Gotham Diary:
The Sillies
20 October 2014
There was a lot of giggling and chuckling, and some shrieking, this weekend. The silliness of the world was upon us. Kathleen finally read Patricia Marx’s piece about tortoises and alpacas (mentioned below). I came across a very funny story in a rather heartbreaking novel, Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship — the punchline, so to speak, goes something like this: “We haven’t noticed any change, Sister Emmanuelle; it must be the convent” — which reminded me of another funny story, this one retailed by Ray Soleil, taken from the ongoing low-grade sit-com that he has going with his mother, in which other family members get to play occasional roles.
Ray’s brother: So, you pissed him off [meaning Ray]…
Ray’s mother: Did he call you? [meaning ‘How did you know?’]
Ray’s brother: No. I figured it out for myself. [unprecedented plot twist]
The whole story made Kathleen laugh — not just smile.
Then there was Will, on Face Time yesterday. He was in a very jolly mood, whispering to us about the three Hallowe’en costumes that his mother bought for him. (The summer’s favorite, one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, has been discarded, and the smart money seems to be on Wolverine.) At the end of the call, he gave me the look of a pure scamp as he echoed his father and said, “Bye, RJ.” This has been going on all year. He is trying to get me to acknowledge the unwonted form of address, but I never do; I just ignore it. Sometimes, but not nearly so often, he calls Kathleen by name, but she ignores him, too. We keep our amusement to ourselves. Had we, at Will’s age, experimented with using our grandparents’ given names, we should have been exterminated on the spot. Nor should we soon have been forgiven for asking, as Will did his father, “When you die, can I have your money?” Old people were no fun when we were young, and they didn’t have any fun, either. It’s very amusing to pretend to be unaware that Will is trying, in a wholly minor and insignificant way, to be a little bit naughty. Not that we actually fool Will.
The silliest thing, though, was in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue. It wasn’t so much the submersible automobile, capable of propelling itself through what a Russian communiqué. badly translated perhaps, has recently called “the aquatic areas of the world’s oceans” — at depths up to thirty feet. It is difficult to imagine a use for this vehicle other than desperately simulating the James Bond experience (sold separately) by taking a spin in sparkling Caribbean waters; it is certainly no alternative to the Holland Tunnel. No, the submersible car itself is just dumb. It’s the price that’s a riot. $2,000,000. You have to look at the figure a couple of times to be sure. In a catalogue offering a wide variety of nonsense priced at $99.95, $179.95, or even $595.95, the seven-figure pricetag (no cents) stands out, and the mind begins to boggle. “And what card will you be using, sir?” “My Fort Knox card, but if I tell you the number I shall have to kill you.” &c. Imagining the purchase and sale of a preposterous toy, sight unseen, via an 800 number, for $2,000,000 is a flight of looniness that even The Onion rarely attains.
When I was a boy, the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue had a more humdrum tone. It purveyed labor-saving gizmos that sooner or later provoked my mother into asking, “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”, as if, had she only had an extra fifteen minutes here or there to spare from her busy life, she might well have conceived the automatic Scotch-tape dispenser or the self-winding shower curtain. (Unable to recall actual gee-whiz products, I’ve been forced to invent.) No matter how impressed she was with the catalogue’s offerings, however, my mother never put down any cash American toward the purchase of one. This was very disappointing to me. Immured in my suburban idyll, I had learned that the only interesting thing that ever happened was the delivery of a box from the outside world.
I was shattered to discover the same item for sale in the pages of Hammacher Schlemmer and those of the Sharper Image. Another illusion broken on the rocks! Here I dreamed that their respective cornucopias were stocked with unique items! And what we they both selling? Sharper Image mentions “aromatherapy,” while Hammacher Schlemmer calls the thing a “Sonic Scent Diffuser.” Either way, it looks pretty nasty. Slice a caldera out of the top of an old smudgepot, insert a hole that spews white smoke from the base of the concavity, and see if it doesn’t put you in mind of the first stage of an alien invasion!
***
When The Blackwater Lightship appeared in 1999 — it was, as I recall, Colm Tóibín’s first American success — AIDS was no longer killing people right and left, so there was a retrospective relief in his telling of a young man’s agonies in the later stages of the disease. This sort of thing wasn’t happening anymore. Another thing that wasn’t happening anymore, or not so much, was the shock and dismay of discovering, in the context of a deadly illness, that sons and brothers were gay. Helen Doherty, the central figure in Lightship, has known that her brother way gay, but not that he was sick; his wretched condition comes as a complete surprise. Although she’s not on bad terms with Declan, Helen keeps her distance from her family, especially from her mother, Lily. Helen has married a nice man and borne two bouncing sons without introducing any of them to Lily. (In fairness, Lily declined at the last minute to show up for a planned reunion.) It is not that Helen hates her mother so much as that she can think of no other way, besides strict quarantine, to prevent herself from turning into the same sort of passive-aggressive witch.
Declan’s dying wish — that’s what it’s all but — is to spend some time at his granny’s guest house, on the sea north of Wexford, where he and his sister were parked while their father took months to die of cancer, nursed by their distraught mother. Two friends of Declan’s (neither a former lover) more or less commandeer Helen into driving her brother from Dublin to her grandmother’s. Luckily, Helen’s husband has taken the two boys off to his home in Donegal, as he does every summer. The Blackwater Lightship is about Helen’s unexpected week in Cush.
Cush, according to Google Maps, is a beach town outside of Cork, not Wexford, so I daresay Colm Tóibín has seen fit to protect the scene of his childhood summers from prying literary fans. His fictional Cush, somewhere near the quite real Ballyconnigar, appears in at least three novels — The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship, and, now, Nora Webster — and in each book it is a range of houses perched atop an eroding cliff of marl, some of them partially collapsed, all of them doomed. In each book, Cush is the modest summertime resort of a family from Enniscorthy, the cathedral town not far inland where the author was born, and which he writes about in all of his novels with Irish settings.
It was of The Blackwater Lightship that I was reminded unawares by Nora Webster. In addition to the physical settings, Tóibín reworks the themes of the earlier book, taking a very different point of view. The figure of the abandoning mother who has made her own way in the world, instead of dedicating her life to her children, moves from the periphery, where, as Lily, she is viewed unsympathetically by Helen, to the center, as Nora, a character for whom Tóibín demonstrates what it seems best to call a bottomless respect — an esteem tantamount to fondness but too discreetly “Irish” for overt displays. Nora and Lily are not the same woman at all, but their positions are strikingly similar, and the books, read together, evidence a writer deeply engaged with the shifting perspectives of a powerful myth.
Now I have turned to the third Cush book, the earliest: The Heather Blazing (1992). In this book, the central character’s mother dies when he is born, so the myth is partially, but not completely, averted. An old man looks back on his long life from the eve of retirement as an important judge. Like the other novels, The Heather Blazing comes from “a silent place,” but it is not nearly so closely situated to its point of origin as is Nora Webster. Still, a very good read.