Gotham Diary:
The Real Soufflé
September 2015 (IV)
Monday 21st
Dig we must, as Con Ed used to say. The grim scene shown above is actually a sign of progress. Second Avenue is being restored. The staging areas for the construction of the subway station are contracting. The ground floor of the yellow-brick building on the left will be given over to the 83rd Street entrance to the new station. The era of very ugly pictures at this Web site may be drawing to a close!
Over the weekend, my left eye developed a peculiar inflammation. How peculiar, I’ll find out tomorrow afternoon, when I’ll be squeezed into a covering ophthalmologist’s already tight schedule. When the Advil wears off, it hurts like the dickens, but it does not appear to be an infection. (I’m prone to peculiar eye problems, as a sideline of the things that are really wrong with me.) I’ve had some trouble reading — I can see, but the muscles hurt; so, last night, when I wanted to read Victory, but found the print in the Penguin edition to be rather small, I bought (a medical expense) the Kindle version of the Penguin. It was quite easy to read.
I had gone straight from Nostromo to Victory. As stories, they are very different. Nostromo sprawls immensely, capturing a revolutionary episode in an imaginary South American country (Costaguana, modeled chiefly on Colombia). The cast is immense, and Conrad’s narrative is so looping that early readers complained of too much “machinery.” Victory is intimate, and far more straightforwardly deadly. I haven’t read it before, so I don’t know how it’s going to come out, but as this is Conrad, I am not expecting happy endings. What’s particularly intriguing is its operatic construction. A summary of the action would look a lot like an opera synopsis. There are four acts, each divided into a few scenes, and they feature the handful of characters pretty much as a librettist would handle them. The beginning of Act III is, I believe, an intensely ironic love duet, powerfully reminiscent of Tristan und Isolde, because while the lovers air their ardor, a ship approaches from the distance, and we know that the ship does not carry friends. When I put the book down, late last night, incapable of reading another word (not because of the eye condition, but because I was exhausted), the ship had not yet arrived. It’s a wonder I’m writing here now.
Why the Conrad all of a sudden? Because I decided to re-read Nostromo last year. I am always re-reading things now. But when I got to the middle of the book, I stalled, because I was so swelled with hope that Martin Decoud’s political plan would succeed that I couldn’t bear the suspense of the chapter in which the rootless intellectual (made political by his desire to impress his lady-love) and Nostromo, that paragon of vanity, and, unbeknownst to them, the hide-merchant Hirsch, drift around the airless Golfo Plácido in a lighter laden with tons of silver ingots, while hoping not to run into an enemy steamer. The spine of the Oxford World’s Classics edition has been scowling at me for a year now, as has its cover, which shows the arresting self-portrait of the late Italian painter, Pietro Annigoni, whose somewhat reactionary portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in her somewhat windswept robes excited much midcentury derision.
On page 62 of The Last Love Song, biographer Tracy Daugherty quotes Joan Didion as calling Victory “maybe my favorite book in the world” — a recommendation that I had to follow up at once. But first, I must finish Nostromo. This didn’t take as long as I feared it would, probably because I was so primed for the action by the complications of Sybille Bedford’s Mexicans — Costaguanans at peace, so to speak.
***
This afternoon, I shall have to do something about the laundry. I have this week’s wash-and-fold to put away, and last week’s as well. There is an awful backlog of pillowcases and napkins to be ironed. I don’t understand my resistance to this chunk of housework, but I would rather follow Wyle E Coyote off a cliff than attend to it. Dinner will be simple. Kathleen wants another bowl of the chicken soup that I made for her last night — her tummy is off. I took a tub of Agata & Valentina’s chicken broth, simmered it with an ample tablespoon of aromatics (also conveniently available at Agata, layers of chopped celery, carrot, and onion, also in a tub), along with some white peppercorns, a sprig of thyme and a sage leaf. When I thought that the broth had picked up all the flavor that it was going to, I strained it, kept it warm, and then spooned in some of the Arborio rice that I had steamed for my own dinner. To me there was nothing special about any of this, but Kathleen said that she had never had chicken soup like it, had not imagined that chicken soup could be so satisfying, &c. Happily, I have a few more tubs of broth in the freezer. For myself, it will be spaghetti with butter sauce. I’ve discovered that butter sauce does not freeze well; it become pallid and watery for some reason. Since butter sauce is the knock-out punch of tomato sauces, pallid and watery won’t do at all. Nor does butter sauce keep for more than a week in the fridge. I used to wish that the recipe (28 ounces pulped tomatoes, 1 medium onion halved, and a stick of butter, simmered for ninety minutes or so, whereupon the onion is discarded) yielded more sauce, but I have learned better.
What I have not learned is how to resist the appeal of the vision of the writer at work. So often, I see myself writing — at times when I am not writing, that is — and the picture is so inviting! So quiet, so focused! So safe! Now, I am that lucky writer who enjoys writing, so I do not need the blandishments of conjured delights to woo me to the desk. But I feel cheated all the same, because the act of writing is simply never like that pretty picture. The problem is not that the actuality of writing yields other, less attractive pictures — again, I’m an easygoing writer who never tears his hair out or tosses crumpled sheets of paper into the bin. The problem is that there is no picture. When I am writing, I am not thinking of the fun that I am having writing (unless I have just thought up something very cheeky). I am not thinking of me at all, even when I am writing about myself! A true picture of the artist at work would show all the accoutrements of writing, whatever those might be (pens, typewriters, computers), but no artist. In the act of writing, the writer disappears, leaving only a husk of flesh and bone that could not be less real to him.
As a reader, however, I quite consciously relish the congruence of the pleasure of reading with the pleasantness of the setting in which I am reading. The picture of me reading is obviously not the same as the picture of what I am reading, if picture there were, but the pleasures harmonize. If picture there were, I say, because although of course I imagine visual scenes when I read, those scenes are violently unstable. Reading for me is not the translation of text into a spool of film. The words on the page never disappear. In between the words, above and below and before and behind them, flash animated snapshots of spaces, gestures, utterances, and responses. Sometimes these snapshots are imported, as for example the reminiscences of Tristan summoned by the beginning of Part III of Victory. The visions appear and disappear so quickly that they never interrupt the flow of actual words, or my sense of the lyricism in the words. The words printed on the page are the great source of pleasure. Notwithstanding the chaotic flight of inconsequent images, there is no picture of what I am reading. Only a sense and a pleasure.
***
Tuesday 22nd
Last night, I came across something new and unexpected, even though it oughtn’t to have been either. Writing in 1967, about a sort of think-tank, Santa Barbara’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Joan Didion comments,
I have long been interested in the Center’s rhetoric, which has about it the kind of ectoplasmic generality that always makes me sense I am on the track of the real soufflé, the genuine American kitsch.
Didion is a sharp writer, but she is rarely so forthrightly insulting. (I think kitsch is insulting, don’t you? It certainly was in the Sixties.) Even more fun is “the real soufflé,” which has the reckless dash of Tom Wolff. Didion’s sentence is anything but a soufflé — a chocolate mole, perhaps. “Ectoplasmic” sets you up for the fun, by sounding a clear note of bogus seriousness. (Ectoplasm was the “substance” of which visible “psychic phenomena” were constituted.) Then Didion suggests that she is a hunter — “on the track” — in search not of live prey but of dubious concoctions. The sentence comes from a very short piece, “California Dreaming,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and I don’t know how I hadn’t heard of it.
The piece is so short that it really ought to be read, and not summarized. Didion has great Didionish fun with the Center’s activities and objectives, which the Center describes as “clarifying the basic issues.” Didion sees the Center as, primarily, a fund-raiser for itself. Its head, Robert M Hutchins, erstwhile University of Chicago worthy and co-founder of the Great Books curriculum, “has evolved the E = mc2 of all fund-raising formulae.” (If Didion is at all unfair to Hutchins, it is in her failure to appreciate his visionary exploitation of celebrities.) She retails an almost grotesquely embarrassing example of the “high-powered talk” at the Center’s conferences. It’s hard to believe that the Center survived her four pages of target practice.
“California Dreaming” was written when Didion was young, and still a contrarian California Republican. Aside from Barry Goldwater, she doesn’t seem to have liked any Republic leaders — loathing for Ronald Reagan would cause her to leave the faith once and for all — but that wasn’t important; her mission was to attack and explode liberal fatuities and government plans. In retrospect, there doesn’t seem to have been anything particularly liberal about Hutchin’s Center, and it’s possible that Didion’s training misled her into treating every vent of hot air as liberal output, but in the days of Goldwater and Nixon, that was a reasonable inference. If hot air were lava, Santa Barbara would have gone the way of Pompeii.
When I stopped laughing, I was left with “hot air” and “Great Books.” Regular readers already know that I majored in Great Books in college, following a curriculum adapted from the Hutchins model. Unlike most of my classmates, I was not drawn to Great Books as a “prelaw” program; nor was I drawn to the then somewhat cryptic study of Christian humanism, which has since that time become far more pronounced at Notre Dame. No; I was already the amateur historian: I thought that it would be a good idea to read books that had stood the test of time — even if I was already more than a little suspicious of what that test entailed. What were they thinking? I was not, in short, interested in “great books” per se. Were it up to me to design the curriculum now, I’d cut back on the overexposed thinkers (from Plato to Aquinas) and include more diverse material, indicative of the anorthodox scope of thought in Antiquity. (For example, I’d investigate Iranaeus’s infamous ban of heretical tracts, of which we knew only the titles in his list until the texts themselves were discovered in a pot in Egypt, in 1945.) I should certainly do everything possible to unseat what appears to have been Hutchins’s leading objective, the bolstering of the status quo with high-minded discussions of the works of marble busts.
Nevertheless, I’m glad that I read all that stuff, if for no other reason than that I’ve been able to go through life without feeling guilty about not having done so (as I do for not being fluent in Latin and Greek). I think that I’ve also remarked here that those who don’t read Plato and Aristotle are probably likely to repeat them unawares. Well, Plato is complicated: lots of people who read him have quite consciously repeated him, and in action, too, particularly in the stretch of utopian revolutions running from the 1790s to the 1910s. Aristotle, who is very appealing as an early humanist, set practical science back a thousand years, not because he was bad it — he is said to have been an astute observer of such out of the way but not altogether inaccessible phenomena as tide pools — but because he didn’t do it: he substituted, for science, armchair speculation. Aristotle gave the know-it-alls of the world a great deal of extremely regrettable and unnecessary encouragement.
The Internet has put an end to armchair speculation — or it will have done, when its last remaining exponents die off. In truth, casual research used to be difficult. For all the bulk of the standard encyclopedias, there were lots of things that you couldn’t really look up, especially things having to do with other cultures and civilizations. Synopses of the past always refract upon it an unconsidered belief about what is important now. One of the reasons why the old theological disputes, about such things as the nature of the Trinity, for example, are so deadly dull to read about today is that nobody cares about such things anymore, and probably won’t ever again. Encyclopedias catalogue what has been known as if it were gathering the husks of insects, and not the passion of knowing.
And in what reputable household reference book would you have been able to learn about the tulip craze that wracked Holland in the Seventeenth Century? Or the hula-hoop craze that — sometimes seems to be making a comeback?
In any case, we want to know about the past not because it was a golden age or in any serious way superior to the present, but because everything that we know about the past throws everything in the present into richer, more comprehensible perspective. Take our worrisome environmental issues, our sudden awakening to the vital importance of sustainability. Without a grasp of the historical record, we are all-too-humanly inclined to splutter that the people who went before us were too stupid or thoughtless to stop and think what they were doing. But this was never the case. What was the case, every now and then, was that pros and cons were weighed in an intellectual environment that was ill-informed about the cons. Such considerations attended the use of coal at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Coal’s immediate and local drawbacks were well-known in earlier times, and so long as European economies could rely on charcoal, which is carbonized wood, coal was eschewed. But then the forests dwindled, just as the demands of new uses were set to take off. The unofficial ban on coal was lifted, creating London’s fog and a European-wide epidemic of tuberculosis. These were deplored, of course, but they were also dimmed by the startling expansion of railroads, factories, steamships, and the other products of coal-fueled heavy industry. Not only were enormous fortunes accumulated, but wealth was ever more evenly distributed. In the Nineteenth Century, the long-term costs of using coal were concealed. Stupid and thoughtless are not the right words. Venal and ignorant are. They still are.
History would help us to understand our health-care mess. It would teach us that key developments in modern medicine were paid for by bottomless pits of wealth — bottomless, because the pool of beneficiaries was very small. The armed services developed emergency-room techniques that, spread over a population of hundreds of millions, is quite literally ruinously expensive. The same goes for the fancy-schmancy diagnostic tools that were bought and paid for by corporate health-care plans, which in theory benefited all employees (already a very limited number of people) but in practice favored savvy, highly-educated executives — a goldfish bowl of users. For both the military and the mid-century corporation, it didn’t matter how high costs were, because expenses were so occasional. In short, our health care system was nourished by extraordinarily unequal access. Given that nobody gave it a thought, it is impossible to see how “affordability” could have failed to be the headache that it is.
History reminds us that we are the future’s past. In the old days, noble Romans read history in order to inspire themselves to behave greatly, so that they, too, would be remembered. The past, the present, and the future were the same thing. This is no longer imaginable. We can actually destroy life on this planet, should we be foolish enough to do so. Our footprints trample. The people who read about us, moreover, will have somewhat different ideas about what’s important. We cannot act, as the noble Roman could, on the understanding that our valor will be appreciated as we appreciate that of the people of the past.
We can’t afford hot air.
***
Wendesday 23rd
Part of the fun of reading Victory was imagining Joan Didion reading the novel in college and liking it a lot. I can imagine her feeling very severe about Axel Heyst’s belief that he could step aside from human entanglements, that he could sustain a disinterested position in the world. Reading Victory is not unlike reading Didion, not that her writing is all that stylistically similar. There is simply the same warm chill.
For most readers, Baron Heyst is going to be the good guy. He helps out a stranger with a small but absolutely essential loan, and is rewarded with a partnership in a coal company. The coal company fails, but Heyst stays on at its remote island headquarters, content to stop wandering. A business matter requires him to visit Sourabaya (as Conrad calls the town on Java); while there, he is drawn to a young woman who is in an unpleasant situation, from which he decides to rescue her. Together, they run off to his island, where they fall in love.
Needless to say, Heyst has a curious background. The son of a Swedish intellectual who was driven from his homeland and who settled in London, Heyst was taught by his father to cultivate contempt for worldly things: your basic Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is a difficult figure for us to grasp, because the impulse behind his thinking was an emotional response to the tumultuous upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. Contempt for worldly things was spiked by the shocking proliferation of worldly things. Rigorous materialism was the common weekday religion. The bourgeoisie was ascendant (even the military was infected). Practical people found that life was easier to negotiate if you kept a small mind, if you acted as though everything that you were taught in school were all that you needed to know. The triumphs of science, moreover, continued the Enlightenment’s enervation, vaporization of religion. Against such a background, pessimism looked almost chic. Schopenhauer cooked up a fragrant blend of Kantian other-worldliness and Indian fatalism.
What’s wrong with Heyst, in the stern view of Conrad, is that his rejection of life is not preceded by an engagement with it. It is simply Heyst’s idea good manners. He is affable but diffident. Everyone finds him strange, because he is obviously not cut out for a world populated disproportionately by opportunistic adventurers who do not see the Malay Archipelago as a locus of escape (except from creditors and European disgrace). Heyst is a good man, a quiet man, a man who takes advantage of no one. He walks through life without friends or enemies — until he falls in love. Too late, he discovers that loved ones require protection. Too late, he discovers that his loved one has ideas of her own about protecting him. Heyst is too good to be good for anything.
And Heyst is so careless about Schomberg! Conrad exploits the awfulness of Schomberg to tempt the reader into admiring Heyst. Surely the object of so abominable a man’s baseless vituperation must be a saint! We are even tempted to believe that it is fine of Heyst to be unaware of the terrible things that Schomberg, a hotel-keeper who gossips with his customers, says about him. (Without friends, how is Heyst to find out?) Schomberg has always regarded Heyst as a scoundrel and a thief, even as a vicarious murderer, but the idleness of Schomberg’s scandal curdles when, with silver-plated arrogance, Heyst steals Schomberg’s girl. She is not Schomberg’s girl yet, and she will never be Schomberg’s girl willingly, but Schomberg is so conceited that, once she is gone, he thinks of her as having been just about his. Rescue or no rescue, Heyst has made a mortal enemy — and he ought at least to know it.
It is at this point, in the wake of Heyst’s flight back to the island, that Conrad introduces a trio of malefactors. One of these villains is disgusting, or made out to be — a hairy aboriginal from the Mosquito Coast, Pedro is never so much as mentioned by Conrad without repulsive physical details. The other two, however, are nothing less than fascinating. The cadaverous gentleman who calls himself Jones is accompanied by feral Martin Ricardo. They’re as awful as Schomberg, but whereas you want to step on Schomberg and crush the life out of him, Jones and Ricardo perk you up. They conjure an amusing team of jewel thieves, working the Riviera in a glittering Fifties TV series. Of course they are actually much too malignant for popular entertainment, and dangerous, too. When Schomberg contrives to send them off against Heyst, convinced that the baron sits atop pots of ill-gained loot, you can’t imagine how Heyst will survive their attack.
And I’m not going to tell you how he does (or doesn’t). Victory put me in such a state of suspense that I almost lost the ability to read coherently. A hundred pages are devoted to the events of one climactic day, fourteen chapters of recombination and reversal. The dread, thick as humidity, ought to paralyze the six characters, but instead it shunts them onward: they must always be doing something. As I wrote the other day, the construction is oddly operatic, and the other part of the fun of reading Victory was imagining how it could be carved up for the lyric stage.
Conrad subtitled Victory “an Island Tale,” and that is how I take it — as a tale. As a novel, I think it fails, partly because it is too ingeniously pessimistic, and therefore something of a mere entertainment. It is also both unsocialized and sentimental about unsocialized ways of life. (Perhaps I should make myself clearer if I substituted “bourgeois” for “socialized”; gloomy philosophies aside, much nineteenth-century fiction, and even more of the Twentieth’s, celebrates the romance of rejecting bourgeois life as unredeemable.) This is another way of saying that, aside from the one beautiful and exemplary woman in the book, the rest are all some kind of hag. Mrs Schomberg’s appearance is deceiving, but is nonetheless a very unattractive appearance, marked by a perpetual idiotic grin that Conrad does not allow us to set aside. Conrad is second only to Trollope in his eagerness to discuss the nature of women, and he no longer appears, if he ever did, to be particularly well-informed. His thoughts about love are difficult to reconcile with his thoroughgoing pessimism. Love becomes something too glorious for human experience, and therefore doomed.
Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that something rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace, there was born in her a woman’s innate mistrust of masculinity, of that seductive strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from the recognition of the naked necessity of facts, which never yet frightened a woman worthy of the name. (Penguin, 262)
Chivalry rears its fatuous head. It even leads Conrad into nonsense: there was born in her a woman’s innate mistrust.
I am coming to believe that there is a important qualitative difference between the novel and shorter forms of fiction: the novel ought to show us how men and women (several of each at least) manage the society that they share. Societies too exclusively male or female fail to generate the necessary spark. And men really do need to learn what women have been chuckling about for a hundred years or more: many of the most ardent opponents of bourgeois life spend a great deal of their free time ensconced in amply upholstered armchairs.
***
Thursday 24th
On second thought.. It’s obvious that that last crack, about the upholstered chairs, is the comment of an old man addressing a vanished scene. The young men of today, at least the ones who write, appear to be quite aware of all the ironies of manly life. Bluster and hypocrisy — guilty as charged. (Doing something about it perhaps remains a problem.) Also: “bourgeois life”? What exactly is that, nowadays? Other than a way of life preserved (rather patchily, to be honest) by the likes of me? I last wrote about it about ten years ago; perhaps a rethink is in order.
Last night, I read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the long title essay in Joan Didion’s first book. Like most paranoid visions, it is so wrong that it’s funny. Also, like most paranoid visions, it springs from an important, uncommon insight.
Of course the activists […] had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values.
Didion seems to have been looking for signs of an imminent outbreak of anarchy; perhaps she was seized by a premonition of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. In the end, nothing much “happened,” beyond the shooting of a few students. By the 1980s, few people remembered the ugly and confused side of Flower Power. The experiments with communal living did not last long, at least in part, it seemed to me at the time, because the excitements of the late Sixties threw people together regardless of background, and it didn’t take long for differences in background to become annoying. People returned to wherever they’d been. Many were cynical about the experience; or rather, they were just cynical about experience generally. Some were able to keep a spark alive, an idea, at least, of what a new and more satisfying society would look like.
And then, despite nothing happening, society did change after all, did become more open and less oppressive. We’ve already become familiar with the resistance to this change, the foot-dragging or worse of white men of middle age and older. Whether they will be able to bring change to a halt, and perhaps even reverse some of it, is a very real question, because, outside the West, it is not just middle-aged men who are resisting. But I don’t want to follow Joan Didion in foreseeing an apocalypse.
Didion is absolutely right, though, about what she says happened “between 1945 and 1967.” She is especially right to suggest that “we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves.” I can still feel that. The grown-ups, round about 1960, no longer really believed in what they were doing. I don’t know why. Perhaps it had something to do with putting the world back in working order a little too quickly after the two wars. Perhaps it had something to do with the flood of creature comforts and easy entertainments that was nowhere near cresting in 1960. It wasn’t hypocrisy, but it was insincerity. The grown-ups were going through the motions. Young people were not inspired to emulate them. Even now, a generation later — or is it two? — young people are not inclined to believe that there is much to learn from older people. We older people are simply passing on what we weren’t taught.
I say that “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is “wrong,” but only as a political report. Neither utopia nor dystopia were over the horizon. As a social report, however, as a snapshot of the groovy, drug-centered lifestyle of hippies, the essay is nothing, for anyone who lived through it, but a flashback — a flashback and a slap. It seems so pointless now, that would-be way of life. For the drugs never did usher in an Age of Aquarius. They merely rattled a lot of heads and caused a bit of permanent damage. Which makes me ask: Why did I take so much acid?
It wasn’t for fun, let me tell you. Of course, it’s likely that I never came across anything like pure LSD, and that it was additives that inflicted the prolonged and wretched hangover cubed that would prevail for the duration. It wasn’t for the interior journey of discovery, either. I didn’t learn a thing about the world or about myself. I couldn’t even listen to music, because it was like throwing stones at beautiful stained glass. At first, tripping was just very unusual — it’s safe to say that much. Then, when it became familiar, it also got thrilling, because I got daring. No, I never did anything physically reckless. But socially! I went to classes. I participated in seminar discussions. And I passed. I was my own little Mr Superpower.
Whether it’s a coincidence that this was one of the lowest points in my life, as the terrifying approach of graduation from college highlighted ever more luridly my failure to imagine what on earth I should do afterward, I can’t say. Acid wore me out, I’m sure. I took it about forty times that year. But it replaced my worries about the long-term future with more immediate anxieties. And it gave me something to be perversely proud about. Acid did not turn me into the raving lunatic that my parents would have expected; quite the contrary. I was often dressed in jacket and tie.
In due course, I came to the edge of the waterfall, and tipped over into objective adulthood. There would be another flurry of drug-taking three years later, and it would climax in the flame-out of one of my colleagues at the radio station. (He survived, but relocated in Reseda.) There would be snorts of cocaine in the very early Eighties. There would be grass, but grass got to be odd. It has been a long time since I could imagine fiddling with any of these things, just as it has been a long time since I was bored, or worried that my life needed more oomph.
Joan Didion speaks of “the game we happened to be playing.” It was hip, even impious, to talk about “society” as it were nothing more than an amalgamation of people engaged in throwing dice. Life was supposed (but why whom?) to be more serious than a game could ever be. Since then, games have become extremely respectable, but I remain persuaded that if life is a game, only a game, it is not worth living. How can one talk of a game that must necessarily involve, just for instance, the love of and caring for children? What parent finds that to be a game? And yet I agree that something as trivial as a game was being played when I was growing up, and I’m sorry to doubt that anything more serious happens to be going on now.
***
Friday 25th
The Pope is in town, which means that you have to think hard before setting out to get from A to B in Manhattan. For those of us who live here, nobody, not even the Pope — much less the grandees who show up for the opening of the United Nations session — is quite worth the bother of traffic interruptions, at least in a town where employers pretend that nothing unusual is afoot. In the old days, visits from kings and cardinals were marked as holidays, so there was something in it for everybody. Now it is just the infliction of a celebrity crush. The police are partly to blame, certainly: they like throwing their weight around, and projecting their anxieties about social breakdown. (Besides: overtime.) The month of September is looking more and more like the real August — the time to get away.
None of this botheration affects me, of course. I stick to my corner of Yorkville, where nothing ever happens (yay!) and there’s a beautiful park that few New Yorkers know about. Of course, to a reading and thinking person who spends the greater part of the day alone, the need for a papal visit is somewhat obscure. I am second to none in my admiration for Francis; I think that he’s exactly the right pope for right now, and I worry a lot about his health. (What’s with this diet of fish and rice?) He isn’t going to change “church teaching” on the thorny sex conundrums that the Church oughtn’t to be involved with in the first place, but he has already stopped a lot of the scolding. There is a real possibility, for the first time since popes stopped having children, that Catholics who have been barred from the sacraments or whatnot by mean-spirited technicalities will be re-invited to participate, and that, really, is all that matters at this point. But everything that’s grand about Francis comes through loud and clear from Rome.
To say that I am disappointed that the Pope will celebrate the Mass in Madison Square Garden is a light-years-scale understatement. Every fiber of my sense of what is right and proper is offended. There are many reasons to hate Madison Square Garden — without ever having set foot in it myself, of course — but, basically, it is a gym that doubles as a venue for caterwauling. If Francis really must appear before sheltered multitudes, then at least he might have borrowed a page from the old Reformers and simply delivered a nice, long homily. We could use more of those. Communion from the hands of the Holy Father is no holier for that.
Kathleen, unfortunately, has been thrown into, or at least around, the thick of it. Instead of spending these two days quietly in her office, she has had to show up in Tribeca, the Flatiron District, and Madison Square (happily no longer the site of MSG). This has involved trying to avoid crossing the Pope’s path. She was nearly knocked down on an M train platform last night, by a charging woman only slightly taller than herself. She was going to stay home today, but she has a board meeting that must be attended. Kathleen would like to see the United Nations, St Patrick’s Cathedral, and the big Broadway theatres all moved to Governor’s Island.
Last night, sitting on the balcony, I could see the Pope celebrating Mass — in a church, definitely — on a television in an apartment across the street. I couldn’t hear a thing, and probably wouldn’t have even if the window through which I was peering had been open. The silent image flowed along as television images banally do. The broadcast’s producer betrayed a weakness for repeating the same withdrawing shot of the organist’s hands and the keyboards, but not the organist. If there was a clearer way to signal that liturgy makes for dull TV, I’d like to see it. Sometimes you’d see the Pope. Most of the time, though, not. Because the camera has to travel. Too bad if the other things to see in the church were even less lively than an elderly man conducting a contained ritual. Here is what television shouts to the viewer: You are not here! But you have to turn the sound off to hear it.
***
I went to Crawford Doyle yesterday, for the first time in an age, and bought Purity, along with one or two other things. I bought Jonathan Franzen’s new novel because I was asked by a couple of friends what I thought of it. They assumed that I’d have wangled an advance copy somehow, and they were surprised to hear me say that I wasn’t sure that I was going to read Purity at all. I was somewhat surprised to hear myself say it. But the plain truth was that I have felt no desire to put my hands on it. This may explain why I left the Crawford Doyle bag in the taxi that took me home.
I regard patronizing Crawford Doyle as a public service, so, having done my bit, I had no qualms about ordering all the books from Amazon the minute I sat down at the desk. Purity may arrive as early as tomorrow. Along with it will come Lord Jim. I’ve been thinking a lot about the poke that I took at Victory the other day — it “fails as a novel” — wondering, basically, who died and made me king. Just what did I mean? I went on to make a pronouncement about what novels ought to be, going forward, and observed that Victory does not provide much in the way of a model for the novel of tomorrow, but there had to be more to it than that.
I’m against the idea that the best novels are those that pit a man against the consequences of his actions, especially where the consequences are unforeseen (but perhaps maybe they ought to have been foreseen, &c). This is the attempt to shoehorn tragedy into fiction, and the result, as I said of Victory the other day, is usually mere entertainment. Genuine tragedy is a spectacle. There is the tragic hero, but there are plenty of other characters, too, plus the chorus. Tragic fiction is interior, focused on one point of view, one consciousness, at a time. There is also just one reader. The atmosphere is generally airless, even if a storm is rumbling overhead.
The characters in Victory are introduced as strange birds, and Conrad appears to have no interest in understanding their strangeness. The three villains are plainly sociopaths of some kind, and it is the nature of sociopathy to throw no light at all on the human condition. Heyst likes to keep to himself, but his freedom from restlessness (which has nothing to do with real curiosity) is somewhat superhuman. For me, the fact that Heyst likes to read a lot (if not to write) only underscores my preference to share his interest whilst living in Manhattan, not on a desert island. As for Lena, she comes perilously close to being a heroine of the melodrama, miraculously undamaged by her uncertain childhood and ghastly youth. I don’t know how Lena would be able to recognize Heyst as a hero (which she clearly does, even if she has to protect him). In any case, Conrad packages her too prettily, endowing her with a beautiful low voice.
“The horror, the horror.” To me, the great horror in literature occurs in The Golden Bowl, swelling throughout the final hundred pages or so. It is not scary; there are no monsters, no poisons, no risks to life and limb. What there is is worse, the dreadful isolation, from everyone else as from one another, in which Maggie and Charlotte fight their final duel. It is a horror of consciousness, of simply being aware that such a duel must be fought and why. The ostensible family intimacy in which the two women must live is also a horror: their hostility is the tightest of secrets. Every move is silent, invisible. James is very clever for having pulled off the stunt of describing a mortal confrontation without so much as the sound of a pin dropping, but the confrontation itself is no stunt at all; it’s in the deadliest earnest. It is a grand negative fantasy, and it could not be represented but in the pages of a book.
I have already suggested that Victory would make a good opera — with a libretto written for Puccini, but with music composed by Britten — and this is a way of saying that what’s important or arresting about Victory is not its moral judgment but its emotional tension. Emotional tension is a reality that music expresses best (with an exception for Henry James, whose dictated later novels have at least a parlando musicality). All of this said, I would certainly encourage you to read Victory. It’s a great book.
Bon weekend à tous!