Gotham Diary:
Transactions
28 January 2014
At about nine, this morning, I canceled my lunch date. I didn’t want to be dependent on the availability of taxis in the terribly cold weather, and any other mode of transportation would entail overexposure to the Vortex or the Clipper or whatever it is. Tomorrow will be a warmer day, or so they say.
The prospect of bundling up and setting forth for lunch kept me from going back to sleep at 5:30 this morning. I tried to think, as I usually do at such times (and it usually puts me under right away), of what I might write about this morning. This broke off into the question, when this morning? Or this afternoon? This evening? In no time at all, every uncertainty in my life at the moment, amplitudes raised by Kathleen’s absence, paraded through my imagination, and although I was quite comfortable under the blankets, I could not manage the slip into oblivion. Eventually, I got up, grabbed the paper, and read yesterday’s news. Then I turned to Bookforum, a new issue of which arrived yesterday. Pretty soon, I was back in bed, dozing. What an existence!
Tomorrow, Kathleen will be coming home. That will buoy me up.
***
When I finally got to my desk, there was a letter from a friend who mentioned, among other things, that he was reading The Other Persuasion. This Vintage collection of “gay writing,” published in 1977, features, my correspondent told me, excerpts from the work of Proust, Forster, Stein, and so on. It’s long out of print, although it’s available. Looking at the online photograph of its quietly tasteful cover, I thought how assertive it would have been to carry the book around, in 1977, outside of a few urban enclaves. Assertive and/or bold. Thank heaven that’s over. Or at least the enclaves are much, much larger.
It was in the 1970s that readers were invited to consider such categories as “women’s fiction” and “gay fiction.” I wasn’t comfortable with either. Insofar as works in these categories were primarily concerned with issues of gender and sexuality, they could be of interest — interest not merely anthropological — to similarly endowed readers. To the extent that women and gay men wrote novels that fully engaged me, the categorization was empty. Thus I stepped away from the question, and read what I liked, much of which was written by women and gay men. Actually, more and more of it was written, as my novel-reading years passed by, by women.
There’s one thing that women and gay men have in common: the need to pay pretty close attention to the world around them, in order to avoid harm of some kind. This makes the fiction that they write more interesting; it is actually about the observed world. More interesting, that is, than fiction written by straight men. Straight male writers seem always to be wholly wrapped up in themselves, possibly because this is their only topic, they only thing that they’ve had to become familiar with. I don’t mean that these writers are necessarily self-absorbed. I’m thinking here of Augie March, whose Adventures I put down in the middle, not because the book was all about Augie, but because it wasn’t about anything else, either. No other character held the stage for very long. Augie was like a chimp swinging from vine to vine, and when he reached the vine that would take him off to Mexico, I closed the book. I suppose that what I’m confessing here is that I don’t care much for the Bildungsroman — not in its American form, anyway.
I’ve picked up The Wings of the Dove — it has been a while since I read it last. Quite a while. I love the novels to either side of it, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, so I turn to them when I’m in the mood for late James. The Wings of the Dove does have the most extraordinary beginning, the drama-ness of which reminds us immediately of the Master’s frustrated career as a playwright. A woman alone in a room, pacing, impatient. Then she stops before a “dull,” “tarnished” mirror, and while she appraises herself, the author tells us a few things about her family’s fall from prosperity to dinginess — a very few things. But the drama is deeper than that. We are told absolutely nothing of what Kate Croy is thinking. I had already noticed that about James: he never burrows behind physical manifestations to tell us his characters’ secrets. So much for being a “psychological” novelist! It was agreeably ratifying to see Wendy Lesser say the same thing, on an early page of her new book, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books.
Despite James’s reputation as a novelist of great psychological depth, there are virtually no scenes in which he peers behind the verbal surface, telling us that whereas So-and-so appeared to think this, she really thought that.
So much of the excitement and suspense in James come from this reticence — this very loquacious reticence. Like a beautiful actress on the stage, his wheeling prose diverts us from the unsightly tangle of semi-conscious mentalities. Reading some of that prose just now — Lionel Croy’s surprising support for his sister-in-law’s plans for Kate, notwithstanding their hostility to himself — I felt something else: when James’s characters converse, they are either negotiating or gainsaying the need for negotiation. There is a transaction in every scene — sometimes more than one. It is odd to think of James as a businessman, but we forget how much more there is to business than money.
***
Kathleen has just called to tell me that the greatest of my current uncertainties, one that gave rise to an anxiety that I worked hard to conceal from everyone else, has been favorably resolved. The worst of it was, Obamacare was “to blame.”