Gotham Diary:
My Ireland Problem, cont’d
9 June 2015
Gardner Botsford’s memoir, A Life of Privilege, Mostly, begins, cunningly, with his hands-down best story. Not only did Botsford participate in the invasion of Normandy in 1944, but he may have been one of the very first Americans to reach Paris during the liberation of that capital. Talk about exciting! He writes briskly of all this, beginning with his dismay at being assigned to the Infantry, instead of something a little less exposed to gunfire, and rattling off a few highly entertaining anecdotes that, while they have nothing to do with training or fighting, illuminate the dislocations of the war effort. The next thing you know, he is crossing the English Channel (easy) and Omaha Beach (not easy). He has an engaging encounter with a French peasant, only to discover that it might have been, and probably ought to have been, a lethal encounter. Then, on to Paris — AWOL! You can’t put it down. Only when it’s all over does Gardner Botsford settle down to the conventional elements of an autobiography or memoir: the beginnings, the education, and the career. I call this cunning because not everyone will find the career of an editor at The New Yorker to be exciting stuff. I do, but — there you have it. Botsford’s very good war is such a good lead that the rest of the book is irresistible.
Looking back on my life, I see a complete absence of D-Day-caliber stories. I don’t have any thrilling experiences to recount. My past is not what is interesting about me. Nor, I think, do the aspects of it that I recall explain how I became the person I am today. They seem rather to do the opposite, to suggest the development of a different person. The stories that I remember all end up with roads not taken. Or roads that take most of the people who travel them to very different destinations. (I’m thinking of law school here.) What I see in retrospect is a clutch of fragments, bits and pieces of someone who never quite existed. Put that way, it sounds like a portrait of disappointment, but I have never felt disappointed by my life. I have always found a way to follow my star, and now that, whether from narcissism or stubbornness or both, I feel that I have got just about as close to that star as I can, I feel an immense satisfaction.
So the relation of the past to this contented state (let’s not overdo that: I’m an elderly man with aches and pains galore, still high-strung and occasionally fretful, and not at all serene) is a peculiar one. I cannot deny that I have been shaped by experience, but the evidence suggests that I shaped my experiences; what I got out of things may not have been what one is supposed to get out of them, but it was what I wanted, or thought I wanted. (Mistakes were made.) The relation of luck and responsibility is odd, too. I’ve had so many blessings that it is difficult to explain why I am not running a hedge fund or wearing the robes of a federal judge. Not to mention the football player that I never became. But these outcomes were never in the offing, because I didn’t want them at all. I didn‘t want them so badly that I could only have failed at them. I had to find other things to do with my good luck. Many might doubt that I’ve made good choices. I don’t. Even though I lead a very quiet life, I feel completely absorbed in the world: the world as it is, the world as it has been, and the world as it might become. Every day brings a clearer picture.
My Ireland problem, however, seems a little different from everything else that’s on my mind, which is part of why I call it a problem. I suppose that what I am trying to understand is one of my mistakes. Was it a mistake? It feels like one now. When I read a story by Frank O’Connor, I wonder, reflexively, what took so long. You’ll note that I call it my Ireland problem. It’s not an Irish problem. “Irish” would be too broad. Especially in America, you could have an Irish problem without ever considering the actual emerald isle. What happened was, twenty or thirty years ago — there may be evidence out there, in letters to friends, possibly even in a journal entry (although I doubt it), but I’m not inclined to hunt it down — I decided to avoid reading the literature of Ireland. As I remember, I made a similar decision about the literature of Israel, and I would say that both of these countries were too mired in identity problems to produce good writing. What I meant was that identity problems bore me to death, as indeed they do.
I happen to be a picky reader. Aside from a conscientious burst in college and throughout my twenties, when I set out to expose myself to the acknowledged monuments of literature, I’ve read what intrigued me. It is very easy, under such a dispensation, to write off whole swathes of literature. I’ve read just enough military history, for example, for me to dismiss it as a precursor of the video game, and not really literature at all. Ditto all the alternative “genres” — fantasy and science fiction. I’m very impatient about these, actually, just as I am about watching television; it’s so hard for me to imagine that either science fiction or watching television can lead to a better understanding of the world that I abandon the attempt. People say that they do, or at least that they can, and who am I to prove them wrong? The only solution is to ignore.d
(Murder mysteries, however, when well-written, are an essential branch of humane letters.)
So I ignored the literature of Ireland. I read no histories of Ireland. I read no novels written by writers who had grown up there. I decided that Ireland wasn’t worth knowing. Why?
***
The house on Hathaway Road is still there. It’s at the north end, near the intersection with Northway. Our house was on the other side of Hewitt Avenue. I paid a visit yesterday, via Google maps. Our house still strikes me as hideous. The positively defacing feature is a long but narrow picture window, flanked by two sash windows, that violates every principle of fenestration that I hold dear. Then there is the prominence of the garage doors, always regrettable in a façade. Finally, there is the oversized dormer, directly over the ugly picture window. The dormer was bloated enough to hold two twin beds, separated by a nightstand. The house is supposed to look like a charming if unassuming cottage, but it gets everything wrong.
This is not about our house, though. This is about the house at the north end of the road. It is still there, but it has been transformed. The brickwork seems much lighter, as if each brick had been stained a more cheerful red. A classical pediment has been planted over the doorway — I am pretty sure that that wasn’t there. (Wasn’t there, that is, in the late 195os, when I lived on Hathaway Road.) The most effective alteration, utterly erasing the look of a gloomy institution that was so oppressive when I was a boy, is the insertion of much-mullioned French windows. These make the house look almost gay. What I recall is sheets of plate glass, obsidian and unreflective.
The house was different from all the others in the neighborhood. It was older, I’m pretty sure. It was an urban structure, as many early suburban homes were. It was tall and boxy, not low-slung and relaxed. It did not suggest the English countryside, and it was at complete odds with the newest houses, built in the Southwest “ranch” style. No part of the house suggested outdoor living. I remember its foundations being buried behind plantings, but along the driveway there were basement windows of full size, suggesting not the “finished basement,” centered around a large recreation room, that could be found in several homes (although not in ours), but, on the contrary, servants’ quarters, boiler rooms, and even clankety kitchens. It did not look like a house at all. It looked, insofar as it looked like anything, like a rectory.
My Ireland problem may have begun there.
More to come.