Gotham Diary:
Proprietary
September 2015 (II)
Tuesday 8th September
Something has been bothering me. Before heading out to Fire Island, I listed the books that I was going to take with me, and said more than a few words about one of them, The Tale of Genji, which I hadn’t read in decades.
The first quarter of The Tale of Genji is like the forest surrounding Sleeping Beauty — almost impenetrable. It is little more than a court calendar, a gazette of important ritual functions, with accounts of who showed up and, more important, who wore what. (9/3/15)
I’ve already noted that this is just plain wrong, but it’s so wrong, and spoken with such assurance, that feel foolish about the whole enterprise of keeping this Web log. Surely it would be a public service to refrain from writing further entries.
Then, after an early dinner last night, I found something that I’ve been looking for. That has happened a lot lately, finding things, because, having been away for several weeks for the first time since we moved into this apartment, I’ve returned with fresh eyes and new ideas. One of the latter was to store the drip-dry shirts from LL Bean that I bought four years ago, and wear only on Fire Island, in a milk crate in my clothes closet. The crate turned out to be full. Full of what? Damask napkins! What were they doing there? Who knows; but I’d been looking for them. They belonged in the middle drawer of a commode in the foyer. Why weren’t they there? Because the drawer was already full — full of photo albums. I’d been looking for them, too. The albums were in the drawer, and the napkins were in the crate, because I hadn’t known what else to do with them when they surfaced during the crazy weeks of moving in.
One of the photo albums, titled “Our Baby,” was full of snapshots of me. Lots and lots when I was a baby, then fewer, then lots when my sister was adopted, then even fewer. The last picture shows the two of us, me decked out for my first communion — I think. One of the pictures of just me has held my interest in recent years, because I built a little theory around it. I daresay I’ve written about this theory somewhere, drat it. It’s as wrong as my faulty recollection of Genji, and I can hardly bring myself to state it. It has to do with my becoming glum and introspective when my sister was adopted, at the age of eight or nine months; having to share the stage not with a sleeping infant but with a laughing cutie put my nose out of joint (as an aunt later put it to me — I hope that I’m not making up what she said!). And here was photographic evidence, showing a traumatized little boy. But the picture was obviously taken long before Carol came home. I doubt that I was even two years old. A photograph that appears a little later, in what does appear to be a conscientious attempt at chronology, shows me in my playpen. It is dated March 1950 — age two years, three months — along with a note, “Last day of playpen.” In the photograph, I do not appear to be keen to part with the playpen. With one elbow resting on the railing with proprietary satisfaction, I stare into the camera with a gaze that strikes me now as superficially non-committal and profoundly stubborn. It is not a hostile look, but it is clearly not a friendly one, either.
At the time of this photograph, I am still the only child in the house. I may have heard something about my sister-to-come — her birth-mother’s parents wanted to keep her, and that was holding things up (am I making this up?) — but that can’t have had much to do with my impassive expression in the playpen. When I look at the picture, I see myself already fully formed, completely me. All the schooling, all the tedium, all the dead ends, the petered-out friendships especially — none of all this was necessary for me to become me. All that was necessary was to stuff that little head with a lot of reading, and to wait for a critical mass to develop (somewhere between forty and fifty), after which I should be capable of thinking about what I’d read. Now, in my late sixties, I’m re-reading a lot of books that I read when I was young, and I’m finding that I misread most of them. You can tell from the picture of me in the playpen that I would read books the way I wanted to. Had I read them correctly, instead of flying off into daydreams on every page, perhaps the serious thinking would have begun sooner, maybe even in college.
As for the playpen, which I could easily climb out of but (I’m told?) always climbed back into, it was the exoskeleton that I have recreated numberless times in my life. I am sitting in the latest one now. I have never said, to Kathleen or to anyone else, that the book room is my room and to stay out of it, but it seems that I don’t have to. Kathleen is reluctant to come in here, whether I’m in the room or not. I’m not happy about that, but I don’t blame her.
It is easy to see that people are not going to line up to be friends with the man whom the boy in the playpen will grow up to be. Well, it’s easy to see now because I’ve been thinking a lot about it, as periodically I do. This time, thoughts about failures in friendliness have been triggered by the biography of Joan Didion. Joan Didion has always had scads of friends. Well, at least she has known just about everyone. I don’t know anyone. What’s wrong with me?
Did I say “thoughts”? There I go again, getting it wrong.
These days, I ponder the question for a reason. Day after day, I write entries for this site that hail the virtues of sociable citizenship, of setting a good example, of being generous. Day by day, I stay quietly in my apartment, which I never leave for any length of time without plenty to read. Is the dissonance merely cognitive?
I am not shy. I am wary of entering into conversation with conspiracy theorists. By “conspiracy theorists,” I simply mean all people who read neither the New York nor the London Review of Books. What’s unfriendly about that?
I have posted the playpen picture at Facebook. Two friends have commented that I ought to use it as my Facebook portrait. The portrait of an unreliable narrator.
***
Wednesday 9th
It is very hot. The apartment is cool, almost chilly — the renovated HVAC in this apartment works stunningly well, contrasted with the vintage 1963 fittings in the old apartment — but there is only so much that air conditioning can do to the environment, and the low atmospheric pressure is wearing. (My armchair science explanation is that everything expands, getting in the way of everything else. How many times have I written this twaddle?) I don’t sleep as well as I might, and even the lightest blanket can be too heavy. Take it off, though, and I’m freezing! It becomes difficult to get through simple tasks. It took the duration of that 1955 Callas/von Karajan performance of Lucia di Lammermoor, the one in Berlin with the encored Sextet, to process this month’s bills — late as usual (but there’s always an explanation!). At one point, there was mess everywhere — see above for rediscoveries of damask napkins and old photograph albums over the weekend — and I thought that once I’d put it all away, I’d have no energy left for making dinner. Plus, I forgot to take the ball of pizza dough and a fennel sausage out of the freezer until five-thirty. But it all got done, and Kathleen said that it was my best pizza ever. I agreed that I’d never made a better one. I think it may be time to get a peel and a stone.
After dinner, we retired to the bedroom, where Kathleen climbed into bed with her laptop, and I read in my chair. Casting about for something to read, yesterday, I was happy to find something that I’d forgotten about, Andrew Solomon’s novel, A Stone Boat. Published in 1994, it precedes by many years the nonfiction works for which Solomon is famous, and I had no idea what to expect. I need to write this as quickly as possible, because it is about my mother. That’s the first sentence, and I liked it. The words are nicely turned, but they’re also puzzling: of all the subjects in the world, why should one’s mother require a hastily-drawn account? The second sentence suggests an answer, but here my account of A Stone Boat will stop, because I’m reconsidering the habit, into which I’ve fallen this year, of talking about a book that I’m in the middle of and then never mentioning it again. Not to mention the even worse habit of reading books and never mentioning them at all.
Goodness: could I have put that more misleadingly?
When I was new at this blogging thing, or even before that, during the four or five years of Portico, I wanted to write about books because they are a big thing in my life, so to speak, and always have been. But the only models that I had were the book review and the literary essay, and neither was satisfactory, because neither provided very much room for the big thing in my life part. Reviews and essays were supposed to be “objective.” They were to be written as though by an incorporeal spirit, a free-floating intelligence unsullied by the accidents of personality. I knew how to write these things, and I flatter myself that I wrote a few good ones; but I was never happy with the templates. I wanted to show how the books affected me. What put an end to my reviewing, however, was the decision to stop reading new novels just because they were new and talked about; and to re-read old novels that had made an impact, with a view to reassessing that impact. My altered reading list entailed a shift in judgment. I was much less concerned about how a book measured up as literature, and much more concerned with the very point of literature. This led me into the thickets of humanism where I find myself today.
So to read a book and then not to mention it is a waste. I could mention it somewhere else, in a letter to a friend; but I like the scrutiny that I imagine regular readers bring to bear on what I have to say, so I say it here. And then I know, or at least have the beginning of a substantial understanding, not “what the book means to me” but where it fits in the dense fabric of what I call the World. Not every book has a place in this fabric: beach books are like bridal magazines, endlessly self-replacing novelties. I tend not to read many of those; my “beach books” tend to be delightfully quirky reads like Talk. But I did read a distressingly empty novel while I was out on Fire Island, and I quickly saw that its place in the World was as a Mistake, the less said about which the better. I shall be coy: it is not surprising, given the author, that the extracts of verse, attributed to a fictional literary legend, that appear in this novel are more than merely presentable; what’s surprising is that, given the author, the rest of the affair is as breezily clichéd as an article in New York Magazine. Instead of the sophisticated meditation on literary life that I expected, I got a not very enlightening young-adult novel.
Another book that I read by the bay was an account of the Atlantic War, A Measureless Peril, written by someone I knew. Someone I knew a very long time ago, when we were in tenth grade at Bronxville High. Actually, tenth grade was when our acquaintance ended; I went off to boarding school the following year. I had known Richard Snow since fourth grade, when we were signed up for Miss Covington’s dancing school. Richard went on to work at American Heritage, of which he was editor for decades. His father, an architect, had served in the Navy’s campaign to protect shipping between the United States and the United Kingdom during World War II, and his letters home, together with his spoken reminiscences, must have inspired Richard to write, not so much a history of the Atlantic War, as a sequence of personal recollections of it. Military history is not at all my cup of tea, but the story was dramatic (to say the least), and A Measureless Peril is every bit as well-written as I expected it to be. Nevertheless, what stuck with me was remembering Richard’s parents, who were almost a generation older than everyone else’s. I was in their home only once, as I recall, but while I was there I played, with Mrs Snow, the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria.” It was the only time that I ever performed a piece of music with another instrumentalist — a fond memory, and an unforgettable glimpse of how very different life might have been. I chose to read A Measureless Peril in the wake of one of those moments, made so dangerously tempting by the ease of Internet research, in which I thought about dropping Richard a note. It seemed unseemly to point him to this site without having read one of his books.
***
Thursday 10th
The title of Andrew Solomon’s novel, A Stone Boat, reminded me of the marble folly that China’s Empress Cixi had built for the Summer Palace outside of Beijing, using funds diverted from China’s naval campaign in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. (Wouldn’t most of Solomon’s readers have the same thought?) But the explicit reference is to something that someone says in the novel.
But sometimes I look at you and I think it’s as though you’ve chosen a boat carved from diamond with sapphire masts and sails of rubies and emeralds for your journey across the sea. It’s breathtaking to watch it cutting through the waves, but it’s a stone boat. You have to be crazy to choose a stone boat. Anything else would be easier to sail, Harry.” (194)
The stone boat is Harry’s relationship with his mother, or perhaps the way in which he prizes her love for him. I think that it’s also a good symbol for the novel itself, which is extravagantly luxurious and only implausibly seaworthy. Somehow, it completes its narrative journey, jewels blazingly intact. There are several passages of the very highest literary quality, compelling statements of truth that immediately feel essential to have read. But the experience is somewhat exhausting, and I note that Solomon has not chosen to have another try at fiction.
Is it fiction? I want to come back to that later. For now, it’s enough to say that Solomon lost his dearly beloved mother to cancer when he was still a young man. In the update to the Acknowledgments that he appended to the 2013 edition, he identifies the mother in his novel with her. (I am not a hundred percent sure, but my impression is that the mother remains unnamed.) Solomon has changed some of the details: in the novel, Harry is a concert pianist, about to release his first CD. (Schubert and Rachmaninoff, a rather intriguing pairing.) But the grief certainly feels autobiographical. It is greater than any novel can hold, so that, at times, A Stone Boat reads like a tribute. Such overstepping is almost always curtailed by Solomon’s stylistic inclination to analyze from a distance, however, and this keeps the book afloat. The author’s masterful way with words allows him to say, over and over and over, I loved my mother and My mother loved me, without ever lapsing into tediousness.
This is all the more surprising because of the preoccupation with perfection that pervades the novel. Perfection is something of a stone boat. It doesn’t really exist; what exists is the sense, after something happens, that it was perfect. Perfection figures highly in Harry’s memories of his mother and of the world that she brought forth. Mother, as I shall call her (because she is always “my mother” in the book, and I can’t be saying that), is an unflappable juggernaut of careful planning. She is beautiful; she dresses beautifully; she creates beautiful rooms; she gives beautiful parties. But she also knows how to have a good time, how to surrender to the moment. She is, when you get down to it, French. When you get down to it — Solomon never puts it this way — Mother is a prestidigitator, a mistress of misdirection capable of rendering invisible all the little things that aren’t quite right. You sense the magic act, but all you see is the illusion of perfection.
Then along comes cancer, and in two years, Mother is dead.
Mother is not, in fact, perfect; she and Harry fight all the time. We don’t see these fights, and we don’t learn the details; some readers might consider it a flaw that Solomon merely mentions the bad times with his mother. A few moments of unpleasant disagreement are shown. These share the same cause: Mother is not happy about Harry’s homosexuality. She does not want to hear that Harry has happily settled down with a lover in London. She wants him to marry a woman and have children — well, until very recently, what mother wouldn’t? Besides, it isn’t true that Harry is happy with Bernard. How can he be? He is the captain of a stone boat. One of the most powerful passages in the novel is a portrait of this captain, or a series of them, photographs taken at the party that the narrator gives to celebrate the release of his CD. It is quite a set piece, this party, a virtuoso display of disciplined excitement. You might be excused for mistaking it for a billionaire’s daughter’s wedding reception; there is in any case a photographer.
I look at the photos of myself from that party and this is what I see: I see a young man in the middle of a party as stunning as the feast day of an ancient king. I see him surrounded by many friends and a few lovers. I see him looking as though he is entirely in control, negotiating his family and overseeing the waiters and making introductions; he is evidently a master builder who has constructed everyone else’s delight. I see him utterly at ease, and clearly very happy: I see someone of vast competence, looking out at me from clear confident eyes. I look at him and I wonder who this young man is, not yet thirty, so sure of himself and of the world. I wonder what it would be like to be on top of the world like that, to have so much of what youth dreams maturity might hold. I look into his clear blue eyes and I envy him, because he is so full of laughter, because he seems not to know about or not to mind the effort life is, because he has the face of someone who has all the things that I have always wanted, but who couldn’t possibly care less about them. (208)
A Stone Boat is worth reading just for things like that. How difficult it is to bear in mind that sophisticated people train themselves to act with a self-assurance that they may not in fact feel! How hard to remember that the point of good manners is to take over, to command all decision-making, in social situations, whether or not they’re important. We fear that we won’t measure up even we assume that everyone else is effortlessly surpassing. Here we see a man confronting his well-bred shell, astounded by the appearance of supreme indifference to everything that he craves. It is a queasy, bitter feeling to experience envy of yourself.
While cancer ravages Mother — in another great passage, the narrator tells us what he is not going to tell us about the ordeals and humiliations of her treatments, and he’s as good as his word — Harry copes with the demands of his musical career, and struggles with his sex life. Here is it important to recall that A Stone Boat first appeared in 1994. A lot has changed in gay life since then, and a lot had already changed. (Interestingly, AIDS is mentioned only once, very much in passing.) Harry’s early sex life, he tells us, was furtive and incidentally regrettable. Sometimes, it was dangerous. Harry wishes that he were straight, not least because it would make his mother’s life perfect, but also because he would be normal — there he goes again, thinking that everyone else has an easier time of things. Harry is something of a familiar gay type: he has great taste in things, and he has a taste for rough trade in men. By the beginning of the novel, Harry knows that he is bored by his relationship with Bernard, who, it seems, is just about as bored with him. They live out a dream of polite content, but eventually Harry grows impatient with Bernard because Bernard does not seem to know what he’s going through, losing the love of a perfect mother. One of the later chapters is devoted to an account of Harry’s romantic experiences after breaking up with Bernard; suffice it to say, there is a lot for Harry to learn about love — love, that is, that doesn’t involve his mother. I should note, by the way, that Harry’s mother is so perfect that she thinks that he’s more than a little bit carried away by his attachment to her. Again Solomon never says any such thing, but I thought I caught her winking: This perfection is an illusion, Harry.
Mother never says any such thing, either. She pours out her love for her two sons. (Harry’s younger brother is a straight med student, and usually somewhere else, although when the brothers and their parents are together, it’s perfect, even if someone is throwing a tantrum.) She says that she wants to die so that she can spare her sons the agony of watching her die. She talks about how she would have died for her boys when they were born. She says that she loves her husband so much that she wants him to get married again when she’s gone. You might say that she deals perfectly with the mystery of love and death, by not attempting to puzzle it out.
The last chapter provides almost documentary details about the arrangements for Mother’s funeral. Cut, cut, cut! I was about to scream, when suddenly the scene changed, as the narrator recalled a trip that he took, with just his mother, to Venice, when he was eleven. If I copied it out here, you’d see that it’s great stuff, but you wouldn’t see how great, because the scene in the Piazetta transfigures all the book’s excesses by closing on a moment of heartbreaking innocence. It is here that Andrew Solomon is finally able to convey what that perfect love felt like, and with a kind of Proustian triumph, he arranges for it to signal the end of childhood.
***
Friday 11th
Kathleen has once again taken the Friday off; we are both going to work on our closets, emptying their hanging contents onto clothes racks and “editing.” My mind is on the happy banalities of the day. The last thing I want to do is to write about the aspect of A Stone Boat that never quite stopped bothering me as I read it. But if I don’t write about it now, I never shall.
Even then, I wonder if I ought to write about it at all. I’ve just suggested that there was something wrong with the novel, but in fact it’s something wrong with me. A Stone Boat is a kind of photographic romance. Against the background of intense passions — a man’s love for his mother; his mother’s love of life in all its happier manifestations (and therefore necessarily a love for her sons — certain details are pinpointed and rendered clearly. The picture is so rich that you do not think much of all that’s left out, such as the extended family that makes no appearance at all until Mother’s funeral, or the addresses of various apartments, or the names of favorite restaurants. All of that is elided beneath an unstated assurance that it was as perfect as it could possibly be. The family was fine, the addresses were “good,” the restaurants genuinely notable. All of that is “understood.” It is a lot of detail to take on faith, particularly for a novel set largely in New York.
New York is not a dreamy city. It is not, as a city, particularly luxurious; its luxuries are tucked away. New Yorkers, especially affluent New Yorkers, have different ideas of luxury. They don’t all go mad for peonies, for example. I cite peonies because Andrew Solomon makes a great case for the peony as the most special of flowers. In addition to being as beautiful as any flower, the peony remains stuck to its season, the early summer. You cannot have peonies the year round; for some reason or another, the horticulturalists haven’t figured out how to produce its blooms at will. Knowing that the narrator of A Stone Boat prizes peonies tells you a lot about the kind of luxury he goes in for. It is not a decorative detail at all, but enlightening information about a certain milieu. As I read A Stone Boat, however, I was, as I say, always a bit bothered by the omission of a detail that, had it been provided, would have been even more enlightening. And I blushed to be bothered.
In college, I had a friend whose French accent was very good. When he spent a year abroad in Angers, his accent was so good that one of his teachers — or perhaps it was the formidable madame who kept the house where he lived — said to him, “Vous venez de nulle part.” You come from nowhere. This was certainly a compliment, to the extent of implying that my friend did not sound like a hopeless American. But it also meant that he did not have a French French accent. He did not sound as if he came from Lille, or Dijon, or Bordeaux, or anywhere else. I didn’t understand this part of nul part until I was puzzled by certain American accents on display in British shows, such as Inspector Morse and Miss Marple (the one with Joan Hickson), the Eighties and Nineties. These accents had been purged of British echoes, but they weren’t really American, either. Each of the sounds was American, but no single American produced them together.
Something like this puzzle bothered me in A Stone Boat. Where are these people really from, I wondered. “New York” was not the answer. New York was the problem, the very matrix of the puzzle. Because nobody in New York, at least no one whom I’ve ever met or even read about, combines all of the characteristics of Mother and her family. Not quite. Perhaps it is more a case, as I suggested earlier, of omitted characteristics, characters that would anchor the romance in firmer ground — something that I can well imagine Andrew Solomon’s wishing to avoid. So I should perhaps better say, nobody is like this family without being more. Without being something or something else. Without, in short, being either gentile or Jewish.
Just to make this point is to evoke the horrors of anti-Semitism, I know. I also know that, by 1994, when A Stone Boat was first published, homophobia was a much bigger deal than anti-Semitism; and Solomon, moreover, set out to present a bisexuality in which many onlookers simply refused to believe: you were one or the other; to be both was simply (and temporarily) to be confused. In Far From the Tree, Solomon writes that, while his mother disapproved of his homosexuality because she believed that it would diminish his chances at happiness, she also didn’t particularly like being the mother of a gay man. With this one sentence, he illuminates all the “fights” that are mentioned by never described in A Stone Boat. I certainly don’t think for a moment that Solomon, while daring to discuss his then-problematic sexuality in a novel (still something new for mainstream fiction), regarded being Jewish as unmentionable. But I think that he miscalculated in thinking that it was a detail that didn’t matter.
I raise this uncomfortable issue not because I want to suggest that Andrew Solomon is a self-hating Jew; I most certainly don’t. I want to register, rather, an awkward moment in a momentous social shift. When I was young, Jews and Gentiles were equal but separate to a degree that was only imagined by Plessy v Ferguson. It is a grave mistake to imagine that all New York Jews were recent immigrants, uncouth and uneducated and poor. Most may have been, but then most Gentiles belonged to the working class as well. Exceptionally, however, there were rungs of Jews who could put Gentiles to shame for culture, philanthropy, and sophistication. These members of “Our Crowd” tended, if anyting, to make their Gentile equals look like slobs. These people thrived in New York, unlike their doomed distant cousins in Europe. By the time I was in college, the equality was so strikingly balanced the other way, so to speak, that the effort of maintaining the separation seemed to be not worth the efforts.
But the world doesn’t stop turning. In 1994, being Jewish in New York was simply not a big deal. Like fraternities, Jewish ways of life seemed to be on the way out. Well, we know what happened instead. Jewish culture is livelier than it has been in a long time, and there are towns on Long Island that have all but restructured themselves as positive ghettoes. But the resurgence of Jewish culture has about it the wonderfulness of just that: the resurgence of a culture. Ideas of “race,” never more than the most dubious of constructs, have nothing to do with it. Being Jewish is a matter of growing up in a Jewish household, with Jewish relatives and Jewish holidays. It is not a matter of coming into the world with a Jewish body. Jewish culture is a culture like any other, no better or worse — but only from a perspective that nobody can seriously maintain, because we all belong to the culture that we grew up in. From that imaginary objectivity, I might say that I should rather be a Jew than a Gentile from Bronxville — a place that defined itself by those who were not allowed to live there. In fact, I am a self-hating Gentile from Bronxville.
In 1994, Gentiles in New York still regarded themselves as regarded as top dogs. Solomon clearly wanted to fix his family portrait at the top of the social tree, because, I think, that is where he felt it belonged. So (I’m reasoning) he left out the one detail that would have led some readers to disagree, or at least to ask questions. The result of his omission is the blur that, for example, makes the constant tears of Leonard, Mother’s husband and the boys’ father, seem somewhat odd (because in Gentile culture, men really did not cry, except maybe once.) For another example, it the absence of cousins — of any living relatives outside the four members of the immediate families — seem strange, as if Leonard and Mother materialized out of nowhere, instead of from a background that, had those relatives figured forth, would have identified the family as either Jewish or Gentile. It makes a mystery of Harry’s piano career — the reality of life among the upper Gentility of New York might lead one to suppose that truly exceptional children are strangled as soon as they’re seen to be. The problem with A Stone Boat is not that it goes on and on about love and the agony of losing a still-vibrant mother to cancer; if it does these things, it does them very well. The problem is that A Stone Boat comes not from New York but de nulle part.
Actually, for all the family’s preoccupation with comme il faut, you could argue that the family in Solomon’s novel comes from Mother’s beloved Paris. The author begins with a chapter suggesting that that is how it would be if Mother’s deepest wish were granted.
Bon weekend à tous!