Dear Diary: Seriously
In the middle of the afternoon, the telephone rang, and I could tell from Caller ID that the call came from the Manhattan Theatre Club. Thinking that it must be about membership renewal or somesuch, I didn’t pick up, and I was really glad that I hadn’t when I heard the message. A nice lady said that, since we’d been to see The Royal Family last Thursday (the miracles of ticket scanning!), she’d be interested to hear our opinion.
Well.
I could have said, “Gee, we really liked it.” Or, I could refer her to Portico. Problem was, I hadn’t yet got round to writing up Thursday’s performance. Suddenly, however, I was motivated to fix that. So I did. Then, after the usual technological fumblings, I printed the page and read it to Kathleen. She disagreed on one particular, and I caught a number of infelicities. At some point tomorrow, I expect to call MTC back and say, “Gee, we really liked it — and you can read more at this address! When I mentioned the call to Kathleen at dinner, she raced ahead to the possibility of a Portico link’s appearance in Playbill. Happily for me, my optimism stops well short of such visions.
The main thing is that I wrote the page.
Before that, I read a couple of short stories. One was by Yiyun Li, and it was this week’s New Yorker story. I liked it very much, but I wished that my mind could deal with its satisfactions without making reference to tried and true narrative techniques. The conservatism of the story-telling did serve to sustain a kind of mystical psychology, part gripping ghost story but (bigger) part melancholy, realistic nightmare.
The other story came from The Cost of Living, the new collection of Mavis Gallant’s unpublished stories. Called “Going Ashore,” it was a study in forlorn desolation. A twelve year-old girl, Emma Ellenger, finds herself on a cruise ship with her mother. Her mother is one of those women who don’t seem to exist anymore, but who were thick on the ground by the time Dawn Powell was in her prime. I even knew a few of them when I was young. They were single women — divorcées, usually, but sometimes maidens gone to seed — who drank a little too much, relied upon makeup even more, and who “needed a man,” although what on earth they’d do with one if they found him could not be imagined. Enjoy the comfort of strangers, I suppose. I attracted such woman (all unknowingly) because I was always tall for my age, well-mannered (at least in the presence of vaguely frightening ladies), and pretty flirtatious myself. Anyway, this woman is an awful mother, not least because she excites her daughter’s tender sympathy along with the usual impatience. The stories in The Cost of Living are all good, so far — hey, it’s Mavis Gallant — but “Going Ashore,” the fifth, is the first knockout.
Something else that I did today: I sent postcards to eleven friends, ten of them addressed with Dymo labels that I won’t ever have to type again. Here’s the deal: the Museum’s latest scheme — one that I applaud — is to tell sets of ten unique postcards of images from each exhibition. The last scheme was to bundle twelve postcards of six images (two of each, in other words), but that added a complicating wrinkle to the ingenuous project of sending “thinking of you” postcards to friends. What did it mean, I wondered, to send the same image to two different people? Did it suggest an occult affinity? Ten unique images are much easier to deal with. It turns out that there are eleven in the set, because what passes for the top, or “cover,” of the set is the exhibition’s poster, also with a postcard backing. I expect that a few of the recipients will be mystified to receive them. But there are two people on the mailing list who, ten years or so from now, may not remember a time when they did not receive postcards from me, however erratically.
As Mavis Gallant’s story tells it, you can’t take young people seriously enough — it’s the only thing that spares their taking themselves too seriously.