Gotham Diary:
Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
May 2018 (III)
16, 17 and 18 May
Wednesday 16th
The weather got very hot yesterday, and then very windy: it was clear even without reference to meteorology that we were in for some storms. And they came, says the Times, as if on a conveyor belt, wreaking havoc on power and transportation. (But not in Manhattan itself, of course.) The temperature dropped twenty degrees in their wake, and we are now back to the cool and somewhat gloomy weather that has marked this month of May. All in all, the perfect climate for learning of the death of Tom Wolfe.
One had rather forgotten about him. Although I consumed The Bonfire of the Vanities as quickly as my eyes could travel, I was never a fan. I looked at From Bauhaus to Our House, but I did not read it. I gave up on A Man in Full after five or ten pages. Wolfe’s excited prose made me suspect that he was one of those men for whom the word “people” doesn’t include women — a very common failing, to be sure, but unforgivable in a writer. (In a thinker, that is.) I was astonished, even somewhat embarrassed, by the Times’s two-page obituary, much of it taken up by a photograph of Wolfe leaning against a lamppost. Wolfe lived two lives, the necessarily solitary one of the writer, for which, however, he seems to have dressed like a dandy, and then that of the dandy. The writer could be savage; the dandy was by all accounts courteous. Somehow, that strikes me as completely backwards. Shouldn’t the dandy be flamboyant, and the writer sympathetic? Either way, Wolfe cut an unusually public figure for a writer, and I daresay that’s what earned him the spread in the Times.
In an op-ed piece, Kurt Andersen says that he was inspired to become a writer by Tom Wolfe — he discovered him in ninth grade — and that a great deal of his own career was spent in open imitation of the older writer. He claims that Wolfe was a great inspiration for his work at Spy Magazine. I can see what he means, but I must insist that the inspiration could only have been partial. Tom Wolfe never made me laugh, while Spy very nearly laughed me to death. There was something anhedonic about the pile-up of words in Wolfe’s prose, something never sweetened by the giggling self-ridicule that gleefully topples David Foster Wallace’s mountains of clauses. Wolfe was a satirist, Wallace a comedian; the difference is that comedians never scold.
The style of Wolfe’s dandyism was of course the particular style of the Southern gentleman, the planter. This allowed Wolfe to wear his roots as a Virginian, as an outsider in the Big Apple, while looking much more presentable than most New York writers. Of course, if he had grown a beard, he would have risked comparisons with the colonel of fried chicken.
***
Back in 1968, the word “students” still meant “men”; I had to remind myself of that as I read Mavis Gallant’s “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook,” which was published in two instalments in The New Yorker in the autumn of that year. I ordered a copy of Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews, at the recommendation of Lisa Elkin’s Flâneuse, an interesting book that I may have been a little hard on in the other blog. Gallant, a Canadian, was already an established Parisian by 1968; what’s more, she lived around the corner from the university. The violence did not touch her immediate neighborhood, but the disorder did, and that is the subject of the Notebooks. Although the water never stopped running, the power was only intermittently cut, and the phones usually worked, most urban amenities were suspended, as workers, inspired by students, went on strike. Although deeply upset by this uncertainty, Gallant hoped that “the events” would lead to improvements in French affairs, if only by clearing the scene of the elderly de Gaulle, and she was very depressed when everything went back to normal. In fact, she left Paris as soon as she could, for her usual vacation in Menton, on the Riviera, and she declined to cover the conclusion from afar. But the Notebooks do not end on an abandoned note.
Bouleversante conversation with woman in travel agency, Rue de Rennes, where I cancel my auto-couchette reservation for last Friday. She begins by asking what I think. We both pussyfoot around the subject, and she then says, “Don’t you think that le social followed upon something perhaps more lasting and important?” Answer, “Yes, of course.” She becomes excited, says that she, for one, will never be the same again — that she will never accept anything at its face value, that “no one can stop her now” from asking herself questions. She pulls out from under the counter two morning papers, Le Figaro and Combat, and cries what may be the justification, finally, for the massacre of the trees: “Regardez! Je lis!” She says, “Je traîne, je lis, je pense.” Says she goes to the Sorbonne, to the Odéon, to a Catholic discussion group on the Rue Gay-Lussac: “J’écoute.”I say to her, ”What did you hope would happen? What did you want?” Seems taken aback, stares at me, says, “Je ne sais pas. Quelque chose de propre.” Can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this. Say, “Une merveilleuse abstraction?” She shakes her head. Doesn’t know.
The “massacre of the trees” is indeed the most heart-rending detail in the Notebooks. Gallant cries when she comes upon trees that have been cut down to make barricades, to improvise armor. So do most of the other women who appear in the Notebooks. This felling of slow green life is regarded as a crime that only thoughtless, ignorant young men could commit, emblematic of youth’s horrifying appetite for terror. The massacre of the trees is the very opposite of quelque chose de propre — something decent. But Gallant is prepared for forgive the students, amazed as she was to hear them chanting, Nous sont tous des juifs allemands!
Musing on Gallant’s memoir, Lisa Elkin decides that it all comes down to immigrants. The events of 1968, after all, were sparked by the insolence of a stateless foreign student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. If Elkin is right, we are all soixante-huitards, on one side or the other, even down to this day.
***
Thursday 17th
In the current issue of The Nation, which arrived on Monday morning with the Times, I read Bill McKibben’s review of Visionary Women, by Andrea Barnet. I ordered it, and it arrived yesterday afternoon. Sometimes I think Amazon knows what I’m going to buy before I do.
There are four “visionary women” in Barnet’s book: Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters. Add to these the ten women in Michelle Dean’s Sharp — Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm — and a trend emerges, a trend away from a movement. Few, if any, of these women were (or are) notable feminists. Reading about them has led me to conclude that feminism, formerly known as women’s liberation, has nothing to do with remarkable women.
The other night at dinner, Kathleen mentioned “incels,” which she had just read about somewhere, and then, without a break, told me about a show that she had sat through in the back seat of a taxi. After a moment’s difficulty trying to turn off the news feature, she gave up; at least she could mute it. Presently she saw Jennifer Lopez modeling inappropriate outfits inappropriately — striking poses that could most kindly be described as “kittenish.” We agreed that some women’s lack of judgment might be a good explanation of some men’s depravity, and that in fact it might be a case of depravity on both sides. Depravity is the belief in rationalizations that make misconduct permissible. The incels, as a group, have made misogyny normative among themselves, claiming a totally spurious entitlement. The behavior of women who imitate harlots is more puzzling. I can attribute it only to a lack of self-respect.
None of the fourteen women whom I have named suffered from a lack of self-respect. Although they made the most of such opportunities as presented themselves, they did not really require any kind of liberation. They made the most of what they had (minds, mostly), and the results were impressive enough to win admiring attention.
We have recently been treated to the appalling tale of the Washington Redskins’s junket to Costa Rica. During this pleasure trip, the team’s cheerleaders were advised to go about topless and to make themselves available for friendly encounters with rich hangers-on. Do we draw a line? Or ought the line have been drawn long ago, when cheerleaders’ outfits were downsized to their current skimpiness? And who would draw that line? Something tells me that it would not be any of my fourteen smart women. I can’t imagine any of them bringing herself to comment on cheerleaders, any more than correlatively smart men would take notice of drug lords.
The smart women and the cheerleaders do share the fact that they are not common. Now that people routinely marry for love, it may be that there are more beautiful people than smart people in the world, but beautiful people — beautiful people who are also just the right shade of young — are still unusual. (Psst! Have you seen Celeste Sloman’s extraordinary photograph of Gloria Steinem?) But beautiful people have much more in common with each other than smart people do. This may explain why beautiful people face such powerful challenges to their self-respect. Consider Pauline Kael. Kael was lured into a film-production partnership with Warren Beatty that nearly cost her her professional credibility; it was a terrible mistake to swallow this bait. But the bait was unique. It would have been neither offered to nor registered by the other women in my group-that-is-not-a-group. Whereas beautiful people in general are asked, sooner or later, to take off some or all of their clothes.
The object of women’s liberation, or feminism, is to develop the self-respect of ordinary women. Extraordinary women have nothing to contribute; on the contrary, their example may be discouraging — to ordinary women. In the forty odd years since the feminist movement became impossible to ignore, beautiful women have been so many spanners in the works, terrible distractions, insoluble conundrums. Smart, sexy, or both, unusual women make it difficult for an ordinary woman to figure out how to live. It would be nice if their presence on the Internet and in other media were more muted, if they were not presented as Kewpie dolls for the incels to shoot down.
***
Friday 18th
Reading about the shootings in Santa Fe, Texas — a town not far from Galveston, which my daughter and her family plan to visit this summer —I wonder if the modern public high school is not inherently unsafe. It seems to me to create an atmosphere of hostility. I say this even though I have not set foot in a school — any school — in many years, so feel free to ignore me.
High school used to be a place in which to grow up, to come to maturity. Few people went to college, so it was expected that high school graduates would be ready to take their places in the adult world as soon as they handed in their rented gowns. High school was a rehearsal for adult life in that learning was the student’s job. Ideally, among all the facts and figures that had to be mastered in different courses, students learned about the world that they would soon be entering. Perhaps it would be better to say that they were taught a vision of what the world might be if everyone brought his or her best to bear on it. By the final year of high school, students were expected to behave, at least, like adults.
What is high school today but a ghastly holding pen? Nobody takes a place in the adult world at the end of senior year anymore. The adult world is open only to college graduates, and its full richness is foreclosed to all but those who make it through postgraduate professional training. The high school student’s job is to get into a good college. This is not a job that all high school students may be willing or prepared to undertake. The postponement of adult entry postpones the end of childhood; instead of a rehearsal for “real life,” there is only a prolonged playground. The inevitably sexualized atmosphere of high school, no longer contained by the imminence of respectable adulthood, poisons the interactions of adolescents at different stages of development. Instead of appearing to be grown up (and self-controlled), kids in high school fall back on the quixotic project of being experienced.
The supposed collapse of educational standards is not what bothers me. It’s the collapse of educational seriousness that’s frightening. High school is a bad joke.
That solution that I propose is to insert a gap of three to five years between high school and college, and to overhaul business enterprises to welcome cohorts of high-school graduates with suitable jobs, jobs that today are reserved for college grads as a matter of employers’ convenience, not because college coursework is prerequisite but because a college degree indicates workplace virtues that used to be signalled by a high-school diploma. I am not arguing that fewer people ought to go to college, but rather that no one ought to go directly to college from high school except those few students who are probably going to spend their careers in the higher reaches of academia or professional expertise. (And even those gifted ones would probably benefit from a year out of school.)
There is nothing inherent in modern life that makes it take longer than it used to do to grow up. Keeping young people in elementary school until the age of eighteen is a vast civil mistake.
Bon week-end à tous!