Gotham Diary:
Manlie Constancy
December 2015 (I)
Monday 30th
Kathleen said, this morning, “I had a headache for most of the day yesterday, but I didn’t tell you, because I could tell that you were having a bad day.” Really? We talked about it for a moment, because I thought that I’d been more or less fine until the smoke alarm malfunctioned, in the late afternoon, and its unstoppable shrieking threw me into a momentary panic. But Kathleen saw through my good behavior. “You were sad.” And I might have been; we often misunderstand our own emotional climates. I should say rather that I was frightened, that I don’t feel safe, that, much of the time, I should rather not know what’s going to happen next, because, now that I’m an old man, it’s going to be meaningless to me. Worse, I’m meaningless to it. And that’s just the part about “safe” that isn’t material, that doesn’t involve loss of electric power or running water, things that I worry about somewhat inordinately, but also helplessly.
I often wonder how long I shall have to live before I make an impression on my grandson that he will carry with him through the rest of his life, instead of relying on stories from his mother. That worry immediately brings up the much closer anxieties associated with flying out, in just a few weeks, to San Francisco and back. Greatly foreshortening this dread is Kathleen’s trip to Sydney. She will leave this Thursday, and be gone for a week. That fourteen-hour flight from Los Angeles — what an insane, unnecessary risk! That’s how I feel it, even though I know that the feeling is unreasonable. Aren’t feelings usually?
My sleeping pill didn’t work last night. I have my theories as to why (they’re reassuring), but I also have recollections of a very bad hour. My fears, which I have compressed into a few lines here, burgeoned and blossomed and luxuriated with nightmarish density, and it seemed that death would be the only way to wake up. Hasn’t anyone my age lived long enough? Must there be more? Another unreasonable feeling, but for a while it was stronger by far than my fear of flying.
There were two more hours of wakefulness. The pinpoint of my consciousness would not relent. But the agony subsided, as it always does, and finally settled into a melancholy that made me very grateful for the warm and comfortable bedclothes.
No, it was my impression that I was doing well yesterday afternoon. We had a very late breakfast, and then we settled into the end of the living room by the window, where Kathleen stitched (not the best thing for her headache, perhaps) and I put down “the book that I’m reading” — in this case, a book about Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, as told in a manner that would not be out of place in Vanity Fair — and picked up Donald Frame’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. I read “Of Books” and “Of the Art of Discussion” (as Frame has it). Then I located a book that I haven’t yet read, Saul Frampton’s book about Montaigne, When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know that She Is Not Playing With Me? In the chapter that mentions, without quite discussing, what Frampton calls “Of the Art of Conversation,” I discovered the word “proxemic.”
The proxemic sense is a faculty we have largely lost or become unconscious of since the Renaissance. But it is an awareness that was second nature to people of Montaigne’s time, what might almost be called the sixteenth century’s sixth sense. […] Montaigne’s boast that Henri de Navarrre slept in his bed when he visited his house might stirke us as a slightly embarrassing assertion, but for Montaigne there could be no clearer expression of the closeness of their amitié.
“Of the Art of Discussion” struck me as a thorny, typically freestyle presentation of Montaigne’s ideas, their bearing on what we could consider “conversation” shifting into and out of focus. I should have to re-read the essay before saying anything general about it. But I do think that Frampton is right to make a point of the “proxemic” nature of friendship, the most intimate relationship that can be discussed in words. This spatial or physical intimacy is a precondition, chez Montaigne, for conversation. Several times, Montaigne mentions ostentatiously learned people who distance themselves by way of special robes and windy utterances; such would-be authorities are not interested in conversation. Montaigne also complains about the deadly sports that men play, such as jousting, that can cost lives (as, for example, that of Henri II); the implication is that conversation is the game for him.
But opportunities for real conversation are rare. Montaigne never got over the loss, early in life, of the great conversational partner, one might almost say love, of his life, Étienne de La Boétie, even if he never abandoned hope that another man might come along to take his place. Montaigne spent a great deal of time alone at the top of his tower, surrounded by the books to which he makes constant reference in the essays. Were the essays a substitute for conversation? It seems to me that they begin as such. As one finds ones pace, my experience tells me, the dissatisfaction of faute de mieux passes away entirely, and the essay becomes something that has little or nothing to do with conversation. But the project of writing things down would probably never be undertaken if good conversation were always on tap. I suppose that, for those of us who do write essays, there is a persistence or intensity of thought that no conversation could tolerate.
Who can read Montaigne, these days? There have been very good books about Montaigne lately, Frampton’s among them, along with Sarah Bakewell’s excellent How To Live. But it is obviously much easier for today’s reader to read these books through than to dip into Montaigne himself. After all, Montaigne wrote a very long time ago. His French is not as archaic as Chaucer’s English, but it is not as accessible as Shakespeare’s (not to mention the French of Racine or Voltaire), and although the content of his thought speaks to us whenever we can grasp it, its flow is pre-modern. As how could it not be? The Essays as a collection is the edge of the cascade over which writers have been flying ever since, each generation learning a little more about how to organize ideas in a piece of writing. Before Montaigne, every writer was an authority, setting out to tell you what to learn, not to provoke you, as Montaigne does, to think your own thoughts. Yes, conversation was his model, and almost any literate conversation, even today, would, if transcribed verbatim, be as difficult to follow as the most dense of Montaigne’s pieces.
“Proxemics” again: we may, as Frampton thinks, have lost our sense of this faculty, but it is still the case that being physically proximate makes face-to-face encounters more powerful (even if that power purrs gently) than the plethora of virtual contacts in which so many people seem to be sunk today. Indeed, one test of friendship, which I think everyone is at least unconsciously aware of, is whether physical proximity adds anything of value to an acquaintance.
And then there are Montaigne’s references, which are really nothing less than the points in his intellectual universe. It is not our universe, certainly. The Latin classics, some more recent historians — in “Of Books,” these range from Froissart, a friend of Chaucer, to Guicciardini, a contemporary of Machiavelli: Montaigne did not have to read mountains of books to consider himself an educated man. We are supposed to know who his “authorities” are, but Horace is no longer the common possession of gentlemen everywhere, as he was in the later centuries of the ancien régime; and very, very few people with degrees from the very, very best schools have read all of The Aeneid or The Metamorphoses in Latin. For that matter, I fear, very few people have read Montaigne, at least since some mandatory exposure as students. How interesting it would be to have some Big Data about the number — the mere number — of readers who spent more than an hour reading Montaigne in this calendar year.
The essay as we know it is no longer a substitute for conversation, because it is not only one-sided but broadcast: I write not to make a point especially salient to one reader but to make everything that I have to say intelligible to many different readers. Perhaps it would be better to say that that is the skill of the essay, the techniques that writers have developed since Montaigne’s day, to achieve his ends more clearly and more quickly. (Readers have developed corresponding techniques of comprehension.) This is not to say, however, that Montaigne is primitive. He may be the first, he may still be somewhat cru, but he is génial — engagingly brilliant. He is very much worth the effort.
***
Tuesday 1st
One day this weekend — I forget whether it was Friday or Saturday — I read most of the new issue of the NYRB, boom boom boom, feeling guilty about going through a box of chocolates all at one go. Everything was good, but one piece stuck out, probably because it makes a point that I’ve tried to make, too. That it was made by an eminent historian of science certainly gives it superior credibility.
Steven Weinberg’s “Eye on the Present — The Whig Interpretation of Science” takes up Herbert Butterfield’s celebrated critique of progress-accented history (“history is written by the winners”) and argues that it cannot be allowed to apply to the history of science. Progress-accented history (my term) highlights developments in the past that adumbrate or foretell arrangements that the historian regards as successes of his own day. Whiggish historians, to pick an easy example, are far more likely to see Magna Carta as an adumbration of today’s liberal democracy than their more objective colleagues, who will try to tease out what the Charter meant at the time to the barons who forced it upon King John. Whig history winds up telling us more about ourselves than about the past. The objective historians whom Butterfield admired tell us more about the past, which is, after all, the whole point of history. Losers can be just as important as winners.
The history of science, Weinberg insists, is different. Being right is everything. In the course of his essay, Weinberg says some important things about what being right actually means.
Weinberg cites the work of the late David Lindberg, a historian of science who shared Butterfield’s scruples. Lindberg:
it would be unfair and pointless to judge Aristotle’s success by the degree to which he anticipated modern science (as though his goal was to answer our questions, rather than his own).
Weinberg replies, “To me this is nonsense.
The point of science is not to answer the questions that happen to be popular in one’s own time, but to understand the world. Not that we know in advance what kinds of understanding are possible and satisfying. Learning this is part of the work of science. Some questions like “What is the world made of?” are good questions but are asked prematurely. No one could make progress answering this question until the advent of accurate measurement of chemical weights at the end of the eighteenth century. […] Other questions like “What is the natural place of fire?” or “What is the purpose of the moon?” are bad in themselves, leading away from real understanding. Much of the history of science has been a matter of learning what sort of questions should and should not be asked. [Emphasis supplied.]
It is the final statement there that interests me. The central problem of science, the first step that determines everything else, is knowing what questions to ask — and, especially, to recognize those questions that are premature. This calls for a mastery of ignorance, as Stuart Firestein has shown in his brilliant book on the subject (Ignorance: How It Drives Science). Paradoxically, we have to know what we don’t know. To put it more messily, we have to be aware of all the different things that we don’t know, and then we have to figure out which areas of ignorance are more approachable, given what we do know, and which are less.
In other words, progress in science is far more problematic than it appeared to be to the geniuses of the Nineteenth Century, for whom each new discovery seemed to present the next question that ought to be asked. For a while, the sequence of great discoveries (and their subsequent practical applications), reeking of “progress,” seemed to inhere in the nature of science itself. But it was a windfall. The measurements that Weinberg mentions set scientific inquiry on a new course; measuring everything in its turn profoundly altered our understanding of the world — and also of our capacities to alter the world. Eventually, however, everything that could be was measured. “Progress” slowed. What got it going again was a new alteration: the theory of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics posed a new set of questions, which in turn revealed new things to be measured.
The history of science began as nothing more than a narrative of theories and discoveries that began with Copernicus in astronomy, Galileo in physics, and a swarm of brilliant experimenters, working for the better part of a century, in chemistry. The narrative’s first sentence declared that everything “understood” prior to these pioneering figures was wrong. Then it marched through the several tracks of discoveries, showing how each notable figure built on the work of his predecessors. The practice of science constituted the history of science, which was little more than a committee organized to celebrate the progress of science.
Small wonder that this approach to the more or less recent past appealed to scholars in the newly-developed “human sciences.” Our modern way of doing history was one of the first of these. Formerly, history was a narrative sequence of great events, most of which featured great men. While these events influenced subsequent events, they were shown as taking place in the eternal present of unchanging human nature. In Gibbons’s hands, the Byzantines of the Nika Riots (532 CE) look pretty much like the Englishmen of the Gordon Riots (1780) — riots are riots.
With the fall of the ancien régime in 1789, however, a world-order relating kings to priests to people was utterly swept away. A different approach to history was called for, and one was found in prestigious concept of scientific progress. Henceforth, it would be very difficult to convince anybody that the fall of the ancien régime was a bad thing. It was this progressive history that Herbert Butterfield sought to discredit. “Whig” historians were English writers invested in a narrative that traced liberal democracy from its unlikely beginnings in illiterate Germanic “war bands” to the triumph of the Victorian Parliament. Factors tending to impede this wonderful development — bad kings and worse popes — were portrayed unattractively.
Interestingly, this back-to-the-future approach began to be rejected by historians of science even before Butterfield’s critique appeared. The modern history of science began by erasing that first sentence, about all prior science being wrong. It took a deep interest in the natural inquiries of Greeks and Romans; it examined astrology and alchemy. It struggled to explain why the empiricism that powers most scientific work today did not appeal to ancient and medieval thinkers. In the middle of the last century, Thomas Kuhn set out to demonstrate that progress doesn’t exist even in science. His theory of paradigm shifts refuted the rather simple-minded idea of science as mere problem-solving. The origins of modern science were shown to be much murkier than a troupe of brainy heroes shouting, Fiat lux!
Nevertheless, the history of science, as Weinberg argues, is not really like the history of humanity. Nobody knows what the point of humanity is — Weinberg would call that a bad question, and I certainly agree. But we know what the point of science is: to understand the world in a demonstrable way. The point of science is not to produce plausible explanations of phenomena. To put it better, science has rejected armchair theoretizing. It demands proof, replication, verification. To be recognized as “scientific,” a theory must be falsifiable: it must be capable of being disproved. So the history of science must evaluate every would-be contributor to science with these criteria in mind. In the process, someone like Aristotle largely fails to measure up. He is a very interesting failure; he tells us a great deal about the comfortable habits of an ill-equipped intellect. Science may have a point, but the world does not. At the very least, the question what is the world for? is totally premature.
The problem of distinguishing good questions from bad ones is particularly pressing in connection with the degradation of the environment. There are a lot of bad questions out there, and many of them involve a tincture of misanthropy: they want solutions to environmental problems regardless of human cost. They do not regard humanity as a part of nature. We are going to have to be careful to distinguish questions about scientific approaches to environmental repair from questions about human approaches to the same problem, and we are going to need thinkers capable of keeping abreast of both without confusing them.
It often seems to me that cancer remains a killer because we don’t know how to think about it; there is something that we’re missing. In The New Yorker, Jerome Groopman recently assessed the latest theory-of-everything about illness: inflammation is at the root of every malady. (I remember reading not too long ago that the same was said about infection, which is actually not a very different thing. Inflammation is a side-effect of the body’s attempt to defeat infection.) Even if that is shown to be true, it does not immediately offer a solution to the cancer problem; but it would focus attention on the relationship between inflammation and mutation. (It might also show, further along, that understanding the cause of cancer is irrelevant to developing a cure.) And yet, I wonder if the hypothesis could not be shown to be true until the cause of cancer were understood. Happily, I am not involved in the research; at least I know that I don’t know what I’m talking about in this paragraph. But I stick with my intuition: there are good questions about cancer that we haven’t hit on yet.
***
Wednesday 2nd
Regular readers will be aware that Mozart’s Così fan tutte is a work of art close to my heart. I was given a recording when I was thirteen, because it was recommended to my mother by a Sam Goody’s salesman. Odd as I was, it nevertheless took a few years for the opera to grow on me, but by that time I knew the music backwards and forwards, just as I knew all the music in my record collection backwards and forwards: the relatively few LPs that I had got played all the time. Mozart’s score has held up quite well to extreme familiarity.
What keeps Così fresh for me is the libretto, Lorenzo da Ponte’s masterpiece. Da Ponte is a significant important figure in Italian literature; although Venetian by birth, he was an exponent of what we might call Classical Tuscan. There is a little joke here, just as there always is with da Ponte, because he was so helplessly clever. Classical Tuscan is the official language of Italy, for one thing; for the other, in da Ponte’s hands it resounds not only with a thoroughly domesticated Latin but also with extraordinarily understated learning. Così fan tutte sparkles with quiet erudition.
Take, for example, the marriage contract that Despina, the maid who is disguised as a notary, huffs her way through just before the climax. The new lovers cut her off when she gets to the part about dowries, but she has managed to clear up a mystery of which we were probably unaware. The old lovers, Fiordiligi and Guglielmo, Ferrando and Dorabella, mention one anothers’ names all the time, and the men continue to refer to their increasingly unfaithful girlfriends by name throughout the opera, during most of which they are disguised as “Albanians” (think Turks). The impalpable mystery is that, as Albanians, they have no names. They are amanti or crudeli, but they are also anonymous — until Despina reads the marriage contract. From her we learn that these Albanians are called Sempronio and Tizio. These may sound like Italian names, but you won’t find anybody who answers to them, because, as I learned from my readings in medieval law, they are the equivalent of “the party of the first part” and “the party of the second part.” Or, if you like, “Blackacre,” that fictional manor that has changed hands millions of times in the teaching of English property law. If Fiordiligi and Dorabella were more learned, this parade of notional nomenclature would have exposed the deception then and there, but that’s the sly joke. The meaning of the Albanians’ names flies right over their heads, as it does the heads of almost everyone in the audience. I wonder if Mozart himself was in on it.
I came across another little joke the other day, whilst reading Saul Frampton’s book about Montaigne (see above). In a discussion of the appeal of Stoicism to aristocrats, Frampton quotes an emblem from Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britannica (1612).
Amid the waves, a mightie Rock doth stand,
Whose ruggie brow, had bidden many a shower,
And bitter storme; which neither sea, nor land,
Nor JOVES sharpe-lightening ever could devoure;
The same is MANLIE CONSTANCIE of mind,
Not easily moov’d with every blast of wind.
We are to understand that Peacham’s verse restates a cliché — that’s what emblems were all about. The image of the immovable rock rising impervious to the sea would have been a well-worn metaphor, imparted to every well-born young man in any one of Christendom’s many tongues. My authority for this inference is Frampton himself; I’m assuming that there is more scholarship than gratuitousness in his quoting from Minerva Britannica in a book about a French writer.
Here is the beginning of Fiordiligi’s rebuke to the Albanians, when they make their first appearance and claim to be hopelessly in love with the sisters. (It is difficult for me to resist copying the original, but I daresay J D McClatchey’s translation will do.)
Like a rocky fortress I stand,
No wind nor wave may command.
My soul can weather any storm
With loyalty and love.
It is very clear to me now that da Ponte is playing with a well-known trope about manly constancy, putting it in the mouth of a woman who will not live up to it. I expect that many gentlemen in the audience at early productions of Così fan tutte (not very numerous) got the drift of da Ponte’s irony. For me, the current ran in the opposite direction: reading the Peacham, I laughed because I recognized the (later) da Ponte. Which is better than McClatchey:
Come scoglio immoto resta
Contra i venti e la tempesta
così ognor quest’alma è forte
Nella fede e nell’amor.
Now, there are lots of people who find Così fan tutte to be irremediably sexist and offensive, not to say downright cynical — and there always have been. Beethoven, for example, professed to be shocked that Mozart had lavished such beautiful music on so worthless a text. The plot derives from commedia dell’arte frou-frou. Two gentlemen are persuaded by a dirty old man to test their lovers’ fidelity. They tell the ladies that they have been called to war. Having marched off as officers, they reappear as outlandishly turbaned Albanians. Each makes love to the other’s fiancée. One sister’s resistance crumbles pretty quickly; the other’s lasts long enough to make the opera’s second act as hefty as the first. Just as the realigned parties are about to wed, a military flourish announces the return of the officers. When the test is revealed to the sisters, they all but die for shame. The text is not clear about what, if any, order is restored thereafter.
For about a century, Così fan tutte was regarded as a disgrace. When performed at all, it was bowdlerized, so that the sisters knew what was up from the start, and played along. But the opera would not go away. It is now regarded as Mozart’s finest score, for one thing. For another, there is something about this project that caused Mozart to veer from the implications of the title — “women are like that” — to Così fan tutti — “everybody is like that.” Because if the women are susceptible to heartfelt declarations of love, then men are determined to produce them. These boys may imagine that they remain secretly constant, but competition — a masculine weakness — induces them to act, quite persuasively, otherwise. It is not their cynicism that wins over the ladies. It is the sincerity of their appeal, particularly Ferrando’s. Despite what we know about Ferrando’s participation in a nasty stunt, our ears tell us something else.
I have long believed that the state of play at the beginning of the opera doesn’t mean very much; the attachments are somewhat juvenile. (“Matrimonio presto,” says Fiordiligi, reading Dorabella’s palm.) I don’t think that the gentlemen had to work nearly as hard to gain the sisters’ affection when they were officers as they do when they are pretending to be Albanians. There is no flicker of self-recognition in the libretto, no sign that the men have learned anything about themselves — but then isn’t that a sign of manly constancy?
***
I’ve just re-read Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave. I was very impressed with it the first time, earlier this year; the second reading revealed a masterpiece. If I resist hailing it as Lively’s best novel, that’s only because it is in so many ways unrepresentative of her work. There is an austerity about the storytelling that seems uncharacteristic, perhaps even somewhat experimental. The setting is unusually remote. There is a quite palpable marbling of Jamesian reticence. And the tense, unspoken drama is relieved in perhaps the best dark-and-stormy-night scene outside of crime fiction.
Pauline is a wise old owl of fifty-five. She has made enough of a success of her career as an editor to afford to buy a row of three stone cottages, plumped in the middle of a wheat field, and to convert them from peasant tenements to comfortable weekend retreats. She herself occupies one of the refurbished cottages. the other two have been combined into one unit that Pauline has rented out in the past; this summer, she has made it available, rent-free, to her daughter, Teresa, and her family. Teresa is married to Maurice; they have a toddler, Luke. Pauline has also decided to spend the entire summer in the cottage, which is known as World’s End, and so have Teresa and Maurice.
Pauline knows how to make this arrangement work; she keeps to herself for the most part, working in her study, but she is always available to take care of Luke. She knows that her daughter is very much in love with Maurice, but she doesn’t give much thought to Maurice himself, even though she inadvertently brought them together, when Teresa decided to stand up her boyfriend of the moment and attend Pauline’s New Year’s Eve party, to which Pauline invited Maurice, whom she knew through work. Maurice is closer to Pauline than to Teresa in age, and Pauline seems to have a slight resistance to treating him as a son-in-law.
Until, that is, Maurice’s editor, James, spends the weekend at World’s End with his girlfriend, an intelligent but callow blonde called Carol. Carol’s presence almost instantly resets Pauline’s focus on Maurice. Suspicions fueled by her own unhappy experience immediately preoccupy Pauline. It takes forever for the nature of these suspicions (and their cause) to be made explicit, but the reader knows all about them anyway. As a display of show-don’t-tell, the virtuosity of Heat Wave is arguably unexcelled. The Jamesian wrinkle is brought about by Pauline’s determination to say nothing — more not-telling — to Teresa. She hopes that she is wrong, but she knows that she is right. Eventually, Teresa herself catches on, but Pauline knows this only from her motherly reading of a daughter’s face. The women share one unambiguous reference to Maurice’s conduct, after which Teresa resolves to talk about it nevermore.
The background, while limited, is not austere. There is the lush agriculture that surrounds World’s End. There is the summer of relentless, uncharacteristic sun. There is Pauline’s work, which entails counseling a writer on his domestic problems, which can be openly discussed on the phone. There is Pauline’s old friend and former lover, Hugh, an antiquarian but globe-trotting bookseller. There is even a dash of London. In the book’s middle, there is a good deal of past background, as Pauline remembers life with Teresa’s father, Harry, an historian who now lives rather well in California. The contrast between Pauline’s unhinged misery as a jealous wife and her present unruffled self-possession turns up the tension even more.
Finally, in the middle of a thundering tempest, someone falls down a steep flight of stairs. Is it an accident? Is it a homicide? Since this is not crime fiction, the question is not explored. No policemen conduct investigations; the book draws to a swift close. Nor is the sinner caught in the act; the possibility that there was no sin remains open to doubt — open to doubt, that is, by anyone but a reader of the novel.
As a token of Lively’s low-key bravura, I offer Pauline’s imagination of what it must have been like when Harry and Maurice had their one meeting, at dinner with Teresa.
Harry is twelve years older than Maurice, but he has weathered well, by all accounts. Maurice would have seen in him an unwelcome reminder that he, Maurice, is no longer to be counted among the young, that he has crossed the divide, that he is of Harry’s generation rather than of Teresa’s. He would have felt one of those surges of panic. Would have wanted to distance himself from Harry, to push the disagreeable raw fact to one side. Pauline does not have the same effect on him because although standing in the same relation to Teresa she is a woman, and also a person previously known. Pauline’s age is somehow less relevant. Maurice would have talked copiously to suppress his dismay.
And Harry, looking across the table at Maurice, would have seen a reflection of the self he is leaving behind, the Harry who still had a foothold in youth, who was still — just — something of an enfant terrible, a gadfly to his elders, a subversive element. He would have been reminded that within a short while he could become a grandfather, for Christ’s sake. He too would have talked effusively, and no doubt in the process the two of them struck up some sort of accord, for they are both clever and responsive men. They would have responded to one another, recognized a potential affinity, and recoiled from the idea of it. (90)
Make haste to read Heat Wave. That way, you can have the incomparable pleasure of reading it again.
***
Thursday 3rd
In the middle of trying to follow the unusually incoherent story of the San Bernardino shootings yesterday, I chanced to read a note that was sent by special adviser David Hart to his boss, Margaret Thatcher, as a coal strike was about to end in 1985.
We are on the brink of a great victory. If we don’t throw it away at the last moment. Much greater than the Falklands because the enemy within is so much harder to conquer.
Thatcher underlined the emphasized words. I sat back in a kind of shock. No surprise; just a deeply reverberant shock. Here was a head of state, affirming the proposition that political opponents are “enemies within.” Not just “enemies,” but fifth columnists, subversives, traitors. What would it mean, to “conquer” such “enemies”?
It occurred to me that such language is categorically inappropriate in a liberal democracy, except when directed at the agents of hostile foreign powers — most certainly not the case here.
What I don’t want to do right now is to generalize about conservatives and their progressive opponents. As it happens, conservatives are far more likely, these days, than progressives are to behave as though they were defending a beleaguered castle. This tendency dates to the beginning of the Cold War at the latest. It has resulted, in the United States, in the near-total breakdown of political conversation, as conservatives cannot be seen to participate in conversation with others. Meanwhile, progressives, having saddled themselves with a perceived need to “look tough” — a look thoroughly at odds with their political projects — acquiesce to the embattled landscape instead of insisting that conservative talk of “enemies within” is itself treasonous. Such insistence might not convince any conservatives to change their ways, but it might very well rouse an otherwise apathetic body politic. But this is the configuration of the moment. It can just as easily be otherwise, as in “progressive” revolutions that damn “reactionary elements.” The point is that demonizing fellow citizens in a democracy — fellow voters — is always wrong. Always.
***
When I was in school, the two essential characteristics of the sovereign state were held to be monopolies on taxation and violence. To put it quaintly, there could be no robber barons in an effective state, and dueling was also forbidden. Dueling! I should be happy to bring back dueling, if it would put an end to the kind of violence that we’ve got instead. The United States has effectively ceded the monopoly on violence, largely through its failure to restrict commerce in weapons, but also by entertaining the discourse of “enemies within.” Such discourse ought to be suppressed; like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, it does not deserve First Amendment protection. It is a gross libel that the state ought to punish. Unfortunately, it can be very entertaining. Joe McCarthy demonstrated that sixty years ago; that he was also brought down on television did nothing to check the parade of successors, culminating (so far) in Donald Trump, also a loathsome bully.
That is the worst that I have to say about the Donald. His campaign may very well stir up so much rowdy violence among his supporters that the electoral process breaks down — who would dare to cast a vote, if polling stations were surrounded by snipers? — but I am not going to accuse the man of treason. He may be an idiot, but he is not an enemy. He is, I’m sorry to say, a fellow New Yorker — but there you are.
***
I am in the middle of several thick books at the moment. One of them is Chapman Pincher’s Dangerous to Know, the autobiography of a Fleet Street scooper written shortly before the author’s death, at the age of 100. Pincher retails an anecdote about Winston Churchill that belongs up there with the famous, if apocryphal, exchange with Lady Astor.
Lady Astor: If you were my husband, I should poison your coffee.
Churchill: If you were my wife, madam, I should drink that coffee.
According to Duncan Sandys, who was Churchill’s son-in-law, and present at the meeting, Churchill became so exasperated with General De Gaulle during a wartime discussion that he slammed the table and shouted, “Si vous m’opposez, je vous get riderai!“
It’s the little things in life.
***
On the evening before Thanksgiving, Kathleen and I went to the theatre. We went to see Old Times, a Harold Pinter play from 1970. We went to see it because of the cast: Clive Owen, Eve Best, and Kelly Reilly. I’ve wanted to see Eve Best onstage for some time, but it was my huge crush on Kelly Reilly that overcame my resistance to Pinter.
In the theatre — the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater on 42nd Street — there was a dreadful noise. It turned out to be a motif whipped up by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. It looped over and over at an uncomfortable volume. Kathleen tried, with some success, to drown it out with her Nano.
Then the house lights went down, and the drumming yielded to the sound of the surf, with seagulls. Actually, the surf sounded more like a roller coaster to me.
Then strobe lights flashed in our eyes, several times. Most annoying.
There were the three actors, arranged on the set: two chaises longues and an armchair. Also two tables, serving as bars and places to stow cigarettes. There was a lot of smoking, which dated the play enormously. Young people can have no idea what it was like, to say something Delphic, strike a pose, and exhale a plume of smoke. As long as the smoke was visible, nobody could reply. The smoke was part of the remark; to interrupt it would be rude. In this production of Old Times, the smoke took the place of those inexplicable Pinter “beats,” or pauses, that filled his plays with bogus portentousness.
The play lasted a few minutes more than an hour. As we walked out, on our way to Pigalle (our favorite after-theatre restaurant), Kathleen seethed with relief. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there.” She was a “philistine,” she insisted; she had no idea what the play was about. It seemed to me that the play was “about” a certain disaffection that was fashionable in the early Cold War period. It was vaguely Marxist and definitely Brechtian. It was too comme il faut, really, to mean anything. You struck a pose, and exhaled a plume of smoke. That’s what it was about.
I’d never have had the courage to think such a thing when the play was new, had I seen it then. Had I seen it then, I’d have tortured myself for being too thick to understand the symbolism. Seeing it now, I thought — not unamused — quel crock! But cheeky; I had to give it that. While Kathleen was longing for it to be over, I had a pretty good time.
When we got home from dinner, I brought up some reviews. Ben Brantley liked it, with reservations (I’ll get to them in a minute). Marilyn Stasio, who has been covering crime fiction for The New York Times Book Review for as long as I can remember, wrote about the play for Variety. She liked it, too. She called it “sexy.” I couldn’t see that. It seemed about as sexy as a really bad hangover to me. In The Observer, Rex Reed didn’t like it. He came right out and called Old Times Pinter’s “worst play.” His remarks captured Kathleen’s sentiments almost perfectly.
Now that I’ve read several “interpretations” of Old Times, posted at the Wikipedia entry for the play, I understand Brantley’s reservations better. It seems that everybody in the play is dead! Or, in the alternative, that the two women are the split personalities of one woman. There may be more, but I had to stop there. The point is that these interpretations point to sombre production values, which obtained, it seems, at the premières. The Roundabout Old Times was not sombre. It was exuberantly lugubrious — yes. The backdrop was a gigantic pink and purple suggestion of those open-shutter photographs that show stars wheeling about Polaris. The furniture was maroon, with steel and wood notes. Somewhat off-center at the rear, there was an enormous chipped block of ice. It can’t have been, actually, but that’s what it looked like. One of the critics called it “the bathroom door,” which made me laugh. It just stood there. At the beginning, Eve Best was planted in front of it, her back to the audience; she was on stage even though her character (Anna) had not made its entrance. While she stood there, Clive Owen and Kelly Reilly bantered about the latter’s (Kate’s) friends, about whom Owne (Deeley) seemed to know more than he was letting on. The idea that such twaddle could hold an audience’s attention seemed startlingly ludicrous. I could see why the production values had been turned up to the “circus” setting.
By the way, actor Douglas Hodge — philistines will recall his memorable portrayal of Tertius Lydgate in the 1994 Masterpiece Theatre production of Middlemarch — directed. Whatever that means.
It was huge fun, really. The actors performed with vehemence, which is always exciting. And I was laughing, a lot. Perhaps more than was well-mannered. It was like watching someone trying to get away with old tricks. Old Tricks! That’s what the play really was. Did Deeley really meet Anna at a party twenty years ago, sitting across the room from her and staring up her dress? Did Deeley sob in Kate’s bedsit? Has anybody seen Odd Man Out? Did Eugene Ionescu write this play? Who the hell, as Kathleen put it, cares?
The audience did not jump to its feet. The applause was somewhat warmer than merely polite, but not quite enthusiastic. The actors took what seemed to be a very muted bow. I applauded lustily, leaning forward in my seat. If they noticed me, they probably thought I was drunk; I’d been the one laughing inappropriately. I felt chastened. I wanted to shout, Allez, courage! I wanted to thank them for making such an entertaining show out of this prehistoric carcass. They were the reasons I’d come, and they had not disappointed.
***
Friday 4th
At least once every two weeks, I have to strangle the impulse to write, “This entry will be brief.” I know from my experience of letters begun with that announcement that, quite often, it won’t be true. After a few rushed, summarizing sentences, I’ll dilate on some tangent in a goiterish paragraph that, because, hey, I’m being brief, sprawls incoherently over the back of my mind. I may be able to grasp, later, what I was trying to say, but then again I may not. I might as well have said, “This letter will be rude and ill-behaved.” The promise of brevity might belong at the beginning, but it ought to be the last thing written.
For it is really an attempt to reassure myself. Don’t worry about having nothing to say, or no time in which to say it. Just make an appearance and then quietly step off-stage. Show that you’re alive and still thinking, and then wish everyone a good weekend. Hi. I’m alive and still thinking. But I have a terrible hangover. Not from the wine, although I did drink too much of that as I sat up, waiting for Kathleen’s flight to land in Los Angeles. The hangover is a kind of exhaustion — I’m always talking about being tired, aren’t I — that follows prolonged suspense. Follows? The suspense is very much ongoing. Kathleen is somewhere over the Pacific; she won’t land in Sydney until late this afternoon, my time. Then she’ll be in Sydney, surrounded by people I’ve never met (well, maybe one or two, but not to remember), for a week. She’ll leave on what’s Friday in Australia, but spend most of what’s Friday for me in the air, landing an hour or so into Saturday. If she were on a moon mission, I could not be more displaced.
I expect I’ll settle down a bit over the weekend. There’s plenty to do, and I actually did some of it yesterday. I catalogued four shelves of hidden books — books ranged behind other books. The shelves were not particularly long, just a little over two feet. But there were a few books that I’d been looking for. When I’m looking for a book, it’s almost guaranteed that I won’t find it. I’ll remember that its spine is blue when in fact it’s red, or white with a blue patch. In order to see books that aren’t readily visible, I have to get the books in front of them out of the way. I have to put them somewhere — in a room with few empty surfaces. I usually move a handful, and then shift the remaining books from side to side: not a very good method, I assure you.
The books are not very intelligently shelved to begin with. The books behind the books, I mean. They were placed where they are in the bustle of settling into the new apartment and emptying boxes as quickly as possible. They have sat in their disorder for a year. In four or five instances, I have bought new copies of books that I couldn’t find. One turned up yesterday, Ivan Morris’s translation of Sie Shonagon’s Pillow Book. I had looked for it last summer, I thought. Not very carefully, though, because there it was, yesterday, at the back of a shelf that’s one of the most active in my library. “What do you mean by ‘active’,” you will ask; I feel a tangent coming on. Before swerving, I’ll just say that I’m glad that I couldn’t find it, because I wouldn’t have discovered Meredith McKinney’s lucid translation if I had.
The big bookcase in here is what’s called a breakfront. The central section, which is about four feet wide, protrudes by eight or nine inches from two narrower flanking sections. Because this room is so small, and I had to put my writing table somewhere, even though I never write at it, the central section of the big bookcase is almost inaccessible. The flanking section to the right, however, is easy to reach, and it has become a default bookcase for new books that are neither fiction nor history. Nor poetry nor drama. This is where you’ll find Joan Didion’s nonfiction, and Marilyn Robinson’s. A couple of books about the Duchess of Windsor — history, arguably, but really not. Julia Child’s correspendence with Avis De Voto — how well I remember falling in love with Avis De Voto. Jonathan Franzen’s nonfiction. Criticism by James Wood and Daniel Mendelsohn. 7 Types of Ambiguity, Lucas on Style, and Tamar Adler’s The Everlasting Meal. Maeve Brennan, and a clutch of books about New Yorker people. A row of Oxford World’s Classics (which used to be in front but got put in back yesterday). These are the books that I paw over.
(On the left flanking section, I’ve put all the Penguin Classics and the NYRB editions. Also the Loebs. I don’t really need to catalogue these because for some reason that I’d like to understand better, I remember that a book is a Penguin Classic better than I remember how to spell the author’s name. Ditto NYRB.)
There is a sort of shelf just for Hannah Arendt. “What do you mean by ‘a sort of shelf’?” But we shall not go there. Not today. Lined up together, Hannah Arendt’s books, and the books about her, are a domestic librarian’s nightmare, because some are much taller than the others, and to range them on a proper shelf wastes a lot of space. So: “a sort of shelf.” I’ll explain it some other time. Hold your breath.
I kept note of the books’ locations in Evernote. Each shelf, or section of a shelf (front or back — in the big central section, there is also a middle), has its own note, and in the note there is a table. I could wish that Evernote’s tables were more flexible. (I believe that they are, in their Apple incarnation.) You can’t alphabetize the rows, and you can’t insert rows in the middle of the table. So I have to line up the books, in alphabetical order, so that I can fill in the table in order. I’m not really sure that alphabetization is all that important; I’ve used it in the past because it gives me an idea of which end of the long central shelves to excavate when in search of a title.
But searching Evernote is easy-peasy. I just tested it. Pretending to be looking for Josef Pieper’s best-known work, I typed “Leisure” into the search box, and voilà: up came the note (C3R) with its table, and the search term highlighted in yellow (Leisure, the Basis of Culture). If I type in “Sontag,” two notes are returned, because her critical work is in one place, and the first volume of her diaries in another. Mind you, I’ve done only a few shelves so far.
I worked on the library as a way of keeping busy. I also did two loads of laundry. I made spaghetti alla carbonara for dinner. Then I sat down with Chapman Pincher and nearly finished his book, sipping wine as I read. I tried to follow Pincher’s somewhat complicated argument that Sir Roger Hollis, sometime head of MI5, was a Soviet agent. In the end, I was persuaded, but I was mindful, too, that the kind of British treachery that was exemplified by Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, et alia, originated in the deepest ideological murk, and flourished during the War, when Britain and Russia were allies. It was also fueled by a strange brew of contempt for and resentment of Americans, who within the space of a generation displaced the United Kingdom as top dog — and who had the temerity to think that they spoke English to boot! It’s very complicated, and I can well understand why the British establishment has dragged its feet about outing its traitors.
I saved the last two chapters of Dangerous to Know for later. Kathleen called; I took my pill; I slept through the night. It’ll be a few hours before I get wound up again. And, on that note…
***
Bon week-end à tous!