Monday 7th

Daniel Martin is a puzzling book to read in 2016. The world in which it is set is now forty years old at the latest, but there is little sense of history. By “history,” in this fictional connection, I mean the sense of present grinding into past — in a word, change. Things, in Daniel Martin, don’t so much change as reveal their essence. The title character and his friends (using the word loosely) exist in an eternal now. Their lives may be cluttered with memories, like crumpled attempts at a first draft, but their youth was a golden age, a time out of time. To remember the golden age is to feel disappointed by everything that followed, and doomed to that disappointment as the inevitable by-product of self-realization.

Here is a metaphor that is dropped in passing. (I am not interested in the “first major success” that is the subject of the paragraph.)

The anatomy of first major success is like the young human body, a miracle only the owner can fully savour — and even then, only at the time.

This is almost perfectly wrong. The young may enjoy their youth, but they are incapable of savoring it; they don’t know enough to make the myriad comparisons that melt into true savor. The sense of the wondrousness of youth does not come until youth is past, and we see it for the first time in those who have followed us into youth. We know that they don’t, that they can’t, appreciate what they’ve got. All that they’re aware of possessing is the audacity of youth, the license to reach out and take things. They have put the timidity of childhood behind them and are ready to run risks. But they haven’t the equipment for assaying those risks. They don’t know, until it’s too late, how much easier it is to hurt some people than others, and they don’t know which ones are going to be hurt.

Youth is a golden age — or has been one in modern times — because no one forgets the shocked delight of discovering autonomy, which may be nothing more than the absence of parents. It is a more or less unchanging experience, shared by almost everyone, but it is stamped by peculiarities that bestow a trumpery uniqueness.

Because I am puzzled, I am writing very slowly. Part of me wants to be brisk: Daniel Martin is a badly dated book. The author-narrator dispenses a lot of non-wisdom. Sometimes he merely blusters.

It took some years for Dan to realize that the total failure in England to develop a decent commercial movie industry, let alone something better than a constipated trickle of serious film-makes, is at least partly due to our unerring flair for backing bad directors … or to the corollary notion that some semi-illiterate cameraman or ingratiating phony must know more about reproducing life than anyone else. (153)

Consider the string of extreme adjectives: total, constipated, unerring, semi-literate, ingratiating. This could be Norma Desmond talking. There is absolutely no substance in these remarks. It is mere bile, and the all-too-familiar bile of movie writers at that.

Part of me is intoxicated by the sheer readability of the thing. Of Oxford:

No town is further, when it wants to be, from the tame conversational norms of the rest of middle-class England, with all its conditioned evasions and half-finished sentences, its permanent poised flight into the inarticulate. I had lived for so long in exile, in a world whose only ‘test” was one’s degree of craftsmanship in a given context, and aeons from this tiny society that lived essentially, for all its outward academic orientations, by ideal and abstract — and frequently absurd — notions of personal truth and behavior.

I had also, behind the apparent deference, felt obscurely condescended to; the way intellectuals will condescend to peasants, make all kinds of urbane adjustments for their ignorance. (176)

I agree with very little; much of it seems almost violently incorrect. But I do not really complain. I keep turning pages, pages that I have already turned on two occasions. I read Daniel Martin when it came out in paper, and then again shortly after law school. The paperback cover was deep green, and I thought of it Daniel Martin as a green novel, as who wouldn’t after that profoundly rural first chapter, so loaded with unfamiliar terms and arcane agricultural practices that it might have been taken from Keats’s Grecian urn — had the urn been green. It is a big, literate, realistic, almost Victorian novel, all the more so for being studded with situations that no Victorian could publish. (It seems ridiculous now, but Swinging London was really just the final (but successful) attempt to smash the staid English ethos that had come into focus during the old queen’s long reign.) It is sophisticated but not difficult — well, not difficult after the first two or three chapters, which can be as thorny as Sleeping Beauty’s forest, and for the same reasons. Having made it clear that he is not going to consdescend to us peasants, John Fowles proceeds with his stock-taking, which would be clinical if he were not so poetical.

***

And I keep comparing Daniel Martin (the character) to Éamon Redmond, the central figure in The Heather Blazing. The two books share a similar fundamental structure, as chapters set in the present alternate with chapters that glimpse at the progressively recent past, but their protagonists make them utterly unalike. It is easy to imagine Éamon’s response to Fowles’s book — and clear that it would not be verbal.

I cannot get over how familiar Éamon is to me. He doesn’t remind me of anyone in particular, just half the student body of Notre Dame when I was an undergraduate. So many boys were just like him: quietly well-mannered, mild, diligent, stoical, and determined to do well in the world in a way that marked no distinction between family expectation and personal ambition. It was the last part that kept me at my distance, and kept them in a generalized blur. I was fearful about doing well in the world. I was pretty sure that I could not compete; already, I knew that I could not keep my mind on the demands of an external challenge. I might be very good at something, but I should be good in my own way, disregarding the conventions that facilitate apprehension. In some obscure but persistent way, I could not conform. Complicating things further, I did not appear to be a non-conformist. It was like colorblindness, a drawback that you can’t detect in another person without amassing a lot of incidental evidence. I was forever letting interested and encouraging professors down.

And I was almost certain that compliance was corrupting. Eventually, it would become a habit that forestalled judgment. Colm Tóibín drops occasional hints that Éamon’s career has been corrupt ever since he agreed to study law, at the request of Seán Lemass no less. The problem seems to have been that the legal profession was in the pocket of Fine Gael; Fianna Fáil, Éamon’s family’s party, needed to challenge that hegemony, so that it could work with instead of against the lawyers. So Éamon became a barrister and was given Constitutional cases by the (Fianna Fáil) government; eventually, or actually rather early in his career, he was made a judge.

At the beginning of the second part of The Heather Blazing, Éamon is about to deliver an opinion that he knows will be controversial. In a small Irish town, a student at a Catholic school has gotten pregnant. She has not only been expelled, but forbidden to return after the birth of the child. Her presence in the school, the principal testifies, would be counter to its “ethos.” The question before Éamon is whether this “ethical” problem warrants depriving a gifted student of a good education. He himself, we are assured, has no personal stake in the religious underpinnings of the “ethos”; he has completely lost his religious faith. In other words, the ethos no longer has any meaning for him; it is just the way things are. But that has nothing to do with how he envisions his role.

He listened carefully to the counsel’s submission about various articles of the Constitution, but there was no argument about facts or truth, guilt or innocence. In the end he was not the legal arbiter, because there were few legal issues at stake. Most of the issues raised by the case were moral: the right of an ethos to prevail over the right of an individual. Basically, he was being asked to decide how life should be conducted in a small town. He smiled to himself at the thought and shook his head. (88)

And there is no question about how, as an adherent of Fianna Fáil, he ought to decide: for the “ethos,” of course. And yet Éamon is troubled by doubts. When he actually reads his opinion, he is sure that it is correct, well-written and -argued; he knows that his colleagues will approve. But when he looks elsewhere, when he takes his eyes off the pages, he is not so sure. He knows that many Irish people, including members of his own family, will disagree. He quails a bit at the prospect of this contention, and when it does break out he resorts to using his authority as a judge to silence it. But he does his duty. It is all so brilliantly written that you don’t know whether to admire him or to despise him. You manage to do both, because that is the only way to respond to the scrupulously corrupt, when they do unpleasant things no matter what the personal cost.

I came across an essay online, by a professor at the University of Manchester, Liam Harte, on the role of the marine in Colm Tóibín’s writing. Harte’s discussion of The Heather Blazing is interesting at two points for off-topic commentary. First, Harte mentions Éamon’s “emotional autism.” Second, he describes the speech that Éamon delivers at a Fianna Fáil rally in Enniscorthy:

This proves to be a defining moment in his life, which leads directly to his being singled out as a future instrument of Fianna Fáil power, a destiny he duly fulfills when he becomes a state prosecutor and eventually a judge. But it is also the moment in which Eamon Redmond becomes the mouthpiece for a moribund, patriarchal conservatism, parrotting a received revolutionary ideology that is shown to have ossified into platitudinous orthodoxy. It is the rhetoric of de Valera himself, who, instead of addressing urgent social and economic issues of the day, delivers a stock eulogy to Enniscorthy as “one of the sacred towns of this island […], which has ever kept the flame of nationhood alight, even in darkest times.”

Needless to say, Colm Tóibín would never put this so bluntly. He leaves it up to the reader to see Éamon’s “platitudinous orthodoxy” for what it is. Having read my Irish history books, I was able to date the scene to the 1951 election, clinched not only by Éamon’s age but by de Valera’s as well. (He’ll be seventy next year, someone tells Éamon.) I could measure Éamon’s determination to get ahead in the world by his ability to write and then to memorize a speech so at odds with Ireland’s social and economic needs. On the first two readings, I distantly sensed something “off” about the speech, but for the most part I saw the favorite son doing his family proud. Now I felt the depth to which Éamon’s corruption was rooted in his family.

As to the “emotional autism,” this must refer to the unhappiness that Carmel, Éamon’s wife, expresses at two points in the novel. In the earlier (which comes after the later in the narrative), Carmel is pregnant. She complains of Éamon’s remoteness; she feels that he doesn’t listen to her, doesn’t even hear her. Nor does he share himself. The passage is a bitter echo of what we have already heard from the much older Carmel. In the first stage of the illness that will kill her, this older woman makes the same complaint. What she also says at that time is that she blames herself for having tolerated his reserve. She used to admire it, but she learned that it was wrong “to want [him] like that.” (155)

I found myself surprised to be taking Éamon’s side. Colm Tóibín’s side as well, I suspect.

***

Tuesday 8th

Which is more important in everyday life, what we believe or how we behave? I myself have no doubt of the answer. The question, which nobody was asking, occurred to me as I mulled over a passage from Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw, which I’ve just read for the second time.

They had known each other for some years. They moved in a milieu of highly educated, upper-class, post-war young, who had lost ideals and aims but retained their manners. (And the scruples which these comprise.) They had turned — privately: they were no socialists or reformers — against patriotism, militarism (that above all), religion, bourgeois values; they still believed in individual good behaviour. They wanted a good time […but] Unlike Evelyn Waugh’s Bright and Young they wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving unpaid bills or burning cigarettes on other people’s carpets. (182)

Bedford is describing what came to be called the “Lost Generation” in English; the case might be made that, when push came to shove, good behaviour was not enough to check the fascist tide. Dealing with Nazis, perhaps, required a new set of manners, one shaped by public convictions. I don’t know. I was thinking about how well the passage described me, and a lot of people whom I know, with the Summer of Love and its attendant seasons of countercultural excitement standing in for World War I. There would be only one item out of alignment: we did not reject “bourgeois values” so much as retune them. Particularly when it came to raising children, we believed in safety first, followed immediately by education.

The old bourgeois idea of education involved the pursuit of credentials and the development of a personal patina. The credentials vested some objective authority in the managers of business that bourgeois men usually became, while the patina of culture and worldliness conveyed an aura that, if not actually aristocratic, did not clash with high-born manners. Our idea of education was geared more toward self-realization, which usually involves having a good time. Fais ce que voudras. I now believe that the older view of education was better. When I was young, anything like patina was scoffed at — clearly phoney. But it seems that patina is not a mask but a kind of semipermeable membrane that permits sophisticated knowledgeability to flow back and forth between the individual and the environment.

A social crisis may be defined as a moment when belief displaces behavior as the more important thing. Otherwise, belief is, or ought to be, private and personal; it’s behavior that counts. Doing certain things, refraining from others, setting an example most of all: these are the elements of primate sociability. We are constantly checking up on each other, constantly measuring ourselves against others. We want to fit in, but without altogether disappearing, and other people show us how it’s done. Imagine two halls: in one, everyone is disputing the most important ethical principles, while, in the other, everyone is trying to make everyone else comfortable. It always amazes me that so many people choose the first room. Don’t they know about the second? Or do they truly despise comfort? Perhaps they are simply bad listeners.

I knew when I began re-reading Jigsaw that I would be upset when it came to an end, and I am. I want to know more. That is why I have just ordered Quicksands, Bedford’s third and final memoir. At the bottom of Bedford’s Wikipedia page, there’s a link to the podcast of her appearance on the famous BBC radio show, Desert Island Discs, in 1998. I clicked through and listened to it. Bedford shared a lot of Mozart, along with a bit of Beethoven and Schubert — oh, and Bach. All very proper. She sounded like the older and slightly odder sister of the princess that Wendy Hiller plays in Murder on the Orient Express — very plummy, with a light Ruritanian accent. Bedford talked at one point about the importance of love and the risk of jealous misery, but it was clear that she would not allow herself to be induced by these thrills and ills to make scenes. Scenes in front of third parties, anyway.

Bedford’s life story was a charmed one, and we’re to be grateful that she taught herself to write about it so well. Her memoirs are only cosmetically fictional; she compresses and edits, nips and tucks, all in the interest of telling a coherent story. But she does not, I think, shape her material to emphasize the remarkable events. She acknowledges her luck at every stage. Sometimes — rarely — it is bad luck. Certainly few things could be worse than dealing with the drug addiction of a close relative (in this case, her mother). But for the most part it is very good luck, and the best bit of good luck in her life was the friendship of Aldous and Maria Huxley, who took up residence in her tiny seaside town, Sanary-sur-Mer, a few years after she herself arrived. Ordinarily, the advantages of such a friendship would be contacts, doors opened, but in the case of the Huxleys it was more immediate. They were generous to Sybille and her mother when money was tight. They got Bedford married and out of France on the eve of the War, and they took her with them to the United States in 1940. Because Bedford’s mother was Jewish (or partly), and because Bedford herself had published an anti-Nazi piece, she was on the Gestapo hit-list, and she might well have perished in the Holocaust had it not been for the Huxley’s constant material support.

On Desert Island Discs, Bedford cited a maxim of the Huxley’s: you must give people what they need before they have to ask for it. This is the summit on which listening truly merges with observation, with paying attention, with being aware. You hear a request before it is spoken.

I like to think that I’m a good listener, but I have my lapses, and one of them came up a few weekends ago, when Kathleen asked if we could “have some jazz.” I had been lost in the development of two monster playlists, one lasting well over a day and the other, two. I was in the middle of tinkering with one of them and telling Kathleen how happy I was with how it was going when she made her modest request. She was not complaining. She quickly added, “I don’t mean right now.” I didn’t blush, but I felt crass and derelict. Kathleen has often said, over the years, that jazz on the weekends makes her feel cozy and safe. I had stopped listening. I got good at compiling classical playlists to her taste. I had compiled a few jazz playlists that were limited to the mellow classics, to musicians like Lester Young and Dexter Gordon. This wasn’t what Kathleen had in mind. She wanted to hear jazz that was new when she was young. Herbie Hancock. The Crusaders. John Coltrane. Miles Davis. Sometimes mellow but usually not. To me, a lot of this jazz is difficult to listen to in the same way that self-consciously “dissonant” classical music is: I can’t grasp the form, and therefore don’t know where I am (beginning, middle, or end?). There is also a lot of noise: squawks, rushed scales, intrusive drumming. I don’t quite dislike the jazz that Kathleen asked to hear, but I pushed it aside over the years, as we stopped listening to CDs directly and took up connecting iPods to speakers.

Several months ago, Kathleen asked me to play some albums that she hadn’t heard in a long time. Quite a few of them were already uploaded onto iPods (we have two big ones and six or seven Nanos), and I uploaded a few more. In the process, I realized that it really does make sense to listen to albums as albums, rather than shuffling among their contents. I saw that this was why I had stopped listening to Keith Jarrett. Nearly a dozen of his Standards albums, on which he’s assisted by Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, comprised their own playlist, but shuffling through this material for more than an hour gave me a musical headache. I now realized that this way of listening was incorrect. The albums were as composed as the individual improvisations, by a sense of what followed what. And listening to Jarrett’s intensely analytical takes on the standards that he used to play in hotel lounges when he was a young musician is not something to be done at great length — any more than, except for some special occasion, you would play all of Beethoven’s late quartets in a row, or five Mahler symphonies. Such overexposure is not enlightening but corrosive.

From my first encounter with iTunes, as an application for managing a library of MP3 files with a view to uploading music onto an iPod, I have kept classical music separate from everything else. After my Radio Days experience, I don’t have to think about how to organize a library of classical music. Organizing everything else is not so easy. Jazz, for historical reasons, is particularly difficult. Does Mildred Bailey belong with Miles Davis or Jo Stafford? What do you do with Julien Clerc when he sings American standards? (One of my favorite CDs, it’s called Studio.) Pop can be just as difficult, although it usually isn’t: pop shuns the very possibility of difficulty. (And yet: Steely Dan?) In any case, the CDs are filed separately, classical in the book room and everything else, along with all the DVDs, in the bedroom. The MP3 files are loaded onto different computers, too. Everything that isn’t classical is currently stored on a large, heavy laptop that we call “the wheezer,” because no one (included our tech god) can figure out how to keep the fan from whirring into motion, slowing down, and then whirring again — constantly. I no longer use this machine for anything else.

Since Kathleen’s request, I’ve been spending time with the wheezer on at least one day of every weekend. Lots of CDs have not been uploaded at all, so there is always a small stack of them to process. I’ve already used up all the space on an old Nano that was for a long time tucked away and never used. Now I’m toying with buying a big iPod and putting everything on it. Everything.

I do know that it will be easier to listen to Kathleen if, every now and then, she hands me a newly-acquired CD. She won’t have to tell me what to do with it.

I am trying very hard to behave better in another area, too. When I am thwarted by things — when I can’t open a plastic package easily, when wrapped-up bits of food tumble out of the overcrowded refrigerator, when cords coil into knots and wall sockets can’t be reached without bodily contortions — I tend to lose my temper. The root of the problem is almost invariably my impatience, my wish to be done with tiresome things as quickly as possible. The effect is a lot of unpleasant noise. Bad language, blasphemy (baroque at times), an inclination to slam. When I am calm and happy about what I’m doing — cooking, say — I can steer through these difficulties without upset; but when I am doing something else — when I am writing, but momentarily occupied by filling my water-bottle with ice cubes, furious that the ice trays, made by Rubbermaid, produce cubes too large to fit into the mouth of the water-bottle, also a Rubbermaid product; when in short I should rather not be in the kitchen at all — I allow the recalcitrance of things to become what it cannot really be, a personal affront. The first step in a self-improvement campaign such as this one is to recognize as quickly as possible that one is behaving badly, and that is what I am working on. I talk to myself as if I were a child. Shsh! I say, trying to sound calm. Don’t say those things. It doesn’t matter whether I’m alone or Kathleen is sitting in the next room. Cela ne se fait pas.

***

Thursday 10th

Something in Daniel Martin reminded me, the other night, to tell Kathleen a story about the taxi ride that took me to the Hospital for Special Surgery for last week’s Remicade infusion.

I am not keen on talking to cab drivers. I try to provide particular details about my destination, and how I’d prefer to reach it, in the preternaturally clear and firm voice of a seasoned and very busy man. Either I encounter an unusual proportion of daydreaming drivers with no axes to grind, or this strategy of mine works, because most rides pass in blessed silence. The downside is that any driver resistant to my anticipatory rebuff is very resistant to it. Some are pissed off by it, while others are encouraged to believe that I am as anti-liberal as they are. I’m surprised to say that last Monday’s quick trip to the hospital gives strong evidence in support of the latter proposition.

The driver, first of all, was an all-American wreck. He was in his forties at least, and he sounded older — more worn down. His still-blond hair was shoulder-length and scraggly, his face was blurred by uneven stubble and unhealthy skin, and his frame was both sinewy and wasted. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that he had survived a serious drug problem, especially when he spoke. I don’t have much experience with addicts, current or rehabbed, and I shouldn’t be presuming to talk about this driver at all if it weren’t for the delicious punch line. But, although sooner or later I could usually process his statements, they were difficult to follow, especially as they were burdened by a belligerence whose aim was unclear. Sometimes, I thought he regarded me as the enemy; sometimes, as a desperately-needed ally. One thing was certain: he was not going to stop talking. Something else seemed likely: he’d become hostile if I refused to engage.

It was the usual stuff: immigrants were ruining the country — every country. Just the other day, he’d had a passenger from Europe who complained about the refugee situation there. I agreed that migration was a problem, but it was complicated, I said, because you can’t just stand by while people to starve to death, nor can you shoot them (yet) for trying to save their own lives. I pointed out that most refugee problems are the consequences of abandoned colonial projects, for which the Western powers were responsible — and it took him a moment or two to process that. When he returned to the ring, as it were, his new topic was welfare, specifically welfare mothers. Surely something should be done about them. It’s complicated, I said, once again; only this time, I could feel something sparkling inside me: my mind was jumping its leash. Ordinarily, this exhilarating sensation happens right here, when I’m writing these entries, and suddenly an unexpected line of argument opens up like a ray of sun that is doubling as a staircase to enlightenment. I don’t think that I have ever experienced it in a taxi.

We had just gotten off the FDR at the 71st Street exit: the ride was nearly at an end, with less than a minute to go. The driver said something to the effect of finding a way to keep welfare recipients from having children, and my reply was out of my mouth before I knew what it would be. “Indeed,” I said (I really did), “it seems to me that abortions ought to be obligatory in such cases — but you’ll never see that happen in this country.” Without making a sound, the driver radiated speechlessness. “Right in here is good,” I said, suggesting that he pull over near the crosswalk to the hospital. As I was swiping the credit card, he said, “Are you a neurosurgeon here?”

O how I beamed. O the abominable conceit of it!

“No,” I sighed, “I’m just a patient.”

Did I really mean it? Kathleen didn’t ask directly; she was probably afraid of what my answer might be. To what extent was I simply pointing out that extreme conservatives could simplify their lives so much if they could only get over their problem with abortion? To what extent was I offering a Swiftian modest proposal, tongue in cheek?

I do know that I was thinking of the children, the children who are born into welfare. And I was thinking of the many prosperous couples who declined to have children while World War II was raging. What kind of a world would they be bringing children into? Consider my old friend Fossil Darling. Once the War was over, his parents right down to business. He was born within a year of V-J day, making him one of the oldest of boomers. (I’m eighteen months younger, but the more significant detail is that the man and the woman who produced me were not married and not about to be.) Nobody told those couples that they couldn’t have children during the War; it was simply a decision that loving, would-be parents made on behalf of might-have-been children. It’s a pity that this reasoning and this discipline do not occur among the poor. It is also perfectly understandable. Poverty is exhausting, and pleasures are few. Nothing is more delightful than a baby. But babies stop being babies pretty quickly, and nothing is sadder than a child blighted by poverty from birth. A few exceptional kids will break through; exceptional people almost always do, no matter what their background. But one of this country’s leading stupidities is its equation of the exceptional with the exemplary.

We ought to be doing everything that we can to minimize poverty. That’s what I should have said to the driver, had I been thinking.

***

And yet to talk of such things seems a clueless luxury in these troubled times, when the risk of putting a demagogue in the Oval Office is as great as it is. The tide of conservatives who oppose liberal government has not receded, as political tides usually do, but burst all the restraints, and degenerated into an anti-political scourge of the very idea of government, of moderation of any kind. The politicians of the right have finally been overtaken by the bestial mindlessness that they have been feeding for decades. The opportunism of their positions has been exposed, as they themselves ridicule those positions, now that they have been taken up by Donald Trump. They could never come out and say what they were up to. They could never be honest about encouraging bigotry and a profoundly unChristian lack of generosity. Donald Trump is not only being honest about these things, he’s driving voters to fight for them. If those voters have their way, every social transformation of the past fifty years will be undone. I think that their success in this undertaking is unlikely. But their narrative is that of an oppressed people (white men and the women who have to listen to them, in this case) being led out of Egypt and delivered into the Promised Land.

If nothing else, how are these supporters to be managed in the event that Trump’s bid does not prevail?

***

I often claim not to believe in conspiracy theories. What I mean is that I don’t believe in secret conspiracy theories. Public conspiracies operate, if not “all the time,” then certainly from time to time. They are public in that they are not really hidden. There are no secret handshakes. The code words are not encrypted. Take the memo that Lewis Powell wrote, shortly before he joined the Supreme Court. He called for a judiciary more favorably disposed toward business interests. It’s for that reason that I speak of the Powell Court: even though Powell was never Chief Justice, his philosophy has shaped the Court’s judgments for forty years or more. Powell’s role was not widely known until after his death, but it was a matter of persuasion, not conspiracy. He inspired a generation of young lawyers (members of the Federalist Society) to take a new look at commercial jurisprudence. The results have been disastrous, if you ask me. But it’s hard to say that the pro-business agenda was a secret.

Now I wonder if the same thing isn’t happening with Ayn Rand. Sales of her books are “healthy,” to say the very least. People one knows talk about reading her books, although not much to us, because Kathleen and I radiate an anti-Randian voltage — the force that is with us. But how else to explain Justin Keller’s recent open letter about San Francisco?

The residents of this amazing city no longer feel safe. I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience, and enjoy this special place.

This sort of thing would have been truly unthinkable in the Sixties — Keller would have been tarred and feathered. One might have thought like this, but one mightn’t have said it. As with Donald Trump, however, Keller is merely giving voice to politically incorrect views. He wants to live in Disney World, so why can’t he? Ayn Rand is the Donald Trump of educated people. She is telling them that it is all right to complain, as Keller did, about “riffraff.” (I should have thought that Hollywood killed the use of that word in the Forties.) She inspires them to give a nicer-sounding name to what is plainly a casino economy.

As with the Federalist Society, the spread of Randian politics, while not altogether secret, isn’t noisy enough to generate effective opposition. Young people on the left are tilting at abandoned windmills. Wall Street, Big Pharma — these are not the enemy. And they remain impregnable so long as the enemy is ignored. The enemy is the aristocracy of the exceptional. In today’s world, brains have replaced brawn: you can leave the horse and the armor to your computer avatar. Exceptionally bright, focused people are gathering together, and, if nothing else, they are increasingly determined not to live among us.

The aristocracy of old Europe supported itself by expropriating agricultural revenues. Today’s aristocrats are doing something a little different: they’re preventing the spread of wealth, so that nothing has to be expropriated. They are nevertheless the same kind of rentiers, living off the revenues of intellectual property. As a former screen-writer who never owned her work for the studios, Ayn Rand would be applauding very loudly, were she but still with us.

I’ve written elsewhere about this, about my belief that the ownership of intellectual property ought to vest adamantly in its creator. It is not his to sell. He can rent it out, instead. His heirs, too, might benefit financially for a time, but the right to control the use of intellectual property ought to be extinguished with the creator’s death. To translate this into plainer English, no corporation ought to be allowed to own intellectual property of any kind, save perhaps for the limited exception of brand-names and logos. The use of intellectual property would thus pass into the public domain (although not necessarily for free) much faster than it does now. I should award Ayn Rand the rights to her screenplays but strip the Ayn Rand Institute (or, rather, Leonard Peikoff) of the rights to her novels. (How did Rand manage to let Anthem slip into the public domain?)

***

Ask me how I felt when I read David Remnick’s leading note in this week’s “Talk of the Town.”

The G.O.P. establishment may be in a state of meltdown, but this process of exploiting the darkest American undercurrents began with Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

<Sigh.>

I can go back to 2008, although the entry might be a bit difficult to decipher. That would be the first reference to the Southern Strategy on this site, which was inaugurated about a year earlier. More recent mentions of the term, “Southern Strategy,” in 2010 and 2013, do not state Nixon’s exploitation of bigotry as explicitly as I’d like for present purposes. In June 2013, I wrote,

Similarly, the Republican Party has made cynical use of christianists ever since the Nixon Administration. It can happen here.

I may sigh, but I don’t whine. I have always believed, or at least ever since I first heard this nugget of wisdom, that being ahead of your time is just another way of being wrong. (Let’s file this under “Up the Orinoco.”) I understand that anything that I say lacks most of the authority of anything that David Remnick says. But I do wish that that would change. Because the odds against “its happening here” dwindle with time. Before I searched the site, I was sure that I’d mentioned the Southern Strategy more often. That signals to me that I was afraid of talking about it too much. Perhaps I have to get over that.

***

Friday 11th

Were I so minded, I could start a new Web log, or re-pitch this one, to focus on a life of re-reading books. But first I’d have to come up with a better word for it. This is a problem that I often run up against — needing new words for things — and I must confess that I’m not very good at it. New words occur to me all the time, but I can’t go looking for them. Now that reading things a second or third time has become a regular activity, and not something that happens every now and then, I’m truly unhappy with “re-reading.” I daresay I needn’t say why.

Once upon a time, when books were expensive and scarce, multiple readings were the common ones. “Then read from the treasured volume of thy choice,” as Longfellow put it. That’s how I always remember the quote, which was inscribed on bronze bookends that were handed down to me when I was a boy. What Longfellow actually said, “Then read from the treasured volume the poem of they choice,” suggests an even smaller library. (The bookends must have been accurate.)

Then what happened? The consumer society? People now speak of “consuming” literature — perhaps they have stopped this barbarism. Literature can indeed be consumed, but only by oblivion. It survives careless reading robustly. Nevertheless, consider the very word, “novel.” That tells you something. It’s yet another instance of a word’s coming to mean the opposite of what it meant — don’t you just love old novels? — but only for lovers of literature. And even they face the problem of surfeit: in a world of much-too-much, how do you decide upon any one thing? For people who stick to the new and the fashionable, it’s a simple matter of locating the best buzz, but, even then, books take precious time to read. Almost any choice seems very clearly not to be the optimal choice.

I deal with this problem relatively easily, I think; I follow trains of thought. Last year, I read Angela Bourke’s biography of Maeve Brennan — along with all of Brennan’s stories — and I am still on the path that followed from there. I have bought a few books about the history of Ireland, but I have re-read a good deal of Colm Tóibín, and then re-read it again. Perhaps the word I need has nothing to do with doing something again; perhaps “to read,” chez moi, ought to be taken to mean “to read again.” More useful might be a marker for the book that I am reading for the first time. “I am discovering…” Something like that.

In any case, in the course of writing a letter to a friend, I learned from the little records that I keep that, of the seven books that I’ve read most recently, only three were “discoveries”; I’d read the other four before, one of them twice. Of the seven books before those, only two books were new acquisitions; two others had languished on the shelves, unread, for some time. It’s true that a lot of this revisiting began self-consciously, as I tried to justify keeping so many books in the house, and so many more in a storage unit that I rarely visited. But the activity has become a pleasure, and even something of a habit: when I’m looking for something to read, I don’t turn to my bookshelves only after having been disappointed by the offerings at Amazon. I turn to the bookshelves first. The repeated harrowing of my collection, moreover, has forced me to distinguish books that I love from books that literary people are supposed to have on hand. I keep ever fewer of the latter.

At the storage unit the other day, I came across two books that I wished I could dump into a get-rid-of box, right then and there. They were big and fat, just the sort of book that I like to de-accession (is that a split infinitive?). One was a memoir by the wife of a recent Prime Minister, the other the biography of a former Royal-by-marriage. Say goodbye, Gracie! In contrast, the clutch of books that I brought home were all slim paperbacks. One of them, unfortunately — Josef Pieper’s Scholasticism — is falling apart: open it up, and the pages fly out. This isn’t surprising. Paperbacks produced in the Sixties were cheap in every way. A few years ago, I went to read Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake again. I had to buy a new copy. But I couldn’t get rid of the original. I don’t know why the current edition isn’t bound as startlingly, in bright yellow with the title in Chinese red. I couldn’t live without seeing the spine on the top shelf.

The awful truth is that nobody can write about routinely reading books multiple times until the cusp of middle and old age. (I exclude scholars, of course.) Were I minded to keep such a blog, I should have to decide whether to be honest, whether to call it Diary of a Crusty Old Coot or Dust From the Attic. Something appealing like that. Here’s a naughty title: Foxy. (If there happens to be a blog by that name out there, one whose subject was old books, how would you find it? With very great patience, I suppose.) Nobody much younger would want to read such a blog, yet of course it would be young readers who could learn the most. They would at least hear something different from the chatter of journo-marketing.

I used to think that it was bathetic to have a “favorite author,” a writer to whom one could turn and always find satisfaction. If pressed, I should name Jane Austen as mine, but let’s face facts: there isn’t that much Jane Austen to go around. There are five unarguably great novels, and there are the sometimes very amusing things that Austen wrote before she found her heart. (She, too, had a morbid fear of bathos to overcome.) The early work is not the stuff of anybody’s “favorite author,” and the five great novels run the risk of overexposure. Lately, however, I have discovered that I do have a favorite author, and I don’t suppose that anybody will be surprised to find that it is Colm Tóibín. His books are always there for me.

***

The Heather Blazing left me puzzled: why did Carmel complain about not knowing her husband because he wouldn’t talk to her? I can understand her anger about his not listening to her, although I’m not persuaded that Éamon’s not-listening was quite the same thing as that of most men. I came across a perfect description of the general character of men who don’t listen in a book that I’m discovering by Sybille Bedford: The Faces of Justice: A Traveler’s Report. I swallowed the entire first part of it last night. In the following passage, Bedford is describing what she calls a “not-so-good” magistrate. He is the kind of man who

talks with his head down, who seldom takes his nose out of the ledger. He does not look at the people who speak to him. He hurries them along with hnhn’s and well’s. He interrupts witnesses, and when there is counsel he takes the examination out of his mouth. He browbeats young barristers. He gives everybody a sense of the scarcity of his time. He does not appear to listen. He pretends to be unable to understand what people say to him. He is sarcastic when it is too easy. He makes up his mind, or appears to have made up his mind, at the beginning of a case. He loses his temper not because it might be necessary, but because he loses it. He loses it, not because it has been tried beyond endurance, but because it is a cherished exercise. He shows contempt for his customers and his place of work, and he betrays his sense that he is made of different clay. (36-7)

Few actual magistrates may be not-so-good in this way, but Bedford has captured a great many not-so-good husbands. Unfortunately, Genesis supports the “different clay” idea, since Eve is created out of Adam. (You’d think that this would make her superior, no?) Today’s young men are far more conscious than their fathers were of the generality of “feminist” complaints, at least from what one can see in public, but the idea certainly persists that a man is somehow magically better than a woman who is by every meaningful metric his equal. He partakes of masculinity: res ipsa loquitur.

Éamon Redmond is different. Let me not say that he is never a not-so-good husband. But, as Carmel herself complains, he is too often elsewhere, off in his mind. If the narrator is to be trusted, Éamon is lost either in his past or in the law. I don’t think that he fully believes in himself. Perhaps he comes to do so at the end, when, like so many grandparents, he discovers the meaning of everything in the antics of a child indirectly his own.

As I listened to Carmel, I thought of Tóibín himself. Tóibín often refers to his own silences, to his preference for not-saying. Do the people who get close to him complain about this? Do people get close to him? It’s none of my business, but I can’t help feeling an authorial sympathy in these Heather Blazing passages, which seem at first to criticize Éamon but end up leaving me feeling that he has been (justly) acquitted. It is, after all, impossible for a silent man to tell you much about his silences. Tóibín writes volumes about them, but only by displacing them onto imaginary characters.

I found myself pulling down Mothers and Sons, the short-story collection, having forgotten that I’d recently had another look at it, also in 2014. I read everything but the two long stories and “A Priest in the Family.” This time, I read that story and the first of the long ones, “The Name of the Game.” They are both, intensely, about not-saying.

Ostensibly, of course, they’re about other things. In “The Name of the Game,” a widow plots her way out of the debts left by her late husband. In “A Priest in the Family,” a mother acknowledges not so much her ordained son’s pedophilia as her neighbors’ awareness of it. But what propels both stories is silence. In “The Name of the Game,” the widow keeps her plans to herself, discussing them only with the businessmen whom she deals with, and then only with regard to their specific dealings. The only exception is a traveling salesman who is known as “Birds Eye.” Even her exchanges with Birds Eye are short of conversation. He very kindly tells her what she’s going to have to do if she wants to save her shop, and the house that it is in, from foreclosure. He tells her whom to contact to make the arrangements. She asks him questions; he gets back with answers. That is all there is to it, or all that we are told. Her sixteen year-old son, Gerard, and some of her neighbors think that she and Birds Eye are an item, and have thought so before she takes him into her confidence. Needless to say, this news surprises her.

Nancy, the widow, does not tell Gerard anything. Gerard knows only what he can see, as a chip shop (fastfoodery) is opened on the side of the old store, and then the store itself is transformed from a failing grocery market to an off-license beer and wine shop. In due course, he also knows what he can count, as business booms. Because Nancy tells Gerard nothing, he assumes — and, again, so do the townspeople — that she is doing it all for him, that he will inherit the business pursuant to the custom of the country. But that is not Nancy’s plan at all. She intends to escape the town at the first possible moment, move to Dublin, and find herself a job as an executive secretary. The story stops short of the likely catastrophe, which is that Gerard’s life will have been ruined by reasonable expectations’ sprouting at a dangerous moment in adolescence. For Gerard hates school, or thinks he does, and embraces the promise of salvation that he sees in his mother’s enterprise. He drops his school chums and takes up wearing suits, and hobnobbing, so far as possible, with older men. (They don’t think that he’s being ridiculous.) What Nancy never mentions to anyone, of course, is her intended betrayal. Everything that she does, she does only to leave it behind.

I’ve arrived at the age where Nancy could be involved in international espionage, followed on every pavement by troops of assassins, and the story would be no more thrilling — less, in fact. What Tóibín never loses sight of is his setting: Nancy’s story unfolds beneath the carcinogenic lens of small-town attentiveness. Nancy is not the only silent one. Her neighbors are just as oblique. They also say nothing, or nearly. Saying nothing is how Nancy’s best friend and her husband indicate that their friendship has been dealt a mortal blow.

In “A Priest in the Family,” everyone is silent because nobody can imagine how Molly will react to the news, which seems to have reached the town in some indirect way, that her son, Frank, is going to be tried for abusing students. (The background is autobiographical, in that several of Tóibín’s boarding-school classmates were abused by a teacher. Tóibín himself was not. This wasn’t because he wasn’t the cutest kid in the dorm. It must have had much more to do with the massive not-neediness that, like Éamon Redmond, he developed in response to childhood loss. Such losses, interestingly, generally increase the vulnerability of children to predators. The story’s perspective on the crime is also autobiographical: it happened long ago. Frank is a middle-aged priest now.) The title of the story is ironic, of course; what had long been seen as a great advantage for any family was now more likely to be a liability. This is never mentioned or referred to in the story itself, except by its absence — another silence.

“A Priest in the Family” is a series of shatterings, all breaching the silence that surrounds Molly and all quickly repaired by her determination to maintain that silence. These upsets increase in violence (there is no other word) until a moment of extreme alienation, following a confrontation between Molly and her daughters, both mothers themselves. They daughters think that Molly ought to leave town for a while, to allow the scandal to die down. Molly is determined to continue her life as it is, but of course she cannot.

The town during the next week seemed almost new to her. Nothing was as familiar as she had once supposed. She was unsure what a glance or a greeting disguised, and she was careful, once she had left her own house, never to turn too sharply or look to closely in case she saw them whispering about her. A few times, when people stopped to talk to her, she was unsure if they knew about her son’s disgrace, or if they too had become so skilled at the plain language of small talk that they could conceal every thought from her, every sign, as she could from them. (147)

As she could from them. Molly has a better idea about how to live down “her son’s disgrace.” She will not go off to the Canary Islands with her friend, Nancy Brophy. Instead, she asks Nancy to do her a favor.

“Would you do something for me, Nancy?” Molly said, standing up, preparing to leave.

“I would, of course, Molly.”

“Would you ask people to talk to me about it, I mean people who know me? I mean, not to be afraid to mention it.”

That’s how you keep people from talking. All anybody (everybody) wanted to know was how Molly was going to take the news — would she, as some of them must have hoped, explode in hysteria? The people who knew Molly well knew that that would never happen, so (it follows) whatever might happen must be much worse. But they in their turn were wrong about that. Molly simply lets the air out of the balloon, and without pricking it.

It’s a neat trick, ain’t it, all this eloquent writing about silence.

Next up: my life as a born chatterbox.

Bon week-end à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2016 at 12:52 pm.