Monday 14th

Running an hour late on everything — trying not to feel delinquent, panicked.

Time Magazine was mentioned in one of the Op-Ed columns this morning — Paul Krugman’s, I think. Time Magazine! How surprising — that it still exists! But of course it doesn’t, any more than today’s Vanity Fair is really anywhere near as old as The New Yorker. It’s true that Time has published without interruption, but not only has it changed out of recognition, but the world that it served in the heady American-Century days of the Fifties and Sixties has disappeared — extinguished, pretty much, by people like me.

Now, I’m making all of this up, of course. You’re to read it as a piece of fiction, a story that might or might not seem to hew to true facts, whether or not you yourself remember them. Try it on; see if it fits. But when I caught the mention of Time this morning, my entire life flashed before my eyes.

The story begins in the early Sixties. Kennedy is president, or perhaps Johnson has already taken his place. Where I come from, it is still the Fifties, and where I come from is Eisenhower country. Eisenhower is a Republican, of course, but he has spent a good deal of his presidency trying to outmaneuver the ardent, Red-fearing right. He may have seemed to be a boring old man, but he was sound. Somehow, Kennedy seemed to be more sound than Nixon, and, if he wasn’t, the assassination at Dallas took care of that. Johnson is definitely not sound.

I come from an affluent Coastal suburb. Everyone is a Republican, but only a few people are in any way ardent. Republican is the default setting for “normal.” Democrats are, by and large, less educated and poorer. They live in other suburbs, or in the city. Nobody really believes that Democrats are Communists, because — I left something out — almost every white voter in the South is a Democrat. Nobody pays much attention to Democrats, at least until Johnson comes along.

In this Coastal Establishment, Time Magazine has the last word on everything. Take the clout enjoyed, on today’s liberal/progressive front, by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, and even The Nation — all the periodicals on my library table — and put them into one very faintly right-wing publication, and you have Time. Smart teenagers read Time as a matter of course. (To be impressive, you have to read US News & World Report — the most boring prose in America.) Time tells you how things are.

And then there is the rift. From the very start, the rift is generational. Kids look at their parents and assume that they’re wrong — about everything. Why? Is it the music? Is it the pictures of self-immolating monks and nuns in Vietnam? Is it Johnson’s talk about civil rights? Is it — drugs?

It is all of these things, but it is something more, because the parents, if not exactly wrong, are somehow mindless. The grown-ups have stopped thinking. They sound just like the authority figures in Brave New World and 1984. They want to have a good time, and they want their kids to have the same good time, dammit. They do not like having the boat rocked just for the hell of it — they can’t imagine having a good reason to rock the boat. They don’t have much imagination at all, really, and no wonder, given their experience of the Depression and the War. They’re entitled to some peace and quiet, no?

The problem is — Communism. The Commies are out to put an end to the good life. They want to surround the United States with Commie dictatorships, so we fight back with our own Crony dictatorships. In the South, Democrats complain that Communist infiltrators are encouraging Negro activism. How seriously do comfortable Republicans in the Coastal suburbs take these complaints? Not very. But they equate Commies with boat-rockers, and boat-rockers belong behind bars. End of discussion!

But their children — people like me — see the Negro struggle in a very different light. We may not actually know any Negroes — in sad truth, this ignorance makes our virtue easy — but we think that it is wrong to forbid some people to sit down at a lunch counter. We are beginning to learn about the Holocaust, and the idea of separate drinking fountains has a terrible smell. We don’t know if the nuns and the monks in Vietnam are really Communist agitators, but we sense a lack of connection between what is going on in Vietnam — what the people there really want — and the government that the United States is increasingly seen to be propping up. By the time Johnson decides not to run for reëlection, most people like me will regard his Administration, at least its military parts, as a big fat liar. As wars go, there is something awfully wrong about the War in Vietnam. Something — stupid.

I always think of this as Time’s swan song: Now that flower children have gone to pot. That’s from the late Sixties, obviously. By then, the Coastal Establishment is broken beyond repair: people like me have seen to that. We have embraced all the social challenges, and as Nixon and Watergate and the Oil Embargo and Stagflation bring the United States to what looks like the end of the American Century, a bit ahead of time, we grow up and get advanced degrees and start running things. This is where people like me divide into two opposed camps, one of which supports Jimmy Carter while the other hates him. (The people who hate Jimmy Carter are gearing up to financialize the American economy, but Afro-Americans are welcome everywhere among us.) But that’s another story. Between us, we have trampled Eisenhower’s Republican Party — also Nelson Rockefeller’s — to death. And, whichever side of the aisle we’re on, people like me are convinced that we’ve won.

But we’ve missed something. We have taken no political account of white people who are not people like me. In a curious transvaluation of values (I don’t know what that really means), we have rendered these people politically invisible. The ones whom we see are “entertainers,” Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, just as our parents ignored Negroes who were not entertainers. We may no longer read Time Magazine, but the white people who are not people like me never could read Time. It was above their reading grade, way above. Those people were too hopped up on schnapps and NASCAR to follow politics. People like me are in fact tacitly bigoted about such people, whom we call “rednecks,” “yahoos,” and “crackers.” How nice it would be if they would all emigrate to Australia!

We hadn’t noticed — we were still a bit young at the time — that Nixon had activated a sequence of changes that would transform American politics in a way that made people like me almost irrelevant. We sort of understood why southern Democrats, feeling betrayed by Johnson, were becoming Republicans, but we didn’t know where that was going to lead. Or perhaps we simply couldn’t see where it would lead, because where it would lead was not a political possibility, in the minds of people like me. Surely racist bigotry was a thing of the past?

I don’t know where we got the idea, people like me, that we had put an end to racist bigotry. We had put an end to our parents’ short-sighted, go-along-to-get-along quietism, but our parents, with a few exceptions, were not racial bigots, or in any case were not prepared to make a fuss about their bigotry. They would retreat to their gracious country clubs and churches, places in which enthusiasm of any kind was firmly discouraged. That’s what we brought to a stop. We never had anything to do with genuine, pulsing bigotry.

So, now it’s our turn to retire. the oldest amongst us are pushing seventy. We support Hillary, not because we like her but because she has proven to be a capable executive, or we would like to support Jeb Bush. Donald Trump has grown up with us; he might have been one of us. But he was never one of us, whether because he was an insecure dreamer or a bully or both. We have laughed at Donald Trump almost all our adult lives, when we haven’t scorned him for vandalizing the Bonwit Teller signage. We have always seen Donald Trump as a rogue, and we should never let him run anything.

My mind goes back to Simon Winder’s Danubia, which I read at the end of last October. Writing of the failure of the various revolutions of 1848, Winder points out that nobody was prepared to agree on a second step: after the revolution, then what?

People like me never even saw that there was a second step. We may have stopped reading it, but we were still blinkered by the worldview of Time Magazine.

***

I wound up last week’s entry by asking a question that I never began to try to answer. Why, in The Heather Blazing, does Carmel Redmond complain, on two occasions, at the opposite ends of her married life, that her husband Éamon doesn’t tell her about himself?

You’ve always been so distant, so far away from everybody. It is so hard to know you, you let me see so little of you. I watch you sometimes and wonder if you will ever let any of us know you. (154)

What does this mean? What would be the disclosures that Carmel feels her husband has withheld? And how can she have lived with him for decades without developing a sense of who her husband really is that she can depend upon, regardless of what he says or doesn’t say?

In other words, is she “really asking,” or is she demanding some sort of ritual performance?

When I read The Heather Blazing for the first time, I took this passage, like so many others, as an evidence against Éamon, an “indictment,” so to speak; that he could not defend himself amounted to a sort of conviction. Now I wonder if, each time that I read this novel — and I certainly intend to read it again sometime — I shall find myself forgiving Éamon Redmond’s faults even more unreservedly than the last time. To me now, he seems to be an almost obstinately decent man, meaning not that he is a rebel who stands up for inconvenient principles but rather that he is determined to suffer every inconvenience — every tic of conscience — that’s required to repay the debt that he owes to those who have taken care of him, the men of Fianna Fáil. It may be clear that Éamon is a cog in a machine that has already done whatever good it could do for Ireland, and that is now doing things that are not so good. But it is not clear that this makes Éamon a bad man. And my ambivalence surprises me. I do not expect to like characters such as Éamon Redmond.

And who would be responsible for that, for my liking him? Who, now? Who would make his silences so understandable that I should like to take Carmel aside and beg her to stop demanding ritual performances? I understand that the sharing of intimacies is a fundamental aspect of human social grooming, but by Carmel’s own account it was Éamon’s resistance to such norms that made him attractive to her in the first place. And there is nothing inside Éamon that would allow him honestly to comply. There is no withheld information. Why do I believe this? Where did I get this idea?

Why do I find Éamon Redmond increasingly semblable? Is it me? Am I changing? Or is it the novel — am I reading it more clearly?

What if Colm Tóibín didn’t know what he was doing back then, twenty-odd years ago? What if he set out to paint a portrait in vitriol but didn’t have the heart for it? What if he set out, instead, to invest a character, whose outward circumstances were the opposite of his own, with his own confusions? To infuse a High Court judge with the spirit of a gay expat journalist? Or to imagine himself as a High Court judge? It is none of my business, but the question, What does Carmel want? has become something of a laugh line.

***

Tuesday 15th

The pile of books alongside my reading chair has taken one of those Jack’s-beanstalk jumps that happen every now and then when books come in all at once from several quarters. There are some new books, some books that had been in storage, a book that a neighbor lent to me on the understanding that I would (please) not give it back, and books from my own shelves. Every one, though, belongs in one train of thought or another.

Well, almost every one. George Sand’s Consuelo is there because, frankly, it is very fat. If I read it and then decided that I didn’t need to keep it, that would be a very happy outcome. I have never finished a novel by Sand, although I have begun more than a few; this is another source of pressure. Consuelo is about a Venetian singer in the Eighteenth Century; I suppose that I could attach it to the Gilbert & Sullivan train, by contrasting it, however grotesquely, with The Gondoliers, which is set in the same place and time (roughly). Both capture, or rather are captured by, that sugary cuteness that you used to be able to find in Little Italy, on horrible table lamps featuring shepherds and shepherdesses: that is how one century liked to see its predecessor. Both Consuelo and The Gondoliers rise above the level of schlock, but you have to ask what, exactly, the period setting brings to the finished artwork.

Another fat novel is John Fowles’s Daniel Martin. I am well into this somewhat hypertrophic roman à moi, in which Fowles reinvents himself as a successful writer of Hollywood screenplays. The conceit is that the book in your hand is the novel that Daniel conceives of writing about halfway through the narrative — his first. It was of course not the first for author Fowles. I ask myself, Why am I reading this for the third time? The answer seems to be that it haunts me, that I remember it as a deeply engaging book, even if I forgot lots of the details, or even the extended episode in Egypt that finishes it off. I am about to embark for the Nile, in fact, and I’m twitching with the resistance that made me put down The Adventures of Augie March when the action was on the verge of shifting to Mexico. That won’t happen here, I don’t think.

Daniel Martin haunts me for several reasons. First, it is tremendously readable, even though written by a man. Even when Fowles launches one of his aesthetic sermons, he holds your attention. His opinions are very strong, and — now, in 2016, nearly forty years after publication — sometimes thrillingly out of date. It’s hard to make sense of some of them: you have to worm your way back to that rackety decade and revisit its peculiar perspectives (anything but confident, but not very clear, either) on past and future. The dialogue is lively, too, although it is something of a joke that Fowles/Martin exhibits none of the discipline of a moviemaker. His conversations go on and on and on: you are there. If you weren’t convinced of the sincerity of Fowles’s urge to recreate life as it is lived and breathed, his garrulity would be unbearable. (There is one tic that I cannot bear. In the depths of his exchanges, which read pretty much like a script, with even less adverbial modification outside the quotation marks, Fowles will deploy someone’s name as an anchor, to remind you that someone else is the one speaking. “Oh, if only I could see it that way, Dan” — an invented example with emphasis supplied. In the thick of intimate conversations, people don’t call one another by name.) Then there are the long lyric passages, usually describing landscapes, especially the landscape of Devon. These passages are shot through with a love of Little England and the longing of the highly rational man (or of one who thinks he is) for the simple certitudes (as he imagines them to be) of peasant life. At the same time, Daniel Martin is marinated in English literature. I don’t mean that it’s full of allusions that must be caught (although it is), but rather that it seems of a piece with great books from the early days of Modern English onward. Like so many English writers of the Twentieth-Century, Fowles finds the Seventeenth expecially congenial. And you can see that he is just about willing to consider forgiving the Victorians for having — existed. In the end, I suppose you could say that Daniel Martin is the literary equivalent of a visit to Colonial Williamsburg, except of course that one was alive for part of it.

Another novel is Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, which I haven’t read before. I haven’t much to say about it yet, having penetrated no further than the first two chapters, and I don’t expect to think highly of it. Huxley, as a recent re-reading of The Devils of Loudun brought home, has not aged well. I’m reading it solely because Sybille Bedford, in Jigsaw, tells us that Huxley “borrowed” some unpleasant dramas from her own family life and recycled them here. She was horrified, when she found this out, in 1937, but by then she and the Huxleys were great chums, and Maria Huxley reminded her younger friend that her husband used everything in his novels. So the friendship was not damaged, and Bedford went on to write the authorized biography of the author of Brave New World, which book I must say that I have managed not actually to read. I’ve treated 1984 in the same way. It occurs to me that I should have seen them, if they were great movies.

Anyway, I decided to read Eyeless in Gaza, really, because it was a way of holding on to Sybille Bedford, who didn’t write enough if you ask me. I read her Jigsaw years and years ago and liked it, but I thought that it was rather queer, and I don’t mean sexually. What made it queer was the Bohemian freedom of its characters’ lives, a freedom nevertheless bound up in good manners. I was too young, I think, to hear the crystal purity of Bedford’s voice. Now that I’m old enough, I read her with avid hunger. Legacy, A Visit to Don Otavio, A Favourite of the Gods — all marvelous. And now I’ve just read The Faces of Justice: A Traveller’s Report. I quoted a passage from this the other day, but did not talk about the book. It ought to be read by every lawyer and, especially, every law student. Everywhere in Europe.

The Faces of Justice is something of a fragment. It might have been a much, much bigger book. I don’t mean that Bedford ought to have burrowed into the philosophical differences between Europe’s two great legal systems. The virtue of her writing is always that it sounds the depths from a calm surface. This is a knack that is easier to explain, in terms of Bedford’s very complicated personal background, than to describe; other writers who possess it would be Penelope Lively, though to a lesser degree, and Janet Malcolm, who seems to me to be following in Bedford’s footsteps. Both Bedford and Malcolm are fascinated by the funhouse-mirror distortions of legal procedure, and both appear to understand the whys and wherefores of everyday justice without having bothered with law school. Bedford, who became interested in trials as a very young woman in London, has a keen if unacademic awareness of, for example, the niceties of hearsay, and she is horrified by its admissibility as evidence in Continental jurisprudence. Provincially horrified, she is careful to note. If you grow up in the Anglophone legal tradition, then the courts of Germany and France (and all the rest) are going to seem frightfully inquisitorial; if you’re looking at Anglophone law from a foreign perspective, it can seem hideously infected by sporting notions that have nothing to do with right and wrong, but are instead wrapped up with that utterly untranslatable term, fairness. “Life isn’t fair,” we all console each other; but English law and it numerous offshoots all do try to correct that.

In The Faces of Justice, Bedford starts out with the way things are done in England. She attends an “ordinary” case, by which she means one in which there is no actual suspense. The dim truck driver who “converted” a shipment of apples and Gloucester cheese to his own use — that is, he stole it and sold it and used the proceeds to buy a flashy car — is obviously guilty. There is nothing to get to the bottom of. This makes the case a good teaching tool, because all the things that take place in an exciting case happen here, too, and, because there’s no mystery, it’s easier to pay attention to them. Bedford shows how the case against the driver is painstakingly made, by establishing, as if in some virtual, holographic recreation, the facts of the matter. We take this for granted; Bedford insists that we see exactly what it is that we take for granted.

Bedford also writes about “summary justice,” which is how the vast bulk of infractions are dealt with. Think of parking tickets; think “drunk and disorderly.” Think of stealing a quantity of matchbooks and a slice of cake from the back seat of a parked car, as one odd young man was caught in the middle of doing. So long as the money involved is below a certain threshold, and the penalties fall short of high fines and extensive prison terms, these cases can be handled by a magistrate, usually, in England (at least at the time of Bedford’s writing, 1960 or so), a retired barrister. Bedford runs through about two dozen matters: la comédie humaine. The salience of justice is oddly higher in magistrate’s court, perhaps because the magistrate is, within the scope of his jurisdiction, rather godlike: he is judge, jury, and counsel wrapped up in one person. And Bedford’s report demonstrates that magistrates usually, but not always, do dispense justice.

Then Bedford crosses the Channel, and visits the capital of the province in which she grew up, Karlsruhe. I didn’t know that Karlsruhe was the seat of West German justice prior to unification, a fact that is really neither here nor there in her report, which is primarily devoted to a somewhat sensational case (at the time) involving a stressed-out father who shot and killed an elderly exhibitionist who had been flashing his daughter. This is definitely not an ordinary case, but Bedford squeezes it for all that it can tell us about how things are done in Germany — how very, very differently. The jury, for example, sits alongside the judges, and together with the judges, one-man-one-vote, reaches the verdict. Nor are the members of the jury members of the public whose names are drawn out of a hat. They are what we might call stand-up citizens, people with good reputations in the town and solid balances in the bank. If there were one reform to be borrowed from Continental law, this would be my choice. I see the attraction of sporting chances as a way of leveling the field of justice, but I am not willing to extend it to a way of composing juries that permits uneducated men and women to grapple with complicated, unheard-of fact patterns. Nor do I buy the Anglophone fairy tale that juries are triers of fact but not of law.

There is a beautiful sequence of paragraphs about the Courts of Restitution. “Most of the plaintiffs are dead.” One gathers from today’s news that these courts must not have been doing a very good job, since the restoration of art (especially) to Jewish families dispossessed by the Nazis is as big a deal as ever, nearly sixty years after Bedford’s book. Her account, which is worldly and humane and as brief a can be, suggests otherwise. Grand pianos, furs, rings — it’s all being sorted out somehow. “Anyone who cares to may walk in and hear; this is the aftermath of what everybody knew, and here it is going on, in living memories. And it as grim and pitiful and unbearable as it ever was.”

The plaintiffs in such cases are represented more often than not by Jewish law firms. Once more, Jewish faces are seen in German courts; Jewish lawyers, move, speak, mix with apparent smoothness. “Morning, Herr Collegue — ” “Morning, dear sir — ” All as before? Better than before? Whatever lies behind — must lie behind — this is a daily reality. (108)

Bedford also goes to Switzerland and to France, providing a very interesting picture of the former and a more perfunctory portrait of the more-familiar French. Along the way, there is an “Austrian Interlude” that I have to read again, because it is so odd and so curiously funny: it’s as if Bedford were humming arias from an imaginary Mozart opera set to the usual Italian libretto by da Ponte, only this time starring Don Basilio.

I’ll wind up by quoting a passage or two from the Swiss section of The Faces of Justice that gave me a good laugh.

Bâle is a very rich canton. There are no poor. Private and public money is spent freely. Taxes are just and not too high. The young are well brought up. God is feared and the family is loved. Crimes against property are committed mainly by psychopaths and foreign workers. Nevertheless the summary courts do not stand idle. The Swiss appear to have a passion, almost equal to the Germans’, for dragging their private rows before the courts. Charges of slander, vilification, back-biting and evil-speaking are forever poured — not reticently — into the patient judge’s ear by waitresses, landlords, van drivers, neighbours and meddling passers-by. (153-4)

And, on the next page:

Then there came a whole group who complained of a messenger boy who would whistle at them when they went out to hang their washing in the yard. The boy said that it was his luncheon hour, and by no means at all of them.

The judge said, “That amounts to an admission, you know.” The boy laughed.

How I hated to finish this book! To make things worse, it’s a very slim reprint (by Quid Pro books, of New Orleans), so its removal from the reading pile didn’t amount to anything.

Other books: The Bad Popes, which you can be sure I’ll be telling you about; an early, and rather short, novel by Fontane that I’m never able to get quite into, whenever I pick it up — its time will come; Tom Sharpe’s Indecent Exposure, with its very indecent jacket art a book that cannot be read in public places; the first volume of Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society, which I thought might make a nice bedtime read; Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons, which I must return to or replace on the shelf; Francis Bacon’s Henry VII, a surprisingly legal history of the reign and every bit as demanding as it is interesting (and so not for bedtime); and the latest Granta. Oh — and a real threat to the stability of the book pile unless it’s at the very bottom, Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night. Soon to come, Tom Bartlett’s history of Ireland. What’s that book by Nicholson Baker? Fermata? I need that, but not for sex.

***

Thursday 17th

As I mentioned the other day, I’m reading Eyeless in Gaza, by Aldous Huxley. Discovering it, I ought to say. Discovering it in the now-official sense of reading it for the first time. But also discovering something, by means of rediscovery, something that once seemed familiar but is now amazingly ancient. That would be Huxley’s “novel of ideas” gambit. When I first read Huxley, in the early Seventies, he seemed adult and authoritative; the struggle that he had with reconciling passion with reason, the beast with the angel, was genuinely agonized, and informed by an Arnoldian study of all the best that has been thought and written. (Matthew Arnold was a collateral forebear.) Not only was Huxley not bound by European prejudices, moreoever, but he was keen to propose a third way, that of mysticism. He was greatly attracted to the dream of merging the self in the cosmos, as his two “psychedlic” books, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, attest. But for all the big ideas, Huxley now comes across as just another twentieth-century Brit dogged by irritated impatience with the limitations of his physical and psychosocial frame.

And who would not have been irritated and impatient? As I read the non-idea passages of Eyeless in Gaza, I’m reminded of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Huxley’s style is differerent (it’s not so hierophantic), but his picture of the late Victorian world of his (and Compton-Burnett’s) childhood shares a certain heavy deadliness, as if every cup of tea were laced with soul-killing toxins. Stiff and stuffy, it is a time of frowns, of discomforts (those clothes!) and dissatisfactions. I rather enjoy these bits, because it is by no means disagreeable to be reminded of Ivy Compton-Burnett if you do not actually have to read her. But one must also bear in mind that it was the experience of these buttoned-up atmospheres that made all the young men so thrilled to rush off to fight in 1914.

Owing to a childhood illness, Huxley’s eyesight was severely limited; he could not drive a car. But even had he been completely able-bodied, I doubt that, for all his loving-kindness for humanity, he should ever have been much help around the house. His clever but devoted wife, née Maria Nys, managed everything for him. I have to wonder, though, if she proof-read Eyeless in Gaza. I am certain that, had she had a look at it, Sybille Bedford would have complained about the following:

One isn’t lazy about what one loves. The problem is: how to love? (Once more the word is suspect — greasy from being fingered by generations of Stigginses. There ought to be some way of dry-cleaning and disinfecting words. Love, purity, goodness, spirit — a pile of dirty linen waiting for the laundress. How, then, to — not “love,” since it’s an unwashed handkerchief — feel, say, persistent affectionate interest in people? How to make the anthropogical approach to them…? Not easy to answer. (11)

You will be wondering who the Stigginses are. So was I. A light search revealed a learned-looking text in which the Stigginses were grouped with those oleaginous religious pooh-bahs, Austen’s Mr Collins and Trollope’s Obadiah Slope. I think that we can leave it there for the moment.

My concern for the Stigginses evaporated the moment I came across “dry-cleaning” and then “disinfecting.” What was wrong with “laundering,” I objected? Why introduce all those chemicals to the problem of eliminating adulterants? And then came the “dirty linen,” followed quickly by the “laundress.” My jaw fell; I didn’t know where to begin. With “laundress,” of course, Huxley inadvertently acknowledged my objection, but was he aware that laundresses do not oversee the dry-cleaning process? Most of all, did Huxley know that linen is not usually dry-cleaned? Laundering does not degrade linen, as it does, say, wool. All textiles wear out eventually, and cleaning processes of any kind hasten deterioration, but laundering makes linen soft and supple long before it frays it.

Aside from this domestic incongruity, there is the sheerly literary awkwardness of bringing together a snazzy new technology — the replacement of chlorinated for petroleum-based solvents made dry-cleaning much safer in the 1930s — and a venerable (if “unmentionable”) conceit, used by Voltaire if not earlier.

Finally, there is the confusion of following the mention of the laundress and the “pile of dirty linen” with the suggestion that laundry isn’t possible: love, that “unwashed handkerchief,” must be discarded. For Huxley is indeed assuming that there is no way to dry-clean, disinfect, or even launder words that have been soiled by overuse. I make no such assumption. I believe that you can nurse weakened words back to health by using them sparingly and deliberately, and exhorting others to do the same.

I reject, furthermore, the notion that human beings constitute a jumble of paradoxes and design flaws. They are not fallen angels. (There are no angels.) Nor is it intelligent to regard them as highly-gifted animals, because those differentiating gifts are so extraordinary that to overlook them in the search for a common nature is to commit a category mistake. We are what we are, and if we’re confused so much of the time, that is because we can create things that we don’t really understand. (Consider the smartphone.) We are perhaps too fond of keeping our options open, but then, having any options at all is a rather recent development in human history. Why should we be good at it?

“One isn’t lazy about what one loves.” What is that pearl of wisdom supposed to mean? Also: says who? “The problem is: how to love?” Is Huxley looking for a manual? I throw up my hands: men! Dry-cleaning the linen, indeed. Maria Huxley, we’re assured by Sybille Bedford, was a very busy woman.

***

The strangest feeling overcame me as I typed out Huxley’s words: the awful recognition that it was with this sort of twaddle that I filled volume after volume of my youthful journals. Anthony Beavis, the Eyeless in Gaza character whose diary the passage comes from, writes better and more coherently than I did, but the emptiness of the activity is the same. The problem with asking how to love? within the confines of a page in a book at a desk in a room that hardly anyone will ever see — nay, that one will almost certainly never revisit — is that talk of love makes no sense in solitude. Talk of love in general terms is never more than decorative. Love is a state that exists, with highly varying qualia, only between actual human beings. You cannot talk about love without having at least one other specific person in mind. How to love my wife after ten years of marriage? How to love someone from the other side of the tracks? How to love my parents? How to love this beautiful woman who has nothing to say? How not to love the guy who beats me up?

Like Aldous Huxley, I grew up in an affluent world of superficially similar people. Experience was both narrow and universal. It’s no wonder that, when we took up our journals, we assumed that we knew everything that there was to know about the world, except how to bear it. Being intelligent above the common run (the common run of this affluent world, that is), we set out to imitate the philosophers: we would work out the big problems by writing about them. Eventually, I realized that I was treading water in a limitless sea of verbiage. Huxley, more bold perhaps, polished his ratiocinations into books. His answer to the question of love was to be the devoted recipient of Maria’s care, while indulging in affairs with other women. I’ll bet that there were times when Maria Huxley wanted to send Aldous to the dry-cleaner’s.

***

My persistent cold, which seems to be a vast subterranean network of roots that now and then puts up mushrooms of congestion and misery, brought me low on Tuesday, but relief was at hand. 15 March was the release date for the videos of Brooklyn and The Big Short, and Amazon contrived to put the DVDs in my hands just after lunch. So I watched one and then the other. Brooklyn first, of course — and a good choice it was, too, to reserve The Big Short for second, because I lost about five pounds in salty tears watching Brooklyn and might well gone on weeping without something acerbic to change my tune. Both films are remarkable, but I don’t want to say much more than that right now, because yesterday —

Yesterday, I walked by the Video Room on my way home from the dermatologist. Or rather, I walked in, and then walked out with a copy of Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, which I watched as soon as I got home. During the years when I went to the movies almost every Friday, I should probably have seen Steve Jobs in the theatre, because if you go every week you have to sit through more than a few good films that are nevertheless not, at least in advance, compelling. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m trying to determine whether Steve Jobs is compelling — compelling enough to add to my library. Will I watch it again? Well, yes; I’d like to. But after the third time, would I be done with it? I can’t tell. The film has all the morbid attraction of a highway accident. You look for bodies. And you think, this man will die in 2011. But you also wonder: what is this movie about?

Steve Jobs asks you to look forward and backward. It moves forward, jumping from product presentations in 1984, 1988, and 1998, while jumping back to a few earlier moments in time. The formula is a Hollywood ancient, a sort of triple-play backstager: the moment Jobs (Michael Fassbender) walks onstage to pitch the latest marvel, the screen garbles or fades to black and we move on, for another twenty or thirty minutes of pre-game drama. Each time, Jobs has to confront three antagonists: Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), the computer engineer who actually designed the first Apple products; Lisa, the daughter whom he is so reluctant to recognize (played by three actresses over time, with Katherine Waterston appearing as her mother in 1984 and 1988); and John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the professional executive whom Jobs hired and who fired Jobs. At Jobs’s side throughout is Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet). It is unclear what her job is, but she is clearly the only person who can make Steve Jobs do things that he doesn’t want to do. With good-hearted opportunism, Hoffman will play whatever role the situation requires, from dutiful personal assistant to stern grandmother. Kate Winslet must have had a ball, and at least she won at the Golden Globes.

With Wozniak and Lisa, Jobs is challenged by the demand that he settle old scores. It is with Scully that Jobs himself is the subject of the discussion. Scully, evidently a father figure of sorts at the beginning of his relationship with Jobs, is particularly interested in Jobs’s way of dealing with his adoption — by far the richest story line unspooled in this film, and I think that I can say that even though I had every reason, as an adopted person, to find it the most interesting part of Steve Jobs. Scully asks, “Why did you feel rejected? Why didn’t you feel selected?” Ha. I might say that I could write a book about that question, but it will probably be nothing longer than a chapter. The answer in Jobs’s case turns out to have been chilling: he was selected and rejected. Because his birth mother contested his placement with the Jobs family, his adoptive mother withheld her unqualified love, lest the child be taken away and her heart broken. That certainly explains a lot.

It explains a lot of Steve Jobs’s legendary indifference to the feelings of others. But why, really, do we care? By the time he died, Steve Jobs was famous for inventions that are only hinted at, and only once, in Danny Boyle’s movie. The Mac, NeXT, and the iMac have been consigned to the museum of technology. The Power Books and the portable devices that are so much with us are yet to come when the movie ends. I suspect that keeping these familiar products offscreen is part of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s strategy for likening Steve Jobs to a rock star, a man who got onstage and killed the people. The movie leaves us all aware that the best is yet to come. And the final episode, set in 1998, seems to wrap up the squabbles. Scully is at peace, Lisa realizes that her father really does love her (a Rosebud moment), and Wozniak walks away, disappointed, presumably forever. Clear sailing ahead for Steve! Aside from the liver problem, that is.

“I play the orchestra,” Jobs tells Wozniak at the second encounter. They are standing in the pit at the San Francisco Opera, and Jobs credits the remark to Seiji Ozawa, who conducted in San Francisco for years but also appeared regularly at Tanglewood, which is where Jobs says Ozawa explained the conductor’s job — what, to be precise, distinguishes a conductor from a metronome. I should like to see a movie that explores this conceit, for it seems to be the one really interesting thing about Steve Jobs, more interesting by far than the innovations that he oversaw. As Wozniak sneeringly implies, Jobs was not really a “computer person.” He never learned how to make computers, or to make them do any particular thing. But he knew how to talk to the people who could do these things. He was, in a sense, the ideal customer, ideal not from the fabricator’s point of view (hardly that) but as a customer. He could have anything that he wanted, anything that he could dream up. As I see it, this virtually godlike power would play a much greater role in setting up the “reality distortion field” that Jobs was said (by Hoffman?) to inhabit than any adoption traumas.

What made Steve Jobs so interesting? It can’t have been bad behavior merely. Everyone knows who Bill Gates is, but I suspect that far fewer people know about his privileged background than know about Jobs’s more troubled one. Gates is gifted and clever, more knowledgeable than Jobs about the tech side and far cannier about business. But this extraordinary superstructure seems to rest upon the foundation of an ordinary guy. Steve Jobs’s foundation was daemonic: he vibrated, or so it seems, at superhuman frequencies.

If I am not a computer person myself, I am especially not an Apple person. I have an iPhone for one reason only: it facilitates FaceTime visits with my family in San Francisco. (My family is, decidedly, Apple people.) I no longer have in iPad; indeed, I have two tablets but rarely use either. And I do use the phone almost exclusively as a phone. The odd text; checking the weather — that’s it for me. I spend a lot of time at a computer with three screens. That is “work.” The rest of the time, I’m not connected. Perhaps I’m too old. I gave it a try, the new, seamless way of living, and decided that it was not a good thing for me. I treasure my traditional private life, a life that is spent apart, with family and friends, or alone. I don’t want, in the words of an infamous ad campaign, to make the world my living room. I think that it’s a mistake to conduct your private life in public, to text absent friends while dining with present ones. There is a terrible confusion here that I expect future generations will sort out. Since I probably won’t live that long, the experiment doesn’t interest me.

Although Steve Jobs isn’t the movie that I’d like to see about this remarkable man, it shows, with a lurid fascination, a way of being private at all times. Horrifying!

***

Friday 18th

As I was reading along in Eyeless in Gaza, I came across a line of German poetry that, without thinking, I rattled off with passable fluency. Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss [sic]. I could even sing it. (Mahler’s version; I can never recall the Liszt, although it is very beautiful.) I knew that the verse was Goethe, from the second part of Faust. But what did it mean? I really hadn’t the foggiest. Something about illusion. I looked up the words in the dictionary, but that got me nowhere. In a Wikipedia page on Liszt’s Faust Symphony (Mahler used the same chunk of sublimity at the end of his Eighth Symphony, the “Symphony of a Thousand”), the line is translated thus: “Everything transitory is only an allegory.” I don’t know; you tell me. The stanza ends with the equally inexplicable bit about how the Eternal Feminine draws us upward. It’s all very beautiful in German; it might be beautiful in any foreign language. But never, oh never, in English.

I had to set Eyeless in Gaza aside; its pretentiousness was keeping me awake. I turned to Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society, which is far more readable than Huxley’s novel. I keep waiting for it to become dry in the French manner, but it never does. I believe that I can actually date the purchase of this two-volume history to 1995, and even to a particular bookstore: the Quill, in Northampton, Massachusetts. I was there with Kathleen, apparently the only husband that an alumna of the a capella group, the Smithereens, thought to bring along to its first reunion (marking its fiftieth). I loved the Quill and bought quite a few books there.

I was also, at the time, getting serious about understanding “the Middle Ages.” Somewhere around that time, I acquired Susan Reynolds’s Fiefs and Vassals, a book which argues that there never really was a feudal period, strictly speaking; feudal concepts, in Reynolds’s view, were elaborated by lawyers in Northern Italy just as the need for feudal arrangements — knight service and all that — was beginning to die down. If this sounds strange to you, or somewhat perverse, the reason for the lawyers’ interest was their clients’ desire to nail down property rights that, owing to very poor record-keeping in earlier centuries, were not very clear. I believe that Reynolds is quite right. The lawyers were only doing what historians have done ever since: they were imposing a retrospective coherency.

Does this mean that Marc Bloch was wrong to take “the feudal society” seriously enough to investigate its workings in five hundred pages of small print? I’ll see, won’t I. Meanwhile, I was struck by something that Bloch points out on page 75 of the Chicago paperback. Alone in Europe, England governed itself in its own language, Anglo-Saxon or Old English. It is true that this came to an end with the Conquest, after which everything was in Latin for a while; what Bloch neglects to mention is that Latin, the official language on the Continent until well into the Renaissance, did not take hold in England for very long. A hundred years after the Conquest, a good deal of legal business was being done in Norman French. Consider the names of two of Henry II’s most notable possessory writs (real-estate claims), Mortdancestor and Novel Disseisin. Two centuries later, “law French” was firmly established as the language of English courts. I’ve never been able to figure out quite when it was abandoned, but I suspect that the use of law French (aside from references, quips, and quotes) did not survive the tumult of the Wars of the Roses. I have always loved the transitional judgment, concerning the law of nuisance (of all things): “Le noisomeness de le stench est plus que l’utilite de la use.”

Norman French transformed Anglo Saxon from a harsh Teutonic dialect into something vastly more sophisticated, a language, in my view, without a counterpart anywhere else. The French is not a dressing; it goes much deeper than that. It pervades English so extensively that there are rhythmic safeguards that prevent its taking over. In Chaucer, you can still see the French bits, which stick out plentifully. By Shakespeare’s time, French elements are so naturalized that many of them don’t seem foreign even to us, reading centuries later. We have two words in English for many ordinary things, and a great part of any writer’s style is his or her peculiar weave of Teutonic and Latinate words and phrases. English remains a Teutonic language, but only because it isn’t anything else; to describe its difference from other European languages, I should borrow an image from geology and call it metamorphic rather than sedimentary.

Geography is destiny: England owes its peculiarities to its isola-tion. Its language and its institutions have evolved without serious interruption for nearly a thousand years. This cannot be said of any other European country. At the very least, almost all the nations of the Continent were overhauled by Napoleon’s conquests; no matter how reactionary the government of any country might be thereafter, its leaders were afflicted by the need to reform and to streamline. The threat of revolution was always at hand, and often realized. England reformed, too, of course, but never dramatically. In 1832, the franchise was extended, and Parliamentary seats were more genuinely representative of populations; further reforms continued this trend. But Parliament remained Parliament, and the Prime Minister continued to be the head of the leading Parliamentary party. Nobody tinkered with the idea of installing a popularly-elected president. Nobody has. In the 1920s, the legal system was overhauled, but in a backstage manner; the leading players in a trial still wear wigs. England has a knack for changing the foundations while leaving appearances intact; on the Continent, it is just the other way round.

From these cloudy ruminations I draw an explanation for a curious phenomenon: the English are much better at narrative history than anybody else, and English history has a wider, general readership. It is not entirely a scholarly enterprise, and it is not aimed altogether at students. Why? Because English history is so pleasingly continuous, or at least it seemed to be in the Nineteenth Century, when modern traditions of writing history were germinated. It is only recently, with the depressive “realization” that Britain is no longer a superpower, and not a genuine partner of the United States in some “special relationship,” that the glum view of John Le Carré has taken hold. I don’t mean to complain, or to advocate waving flags, but only to say that English historiography was born in a climate of extreme self-satisfaction. Since the overarching story was so magnificent — a monarchy that knew how to relinquish control (as if), an empire upon which the sun never set (and whose books might be regarded as having been cooked by said sun), and a political system that was as free and open to all as Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club — there could be no harm in chuckling now and then at the nation’s dependence on muddling through. Indeed, the moral of English history seems to be, Whatever you do, don’t use your head. Just tell us what really happened.

After all, everything transitory is only an allegory. <?>

***

While Huxley resorts to German, his admirer Sybille Bedford turns to French. Understandably: she spent most of her young life (if not her childhood) in France. Specifically, however, she turns to Racine, to a line from Phèdre to be precise. I have a distinct recollection of her doing so in Jigsaw but did not make a note of it. In The Faces of Justice, it occurs on page 157 of the Quid Pro edition. This is the beginning of a short but intriguing chapter about the daughter of a great French industrial fortune, a woman denied her inheritance by her brothers because she has neither married nor remained at home (“feudal society” still at work, circa 1960). This lady, whom Bedford calls Mlle Z, has come to Switzerland to try to recoup some bonds held there in her late father’s account. Bedford adapts Racine to describe this would-be heiress as “la province française entière à son but attachée.” I won’t translate this, because I’d just have to translate the translation, but the inspiration for the quip is Phèdre’s statement of the fatal nature of her attachment to Hyppolite.

Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée:
C’est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée. (I, iii)

The image of Venus as a raptor, gripping her prey (Phèdre), is something that I have not encountered anywhere else in art — which may be proof that I don’t get around enough. Without being graphic, the line conjures flesh punctured by talons: it’s all in the sytax, which puts the prey before the “attachment.” Bedford’s borrowed plumes don’t quite sit atop Mlle Z’s head, however; far from French Provincial, Mlle Z appears to be somewhat bohemian. What seems to fuel the jest is Mlle Z’s inability to afford Parisian chic.

***

I am in the middle of watching a Nederlander film, Oorlogsgeheimen (Secrets of War, 2014). I picked it up at the Video Room the other day, thinking that it might be good to listen to some Nederlands. Actually, I am near the climax of the film. I had to turn it off last night, because Kathleen was still out, having dinner with a client, and I hadn’t heard from her. I was very worked up. Imagine a Mark Twain boy’s-own-adventure story, but with Nazis. Nazis rounding people up and putting them in cattle cars — that sort of thing. The movie is set in a Catholic village near Maastricht. Two boys, Lambert and Tuur, are best friends. But Lambert’s father is a collaborator, and Tuur’s father is in the Resistance. Tuur has a demented old auntie who speaks her incontinent mind, which is not full of warm thoughts about “Krauts.” Tuur himself has trouble keeping his voice down. He’s somewhere between ten and twelve, I’d say, and the War is very exciting for him. He likes having to run to the bomb shelter — he actually smiles when the ground shakes. That’s at the beginning of the film. One day, a new girl is introduced to the class, and unless your brain is a turnip you see at once that she is Jewish. Inevitably, she sets up a rivalry between the two friends, and at the moment when I had to stop watching, it seemed that Lambert’s jealousy might well bring ruin and worse to the girl and to Tuur and his family. I shall find out presently. The movie is exciting because it keeps the tempo of boy’s life, with slack longueurs punctuated by attacks of frenzy. It is very clear to the adult viewer that Tuur has no idea how dangerous the Nazi officers really are; his parents have tried to protect him from their terror. To no avail, of course. The comic-book pace of the action is horribly ironic: this is no action story.

Bon week-end à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2016 at 2:14 pm.