Gotham Diary:
Getting There
16 May 2013
What a difference a floor makes — especially outside.
I’ve already decided that one of the pieces in storage, a metal rocker, is not going to return to the balcony. It’s not in great shape, and not worth refurbishing because the balcony is not really big enough for a rocker, at least a rocker with me in it. But there are two nice chairs and a simple wooden bench, all of which will find places between the wicker chair in the foreground and the table in the background. It will be a while before everything is in place, but with the “bricks” reinstalled, the balcony is officially done. When the cushion for the bench arrives, we’ll have everything that’s really needed.
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Days like yesterday reduce my brain to frothy pulp, and although there seemed much more to write about than I had energy to comprise last night, I can’t, today, imagine what I was thinking about. All I’m thinking about now is the juicy book that I’m reading, Richard Davenport-Hines’s An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo. Did you know that John Profumo was an Italian baron — or would have been, had the Kingdom of Italy survived the War? I remember wondering how any high-class Englishman could have an Italian name, and of course a lot of high-class Englishman at the time wondered the same thing. Did you know that Profumo’s wife was the actress Valerie Hobson, who plays Edith d’Ascoyne in Kind Hearts and Coronets? Nor did I know that the Profumos had a house in Chester Terrace, which I made a point of photographing when in London last year. I wanted pictures of its arches, one of which is the subject of a Pennell print that’s a jewel of our small collection of good things to look at, and there you have it: only connect. The reason why English society interests me so much more than anything American is that it’s small and relatively unicentric. There is no escaping it. The same names keeping popping up in different contexts — and in the wrong beds. A high water table of ressentiment feeds springs of sparklingly acerbic prose. Consider the following character assassination of Harrow in the Twenties (Cecil Norwood was headmaster at the time).
Norwood’s Harrow installed a smoothly-mannered duplicity. It taught boys to show outward to deference to people for whom they felt little respect. It rewarded them for giving a pleasant smile while conforming to rules that they inwardly scorned. It assured them that compliance to higher authority was the essence of English racial superiority.
That feels vaguely libelous, and also pregnant with ancient anti-Harrovian animus. I’d been thinking of reading the new biography of Nancy Astor, but after this I’m pretty sure that I won’t:
Nancy Astor, when young, was generous, bold, and funny, with quick-witted shrewdness and inexhaustible energy; but after turning fifty her sudden amusing parries turned to rash outbursts, and she became a domineering, obstinate and often hurtful spitfire.
(“If I were your husband, madam, I would drink that coffee,” Churchill is said to have replied to Nancy’s hypothetically poisoned cup.)
But it’s great fun to fill in the occasional blank.
[Bill Astor’s postwar] bride, Sarah Norton, was recovering from the recent death of a much-loved mother and from a broken engagement to Dorothy Macmillan’s nephew, Billy Hartington, who had married someone else and been killed in action in quick succession.
That “someone else” was Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, the eventual president’s sister. Harold Macmillan, we’re told, found the novels of Anthony Powell “witty but pointless.” He read them as “training for Proust.”
Every now and then, Davenport-Hines makes a sententious remark about the Profumo Affair as a key moment in the collapse of Establishment England. I am disinclined to take such statements seriously. English manners seem to be inclined toward brittleness; when they shatter, as they inevitably do, wails on the death of England resound. But the English classes — at least, as they’ve been configured since the Industrial Revolution created new fortunes — persist, without the appearance of fragility. As long as the public schools continue to operate, England will go on being England. The temper of the time may vary, now earnest, now fun, but until the climate becomes something other than green and pleasant (where “pleasant” means “wet”), the worlds of Jane Austen and Edward St Aubyn will be recognizably the same, united not least by a keenly felt language.