You Mustn't Even Try
My infidelities continue astound me; I have fallen so far that I can no longer bear the hollowness of my own resolutions. On Wednesday afternoon, I was seduced by a book lying on a table at Crawford Doyle: Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening. A friend had mentioned seeing the recent film adaptation, which, I was bemused to note, had required nearly ten years of gestation since the novel’s publication. And even then, what fudging: the overweight and blobular Schiller, a seventy-one year-old survivor of the New York Intellectual galaxy, is played by the very dashing Frank Langella. Vincent Gardenia would have been more like it. Now that I want to see it, I’m stuck in the limbo between theatrical and DVD release.
Although the jacket blurb calls the novel “comic,” none of the many testimonials printed at the beginning of the paperback mention how funny the book is. That’s perhaps because I’m the only reader who thinks so. Once I’d calmed down enough to read a passage that had had me coughing with laughter, Kathleen pronounced “clever” and “sweet,” but not “funny.” I was reminded that nobody else finds Verdi’s ballet music side-splitting, either.
I’ll come back to the humor later. For now, the following grave and beautiful passage from very near the end. It concerns Casey, the middle-aged, half-black, half-Jewish professor — this is a very New York novel — whose relationship with Schiller’s daughter, ended years ago because she wanted children but he didn’t, has been rekindled.
The last few months had beden very different from what he’d expected. He was finally ready to begin a project that he’d been thinking about for years, and he’d been hoping for a few distraction-free months in which to concentrate. But now he was getting dragged into the middle of life’s confusions. Worrying about having children with Ariel; worrying about Ariel’s father — it wasn’tg a good time to be dealing with these problems. A part of him wished that he could refuse all this, just close the door on it all and do his work. But of course you can’t refuse it; you mustn’t even try. You have to let it in.
I’m not quite sure why this strikes me as a related thought, but when I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, I saw a rack of inexpensive editions of classic novels. I had just picked up a copy of James Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which I fully intend, for what it’s worth (not much), not to open until I have finished Diary of a Bad Year, because George Snyder wrote that he was reading it and because there had been an interesting write-up in Bookforum, while Kathleen, whose idea this visit to B&N had been, looked at beading magazines. Looking at the rows of seriously great and deeply satisfying novels — Emma! Middlemarch! — I was overcome by the strangest sense of luxury. I had all of those books at home; what was more, I knew that I really liked reading them. I could just return to the apartment and curl up in a chair with one of them. Life could be that simple! If only…
He’s right: you mustn’t even try.