Tuesday 22nd

It took longer than it ought to have done to figure out that taking a certain cold-remedy capsule shortly before bedtime was a bad idea. It didn’t occur to me until half an hour after I took one on Sunday night. What followed was not fun. I was still dozing, unaware of having had any sleep, the next morning. That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was what I shall call an irritated bladder.

Between the cold and the insomnia, I got out of bed feeling that, behind my forehead, my skull contained nothing but low-grade concrete. I got through the day largely by foregoing any attempt at thought. I had to shop for a couple of dinners, and I had to prepare one of them. A very old friend who teaches law in Honolulu, and who doesn’t visit the East Coast as often as she used to do, was in town, and I wanted to try out my Tetrazzini on an important guest. Chicken Tetrazzini turns out to be a very good dish for the cook with diminished capacities: it is all about reduction, and the only halfway demanding part is the slicing of a lot of mushrooms. I never got round to mincing the fresh tarragon leaves, but perhaps they would have been de trop. Our friend very nicely asked for seconds.

We talked about many things, but there was one protracted conversation about writing that remained with me. We were talking about student writing, which is often surprisingly terrible, and always has been. Whenever this subject comes up, I’m reminded of Dr Johnson’s insistence that boys wouldn’t learn Latin unless it were flogged into them. Now, neither Kathleen nor I ever had problems writing. A Brearley teacher once wrote on a paper of Kathleen’s, “You write so well that it’s a pity that you have nothing to say.” My first paper at Blair — a bluff on The Iceman Cometh, which I hadn’t read — was dismissed as “a tissue of circumlocutions.” These are lessons that you need endure only once; perhaps it would be better to say they need to be taught only once. Students whose fluency is initially vacant will blush for shame but grasp the problem pretty quickly. Students for whom writing a three-page piece of expository prose is an exercise in pulling teeth without anaesthesia present a much more intractable problem.

When students who “can’t write” turn up in freshman college courses, or, worse, in law school, teachers tear their hair and wonder how such students have “gotten this far” without learning the rudiments of outlines and topic sentences earlier in their academic career. It has always seemed a deplorable mystery to me, a matter of high-school teachers inexplicably not doing their jobs. Last night as we talked, though, I saw things from the high-school teacher’s point of view. High-school teachers are overworked and underpaid. How realistic is it to expect them to make soup from stones?

Is it any wonder that a teacher confronted with twenty-five or more papers to grade will begin to overlook purely literary failings? If the teacher has assigned a certain theme, then the teacher will know what the student is trying to talk about. Has the student grappled with the theme? Is there evidence of learning in the contents of the paper? The fundamentally literary problem posed by the general reader, who needs to be agreeably introduced to the subject matter and persuaded to read what the writer has to say about it, might well begin to seem somewhat beyond the scope of the immediate assignment, or perhaps simply beyond the imaginative range of the student, who would not be writing (or reading) at all unless required to do so. What are you asking me to do? the student wails. The answer ought to give everyone pause: I am asking you to want to communicate in writing. Because effective writing does not occur without that desire. To what extent is wanting to write a skill that can be taught and mastered?

I still have a few of the letters that my father wrote to me, mostly during my teens. They are crisp and stern, but they are also scrupulously literate. To me, it seemed that he wrote easily, but he assured me that this was not so. No, he said; “You should be a lawyer, because you can write.” Oh for the days of the party of the third part.

It was bliss to wake up this morning, hours and hours and hours after last registering awareness of the time.

***

In my adult life, I have often feared political candidates whose policies were wrong-headed or worse, but now for the first time I am fearing not the politician, not the Donald, but my fellow citizens, his supporters. Whatever happens in this election cycle, Donald Trump has opened a putrefying abscess on the body politic. The growth of this abscess is of course none of his doing; ever since the Cold War persuaded the nation’s leaders that it was all right to lie to the voters and to misrepresent issues for the national good, Americans have been living in a sort of Disney World of fictions and unrealities. So long as we were prosperous, grateful Americans could afford the pretense of magnanimity, but, now that there is little to be grateful for, the sham is obvious to those who fell for it. They not unreasonably feel that they’ve been made fools of, and they’re mad as hell. What if these angry people coalesce into a political body capable of sweeping away the leaders who have lied to and taken advantage of them? What if the poisons of the abscess pass into the nation’s blood stream?

For that is how the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Everybody thinks, Hitler this and Hitler that. But Hitler, like Donald Trump, was merely an enabler. Sure, he looked like a dictator, he ordered and commanded. But he was only ordering and commanding what many Germans already wanted, and that is the problem, their already wanting it. Without that, there would have been no calamity, no Holocaust. Being high-minded and liberal no longer seemed worth the effort to Germans whose fortunes had dwindled after the economic chaos of the 1920s. They did not have to be persuaded that the victors of 1918 were wrongly punishing them with massive indemnities. (After all: what victors? World War I ended with a truce.) They did not have to be cajoled into imagining a return of Germany’s imperial power. The persecution of the Jews aside, the Nazi program for Germany was a happiness project, and it’s no wonder that so many Western observers were positively impressed, at least at first.

It has become horribly easy to imagine that the United States is on the threshold of a repeat performance. When I began keeping a Web site, I believed that it was not altogether useless to consider the mistakes and failures of leaders, with a view to avoiding both in future. It arguably remains useful. But, for the first time, I wonder if it is not actually, definitely, too late for secular improvements.

It has been pointed out, by Ross Douthat and others, that Paul Ryan could put an immediate stop to Trump’s juggernaut if he could only bring himself to repudiate the fustian economic policies that, surely, he can no longer take seriously. If he would set aside the free-trade, tax-cut nostrums of the Republican Party establishment, if he would acknowledge that Trump is right about a lot of economic issues, then faith in the GOP might be restored sufficiently to permit Party leaders to nominate the next candidate. The point of this exercise would be that, having come clean about economic fiddle-faddle, the Republicans could call a halt to Trump’s social demagoguery, much as an Eisenhower would have wanted to do, however indirectly. But this seems to be beyond the imaginative powers of today’s leading Republicans. They are more committed to an ideological program (one that increasingly seems to make no real-world sense, except for plutocrats) than they are to leadership or power. They are determined to honor their parents, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Martha Howell reviews a new book about Jacob Fugger, the Augsburg financier who flourished around the turn of the Sixteenth Century. Although Howell finds many faults in Greg Steinmetz’s mercantile biography, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, she thanks the author for making one thing crystal clear: large-scale capitalism depends upon state support. In Fugger’s case, bad loans to European rulers might be offset by commodity monopolies that were in the gift of those rulers. One does not have to think very widely to enumerate examples of state support for American capitalism: consider the gift, to private investors in a very wide range of transport enterprises, of publicly built and maintained highways and airports. Nor should countless tiny but lucrative amendments to state and federal legislation be overlooked: ostensibly neutral in their wording, their application will benefit particular, if unnamed, businesses. Consider the Black Hole of “Defense spending.” And yet none of this stops right-wing politicians from demanding that the government get out of business’s way. Eventually, someone — we’ve had the bad luck to draw Donald Trump — will come along to tell the losers whom he promises to make winners that the Establishment is wearing no clothes: policy and actuality have canceled one another out.

The cover story in the current issue of Harper’s is Dan Baum’s call to stop the War on Drugs, and I urge everyone to read it, and not only because it begins with a cynical confession by John Ehrlichman that makes Nixon’s Southern Strategy look ingenuous. Baum rightly devotes his most urgent discussion to the problem of regulating drugs after the current prohibitions have come to an end. But this discussion is blinkered by a common binary prejudice: the production and sale of drugs will be overseen and operated by businesses or by the government (or by some combination of the two). He does not consider the third possibility, which is the not-for-profit entity. Not-for-profits aren’t given the thought they deserve, perhaps because they’re neither potential jackpots nor implements of public virtue. Indeed, that is their advantage: they steer between the Scylla of political patronage and the Charybdis of greedy disregard.

The not-for-profit asks us to be clear about what we mean by the word “capitalism.” Do we mean enterprises that support themselves and plow surpluses into the maintenance and expansion of enterprise assets, as well as paying truly decent wages and remunerating executives with significant salaries? If so, then not-for-profits are as capitalist as anything. If, however, we mean enterprises that create earning opportunities for passive investors, pouring money not necessarily earned by the company’s stated business into the pockets of those investors (who have done nothing but contribute money) instead of into the company’s coffers, then not-for-profits begin to look “socialist.” But they are not socialist, because they are not controlled by politicians or government officials, all of whom might also have interests that cannot be served if the company sticks to its business.

The more I think about it, the more apt the not-for-profit seems to be for most commercial enterprises, especially those that people do not regard as primarily commercial at all, such as housing and utilities. I have said this many times before, but I am always looking for a better and more effective way of saying it. I’m also looking for contexts that point up the attractions of the not-for-profit. Whenever I think of Donald Trump and his “deals,” I consider how different our economy would look if not-for-profits ran the bulk of American businesses. There would be little room for the Donald in it.

For-profit capitalism has an important role in the economy: it is, demonstrably, the most effective engine of innovation. The development of innovative businesses is, needless to say, highly speculative, and investors in successful innovations ought to be rewarded for running substantial risks. But no enterprise remains innovative, and that is not a bad thing at all. Innovation comes to a stop the moment it finds a stable place in the economy. Once that happens, “innovation” becomes “improvement,” in a business that is no longer fighting for its life. To pick an historical example, landline telephones ceased to be innovative when they were installed in a great number of American homes and businesses. (And, as if to prove my point, the mature AT&T was opposed to most innovations, as anyone who tried to get a new phone jack installed will recall.) Another test of the moment when innovation cedes to improvement is passed when it becomes plausible for an enterprise to raise capital by issuing debt.

It may be too late for any of these ideas to stop Donald Trump’s insurrection (for that is what it is), but even that nightmare will not last forever. Adolf Hitler was such an idiot that his régime burned itself to a crisp after only twelve years of power. Twelve years ago, George W Bush was finishing his first term. It is in everybody’s interest to hope that Donald Trump is as wild and crazy as he seems.

***

Wednesday 23rd

In the afternoons, I generally stay away from the computer. Sometimes, I’ll sit down and write a letter. But I’ve altogether broken the habit, if it ever was one, of looking online for something interesting. So I generally miss late-breaking news. I didn’t hear about the Brussels attacks until Kathleen told me, when she got home at about nine last night.

To me, these attacks — and the very existence of ISIS — are the fruit of the Western élite’s contempt for the people of Islam. The people of Islam are, after all, generally poor (when they’re not crooks), and they don’t share our ideas about education in the humanities. They’re as either overlooked or looked down upon as Donald Trump’s supporters were, as such, until Trump dispensed with dog whistles and began discussing his issues explicitly. That he found an enthusiastic audience for his bigotry marks a colossal failure for the American élite, just as the emergence of jihadists in Europe represents the failure of a long-term policy of allowing immigrants from North Africa and elsewhere in the Islamic world to fester in hopeless housing projects. The attacks in Brussels also represent the failure of Belgium as a nation. I call these developments failures because no liberal democracy can afford them. The fact that Republican electoral strategies were intentional, that middle-class short-sightedness was actively encouraged, does not make those strategies anything but a failure for the American body politic.

How did so many smart people screw up so badly? I attribute much of the half-baked quality of our social reforms since World War II to the masculine desire to get things done, which sometimes does actually get things done, but which more often seems hasty about announcing achievements prematurely. You pass a few bills — big success! You appoint a member of some minority to a top job — mission accomplished! The masculine way of getting things done is commendable where the results are material (new buildings and roadways) but almost regrettable when it comes to abstractions, such as civil rights. Putting an end to the egregious and visible signs of discrimination does not mean that the impulse to discriminate has been vanquished.

A major weakness of liberal democracy is that it is abstract. Or rather that it remains abstract, and somewhat unreal, for too many ordinary people. Now, there are some people without educations but with religious convictions who “get” liberal democracy without having to think much about it: more than any other form of government — perhaps it would be better to say, alone among forms of government — liberal democracy attempts to realize the Christian belief that all people, being equal in the sight of God, ought to be equal in the sight of men as well. A corollary of this equality, routinely dismissed by every kind of self-appointed authority, holds that no one is in a position to tell anyone else what to do. If these views are part of your spiritual anatomy, then you don’t need a four-year college to steep you in liberal values.

Unfortunately, this conviction is rare. Even worse, the liberal outlook, with is emphasis on freedom, is always somewhat more comfortable with laissez faire ideas than is healthy. Laissez faire would not be a problem in a population of highly-educated men and women. Highly-educated people know right away when their toes have been stepped on, and they can see who has done the stepping. They are in a position to lodge effective complaints. It’s the impact of laissez faire policies on the uneducated that’s the problem. Uneducated people are aware that they’ve been wronged, but they’re not sure about who has done the harm, and they are rather easily misled, at least for a time, by demagogues. Their often misdirected complaints go unredressed. With our dense network of federal and state regulatory agencies, we’re disinclined to see laissez faire as a likely problem, but in fact the concept of “free-market economics,” the juggernaut that has dragged behind it the financialization of markets and the globalization, not of trade, but of labor, is laissez faire in spades.

As I have said many times before, the failure of Western élites has been an unwillingness to communicate liberal values to the uneducated. Élites prefer to announce them, in rulings and legislation and campaign slogans. These are not forms of communication, and they feel like bullying. This is the big problem with Hillary Clinton. She will wonkily master the nuts and bolts of a problem, and then explain it in terms that make sense to people who may not have gone to a college as superior as Wellesley but who have been trained to imagine abstractions into reality. She has nothing to say to voters who lack this intellectual training, which is necessary if social problems are to be fully grasped. She has a hard time concealing her impatience with them. People like me may not like her very much, but we can agree that she’s the best of the bunch. Ordinary people lack the intelligence to judge her good qualities; they see only the bully.

How to deal with the lack of intelligence of ordinary people is a big problem that’s made even bigger by the persistent screw-ups of the élites. But they happen to be one and the same problem. The screw-ups are almost always failures to enlighten uneducated voters, to show people who have not been trained to deal with abstractions why the principles of liberal democracy are so important for us all. This would be a great job for our media, if our media were at all genuinely public-spirited. It is perhaps in our media, across the West, that we are screwing up most badly. It is not that our media tell lies. It’s rather that their way of presentation is a lie: media presenters affect a neutrality and even an innocence that they cannot feel. Television reporters pretend to be shocked by terrorism, for example; they behave as if they, too, were victims. They pretend to be as bewildered by the underlying causes of terrorism, which anyone with an education can see as clearly as the sun in the sky, as most of their viewers really are. Now, I do not mean to suggest that media people are any closer to a solution to those underlying causes — unemployment, first of all; cultural disaffection that is all but stoked by majoritarian contempt and official condescension; nostalgia and sentimentality that spoil in isolation; adolescent restlessness — but the harm is done by the appearance of cluelessness. If the media are clueless, then the causes of terrorism must be inexplicably evil. But the media are not clueless. There is just too much that they find it inconvenient — boring? — to say in front of the camera.

Worst of all, media people pretend that education is not really necessary. Anybody with good reflexes can bone up on a lot of facts and slam winning buttons.

***

I have entered the final, Egyptian phase of Daniel Martin. I ought to be speaking from experience, having read the book twice before, but in fact I had to skim the final pages to find out how close to the end the return to London was set. I can’t believe that I’ve come this far, over five hundred pages, without getting tired of the book’s obvious faults, which generally fall under one of two headings: endless stretches of dialogue that are often quite as deprived of literary interest as a tennis match; or authorial musings on gender issues that have gone rancid over the years. In this latter regard, it’s as though The Collector were John Fowles’s touchstone novel: his men do like women, a lot, but the question is whether women like being liked by his men? Well, of course they do; Fowles is writing the novels, after all. Except for that first case, where the woman tries to escape. For my part, I read Martin’s thoughts about women and so forth as historical curiosities, even though I know that most men still probably think that way. Martin’s bland self-assurance, at least, seems no longer sustainable.

In fact, I can’t say what is attractive about Daniel Martin. It owes a great deal to the novelist’s ability to present his hero as a creature who inhabits the world. I’d prefer to avoid talking of Daniel Martin as an animal, because he does so himself, always with respect to carnal desire. I find this idea, that it’s the animal in us that makes sex so compelling, slightly laughable, because for actual non-human animals sex is an endurance test that is undergone only very occasionally. Animals are more on the lookout for dinner, but you will not find Daniel Martin talking much about food. He does, however, inhabit the landscape of Devon, almost in spite of his descriptions. In his very green corner of England, Daniel goes shamanically green himself. (He does also make some curious remarks about Robin Hood.)

Egypt, of course, is not green. But it does have the Nile, which has already (by the point I’ve reached) been described as “pearly gray.” Cruising the Nile is like taking a train: you board a movable shelter that could be anywhere, and then travel through a peculiar landscape, only occasionally, however, setting foot in it. This is what the Nile means in literature (as opposed, say, to what it means in Egyptian agronomy). You steam up and down the river, and hope that the adventures will be manageable. You compare the slightly boring tranquility all around you with the hustle and bustle back home; you reflect that the Nile has been doing its thing for x long time. You study your companions, who bristle with far more points of interest than the riverbanks. You comment on the quality of the wining and dining. As an important part of the Nile trope, you’re involved in some complicated, problematic sort of romance.

I can’t remember a thing about how John Fowles plays this hand. Daniel and Jane are still in Cairo. They’ve just been to a good dinner party at which some very funny jokes have been told by a professional comedian. The jokes are still quite sharp and funny. Here’s the first:

They find a stone statue of a pharaoh at Luxor. The inscriptions are indecipherable, the archaeologists are at a loss as to who it is. The statue is brought to Cairo and cleaned, but still the experts are baffled. At last a secret policeman asks if he can see it. He is taken to the room, he goes in and locks the door. An hour later he comes out pulling his coat on and wiping the sweat from his forehead.

“It’s okay,” he says. “He confessed.” (523)

The sad thing about this is that what used to be an Egyptian joke is now a TSA joke.

***

The lobby just called to tell me that a “delivery” was on its way up. Delivery? Of what? I wasn’t expecting anything. It took a few minutes to remember the Easter ham. I ought to have had the ham delivered tomorrow, or even on Friday, but I wanted to be sure that I had it. So now I have to find somewhere to put it. It’s a whole ham, you see, from which the butcher has sliced three or four steaks, leaving a great big roast for Sunday and a small roast to send someone home with. The steaks are the best part, if you follow a recipe in Julia Child’s The Way to Cook. It’s an adaptation, for ham steak, of a roast ham recipe in Mastering the Art, and really much better. The steaks are obviously not all the same size, but they always seem to feed three diners generously.

Even though I’ve been clearing out the freezer and the refrigerator with unprecedented regularity, I have nowhere to put all this ham — not yet. I’ll figure out something for the big roast. The steaks are more of a headache, because one doesn’t want to look at ham in any form until Whitsun, so the steaks have to be frozen. And where is the room for that, may I ask, especially in light of the big mistake in my last order from Nueske’s. I meant to order one package of Canadian bacon, but I ordered two. As I don’t know anyone else with a meat slicer, I can’t give the extra package away.

I wish I could remember how to cook the roast ham. I know that part of the method is to slice a fresh pineapple and line the bottom of the roasting pan with the rings. The ham sits on them instead of in the juice, and the result is magical. There’s also brown sugar, of course; but was there some strange ingredient that you’d never guess in a million years? In other words, did I make this recipe up in a moment of unrecorded genius?

And dessert — what’s for dessert? It has to be something chocolate, to break Kathleen’s Lenten fast. As always, Ray Soleil offered to make his intense chocolate mousse, but I wanted to make something this year, or thought I did, and so I declined. But what am I going to make? Is it too late to call Ray?

***

Thursday 24th

As I was walking out of the theatre yesterday — Yes! I went to the movies! But first, the important part — as I was checking my phone, I found two messages from Kathleen. The first said, “:will call when I check in at. Hyatt.” Great! Kathleen was in Washington for the night, attending an annual confab involving dinner and then a long meeting the next day. The second message took a while to process. It was from Kathleen’s phone, but not from Kathleen.

Hi: I found this blackberry on the train after we reached DC. Please tell the owner when you talk to her that I gave it to lost and found inside union station!

Two curious details about this message are that the writer knew that the phone’s owner was a woman, and that the phone was recovered by the stranger so soon after Kathleen wrote her message about checking in that the phone had not locked; there was no need to open it with a passcode. But I didn’t think much about these things at the time, and, indeed, there is still no reason to attach much importance to them. As of this writing, the phone remains in Lost & Found at Union Station — a haven with which we became familiar a few years ago, when Kathleen left her wallet on the train.

A more important detail: the lost phone receives the constantly updated codes that allow Kathleen to log on to her law firm’s network. (Need I point out that she left the phone on the train because she was preoccupied by packing up her laptop, on which she had been working all the way from Penn Station?) Without access to “the system,” she could not determine the time and place for dinner in Washington. I found this out when one of Kathleen’s associates called me. She had been out of pocket when Kathleen called for help, but was now able to be of service. She had called Kathleen at the Hyatt and gotten no answer. Unaware that Kathleen had called another associate and found out what she needed to know, I was left with disturbing visions of a Lost Kathleen, wandering the streets of the capital before finally collapsing, exhausted, in an unsafe alley.

And then there was the Hyatt angle. Kathleen had told me that the dinner would not be late, so, between ten and eleven, I called her room several times. Calls to the hotel were automatically answered by a recording. If you knew “your party’s extension,” you could dial it at any time. I would punch in Kathleen’s room number — which I knew, because I had tracked her down when I got home from the movies, and was able to tell her where her phone was before she was entirely sure that she had mislaid it — and then nothing would happen; nobody would answer. I was frantic by the time our landline phone rang, just after eleven. (Kathleen can’t remember my cell phone number.) “I thought I’d wait until after eleven,” she said, matter-of-factly recurring to an ancient practice that reflected the sharply reduced long-distance rates that use to kick in at that hour, sometime during the Peace of Westphalia. When I said that I’d been calling her, we had a new mystery. She had been sitting “right there,” and there had been no ringing. It turned out that something was wrong with the hotel’s phones. To get Kathleen, I should have to go through the operator. This morning, placing a wake-up call, I found even that to be a challenge. I cycled through three welcomes from the recorded voice before I finally chose an option that would take me to an answered phone and a re-connection to Kathleen.

After all, just how important are hotel phones these days? Everybody knows that their use is laced with surcharges. Everybody else knows that you can always reach your chums on his or her mobile, the number of which is tucked nicely into yours.

The cherry on top: Kathleen was carrying an iPhone. She had not left that on the train. She had not used it in ages. It was not charged. She did not have an Apple charger, and the hotel could not provide her with one. (Big surprise.) The whole point of the iPhone is that Kathleen is supposed to use it to contact me, and, presumably, other non-business contacts. I don’t have time to tell you more about this, because I can hear the men with the big butterfly nets and the funny white suit out in the hallway.

Now that I have described this sundae of technological delight, permit me to suggest the ambient lighting: the film that I had just seen when this opera buffa began was Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky. Ah, here they are. They’re trying to decide whether to take me away to the “clinic” or settle for an injection. So I can’t tell you more about this nail-biting drama about a drone attack that alone will prevent a couple of suicide bombers from wreaking yet more havoc on Nairobi.

***

Just a few more deep breaths.

***

Not only did I go to the movies; I went to the Museum! For the first time since September, I’m ashamed to say. (It has been a difficult year. Longer than that, really.) But the weather was lovely, and I finished writing on the early side. So I dressed and ran outside and grabbed a taxi. The Museum is not far away, but I save my energy for walking around in it, not to it; and, in the event, I walked all the way home, too. On the way home, I stopped in at Crawford Doyle, not for the first time since September, but very nearly. I told the assistant manager that the store ought not to be selling the books of Marie Kondo, not, at least, to me; for I had taken the first one to heart and just about stopped buying books. But only just about. I did leave the shop with two new ones. There was Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, which I had intended to buy if they had it, and then a sort of surprise, Máirtin Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust. (I managed not to buy the new Kondo.)

Only now do I see what these books have in common: neither was written in English. A few months ago, as it must be by now, Jhumpa Lahiri published a piece in The New Yorker, an extract from her new book, announcing that she had stopped writing in English, and that she had taken up writing in Italian, a language to which she had no connection beyond an infatuation that began in her youth. The excerpt was translated, like the book, by Ann Goldstein.

I read a good deal of In altre parole when I got home. The original Italian text is printed on the even-numbered, left-hand pages, facing Goldstein’s translation. I was surprised by how rarely I had to look to the right. I, too, have an infatuation with Italian. I am by no means as fluent in it as I am in French, but I understand it better, perhaps because it is further away from English, just as Italy is vastly more self-absorbed and uninterested in Anglophone antics than France is. For some reason, I don’t translate Italian into English as much as I do French. Italian is more likely to make immediate sense to me. Why? All those years of listening to opera? That seems both plausible and far-fetched. After all, I haven’t learned German from Wagner and Strauss. It has something to do with the rhythm of Italian, which is perhaps the most beautiful rhythm in the world of language.

But my knowledge of Italian is vague and confused. I cleared up quite a few confusions yesterday, perhaps forever, thanks to Lahiri’s beguiling memoir. The difference between dentro and dietro, for example (within, behind). Per quanto — however (much/many). Sciocchezza: a folly, not a shock. Lahiri writes a lot about wanting to learn Italian — what, exactly, that was like. This involves a vocabulary with which I am already familiar. Lahiri’s very thoughts are familiar. This is her first book in Italian: the writing is not very difficult. I daresay that one of the attractions of Italian, for Lahiri, is the beauty of its simplicities. I suspect that it is more difficult in Italian than it is in English to be trite, banal, and stale. (The danger is all the other way: pomposity, grandiosity, drama.) Now, literary Italian can be — well, Latinate, as Dante often is. I carry around in my head a favorite sentence from a story in New Penguin Parallel Text Short Stories in Italian, the Nick Roberts edition (1999). It comes from Silvia Petrignani’s “Donne in piscina.” The women of the title, sunning themselves beside, not in, a swimming pool, are talking, why not, about men, and one of them says,

Perché sono pochi gli uomini a cui le donne piacciono sul serio.

Because there are few men who really like women. Sad, but true. But I love all the bumps. “Pochi gli uomini” reminds me that what the sentence is really saying is that They are few, the men who like women really. And the inversion of piacere: Like the French, Italians don’t like things; they are pleased by them. That pleases me: Mi piace. Women please me: Le donne mi piace. Women please them: Le donne gli piacciono. Men to whom women are pleasing: Gli uomini a cui le donne piacciono. There aren’t many: Sono pochi. Really: sul serio. For me, the sentence is an Italian lesson all by itself. I have encountered nothing like it in Lahiri’s book, and I don’t expect to.

In altre parole is a handy Italian on more generous lines. It’s a pleasant book, tinged with loss and longing, that one can dip into anywhere. I was about to refer to an earlier entry here, but it doesn’t exist; I must be remembering a letter to a friend. When the excerpt appeared in The New Yorker, it obliged me to think about what it means to be a native speaker. Lahiri, accomplished in English as she certainly is, is not a native speaker. Bengali is her mother tongue: the language that she spoke with her mother. But that’s all it is. Growing up in London and Providence, she did not speak Bengali with anybody else. She does not speak it well, she says — she has a terrible accent, she says. And she can neither read nor write it. It would seem that Lahiri has known English almost all her life — but not quite.

So, when she fell in love with Italian, as one does, Lahiri did not feel altogether foolish, as indeed I should. When she stopped reading books in English, a few years ago, she closed the door on a world that, however familiar, had no real claim on her; it had not shaped her most fundamental thoughts about the world. She had enjoyed great success in English, obviously, and I hope that she will do so again, even if she is not so sure that she wants to. But English remains her second language. Why not make of Italian, not a third language, but another second?

It’s curious that one’s immediate objections are entirely “practical.” First, she is old to be learning a language. She has a lovely chapter about collecting words that she doesn’t know. She gathers them up every day and puts them in a basket. At the end of the day, the basket is almost empty, because of course it is her memory, and memory discards most of what comes before it. She is delighted when a word sticks. But is this a viable modus for a reasonably sophisticated writer? Presumably — this is at least my stumbling block with other languages — Lahiri would want to write an Italian that is as proficient as her English? In altre parole is an easy book for me to read, because it is the work of someone who learned to describe the world in English. Lahiri’s Italian is very good, but she says the things that an English-speaker would say.

Second, and perhaps the more massive caution, there is the numerical abyss between the languages’ readerships. Even without globalization, English is spoken by many times more readers than Italian is; and there is some evidence that Anglophones, for all their many faults, are bigger readers. Why write texts that will have to be translated, their born glories sheared off, in order to be widely read? As I say, I haven’t encountered a single sentence in Lahiri’s book that is anywhere near to the foreignness of Petrignani’s. But the language itself is indeed foreign.

Scrivo in un italiano brutissimo, scorretto, imbarrazzante.

Ann Goldstein’s translation is interesting.

I write in a terrible, embarrassing Italian, full of mistakes.

If you’re following me, you’ll see that there is nothing at all foreign about the thought that Lahiri seeks to express. Goldstein captures it very well, but the changes that she wrests in order to make the statement fluid and agreeable in English completely destroy the power of the original, which depends entirely on a build-up of somewhat onomatopoetic adjectives. Brutissimo! Not just “terrible,” but “ugly.” Scoretto! So many Italian words are made negative or even nasty by fastening an ‘s’ onto the beginning, short for “dis” but resulting in a premonitory hiss. Imbarrazzante! Eem-barratz-AHHNNN-tay. How can “embarrassing,” obviously the same word, only in English, compete? The rhythm of those three denunciations is a virtuoso pile-up that requires no italics or exclamation points. It can’t happen in good English, as Goldstein demonstrates by taking scorretto out of the sequence: incorrect just won’t do. “I write an Italian that is ugly, incorrect, and embarrassing.” The literal translation is a flop. Of course anything so ugly and embarrassing is going to be incorrect. More has to be made of this note: it has to be amplified to “full of mistakes.”

The vituosity is not Lahiri’s, as I expect she’d be the first to agree. It’s simply Italian.

***

Good Friday 25th

Which is why the sentence exhibits none of the defects that it enumerates.

All day, I’ve been trying to decide whether to tack the preceding sentence, which didn’t occur to me until later, onto the end of yesterday’s entry, and finish it off with good wishes for the weekend, or to add something else. Having chosen the latter option, I’m still not sure that it’s a very good idea, but I’ll plead helplessness: I’ve just finished Daniel Martin and can’t think of anything else to do with myself, at least for a little while, until it’s time to make dinner. For several days, I’d put off continuing with the novel, because I really wasn’t keen to follow it to Egypt — and I was right about all the superficialities, which may mean no more than that John Fowles introduced the Nile-cruise trope to me. But it was in the final two hundred pages that the following statement began to make at least a vague sort of sense.

[Daniel Martin is] intended as a defence and illustration of an unfashionable philosophy, humanism, and also as an exploration of what it is to be English.

Those are the author’s words, printed on the back cover. Humanism? Never have I read, or at least tolerably enjoyed, a novel so completely marinated in the whine of male adolescence. Here is a sentence from the high slopes of the final climax, which is set in Palmyra — the Temple of Baal, recently destroyed by Da’esh, is pointed out, but this was forty years ago.

They were now reduced to what, in their two sexes, had never forgiven and never understood the other. (678)

So gross an appeal to gender, as if Dan stood for all men and Jane for all women, is nothing more than the rankly hormonal cry of thwarted carnality: I especially cherish the authority with which the author and his protagonist speak for women as well. Indeed, there is a dismaying Così fan tutte quality about the novel’s resolution, as if Dan and Jane were only doing what men and women were put on the planet to do. This is not Fowles’s intention, I suspect, but it keeps blurting out from behind the pretense of mature, experienced adulthood. I thought that Dan was an idiot tout court for pursuing Jane so loudly within the very month of her husband’s death by suicide — give the girl some time, man! So I felt mildly disappointed by the success of his importunings.

The humanism of Daniel Martin did not, for me, abide in the romance. It emerged from, of all things, the trope of the Nile-cruise. I’d left an important element of this elegant conceit out of my catalogue: along with the repetitious riverbanks (which however Jane and Dan claim to find endlessly interesting), the peculiarities of the fellow tourists (observed in somewhat contemptuous detail), and the “timelessness” of the ancient river, there must also be a wise old man (or woman) who does not so much explain the riddle of the sphinx as sprinkle other gem-like mysteries on the tablecloth. I had forgotten the Herr Professor, an elderly archaeologist from Leipzig who now lives in Cairo, serving Eastern Europeans as a guide to the antiquities. It turns out that his late wife was English; she was the daughter of a doctor who had settled in Egypt, and a pediatrician herself. After the War, the Herr Professor accepted the invitation to return to his now East-German university; one of his sons remains there (another doctor), while the other has gone to America. All this in the middle of a Cold War that the Herr Professor’s sheer humanity seems to see beyond. The conversations that he has with Dan and Jane are as interesting as conversations can be (although Jane, always something of a geisha, says little), but there is a tidal pull underneath that bound me to the novel, and made it seem to be the most important thing that I could possibly be reading. An interesting illusion, that. But somehow the presence of the Herr Professor does substantiate Fowles’s claim: Daniel Martin is indeed a defense of then-unfashionable humanism.

What mysteries, you ask. Simply the mysteries of another person, another life, another generation, another background. For once, Daniel Martin forgets about himself. Or at least the novel forgets him, forgets, for a moment or two, Daniel’s amorous quandary — whether to continue a relationship with the young actress whom he has befriended in Los Angeles, or to succumb to the weakness of Be Here Now and rattle Jane with his attentions. And the odd thing is that this new element, the open and nonjudgmental appreciation of sheer otherness, seeps up and floods the rest of the novel, so much of it, necessarily by now, in retrospect. If Daniel cannot stop measuring the world by his desires, his ambitions, and his contempt for both of these things, John Fowles shows that he at least can step back. The Herr Professor makes us aware that, all along, Fowles has enabled us to look over Daniel’s shoulders, and to see the other people in his life, for ourselves. We can’t look to Fowles for a judgment of his principal character, because everything about the novel (including that other trope: the novel that you are reading is the one that the lead character is thinking about writing) points to an identity, with Daniel filling in as an alternative Fowles, waving from the other side of experience. But even if Daniel and his author are the same person, the author is writing about the other people in the book from the perspective, and perhaps with the insight and the wisdom, that follows the writing of a novel. I hope that I am not spinning too fine a thread when I suggest that Daniel Martin is about who Daniel used to be, and who his friends have been all along.

As with the Herr Professor, the sense of a humanist assessment of life arises from a grasp of time, the difference between now and then. This is really nothing but sheer history, a feeling for which is so palpable in the Herr Professor’s personal narrative. Daniel always is, even when he is remembering his youth in the combes and hangers of Devon. That’s why he is so maddening. But the book itself is not lodged in an eternal present — another mystery. My solution to this mystery is to conclude that the novel is the history of a man who has no very clear sense of history.

And there I must stop: it is time to make dinner. My copy of Daniel Martin is flagged with more than a dozen small Post-its; I wonder if I shall actually take the time to copy all the passages into Evernote and explain why they caught my eye (if I still can). I hope so. It would be a fine way of working out the confusion that I felt throughout this third reading: why? What makes this book worth the time? Because so much — so much about the title character — argues that it isn’t. I feel that, in these few paragraphs here, I have reduced the perplexity considerably, but I sense that there’s more to be learned. Meanwhile,

Bon week-end à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016 at 2:41 pm.