me to ask, simply, “Does anyone know how to pronounce this poet’s name?” That, sadly, never occurred to me.
It feels like a Midas touch: to the extent that I try to be friendly with people (as distinct from simply respectful and pleasant), I make them feel bad about themselves. But then, what else could “trying to be friendly” mean?