Gotham Diary:
“If it were always breakfast, I’d be fine.”
20 March 2012
My plan is to go downtown this evening, to Three Lives Books, for Peter Cameron’s reading. I found out about it yesterday (someone told me), and, for once, my to-do list is clear enough for me to contemplate the excursion. I’ll take along my copies of two of Mr Cameron’s books, the new Coral Glynn and the classic Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, which I’m about to finish for the second time.
Last night, as I was breezing through the second half of the book, I kept coming up with questions for the author. I didn’t write them down, and now I can’t remember any of them, because, after all, they amounted to little more than anticipatory literary chitchat. Decades from now, someone will produce a reaonsably scholarly biography of Peter Cameron, and unearth connections between his fiction and his life, such as they may be. The trade-off for being alive at the same time as an interesting author is that you never get to find out any of that interesting information. The question is, though: why is it interesting?
Mr Cameron’s second novel, Andorra, is full of interesting narrative decisions, but the book itself did not interest me. I was tremendously put off, on a sexual-preference level, by his application of the name of a mountain-bound feudal remnant to a seaside locality. It must the result, this aversion, of my passionate childhood philately, which was fueled by my innate desire to know where everything is. Where is always more directly interesting to me that why or how. So all that I really remember about Andorra is that it tapered into metafiction, whatever that means (and I may be wrong), and that Andorra wasn’t where it was supposed to be. And although I bought This Is the City of Your Final Destination, I did not read it. If Ms NOLA hadn’t strongly recommended Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, I’m not sure that I’d be following the author. As it is, I already want to re-read Coral Glynn.
***
James Sveck, the protagonist of Someday, is enviably bright and sophisticated. That is, I envy him as if I were still his age, eighteen. He’s so way ahead of me! And already he has mastered that fully expressive deadpan that makes me just about squeal with delight.
I sometimes got spooked working alone in the gallery. Anyone could walk in off the street and often anyone did, and the problem was you had to be cordial and welcoming even if you instantly knew they were freaks. John told me that if anyone really seemed dangerous I should tell him or her that the gallery was closing early and escort them out and lock the door. If they refused to leave I was to call the building’s security guard, but since he spent most of his time out on the sidewalk smoking and saying things like “Baby, baby, you don’t look so happy, I can make you very happy, baby” to the women walking by, and since the elevator (if it was working) took about half an hour to reach the sixth floor, I knew I would be dead before any help arrived.
The entire paragraph vibrates on a tension between “often anyone did” and “I knew I would be dead.” The exaggeration is funny, but it does not disarm the menace, at least for someone who, like James, thinks that he expects the worst.
And then there are the sessions with Dr Adler, the psychiatrist. I suppose I’d like to know how Peter Cameron conceived these scenes. Did he go to a shrink in his teens? How else would he know? Maybe he has a friend in the profession who has briefed him well. I’m curious. Because even though more than fifty years have passed since I spent my hours in the office of a Dr Knight in Scarsdale, James’s encounters with Dr Adler are palpably identical. The older person reacts to what the young person says, with neutral-seeming probes. To the young person, who is an adolescent, very much in between states and very tired of being in transit, the doctor’s attempt to fix meanings and references is uncommonly annoying. I sit there; I don’t know who I am, only who I don’t want to be, which is pretty much who I seem to be but know that I can’t really be, because, if it is, if I am, then I’m going to commit suicide.
James dreams of buying a solid, stone-clad old house in a quiet Midwestern suburb, and getting a job as a librarian. This is meant to be funny, by which I mean that the author introduces the dream at the most incongruous points in the narrative. What a strange little old man James is, dreaming of retirement already. But it’s the prime of life that terrifies him: how on earth will he be a man? I couldn’t imagine it, either. I took refuge in history books, in daydreams of living in the Fifteenth or the Eighteenth Centuries.
On the cross-country trip that my family took in the summer of 1962, we stopped at my father’s birthplace, Clinton, Iowa, where he still had relatives. Among these was an elderly cousin and his wife who had never had children but who were still, or perhaps for that very reason, very sporty and youthful. They lived in a very pleasant one-story cottage-like house with a wrap-around verandah. It was as though they had flown an acre of New England to the heights above the Mississippi. The next stop on our trip was Chicago, but by the time our departure came round I’d made fast friends with the cousin’s wife, also a reader of The New Yorker, and she asked my parents if I could stay on for a week or so and then join up with them later. I don’t know why my mother declined this invitation, but she and my father may have been concerned that I would exhibit some shocking, shaming eccentricity in their absence and that they wouldn’t be there for quick damage control. It wasn’t that I had actually done anything really shocking or shaming (perhaps I’m forgetting something), but I was already regarded as an odd child, difficult to manage and possibly bad-tempered. My parents were probably only doing the responsible thing. But the vision of the week that I’d have spent with the happy older couple in their vine-clad house established itself as a vision of paradise that has diminished only to the extent that I find myself actually inhabiting it (albeit in a New York apartment), now that I am their age, and no longer have to worry about being a man.