Gotham Diary:
Outside
25 June 2013
We see here the first move in what I expect will be a lengthy game. Almost everything in the new piece was standing, either by itself or crammed into one of the storage boxes at the bottom, on the other picnic bench. With time, a number of pieces, I’ve no doubt, will migrate from the kitchen, to make more room in there. The game of shelves has begun.
Ray Soleil came uptown to give me a hand setting up the new piece. The assembly was somewhere between really easy and unexpectedly complicated. The hard part was all at the start. We put most of it together in the foyer, where it was cooler. Lugging it outside turned out not to be difficult at all.
Our picnic dinner Friday night was exactly what I had in mind, a pleasant, easy evening of cascading conversation and straightforward food. I served spare ribs, chicken legs, potato salad, asparagus and bean salad, corn on the cob and cornbread. Then a Fairway cherry pie, and Queen Anne cherries. When everyone left, I ran the dishwasher and read; the real clean-up I saved for Saturday.
On Sunday, Kathleen finally took a nap on the Lutyens bench, chosen for exactly that purposes. She was out cold for the better part of two hours. She said afterward that it was much nicer than sleeping in a chair. The rest of the time, she was working. She’s very busy at the moment, and happy to be so.
***
I am in the middle of Janet Malcolm’s book about Joe McGinnis and Jeff MacDonald, The Journalist and the Murderer. It made a big stir when it came out, in 1990, but I didn’t want to read about two jerky guys. But of course it’s not really about two jerky guys. It’s about the ethical considerations that underlie the art of creating real-life novels — what we call “nonfiction” — and Malcolm never ceases to insist that she is as fully implicated as anyone in the murky business of coaxing interesting material out of people. At one point, she wonders if a question that she asks might have been imprudent, might have caused her interlocutor to clam up. At another, McGinnis himself, originally eager to share his tale of woe — MacDonald, convicted of murdering his wife and daughters, sued McGinnis when McGinnis’s book about the murder trial turned out to be hostile to MacDonald, leaving the convict feeling doubly let down— refused to talk to Malcolm after an initial interview. She says that she was relieved.
Every hoodwinked widow, every deceived lover, every betrayed friend, every subject of writing knows on some level what is in store for him, and remains in the relationship anyway, impelled by something stgronger than his reason. That McGinnis, who had interviewed hundreds of people and knew the game backward and forward, should nevertheless exhibit himself to me as a defensive, self-righteous, scared man only demonstrates the strength of this force.
In the end, of course, the reader is implicated as well, for without the interest of readers, there would be no journalists, and no subjects suffering “what one goes through in those nightmares of being found out, from which one awakes with tears of gratitude that it is just a dream.” An extraordinary paragraph in the middle of the book, really too long for me to type out for a short entry, ends thus:
The Joe Goulds and the Perry Smiths of life tend to be windy bores and pathetic nut cases; only in literature, after they have got under the skin of a writer, do they achieve the ambition of fantastic interestingness that in actuality they only grotesquely gesture toward. MacDonald had no such ambition. He insisted, and continues to insist, on his ordinariness. “Im just this nice guy caught up in a nightmare of the law, fighting for my innocence.” McGinnis, if he had believed in his and had written about him as innocent, would have created a more interesting, if still not deeply fascinating, character, rather than the incoherently unevil murderer he had to settle for. Similarly, if I believed in McGinnis’s side of the lawsuit and could write about him as the the victim of a vicious act of vengeance on the part of a disgruntled subject, I, too, could create a better character. Like McGinnis’s MacDonald, my McGinnis doesn’t quite add up.
This is entertainment of the deepest, darkest art.