Gotham Wisdom:
“Once you choose the right people and set them free”
5 May 2015
The weather has been sunny and mild for more than a few days now, and we are all stumbling around in a daze, almost startled by the return of clemency after so prolonged an absence. Today, skies are grey, and rain is expected this afternoon. As it happens, I am in the exact mood for rain. I may dash across the street for a quick lunch, but otherwise I shall stay in, tidying the back of the house and continuing with the project of emptying the book room of materials pertaining to the household. I shall try to make a few contacts. I’m due for the annual physical exam, so I’ve got to call the internist. I want to write to the man who made (or who had made) our glass curtains, and to ask him to sell me a shorter version of the brass curtain rod that Kathleen ordered from him when she was still in charge of the curtain project. The rod turned out to be unsuitable for glass curtains in this apartment, but it has been mounted in the living room for months now, awaiting the arrival of draperies. What I need is a matching rod for the draperies in the dining ell. And I need it soon, because the draperies have already been dropped off at the post office. They’re on their way.
The weather is good for Kathleen, who has had an extremely rough winter, especially during April, when the unrelenting harshness of the weather made it hard for her to deal with some other struggles. Now she is doing much better, and that’s good, too, because work has picked up. She will be spending tonight, tomorrow night, and Thursday night working late at the office, preparing a filing for a client. I’ll have no excuse not to tackle the mountain of napkins and handkerchiefs that need ironing.
Ordinarily, I watch a movie when I iron, but I can’t think of a movie that I’d want to watch right now, even though there are so many good ones in my library. Basically, what I want to watch is a movie made by Maeve Brennan. Maeve Brennan never made a movie in her life, and, by all accounts, she probably lacked the most basic organizational skills that movie-making requires, but I want to be clear that I would probably be very disappointed by anyone else’s attempt to adapt her writing for the screen. No writer I can think of is more precise about exact points of view, about placing people exactly where they are and telling us what they can see. Her New York — the Alibris copy of The Long-Winded Lady arrived yesterday, and I am lost in it — is a city of specifics, in which it matters very much whether an insignificant incident occurs on West 48th Street or in Washington Place in the Village. It is also a city in which only a few Manhattan neighborhoods exist. Midtown, especially Midtown in the Forties, between Madison Avenue and Broadway. Greenwich Village, all the way over to the Hudson River. At one point, Maeve misses a subway stop at 168th Street, where she was planning to catch a bus. What bus, I wondered. At 168th Street, the two subway lines that run up to Inwood intersect, more or less at the foot of what I still call Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. Walking two blocks west or three blocks east takes you to the edge of the island. Perhaps Maeve Brennan had a friend living in Jumel Terrace, which is a bit out of the way and which can be reached these days by a bus that you could catch at 168th Street and Broadway. Needless to say, what interests Maeve about missing the bus is not the excuse that she will have to make when she gets where she’s going, wherever that is, but the opportunity to drop into a bar for a quick martini and a backward glance.
While I was sipping it, trying to make it last exactly to exactly the moment that would get me a good place in the bus queue without having to stand too long in the cold, I wondered what I should have done about that man in the subway. After all, if I had taken his seat I probably would have got out at 168th Street, which would have meant that I would hardly have been sitting down before I would have been getting up again, and that would have seemed odd. And rather grasping of me. And he wouldn’t have got his seat back, because some other grasping person would have slipped into it ahead of him when I got up. He seemed a retiring sort of man, not pushy at all. I hesitate to think of how he must have regretted offering his seat. Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do.
Maeve Brennan wasn’t fond of subways — she much preferred taxis — but they crop up in her pieces. On another occasion, she finds herself gripping a pole while reading a story in Life about “Miss Jerry Stutz.” Maybe that’s what people called the president of Henri Bendel in the late Fifties, but by the time I first heard of Ms Stutz she was, emphatically, Geraldine. And I heard of her because she was a woman and the head of something. Permit me to recall that this used to be very unusual. It is still regrettably unusual, but no longer remarkable.
On the subway, Maeve was hypnotised by a pearl of wisdom, graciously handed to the Life reporter by Miss Jerry Stutz. “Meanwhile, my first principle applies — when you come into a new job, put your eye on people, not figures. Once you’ve found the right people and set them free, you can’t lose.” Once you’ve found the right people and set them free, you can’t lose. This reminds Maeve of something, but she can’t think what, so she keeps repeating it until it sounds just as ridiculous as it really is. Instead of pointing this out directly, however, she deconstructs the sentence’s implications.
I couldn’t begin to guess how Miss Stutz recognizes a right person, but I did allow myself some naughty conjecturing about how she sets the right people free once she has put the finger on them. Does she take them up on the roof at Henri Bendel? Or out into Central Park? Does she set them free all at once, in a flock, or one by one? At dawn, or when? If by some mischance a wrong one starts out of a coop, how is he or she got back in again? A hand on each shoulder? Both hands together on top of the head? Net? What if a wrong one gets clear away?
All the time I was giggling over this, my tears worshiping Maeve Brennan’s oblique manner of poking holes in the lady president’s first principle, I was remembering an article in this Sunday’s Times, in the business section. Sunday occasions a lot of commercial hot air in the Times, mostly in everyday vernacular chats that parallel those inspirational posters, showing sailboats and sunrises, that Despair.com has such fun with. One regular feature interviews a company head whom you’ve never heard of, but there is no need to read the ensuing Q&A because each one is taken verbatim from the HBS Book of the Dead, an ancient treatise on how to lie about your success by attributing it to some common skill or characteristic that anybody can develop. This week’s subject, for a change, was the very well-known Diane von Furstenberg, and even if you haven’t memorized the contents of the HBSBD, there is no reason to read further after swallowing the headline: “The Key to Success Is Trusting Yourself.” This is really just another way of saying, “Once you’ve found the right people and set them free, you can’t lose” — because, of course, you have trusted yourself to free the right people. Even though the former princess goes on to say that she is a terrible manager.
They key to success is being prepared to take advantage of very good luck — being prepared, that is, for very good luck that, in the manner of luck, may never come along. And what Miss Jerry Stutz’s insight reminded Maeve Brennan of turned out to be that old Chinese fortune-cookie joke: Help! I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery!