Morning Read: Harry Pissalatums

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¶ Lord Chesterfield dispenses some advice that is violently at odds with the Sixties ethos in which I came of age.

The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, and friendships, require a degree of good-breeding, both to preserve and cement them. If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass night as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good-breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.

I have had to work my way toward understanding the truth of this the hard way. I’ve gone a little farther than the earl: I believe that there is not a moment in life, no matter how solitary, that does not require the attentiveness and respect that are the pillars of good breeding.

¶ Another homily in Moby-Dick: Melville concludes a brisk chapter on the sprucing-up of a whaler after the rendering of the beast into commercial commodities with another attempt, as it seems to me, to give contemporary life an Old-Testament look, a sort of spiritual Williamsburg-ing.

… when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, this is but man-killing!! Yet his is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when — There she blows! — thee ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.

Oh! the metempsychosis!

My word exactly.

¶ In the middle of the monkey-business in Chapter XXV of Don Quixote, I hit upon another passage that reminded me of the operatic sensibility that infuses so much of this book; not that Don Quixote is like comic opera, but rather the reverse: the book inspired the pace and the tone of comic opera.

What could be more Mozartean — or Verdian — than the reaction scene in which each member of the ensemble has a different response to the wonders just transpired:

Don Quixote was dumbfounded, Sancho astounded, the cousin baffled, the page stunned, the man who told about the braying stupefied, the innkeeper perplexed, and, in short, all who heard the words of the puppet master were amazed…

All these reactions are, in fact, the same, but Cervantes’ determination to come up with a different verb for each member of the company sets each slightly apart from the others, an individuation that lies at the heart of comic opera’s greatness.

¶ Squillions: In a letter from Beverly Hills dated 18 December 1955, Noël Coward retails some tittle-tattle about Clifton Webb (Waldo Lydecker in Laura):

He is leaving Clifton’s today and has taken an apartment in the same place as the boys [Charles Russell and Lance Hamilton] as we considered it unwise for him to stay here. This has caused a great fluttering in the colony and no-one knows where they’re at. He has handled the Clifton situation with consummate skill and every prospect pleases, except that it was getting near the point of no return. Poor Clifton is always on the verge of Umbrage about something or other and this this not helped by Harry Pissalatums which happens very very very often indeed indeedy.

If editor Barry Day had glossed this coy report of gay romance, and explained the meaning of “Harry Pissalatums,” he would only have been doing his job. Why he bothers to identify Russell and Hamilton but not do his job makes me throw up my hands — hardly for the first time in this inexplicably bad book.