[F]ew sixteen-year-old boys dream of being a father, yet every good writer spent his or her teen-age years dreaming of being a writer, plotting how to become one, rehearsing and practicing, fantasizing and preparing.

So says James Wood (in this week’s New Yorker, reviewing Greg Bellow’s book about his father). I certainly intended to be a writer, almost from the moment puberty hit, but the plotting, rehearsing, practicing and fantasizing, not so much. Did I prepare? Well, I wrote a great deal. All of it rubbish, except perhaps for the history papers that I wrote in school. (They weren’t very good, but they weren’t rubbish.) And I read a great deal. It’s hard for me to resist the very strong impression that I dreamed of becoming precisely the writer that I am today. I never wanted to be a novelist (even though I did try to write one, twenty years ago) — which may be why I skipped the rehearsals and the fantasies. As for what I did want to write, that took a long time to find out. It took time and it took a lot of reading. Like a wine, it took ageing.

But although I wanted to be a writer, I was never very ambitious about it, and this makes me wonder, from time to time, if I’m any good at it. I wonder if I don’t suffer enough when I write. I don’t groan at the keyboard, or struggle to get things just right. (I do a lot of editing with that end in view, but editing is a kind of reading, not writing.) I like to write. I like having written very much, but the actual writing is a pleasure as well, if not exactly a form of bliss. Writing is how I think.

***

Reading Anthony Pagden’s new history, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters, I gradually recalled how attracted I was to the writers of the Enlightenment when I was young. I just might have fantasized about wearing a wig like Voltaire’s. The writers of the Enlightenment were always being quoted, and their remarks were always both pithy and elegant. There was a relaxed, off -the-top-of-the-head quality to their observations, which they could pull off because their heads were packed to the crown with interesting information — interesting, if not always reliable. Their opinions were clear and they enjoyed expressing them as economically as possible. The French writers, anyway. Écrasez l’infâme! It just doesn’t fly in English.

Pagden’s subtitle expresses an opinion that infuses every page of his book. The author, new to me, has written extensively on European identities and empires. He is aware that “the Enlightenment project” has taken a beating from the postmodernists, but he saves that for his final chapter. Instead of defending the Enlightenment, he demonstrates that it is still in process. We, the WEIRD people of the world, are still working out the details of plans first sketched by the men of the “republic of letters.” The constitutions of today’s liberal democracies embody ideas that were floated by Locke and Montesquieu, among many others, and we are still trying make representative government work more responsively.

To be sure, the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath still seem to have drawn a line marking the end of the Enlightenment, and many of the horrors of subsequent centuries are still attributed by many to the philosophes’ radical anticlericalism. But Pagden digs up the Enlightenment’s roots in the Reformation, which left Europe divided against itself and made organized religion a serious problem for all seekers after tolerant peace. The Enlightenment was headquartered in Paris for a simple reason: nowhere was organized religion more intertwined with government power than in France. With the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, Louis XIV rescinded France’s commitment to pluralist progress, and his death, thirty years later, brought an end to what had always been a highly personal style of monarchy. The two kings who followed him were unwilling and unable to keep his blaze alight,  but they were also indisposed to tinker much with his legacy, especially in the area of religion. The men of the Enlightenment could see that France’s magnificent conservatism would end in bankruptcy of some kind or another, and, far from a blueprint for its destruction, their work deserves to be seen as a storm protection plan.

It is true that the laicization of the church — the fatal move, in historian William Doyle’s view, that would carry an ever-more paranoid France right into the Terror — appears to be the realization of an item high on the Enlightenment’s agenda. But Kant, in Pagden’s estimation the climactic Enlightenment thinker (Kant lived to celebrate the Revolution, if at a safe distance), would have argued that the move was premature, and Pagden’s portraits of the philosophes convince me that most of them — all but the dodgy Rousseau, in fact — would have agreed. We need to recall, however, that the Church of 1792 was a temporal, foreign power, and its priests its putative agents. This was always the specifically Catholic problem of the post-Reformation world: alone among the religious leaders of Europe, the pope commanded an actual army. From his state in central Italy he engaged in diplomatic alliances just like any secular prince. He also bore the singular power of anathema. It is not hard to see why the revolutionaries deemed it important to cut the French church’s ties to Rome. I am inclined to see the church’s worldly power as a greater evil than the radical excesses of the Revolution. The Terror was hatched by the Inquisition.

(It is for this reason that I regard Augustine, the first leader to invoke state force in dealing with religious matters, as the most wicked figure in Christian history. As the inventor of “original sin,” he is merely the most deluded.)

The great theme of The Enlightenment is cosmpolitanism. This was certainly very important to the philosophes, but it is even more important to us today, because the world is one place at the moment, and we need to do much better at living together with people who think very differently. At this, I believe, we WEIRDos are in the lead, because we have the most experience at agreeing to disagree. In the Islamic worlds, such toleration is impossible even between Sunni and Shia. The Morsi government has just been ousted in Egypt because of its majoritarian intransigence. In Iran, hysterical anti-Western sentiment has been allowed to consume much of civil society and even more of the country’s wealth. I am all for standing on principle, so long as the number of principles does not exceed three. (No killing, no taking, no defaming.) Beyond that, firmness is merely stubborn and childish. The whole thrust of the Enlightenment was to question, to critique, the validity of oppressive doctrines. It did not seek to substitute oppressive doctrines of its own, although oppression was certainly felt by those who would not welcome cosmopolitan acceptance. We must deal with the recalcitrants with Kantian patience, by never abandoning the Enlightenment project of cosmopolitan education. Anthony Pagden’s final paragraphs:

The realists may claim, as realists invariably do, that most of these institutions (the EU aside) are only fora in which people merely talk. But talking counts, and states today spend a great deal more time doing it than they ever have in the past. Then, on another level, few of us the West can, or would probably want to, live out our lives unaffected by the lives of often radically different others. The world of communicating beings that Kant saw as providing the necessary basis for any future cosmopolitan world may still be some way off. But it is far closer than it was in, say, 1945.

None of this was achieved, and nothing in the future will ever be achieved, by shutting ourselves up in communities, by measuring out our lives by the horizons of what our fathers and our forefathers have set down for us, or by regulating our actions, and our desires, according to the dictates of those who have appointed themselves to be the representatives on earth of a highly improbable divinity. Much of what modern civilization has achieved we obviously owe to many factors, from increased medical knowledge to information technologies to vastly improved methods of transport, which although they are an indirect legacy of the Enlightenment and the revolutions in science and technology that both preceded and followed it, have no immediate or direct connection to its ideals. But our ability even to frame our understanding of the world in terms of something larger than our own small patch of ground, our own culture, family, or religion, clearly does. And in that, we are all, inescapably, the heirs of the architects of the Enlightenment “science of man.” For this, then, if for no other reason, the Enlightenment still matters.

***

To me, writing has always seemed to be a way of being private in public. I never thought of it as involving, business aside, meetings with other people — I wanted to share my words, not my company. If I became famous, it would register as letters from appreciative readers. (I’m still working on quantity, but I’ve become familiar with the quality of letters from appreciative readers, and it is exactly what I hoped for.) No, my fantasies about “being a writer” definitely stopped with that wig.

Something is bothering me. I don’t know what it is, but it’s making me impatient and irritable. Certainly the subway-station construction is a factor. I went to Fairway last night to pick up some deli food that I wouldn’t have to cook and that we could eat cold. A simple walk across the street. But the street is anything but simple. The sidewalks have been narrowed, and the walkways  that take the place of completely obliterated sidewalks, such as the one in front of our building (whose foundations stand exposed in the pit where the station access will be placed), are constricted and not infrequently work sites themselves. Workers swarm about like invading Goths, while traffic police try to unwind the snarls of pedestrians and turning vehicles. The heat intensifies the unpleasantness. The intersection of Second Avenue and 86th Street is a deeply unpleasant place right now. Construction projects ought not to be so blithely uncivil. I worry that I won’t live to see it cleared up.

So, that’s one thing. But there must be more to it, because I blew up this morning, went barking mad in fact, when I read Adam Ross Sorkin’s story about greed on Wall Street. What drove me crazy was the shocked, shocked tone of Sorkin’s piece. It seems that a partner at a law firm commissioned a survey of 250 Wall Streeters.

While the results may not be scientific, they are stark. For example, 26 percent of respondents said they “believed the compensation plans or bonus structures in place at their companies incentivize employees to compromise ethical standards or violate the law.”

There is a view that the ethical problems come from the very top: 17 percent said they expected “their leaders were likely to look the other way if they suspected a top performer engaged in insider trading.” It gets even more troubling: “15 percent doubted that their leadership, upon learning of a top performer’s crime, would report it to the authorities.”

There is nothing acceptable about these responses.

The last sentence blew my top.

Do I think that greed is good? No, but I think that it’s normal, and I’m exasperated by the pious pretense that Wall Street bankers are committed, or supposed to be committed, to high-mindedness and putting their customers first. After World War II, the government and Wall Street spokesman tried to sell the idea that retail capitalism is a good idea. Ordinary people were encouraged to invest their savings in shares of American companies. They were assured that Wall Street was not rigged against them, and the rules against “insider trading” were flown as a banner. The playing field was allegedly level.

Piffle. It not only wasn’t level but the attempt to level it ought never to have been undertaken. It is high time to drop the Cold-War charade. Wall Street ought to be draped with red flags emblazoned with cautions. Retail investors ought to be steered into highly-regulated investment companies (mutual funds) and ETFs. What we call retail brokerage ought to be limited to high net-worth clients who are deemed, by their very wealth, to be insiders; ergo, no more “retail.”

All I ask of bankers is that they not steal deposits. All I ask of the government is to replace the Glass-Steagall Act.

Insider trading is an element in some genuinely fraudulent acts, such as front-running and dumping. But merely taking advantage of information that has not been made public, and buying or selling shares for one’s personal account, seems to me to be an entirely valid perquisite of working on Wall Street. I reject the distinction between “inside” information and rumor. The distinction is a nice one, but it serves no worthy purpose. Information of any kind is the oxygen of Wall Street, inhaled in huge quantities by every trader of any kind. To sticker one particular type of information with a penalty warning is artificial. By “artificial,” I mean that it will never have more intrinsic meaning for traders than the prohibition on that piece of fruit in the Garden of Eden. Let’s stop playing God. Instead of penalizing human nature, we need to civilize it.

Behind the hypocrisy about insider trading lies the intensifying American dissonance between empty-headed campaigns for public virtue and a depraved popular culture.

We were lucky with the weather. It was grey, and a bit sprinkly, but cool (coolish), and breezy — comfortable balcony weather. Almost everyone was out there. And then, about an hour after the party was supposed to end, the restaurant where I’d made a reservation for dinner called to ask if we were still coming. We were! On his way out, Will went through the rooms, calling out, “The party’s over! The party’s over!”

We were celebrating the engagement of Ms NOLA and Messir di T, and most of the guests were friends of theirs whom we hadn’t met. I was not surprised to find that they made up a clever and appealing bunch — what other sorts of friends would the happy couple have? I kept thinking of them as “the young people,” but that’s kind of silly, as they’re all in their mid- to late-thirties and quite grown up. You could tell as much from what they didn’t drink: wine and Arnold Palmers. The hard liquor was seriously dented, and a good deal of the beer. Still, I could have had twice as many guests, and we shouldn’t have run out of anything. Not a problem: aside from three gigantic bottles of seltzer, I’ll go through the leftovers in a couple of months. Except for the sideboard by the kitchen, the apartment looks as though nothing happened.

It was also Ms NOLA’s birthday, and when she left our party, she went to another. The wedding will take place in October, in King’s County. I realized that I’ve known Ms NOLA for a quarter of her life; our friendship is only a slight bit older than this blog.

For the party, we hired a bartender and a server, and I ordered canapes from Agata & Valentina. (We could have used a few more of them.) Bill and Jhon ran the party beautifully, but they complimented me, when they left, for being “pretty organized.” Most of my preparations for the party involved tasks that I had been putting off for a few months, but I did spend an afternoon reconfiguring the kitchen for the party — clearing out the refrigerator, clearing off the countertops. The burners on the stove were almost completely covered by a large, sturdy pastry board. One of the tubs in which Will’s toys are stored in the blue room was emptied for beer and ice, while a third, nesting under the other tub, went into the kitchen as an ice chest. (The tubs come from Gardener’s Supply, and are as colorful as they are versatile. Every once in a while, somebody gets plastic right.)

When the party started, I found myself drifting into a slight haze. There was nothing more for me to do, except of course to be sociable, and, while that came easily enough, I could not quite unbend my mind from the four-day exercise of getting ready. Also, Kathleen had booked our Thanksgiving trip to San Francisco — a happy event that, right now, has  melancholy undertones. (I am not quite at liberty to say why we’ll be flying across the country for the holiday — not just yet, but I’m sure that the astute reader will guess.) I could not, in any case, snap out of a certain pensiveness that, while it didn’t interfere with my duties as a host, made it difficult to remember much in detail. Suddenly, an hour after it was supposed to end, the party was over!

But everyone seemed to have had a good time, and Ms NOLA said something really quite lovely in her note of thanks the next day. I couldn’t ask for more.

***

At dinner last night, Kathleen asked, and I can’t recall quite why it was on her mind, where the English rule of primogeniture came from. (This is the rule according to which land passes automatically to a landholder’s eldest son upon his death. It must be borne in mind that land could not be devised by testament.) It had been a long time since I’d read any English legal history — I’ve been more concerned with the somewhat disingenuous invention of the feudal system by Italian lawyers, in the eleventh century — and my brain flashed a COBWEBS! alert. But in my stumbling response, I got it mostly right, as we found when, back at home, I pulled down Volume II of Pollack & Maitland, and I read the chapter on the law of inheritance to Kathleen. The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I is mostly the world of William Maitland, and his crisp, irony-edged style is beautifully Edwardian (that would be Edward VII, of course, and a bit in advance, as the book was published in 1895). I was surprised at how really readable he is, even when laying out abstruse cases. Infusing the thousand-plus pages is Maitland’s conviction that the development of medieval English law, while never systematic, was always driven by a desire for efficiency. That may sound strange, even anachronistic, but in fact it was the simplifications that rebounded on themselves, creating the complications that, by the Nineteenth Century, made wholesale reform necessary. (And, indeed, today’s British law is a bullet train to our American Toonerville Trolley. It has occurred to me that we declared independence so that we could preserve the ancient sport of adversarial litigation.) Maitland is amused, almost to the point of condescension, by the attempts of Glanvil and Bracton — legists writing before and after 1200 — to explain the law of their day as if it were governed by philosophical principles, but he is also mindful of the legal historians of his own century, many of whom were quite similarly naive.

It is as a general rule convenient for the lord that he should have but one heir to deal with; but as already said, the lord’s convenience has here to encounter a powerful force, a very ancient and deep-seated sense of what it right and just, and even in the most feudal age of the most feudal country, the most feudal inheritances, the great fiefs that were almost sovereignties, were partitioned among sons, while as yet the king of the French would hardly have been brought to acknowledge that these beneficia were being inherited at all. It is the splendid peculiarity of the Norman duchy that it was never divided. And, as this example will show, it was not always for the lord’s advantage that he should have but one heir to deal with: the king at Paris would not have been sorry to see that great inheritance split among co-heirs. And so we can not believe that our Henry III was sorry when his court, after prolonged debate, decided that the palatinate of Chester was divisible among co-heiresses. A less honest man than Edward I would have lent a ready ear to Bruce and Hastings when they pleaded for a partition of Scotland. That absolute and uncompromising form of primogeniture which prevails in England belongs, not to feudalism in general, but to a highly centralized feudalism, in which the king has not much to fear from the power of his mightiest vassals, and is strong enough to impose a law that in his eyes has many merits, above all the great merit of simplicity.

In my rambling way, this is how I answered Kathleen’s question. English primogeniture was a consequence of  the “splendid peculiarity of the Norman duchy.” The Norman story is one of the most exciting in dynastic history. In little more than two centuries, a band of Norse brigands pillaging the Seine and the rest of the northwest peninsula (or quasi peninsula) of what is now France transformed themselves into the liege men of a leader on whom a Frankish king bestowed the title of count; the count’s successors took to calling themselves dukes; and in 1066 Duke William successfully invaded England and assumed the crown. At first, he and the Saxon aristocracy tried to get along, but they didn’t try very hard, and soon the antagonistic Saxons were eliminated and replaced by loyal Normans in one of the great land grabs of all time. William became, without a doubt, the most powerful man in Europe. Unlike the Continental rulers, he did not have to worry about local customs and ancient practices, because he faced no powerful opposition with an interest in upholding them; whatever got in his way, he paved right over it.

Maitland’s remark about the French king’s attitude toward the hereditability of beneficia — an earlier term for what would later be regarded as feudal holdings — is worth pausing over. When William was paramount in England, the French king had only just consolidated his control of the Ile de France, a territory much smaller than Normandy (not to mention England). Nominally king of France, he was effectively king of the Ile de France, period. He could squawk all he liked about the hereditability of beneficia, which, back in the days of Charlmemagne, reverted to the crown upon the death of the holder, so that the king could hand over the land’s income to some new strongman. As royal power dwindled, the sons of strongmen, often strongmen themselves, did as they liked, and the king might mumble some words about appointing the new strongman to take his father’s place without so much as a breath about inheritance. The French king never had the power — not even in the blazing days of the Sun King — to lay down any general law of inheritance, or to ride roughshod over local practices. It took the French Revolution to sweep all of those away, seven hundred years after William, and six hundred after his equally formidable great-grandson, Henry II, bent English law to their liking.

It took a while, as I read, to remember the meanings of such terms as scutage and sokeman, gavelkind and borough English, but when Maitland began talking about seisin (as a key concept in the inheritance of land by half-blooded siblings), I had to put the book down. We had a professor in law school who was fond of saying that English property law was like “Chinese music,” full of notes that make no sense to Western ears. In fact, Chinese music is Top Forty in contrast to property law, and seisin is one of the strangest notes at all. It is unlikely that Maitland’s explanation, which I am looking forward to re-reading, might be surpassed.

At the Video Room, yesterday — I was returning The Wrong Man, which I’d thought I owned until the moment I was ready to watch it: oops! — I picked up a film that must have gone straight to video, because I’m sure that I’d have noticed an ad for Leonie, starring Emily Mortimer as the mother of sculptor Isamu Noguchi. I had no idea what to expect, and I’m still not quite sure what I saw. Based on Masayo Duus’s biography of Noguchi, subtitled A Life Without Borders, the screenplay is credited to the team of Hisako Matsui and David Wiener; Matsui directs. The project appears to have been backed by Japanese funding. I say this because it suggests an explanation for the brittle, almost pedagogic quality of the result. Leonie Gilmour, in 1897 a graduate of Bryn Mawr (the first recipient of a four-year scholarship), was a sort of precursor of Katharine Hepburn, albeit one born without the silver spoon. She was a lady who dared to bend the rules, the high-minded mother of two children born out of wedlock. The screenplay makes far too much use of extracts (voiced over by Ms Mortimer) from Gilmour’s writings (letters? diaries?) — if Gilmour is to be remembered, it will be for what she did and how she lived, not for what she wrote. The wiseacres in Hollywood would have cut the voiceovers out.

To be sure, Gilmour’s story isn’t going to be easy for anyone to tell. At a time of rising nationalism in the two great powers of the Pacific, the marriage of a Japanese man and an American woman would be fraught so long as the couple remained in either homeland, and, as we’ve seen, there was no actual marriage. Gilmour took her son to Japan, in 1907, to protect him from the taunts of nativist boys — she was living in Los Angeles at the time (the movie puts her in a Pasadena that consists entirely of tents — surely not?), and then sent him back to the United States in 1918, this time, to protect him from the growing Japanese military. It’s something of a relief when the movie comes back to New York, where it began, because, as we all know (were it only true), the city accommodates all kinds. If there is a critique of nationalist bigotry, the makers of Leonie are much too polite to make it explicit. Their Gilmour appears to be ingenuously surprised by the force of custom, and then, as a high-minded type, she seems to resolve the conflict by remembering that, as she is more enlightened than ordinary people, it doesn’t matter much whether the ordinary people are Japanese or American. There’s a deeply interesting story here, one full of embarrassment and humiliation. The man whom Gilmour hadn’t married, poet Yone Noguchi, deserted her for other lovers before returning to Japan and taking a lawful Japanese wife. (And yet he persisted in seeking the editorial assistance that had brought them together in New York!.) It’s a classic case of proud lady and caddish rogue, but with an unusual international twist. Instead of telling it, the movie is itself rather embarrassed about the irregularities. They are hinted at whenever possible and never discussed. That the identity of the father of Gilmour’s second child was uncertain is mentioned only once, by the caddish father of her first. (Yone Noguchi is played by Shido Nakamura, here rather pudgily pretty.)

What the film wants to be about is the mother who nurtured a great artist, and perhaps it might have been better to cut the first half of the screenplay and develop the second, in which Leonie pulls the clever Isamu out of school at the age of ten and commissions him to design a house, in the construction of which he participates. This is a truly remarkable business, also a very interesting story, but aside from a few scenes in which a carpenter gruffly encourages the boy to work with wood, the house materializes out of cinematic magic, not narrative logic. Later, in New York, Leonie tells her son that he’s an artist, not a medical student. The persuasiveness of this diktat is not filmed; all we see is the result, Noguchi in an art class. As for any struggles that he might have had attaining notice as an artist, they are omitted. (The Wikipedia entry suggests that there weren’t any.)

Movies about artists are the most difficult to make, because the narrative of artistic development is submerged in the artist’s nervous system and impossible to observe. Nothing is more occult than the wellsprings of inspiration, and the movies’ attempt to photograph them is rarely more than horribly crude. Artists are simply not interesting to watch. (Interesting accounts of artists at work simply leave out the boring stretches.) Leonie gracefully sidesteps the problem by focusing on Leonie’s emphatic support of her son’s creativity, however it might manifest itself. And she gave him the example of her free-spirited passion. But the vagueness of the support, its very blank-checkedness, reduces Leonie’s encouragement to greeting-card generality.

In the end, Leonie is an hommage, a cinematic memorial to the remarkable mother of a sculptor whose remarkable work the filmmakers leave it to you to discover.

I took a gamble on Leonie because of Emily Mortimer, and so far as getting a great performance was concerned, I was not disappointed: Leonie is one of the best pictures that this great actress has made. I have rarely seen fortitude so deeply engraved on a beautiful woman’s face. Ms Mortimer’s Gilmour is not so much a determined woman as a strong human being, endowed with education as well as grit. At the end of the movie, a flashback takes us to her final parting from Yone Noguchi, in a grove of cherry blossoms. The full measure of the man’s narcissism is sounded when he tells her that he wants to give her a kiss unlike any other. She looks at first as though ready to let him, but it’s really only shock; as she gathers herself together, what becomes clear is her decision not to laugh in his face. She quietly turns her back and walks away.

***

And now you’ll excuse me, as I have to prepare for a party. The windows are open to the relatively cool air — I couldn’t have asked for better weather for tidying the blue room, which tends to stuffiness. Before that, I’ve got to do a bit of shopping — beer, wine, and a very few other beverages; a few munchables (canapes from Agata and Valentina will arrive tomorrow), and things like plastic glasses and paper napkins. I should very much like the living-room windows to be clean, something I’ve had nearly three months to see to but have neglected.

Kathleen got back last night, safe and sound — but exhausted. Although surrounded by the tranquility of Thomas Pond, she spent quite a few hours on conference calls, and I almost told her host to impose a one-dollar fine for every outburst about Citrix. I’m not counting on Kathleen to help with any of the preparations, but it’s a relief to have her here.

My Hitchcock jag came to a full stop last night, in the kitchen. I had been watching North by Northwest on and off since the middle of the afternoon. That’s when I set the video boombox on the counter and slipped in the DVD, as entertainment for the day’s project, clearing the kitchen for this weekend’s party. Clearing the kitchen was something that I’d been meaning to do for months, and now I had to do it. The work produced several dishwasher loads, and while the dishwasher ran, I sat in the bedroom (the coolest room in the apartment) and read Five Star Billionaire, by Tash Aw. Shortly before five, Kathleen called from the airport in Portland. Her flight had been delayed. Then it was canceled. Happily, the friend with whom she had been staying could come pick her up and take her back for the night. (She is still in Maine, booked on a flight for late this afternoon, but she is also looking into buses and trains.) Once it was clear that I’d be alone for dinner, I ordered a trio of appetizers from Wa Jeal, our go-to Chinese restaurant (come-from, really; we’ve never actually eaten there). When they arrived, I set up a tray table in the kitchen and pulled up a dining chair. It was cosy, to say the least, but the timing was good: by the time I’d gobbled up the food, the train was plunging into the tunnel.

Not a very rigorous way of watching a movie, you may say. Indeed, North by Northwest wasn’t on the list; as foreseen, the experience of watching Hitchcock’s films of the Fifties was complete with Vertigo. We’ll  not quibble. It’s possible that I have seen North by Northwest as many times as I’ve seen all of Hitchcock’s other movies combined. Watching it is something of a default setting. Having it on, I should say, while I’m doing something else. I don’t know when I last sat down and gave it my undivided attention. I’m thinking of scheduling a Hitchcock series from Rebecca to Family Plot. (Someday, I hope to see them all in order.) Because I was in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, and often had my back turned to the screen, I didn’t notice anything new, as I had in all the other Fifties movies.

Before going to bed, I read what Donald Spoto had to say about North by Northwest, in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. Nobody is better at unpacking the recursions on which Hitchcock films are founded, but there’s no need for me to paraphrase any of that. Spoto sees North by Northwest as a remake of The Thirty-Nine Steps, which, while perfectly plausible, only emphasizes how very different the two movies are to watch. I wish that I could say that the following passage had dated, instead of becoming more apt than ever:

On this journey, governments are, of course, as fraudulent as advertising or spies: the Capitol, seen behind the scheming intelligence men, offers no sure safety. At the United Nations, chaos easily erupts, and the symbol of national order and tradition embodied in Mount Rushmore is ominously dangerous. All these solid institutions are powerless to save Thornhill from metaphysical absurdity and human perversity. … Like advertising (the crowded chaos of Madison Avenue veils deception and disruption), and art (the African statue camouflages the secret microfilm), the “ordered” life of the nation has been penetrated by fraud.

Regardless of when it was actually made, North by Northwest is as much a movie of the Teens as anything that will open this year, and I expect that it will be movie of the Twenties as well.

***

I want to call Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire a Chinese novel, but I don’t really know what I’m talking about, as, aside from Dream of the Red Chamber, I haven’t read any Chinese novels — novels, that is, written for Chinese readers, bearing little sign of Western influence. Five Star Billionaire is written in fluent English (and quite perfectly edited and printed, so far as I could tell), but it still seems Chinese to me. Its compelling stories are dominated by ambitious objectives, moral crises, and fateful accidents. There is very little irony and a great deal of sincerity, even when the action is duplicitous. The characters know their own minds, even when they don’t — they may be undecided at times, but they are never, as so many characters in Western fiction are, torn. And the narrator eschews understatement, that detached countersuggestiveness that keeps us smiling through Jane Austen’s pages. The third-person point of view is decidedly uncritical. It may seem that I am deprecating Five Star Billionaire, but I don’t mean to do so. I’m trying, rather, to appreciate a different kind of novel, one that fully addresses the reality of a different culture.

Five Star Billionaire gleams with assurance, and observes an almost Horatian economy. It is a “literary” novel in tone if not content. This is where it differs most sharply from popular beach books and thoughtless quickies. Five Star Billionaire is not a guilty pleasure but its opposite, a pleasure to read. If there is no understatement, there is no excess, either. Saying that, it suddenly occurs to me that there might be one note of irony: in the title itself. There is a book by (almost) the same title in the novel, but there is no five star billionaire. There are four strivers and one con man. Guess which one of them wrote that book.

Tash Aw was born in Taiwan but raised in Malaysia, and Malaysia is the homeland of his quintet of principals, all of whom are struggling, in one way or another, in Shanghai. Well-educated Malaysians are taught English, as happens in most South Asian remnants of the British Empire, and a curious side effect of this, at least for the Malaysians of Chinese extraction whom I’ve encountered, is that English is not so much a second language as it is another way of speaking Chinese.

What stopped him from ringing her now was the absence of achievement. He had done little with his life and had been reduced to absolute zero. On at least half a dozen occasions he had paused with his phone in his hand, her card on the table before him, the number already tapped into the little screen. All he had to do was to press the green button and she would be there. What would he say then? How would he fill the spaces in the conservation if not with tales of what he was doing in Shanghai, descriptions of success? He would have loved to be able to say, Didn’t you hear? Well, yes, I’ve been running an art gallery for five years now, showing a few avant-garde Chinese artists. Or, I moved into film production a few years back —  yes, I gave up the family business completely.

In fact, Justin has been given up by his family’s business — and it was never really his family anyway. Taken in as an infant from a cousin so distant that she might not have been actually related to the grand family that adopted him, Justin has been raised to carry on a small but growing empire of property developments in Malaysia and China. Nearing forty, he is dying of asphyxiation at the beginning of the novel; his existence, outwardly successful — Justin is something of a genius at compromise — is starved of meaning. We eventually realize that he has been unable to replace his first true love, the woman he is now abashed to telephone. Her presence in the novel might be dismissed as “convenient” or “trite,” but it’s not, for the simple reason that Yinghui’s story is even more interesting than Justin’s. Back in Kuala Lumpur, when her father was a minister in the government, and Justin was silently adoring her, Yinghui was deep in a very Western-looking affair with Justin’s brother, the suave and good-looking but basically caddish C S, as he’s called. When that relationship ended, as it would have done even if her father had not been disgraced, Yinghui took off for points East, settling in Shanghai, and made a successful businesswoman out of herself — the very thing that Justin, inwardly at least, has never managed to do. Yinghui is mildly dissatisfied by her celibate lot, but she prefers it to being with a boring man. Then she meets Walter, a tycoon with a business proposition, and by the time she does, you’ve really no choice but to keep reading just to find out how badly her life will be upended. In due course of time, the catastrophe is related in a single sentence, and the dust settles quickly. Yinghui is still on her two feet, but she is ready to take Justin’s call.

The other two characters are Gary, a pop star shot straight from poverty to glittering celebrity, and Phoebe, a girl on the make. Neither of these characters is an empty as ambition requires. Gary has come to hate his millions of fans, without knowing why; and, when she arrives at the threshold of a lucrative relationship with a man, Phoebe has a few brandies and breaks every rule in her many self-help books. Phoebe is at least as interesting as Moll Flanders, and Gary turns out to be quite sympathetic as well.

As I read Five Star Billionaire, I began to have an eerie feeling. Each of the characters has at least one moment like this one, of Justin’s.

He rang two or three other people, but it was the same every time. They’d heard the news [about the collapse of his family’s business back in Kuala Lumpur], they were sorry to hear about his family, and, yes, they’d of course love to meet up but things were so busy in China these days, you know what things are like, just nonstop. They promised to call, but their voices were full of a fake cheeriness that signaled to him that they would not, of course, call back. He had done the same so many times in the past; he never thought he’d be on the receiving end of it.

This was what life was like in China, he thought: Stand still for a moment and the river of life rushes past you. He had spent three months confined to his apartment, and in that time Shanghai seemed to have changed completely, the points of reference in his wold permanently rearranged and repositioned in ways he could not recognize. Just as he had lost his car and driver, he was also navigating his way through life without a map — as if the GPS in his brain had been disconnected, leaving him floundering. Everyone in this city was living life at a hundred miles an hour, speeding ever forward: he had fallen behind, out of step with the rest of Shanghai.

I say that Tash Aw does not exaggerate, but there is something so lurid and catastrophic about this description of the loss of momentum, repeated, as I say, in each of the characters’ stories (except for that of the con man) that I was reminded of the histrionics, as I should call it,  surrounding ghosts in Chinese culture. Ghosts there are not unsettled, sometimes benign presences. Rather they are heralds of malignancy, wielding curses like pathogens. There are no ghosts in Five Star Billionaire, but the despair with which Phoebe and Gary and Yinghui and Justin contemplate their momentarily stalled lives suggests the power of evil spirits. But the stalls are momentary, the spirits not so evil. The despair passes. Perhaps Shanghai is the problem. (Aw lived there for a while, but now he lives in London.)

Five Star Billionaire is not at all my kind of novel, which is why, enjoying it as much as I did, I felt that I’d had a two-day holiday. A holiday — not a vacation.

Last night, I watched Vertigo for the first time in several years. Because I had just read Dan Auilar’s book about the making of the movie, and because, over the past week or so, I had watched the Hitchcock films that preceded it, from Strangers on a Train on, and in order, Vertigo was not the same movie that it had been. It was more disturbing than ever. Well-known layers of meaning peeled back to reveal deeper layers, layers that perhaps could not be perceived when the film was made, because our assumptions about life (especially American assumptions) were relatively naive. Time has also served to stylize the action, by making palpable — visible, even, in the more formal costumes — the polite distances that were maintained by ladies and gentlemen in those days, distances for romance to punch through. To the charge that Vertigo is “dated,” one could only agree, on the understanding that it is no more dated than Hamlet or Aida.

Vertigo is, proverbially, about obsession. It is about a man’s obsession with a woman whose suicide he was unable to prevent, and it is about a film director’s obsession with a woman whose elevation into unreachable royalty he was unable to prevent. I saw last night that it is also a study of depths and shallows. Scottie Ferguson’s obsession with Madeleine Elster rocks him to his core, and in that sense may be said to be “deep,” but this passion is excited by Madeleine’s surface — by a surface that seems to close off such depths as she might have; the cause of Scottie’s obsession may be said to be “shallow.” He is not interested in who Madeleine is; he seems not to want to know her. He wants to possess her qua mystery. And this, unlike his obsession, is not abnormal. Many men seem to be wired just as Scottie is. Whether this wiring is inborn or acculturated remains to be determined, but it is unquestionably related to the conviction, widely held and effectually challenged only within living memory, that women are second-class, inferior human beings. Their beauty and their desirability depend upon it.

Like many fans of Vertigo, I’m always inclined to scold Scottie for the callousness with which he whiningly commands Judy to change her appearance, but it has until now seemed no worse than a lapse of gallantry — no way to treat a lady. Last night, I was more distressed by the imprisonment into which Judy was reluctantly preparing to enter. Madeleine’s looks and costumes would constitute a prison wall through which Scottie would never pass to pay a visit. Judy’s casual, good-times personality (so powerfully dressed by Edith Head), would have to be suppressed, reserved for girls’-nights-out. I must have been aware of this on some level, but, last night, it emerged as a clear wickedness. I began to see that Scottie had been chosen to serve as an unwitting accomplice to the crime of murdering the real Madeleine not just because of his vertigo.

Although I admire James Stewart as an actor, I am usually grateful that I don’t have to spend time with his characters. I find his all-American guys to be more frightening than appealing; however capable, they’re horse-tempered, unnerved by ignorance. Perhaps it was this misgiving that highlighted a minor passage in Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic. Art Director Henry Bumstead told Dan Auilar something that I found most interesting.

In the early days, we kept good set pieces to reuse, and I was building an apartment for this one character, so I was using three great-looking bookcases that we had in storage. When the director walked through, he didn’t say anything critical, just “Hm, this guy must like to read.” And, in fact, he didn’t. It wasn’t in his character at all. That’s when I began to realize that the set has to match what’s happening with the character.

Now, I misread this remark as a statement about the making of Vertigo, and it isn’t. Hitchcock and the movie are not mentioned. But it’s apt: the walls of Scottie’s apartment are manifestly not book-lined. And when he wants to research the life of Carlotta Valdes, he turns to a bookshop owner from whom, rather rudely, he purchases nothing. Another kind of shallow.

And in Scottie’s discontent with the natural person of Judy Barton, I found reconfirmation of my belief that the last thing you want to do is meet your favorite movie star. They don’t want to meet you, either, and not because you’re nobody. They’re paid to be other than they are (as Judy was paid to play Madeleine), and it’s that “other” that you fall in love with. Actors can only disappoint you, except as actors.

***

More surprising was the reprise of the line, “Try, just try.” This line comes up twice in Vertigo — Scottie begs Madeleine to try to wake up from her bad dream, and Midge says the same thing to Scottie when he is hospitalized. The line is a reprise of Manny Balestrero’s plea in The Wrong Man, also made in a sanitarium. Watching Vertigo on the same day as The Wrong Man, which I’d seen in the afternoon, made the connection between the two movies remarkably obvious. Between them, The Wrong Man and Vertigo feature three cases of mental disturbance. The two that aren’t feigned, moreover, might be bracketed together as what Scottie’s doctor calls “acute melancholia.” Scottie’s unresponsiveness to Midge mirrors Rose Balestrero’s to her husband.

Even Hitchcock, I think, missed the paralleling counterpoint of the Balestreros’ story. Hardly does he get out of jail before she enters the prison of her depression. Depression, it’s true, is profoundly undramatic — that’s the problem: nothing happens. What sets depression apart as a disorder is that it rouses such massive impatience in healthy people. Dan Auilar writes,

The Wrong Man‘s microscopic focus on the justice process left little screen time for Manny’s wife. Dressed down and psychologically shattered by Manny’s unjustified arrent, Miles’s character is never fully developed. Hitchcock seemed impatient with the wife’s story line, and his indifference shows on screen. The film’s sanitarium scenes are similar to the scenes in Vertigo, with the same overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of psychological crisis, yet there was little occasion for Vera Miles to do much else on screen to make an impact.

At the end of The Wrong Man, a nurse tells Manny, “She’s not listening to you now.” This is a stab at educating the audience about the powerful clamp of deep depression. The effort to engage with other people is too exhausting to be kept up; Rose says, “You can go now.” We’re told that the real Rose Balestrero left the hospital two years later, “completely cured.” That’s not very likely. Patrick McGilligan, in Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, writes,

Hitchcock kept in touch with the real-life Balestreros … asking how Rose remembered feeling, but they were consistently discouraged by the couple’s responses. The Balestrero’s had only mild anecdotes. Far from flooding him with intriguing details, reality let Hitchcock down.

Floods of intriguing details are precisely what cannot be expected from the ordeal of depression. I sense that, had Hitchcock (or anyone else at the time) properly understood the disorder, a way would have been found to set Rose’s plight more effectively. (Perhaps she might have been presented in a locked ward.) As it is, Vera Miles’s performance is deeply truthful, and I sobbed at the end. The Wrong Man is arguably Hitchcock’s grimmest film, but it is indeed what Donald Spoto calls it: a fine piece of Kunstprosa.

After a visit to the ophthalmologist yesterday — a routine checkup with happily routine results — I took a taxi to the Museum, hoping to get to the cafeteria before it stopped serving lunch. As the photograph suggests, I was too late, so I went upstairs to the Petrie Court. Aydimè. The burger that I ordered appeared instantly, before water had had a chance to be poured. While I ate, I attempted to read Dan Auilar’s Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, another book that has stood unread on my shelves since it was published (1998). It was difficult to hold the book open on the small table while gripping the dripping burger, but I managed. After lunch, I went to see the Boxer at Rest.

I’d have missed this great bronze’s visit to the Museum entirely if I hadn’t been prodded by Messir di T. He discovered it during his graduate studies in Rome, and just as excited to see it again in New York as I should be if my favorite Degas, the early Belleli Family, were to reappear in town. Together with Ms NOLA, we went to see the statue last Friday, and I was knocked out by the presence of the thing. It reduced everything else in the Greek and Roman Gallery to the status of plaster cast. I’d never seen anything like it. Small bronzes, yes, Renaissance and baroque bronzes, yes; but never a life-size bronze from antiquity. Few survive; most were melted down by armories. Most seem to have been recovered from the bottom of the Aegean or the Mediterranean. Boxer at Rest was buried, probably in the Fifth Century, to protect it from barbarian predation. There it remained, in the side of the Quirinal Hill, until 1888. Now it stands in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. Well, that’s precisely what it doesn’t do now. Now, it’s blocking up the Gallery corridor. How much nicer it would have been to place the bronze in one of the side chambers, along with a few benches. Next week, it will be gone.

Unlike the marble statuary that graces the Gallery, Boxer at Rest is the portrait of an athlete. According to the accompanying brochure, it “draws inspiration from two statues of Herakles sculpted by Lysippos in the fourth century BC,” but a quick Google search fails to return any seated figures. The boxer sits on a boulder, his elbows resting on his thighs, his hands crossed with an easy modesty that, for all his nakedness, screens his privates from most viewpoints. This is not some ideal, some representation of divinity. This is a fighter, bashed up but basically in good trim, taking a breather after a fight and reacting, I think, to hearing something that he doesn’t want to hear. He is incredibly natural.

Which is the conundrum. Why is Boxer at Rest so powerful, when a tour of any gym’s locker room might offer up a very similar sight? He’s just a guy on a bench. And he’s not going to be there for long: his feet make that clear. They are not planted on the ground; this is not a pose. Bronze may have something to do with it; the replacement of skin by dully glowing brown metal is a bit eerie, as though King Midas had been paying a visit on a discount. The metal is in many places somewhat corroded, as well it might be after its thousand-year burial, and this, too, announces the absence of skin. How can something so lifelike not have skin? How can something so lifelike not be alive?

Perhaps the point of the bronze is to allow us to contemplate the boxer as we never could if he were actually present. He would not sit still long enough to contemplate, for one thing. For another, he might want to know what the hell we thought we were looking at. He’s a big guy, almost as tall, I should think, as I am. Broad-shouldered and lean (but for incipient love-handles), clearly strong-legged, the boxer is no brute, but someone who fights with his brain. He’s wired for it. His body is more of a cloak than a weapon, a package for his nervous system. At the same time, there is something crushed about him, some hunching of the shoulders that suggests limited possibilities. Whether or not the boxer is legally a slave, he is as bound to his métier as any successful entertainer. There is nothing for him to do but to keep doing what he does, until the inevitable moment when he cannot do it anymore. It is the boxer’s posture, not his broken nose, cauliflower ears, or dinged forehead, that proclaims his mortality. No, I don’t think that these rich meditations could be triggered by a panting athlete. The living athlete would probably give rise to another line of meditation altogether.

Not to sound too Wallace Stevens-y, but perhaps it is only in inhuman form that we can appraise our humanity. Nobody wants to be bronze.

Over the weekend, I immersed myself in Hitchcock, as one might in a swimming pool — a dark pool at night, with inexplicable splashes at the far end. It was an uneasy rest.

Alfred Hitchcock’s ultimate counsel to anxious colleagues and actors was, “It’s only a movie” — variant: “We’ll make another movie” — and his films do flirt with routine. There is an almost mechanical slickness, for example, manifest in the formulaic way in which subsidiary characters deliver their lines. Policemen and shopkeepers and maîtres d’ all sound like polished stereotypes with no individual quirks whatsoever. Hitchcock deploys the flat predictability of these minor figures as expressions of the unthinking normal world from which the principal characters have been momentarily expelled. They are more functions of the incisive narrative than real people. As such, they trail a certain staleness. This may explain why it took foreigners — the French — to perceive Hitchcock’s greatness; they couldn’t be put off by what to an American ear might sound tediously familiar.

Although my latest plunge into Hitchcock’s movies began somewhat randomly, moving from Psycho to Frenzy and then to Strangers on a Train, from that point I stuck to the order in which films were made: I Confess, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Four on Saturday, and two on Sunday; before angling my chair in front of the screen for The Trouble with Harry yesterday afternoon, I went through magazines. I wish I hadn’t, in a way, because I’d have liked to move on to The Wrong Man, but it was too late. I ought to mention that I watched all the featurettes on the DVDs, each of produced by Laurent Bouzereau. These began to be monotonous and, at times, vaguely irritating — if John Forsythe could be persuaded to reminisce, why not Shirley MacLaine and Jerry Mathers? But the featurettes buffered the features.

Seeing the films in order gave them a surprising freshness, and emphasized their somewhat surprising variety. We’re so accustomed to thinking of Hitchcock as an auteur, and to seeing his films as the work of an extraordinarily methodical producer, that it’s easy to forget that he drew his material from very different sources and maintained a remarkable heterogeneity of tone. I Confess is so transfigured by the miraculous fit between its abundant Catholic imagery and Montgomery Clift’s brooding saintliness that it doesn’t seem like an American, or even Anglophone movie. The next two films on the list have nothing in common except Grace Kelly, and that only nominally, considering the transformation wrought by opportunites fro acting development presented by John Michael Hayes’s screenplay. For the first time ever, the fireworks in To Catch a Thief did not annoy me; they seemed quite suavely done. And Francie Stevens was a real girl, not Grace Kelly pretending to be one. The Trouble with Harry is a “minor” picture that refuses to feel minor while it is actually running; the four principals are engaged in an ensemble that has a glittering commedia dell’arte quality, an effect heightened by Mildred Dunnock’s occasional contributions. If I was shaken by The Man Who Knew Too Much, that owed in part to personal circumstances; the story seemed less about international intrigue and more about kidnapping. But it had me in tears at several points, and the scene in which Doris Day’s Jo McKenna lashes out at her husband, played with magnificent uncertainty by James Stewart, for having sedated her before telling her the awful news about their son made me forget that I was watching a movie. “Only a movie,” my foot.

***

I continue to wrestle with the problem of loyal opposition, more convinced than ever that it is not just a crucial element of democracy but something like the good fairy that wasn’t invited to the birthday of our modern republics, for whose exclusion we have been paying dearly ever since. The modern faith in democracy was engendered in the optimism of Enlightenment, molded by an untried conviction that, given the chance — freed from the shackles of monarchical despotism, that is — reasonable men would come to see things the same way. What we call political parties, the Lumières called factions, and they were regarded as dangerous. George Washington’s second administration was riven by internal dissension between Jefferson and Hamilton that seemed impossible to account for without marking one man or the other as a traitor, and this confusion has never been altogether resolved. There was no conception of loyal opposition in the 1790s, and none was developed in the course of the following century. Indeed, the Civil War was brought about by a professedly disloyal opposition.

The lack of a concept — of a belief in the importance — of loyal opposition underlies many of today’s political crises, if not all of them. From Putin’s Russia to al-Assad’s Syria to Chávez’s Venezuela, we see what happens when the opposition is demonized instead of being respected. “Winner Take All” is not a political motto but an anti-political one.

The lack of constitutional provisions governing the behavior of loyal political parties made it possible for Hitler’s Nazis to take control of Germany via democratic process; the same thing happened in Morsi’s Egypt. Upon assuming power, both regimes set about disemboweling political life and, in the process, making a mockery of democracy. The free election of leaders is not the climax of democracy, but its opening move. Because elected leaders cannot represent everybody — a sad truth about human nature of which the Enlightenment was blithely unaware — it is only when they assume power and engage in compromise with their opponents that we can tell whether the polity is a true democracy or merely a majoritarian tyranny. Such tyranny is the “mob rule” that the thinkers of classical antiquity identified with democracy, and that inspired them to prefer almost any other kind of government.

The wrestling, then, is a matter of nuts and bolts. How would a provision for loyal opposition read, constitutionally? What are the criteria? I would argue, for example, that the loyalty of an opposition not be determined by religious factors, and, by extension, that the constitution ought to provide more robustly than it does for the separation of church and state. And yet there must be agreement between administration and opposition about substantive fundamentals, such as the recognition of human dignity (which comprises privacy) as a personal possession that must be protected by law. And certainly the behavior of political parties, independently of office-holding, out to be prescribed by the constitution. All this, without stifling evolution. I’m glad that it’s not my job to work all of this out.

Above, the old Food Emporium (a grocery store) downstairs, its shelves emptied and abandoned at the end of April, but the check-out terminals still glowing — something that I didn’t notice when I took the photograph. I never set foot in the store after Fairway opened across the street, about two years ago. The Food Emporium was overpriced and spottily stocked: I could never be sure that I’d be able to find most of what I needed.

Why are the lights on (not to mention the terminals)? I have taken to avoiding this side of Second Avenue, because the walkway between the building and the hopper from which the great blocks of blasted rock are dumped into trucks is uncomfortably narrow. (That’s what finally put the Food Emporium branch out of business.) The other day, though, I wanted to stay in the shade, and I was surprised by this view. If I don’t miss shopping at the Food Emporium, I miss the check-out ladies. One of them was always very sweet to me, while another — a very short Asian woman bearing a resemblance, I thought, to Yoko Ono — did her job as if in a fit of distraction: she was efficient enough, but without paying attention to what she was doing, or where she was doing it.

Presumably, a new tenant for the space will not appear until after the construction stops, sometime late next year. I always wonder if I will live to see the end of the mess into which our quartier has been plunged.

***

Kathleen is on her way to Maine, for her annual junket, a reunion with the cmp counselors she worked with nearly forty years ago; two of them have cottages on Thomas Pond, not far from the summer camp. We had a cottage up there, too, for a while, and I often wish that it was the only house that we ever bought. But not so much, since we rediscovered Fire Island. We’re going out to Ocean Beach for a week this year, just a week, but that’s enough after what has been a year that was unsettled from the moment we returned from Fire Island last September.

I am really hoping that the agitation and uncertainty that marked the past school year will have climaxed in Kathleen’s moment of fame on Tuesday. It is very agreeable to read about yourself (or a loved one) without having the slightest reservation about the report. I know from experience that the pleasure is also very, very rare.

In any case, I’ll be alone for a couple of days — the better part of a week. At the moment, I’m grateful: I need some time by myself. And the blue room needs me to itself. Now that the chair has arrived, it is time to clear the piles of books that give the blue room its overwhelmed look. The only way to tackle the problem is to hang out in here and meditate while listening to operas or watching movies. I need a few hours of aimlessly standing around, appearing to do nothing, and then finally bursting through my impatience to do something. I wonder what it would be like to live a life in which such fits of reorganization were unnecessary.

***

When I read Sanford Schwartz’s favorable review in the NYRB, I decided to read Eric Fischl’s Bad Boy, an autobiography written with Michael Stone. It is one of the most useful books of art criticism that I’ve ever read, because Fischl is not only thoughtful, intelligent, and reasonably worldly, but committed to a tradition of artwork that was strained to the snapping point by modernism and its aftermath. For all the transgressiveness of his early-Eighties work, he is a true keeper of the flame.

Eric Fischl is my age, give or take a few months, and, like me, he grew up in an aspirational suburb of New York City — Port Washington and Sands Point, on Long Island, in his case. At every stage in his book, I could ask myself what I was doing then — how, in short, I was dealing with things at the same age. When Fischl achieved his first real fame, in the early Eighties, I was a law school graduate struggling to find a place on Wall Street — I never did — while having my first real taste of life in Manhattan, something that I had wanted all my life, and still want, much more than fame. I remember being disturbed and somewhat repelled by Fischl’s paintings — the few that I saw, anyway — because they  captured suburban malaise so precisely, and I wanted to put the suburbs behind me. I especially wanted to avoid the dodgy moral climate of the American dream. It is only now, in fact, that I’m comfortable considering it at all, and the real draw of Fischl’s book wasn’t his reputation as an artist but his background, so much like my own, leading as it did to a similar search for foundations upon which to build a good life.

Fischl writes about the early days of a celebrity art market with ingenuous frankness that comports with what one remembers of the buzz.

But the glamour and excitement came with costs. Two years before, I was living on $1,000 a month. Now it had risen to several times that. I’d discovered I could defray some expenses by swapping my work — sketches and preliminary paintings — and the art world, suddenly flush, underwrote a portion of my social life. What’s more, having worked to support myself with my teens, I was judicious with money. But now I was taking taxis instead of the subway, drinking wine instead of beer, fine wine rather than screwtop or Gallo. I had started out working just enough so I could focus on my painting without feeling I had to make work to support a lifestyle. Twelve thousand a year had seemed plenty. What surprised me was how fast you grew into living on more. What had once seemed a fortune to me because something I could easily spend in a year.

That certainly sounds familiar. But it was clear that the downtown art scene was not a world that Kathleen and I were ever going to move in, and we more or less stopped paying attention to contemporary art. It wasn’t our taste, anyway; we liked older things. And although I was familiar with a great deal of art, old and new, and knew its history fairly well, I didn’t understand much about painting and sculpture. It was just there, and I had not begun to ask why. I did not begin to ask why until I began wanting to write about what I saw at museums here, or one of my earlier sites. Writing forced me to think. Writing every day forces me to think a lot — even if I always end the day in a heap of questions.

It was neat to feel so completely simpatico with Fischl’s reservations about conceptual art and his total contempt for the empty trifles of Koons and Hirst.

As it happens, I’m going to the Museum this afternoon, to meet up with Ms NOLA and her fiancé, Messir di T. In Bad Boy, Mike Nichols is quoted as having donated Fischl’s portrait of him to the Museum, and I wonder if it’s on exhibit anywhere. (It may well be one of those testamentary donations that will take effect when the writer/director dies.) That would be nice to see — nothing suburban about it, I expect.

The chair is not as small as I thought it would be. Ray Soleil and I had more than one moment of mutually concealed despair. The arms were a quarter-inch wider than the doorway and they wouldn’t give no matter what. In the end, it took an extreme deployment of body English, probably enough to get you arrested in public. But we were home. Later, when Fossil Darling sat in it, he looked exactly like Mao Zedong. Mao in shorts and a pressed blue shirt, but Mao nonetheless. Do I look like Mao when I sit in the chair?

It’s a very comfortable chair. If I could, I’d tell you all about it, but at the moment — what a week of celebration this has been! —I can hardly speak English. Nevertheless we have the chair. The totally Mao chair. Maybe it will help to remember my radicals.

***

The foregoing, WUI, was a desperate bid to clock an entry on an ordinary weekday that was working out anyway but ordinary. All day yesterday (I’m writing on the fifth), I mean to tidy up my scribbling, and add a more substantial paragraph or two, but I much preferred to read in the bedroom while Kathleen sorted through closets and drawers and eventually packed for her trip to Maine. We celebrated the Fourth by having dinner at the Café d’Alsace, where Kathleen forgot how plentifully filling the bowls of gazpacho are — meals unto themselves, really — until she was halfway through the plate of John Dory that came after. I reveled in steak tartare, brightly seasoned to counter its inherent richness; most satisfying.

After dinner, I finished reading Eric Fischl’s Bad Boy (written with Michael Stone). Fischl never mentions television, but I found myself thinking about it, rather fiercely, as I turned the pages.

Today’s may be the briefest entry ever — I rather hope so. But it’s no use trying to think. There is nothing to do but savor, if only for a day, a very rare pleasure. Yield to the vanity of human weakness.

Even if Kathleen had retained a publicist, at an annual six-figure fee, the following sentence, appearing in today’s Times, could not have been improved upon.

Their proposal has the advantage of coming from the desk of Kathleen Moriarty, a lawyer at Katten Muchin, who played a leading role in the creation of the first exchange-traded fund and popular gold- and silver-backed E.T.F.’s.

We have Nathaniel Popper and Peter Lattman to thank for this, and also, of course, the clients themselves, who asked for a list of Kathleen’s major deals before they made their announcement.

As the story goes on to say, this is only the beginning of a challenging regulatory process, one that will almost certainly force two antagonistic agencies to agree on something. But, just for today, we’re going to lounge on that desk.

Patrick McGilligan’s book, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, has been on my bookshelves since it came out, ten years ago, but I’ve never cracked it, largely for reasons alluded to in connection with Stephen Rebello’s book about Psycho, in an entry last week. You can say that I’m cracking it now because the Rebello book, if it didn’t float me over the déja vu that seems to accompany reading about Hitchcock, at least got me to watch Psycho with fresh eyes, and that, in turn, made me eager to see Frenzy again. I’ve liked Frenzy since it came out, in 1972, and long regarded it as Hitchcock’s last really great movie. Watching it over the weekend made me want to read something about it — perhaps it might identify the Oxford Street alleyway in which Brenda Blaney’s marriage bureau is located — so I pulled down McGilligan. I didn’t find out anything about the alleyway, but I found myself, when Frenzy was over, reading about Strangers on a Train, and what McGilligan had to say made me want to see it again right away, so I did.

Frenzy was something of a disappointment, largely because it lacks what made Psycho so appealing to me when I watched it last week: dramatic, “theatrical” conversations. Hitchcock’s films are studded with them. Their pace is generally, and very ironically, restrained; the drama comes not so much from the dialogue, and certainly not from the actors’ expressions, as from the lighting: like any magician, Hitchcock understood that lighting can make even familiar inanimate objects intriguing. One of my favorite scenes of this kind is the library scene in North By Northwest, in which Roger Thornhill’s uncomprehending but apparently bottomless vulnerability is at odds with the room’s handsome, somewhat staid appointments. Three be-suited gentleman in a paneled room overlooking a garden — who can think of violence in such a setting? The dialogue, too, is hardly that of rough guys spoiling for a fight, but it is loaded with malice. (“Your very next role.”) Last week, I wrote about the powerful scenes that Norman Bates has with, first, Marion Crane, and then, with Detective Arbogast, but missed the significant point that these are the two people whom Norman is going to kill as the action unfolds.

There are no such scenes in Frenzy. One might argue that Bob Rusk’s visit to Brenda Blaney’s office constitutes one, but while it might begin as one it soon becomes something very different — something without precedent in Hitchcock’s work. The library scene in North By Northwest ends with a bit of manhandling, as Roger is forced to drink bourbon, but the ensuing violence occurs on a North Shore road, with Roger, rolling drunk, at the wheel of a stolen car. (Ah, those scenic oceanside drives along the cliffs of Glen Cove and Oyster Bay — what a shame they don’t exist.) At the risk of being precious, I might argue that the library scene is the cavatina, and the driving scene the cabaletta, of a bel canto aria of Hitchcock’s operatic style. In Frenzy, the two bits are merged, and no one, seeing the film a second time, can imagine that what is in fact an assault, rape, and strangulation scene is going to depend on creative lighting for its effects. There is, in short, no false calm, or very little of it. (Bob and Brenda lose their tempers pretty quickly.)

The other powerful “scene” also features Bob Rusk, but he is alone with sacks of potatoes and a corpse: there is no conversation. It is an action scene, slowed down to a crawl — something else that Hitchcock knew how to do very well. But the bulk of the movie is spent on the run. Richard Blaney, the intemperate fighter pilot who is wrongly thought to be the necktie murderer, can’t sustain conversations; even his monologues, his attempts at apology, soon degenerate into reproachful vituperation. It is therefore interesting to read what McGilligan has to say about the making of the movie. Finch, it seems, had very imprudently remarked to reporters that Hitchcock was “past his prime” and that he would probably improvise his lines (the dialogue is pointedly vétuste).

In subtle ways and worse, Hitchcock never let Finch forget this transgression. More than once he pointedly stopped the actor before a take, asking if Finch was satisfied with his lines; when Finch once dared to suggest a minor word chance, Hitchcock ceremoniously halted the photography until Anthony Shaffer [the screenwriter] could be found and consulted. Whenever Finch strayed so much as a hem or haw, the script girl corrected him sharply.

Hitchcock gave Finch no warmth or support on the set, so the actor always remained off balance — just as Blaney is throughout the story.

It is well established by now that Hitchcock’s feelings about particular actors often determined the performances that he elicited from them; it is clear that Psycho is a powerful movie at least in part because Hitchcock really liked Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. It’s also clear (McGilligan says as much) that Vertigo owes much of its punch to Judy Barton’s visceral desperation at being trapped in her various roles — a despair that mirrored Kim Novak’s fear, fed by the director’s impatience with her, that she didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing. Eva Marie Saint, conversely, has said that she felt both liberated and protected after Hitchcock personally took her to Bergdorf Goodman to buy her outfits for North By Northwest. The chemistry between director and actor was arguably a leading variable in the shaping of Hitchcock’s films, a remarkable deviation from his dogged professionalism. Jon Finch was never interestingly lighted in Frenzy.

***

Strangers on a Train has quite a few banked scenes. (I’m going to try “banked” as a descriptor: I’m thinking of coals glowing brightly enough to cast interesting shadows.) Several of them are peppered by Patricia Hitchcock’s impish impersonation (if that is what it is) of a proper young lady who knows much more about the world than is altogether suitable. Those scenes are also clouded by the performance of Ruth Roman, which teeters on the edgy of soap-opera excess. Her manner of picking up the telephone and cradling the mouthpiece as if she were caressing her fiancé is almost camp, particular in contrast with the ironbound restraint of Leo G Carroll as her father. Laura Elliott (a/k/a Kasey Rogers), playing Miriam, the funseeking opportunist who stands between Roman’s character and Guy Haines, the tennis ace played by Farley Granger, is much more interesting to watch. Marion Lorne, whom Hitchcock cast before he even had a script, manages to give her silly, vague character, the villain’s mother, a weird but unforgettable passive monstrosity, and her two scenes are nicely banked. The second one would be better if it did not fade out on Ruth Roman’s “perplexed” expression. These overreactions are almost, but not quite, offset by Roman’s more active scenes, which she handled creditably.

Granger and Robert Walker (playing Bruno Anthony, the sociopathic socialite) have the longest banked scene, of course; it’s the one in which they meet and cease to be strangers on a train — with a vengeance. McGilligan tells us that Hitchcock wanted William Holden for Guy Haines; I think that he’s very lucky that the studio insisted on Granger. I can’t imagine Holden sitting through drinks and lunch with the twisted flirtatiousness that Walker summons. Granger makes it clear that what keeps Guy from parting company with the frequently offensive Bruno is his own self-doubt, in addition, of course, to Guy’s need to be nice to people. Walker gives us a Bruno who is captivating when his eyes are twinkling on the screen but repellent when they’re not; if you ask me, he transcends his character’s creepiness. Bruno is deadly but charming.

Both Frenzy and Strangers are “on-the-run” movies, as McGilligan calls them. Watching them side by side, I found the older film to be sleek and accomplished, with a fantastically well-structured climax. (The deranged carousel at the end, tilting off its rocker, has the feel of a very precocious special effect.) But it is not as disturbing as Frenzy. Miriam Haines may not deserve to die (no one does), but she’s an almost completely unsympathetic figure. Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) and Babs Milligan (Anna Massey) are just the opposite: warm and appealing and genially above reproach. But the respite scenes in Frenzy don’t count as banked, because they all take place in the detective’s flat, as Vivien Merchant inflicts nouvelle cuisine — offal cooking would be more like it — on sweet Alec McCowen. There are many clever set-ups in these scenes, but no interesting lighting; the dinners are sardonic intermezzos, pauses in the chase; neither the detective nor his wife, certainly, is on the run. (That it might be said that the detective is on the run from his wife’s culinary ambitions only proves the point.)

And yet Frenzy falls short in the display of Hitchcock’s trademark juxtapositions of the everyday and the extraordinary. The everyday settings in Strangers on a Train, whether they be rail cars or reception rooms or the National Gallery or an amusement park, are all transformed into chambers of horror by Bruno Anthony’s prowling. And he doesn’t need to show up at Forest Hills in order to make Guy’s climactic match a palpitating event. As McGilligan says, this part of the climax involves multiple games. Guy wants to win the match, of course, but he also wants to win quickly, so that he can get to Metcalf in plenty of time to foil Bruno. He also has to play a game of evading the police who are tailing him. Bruno, meanwhile, has a game of his own, and it is an extraordinary example of Hitchcock’s artistry. Bruno is the bad guy, and the cigarette lighter that he’s carrying is meant to implicate Guy in his wife’s murder, and yet, when Bruno drops the lighter in the sewer and then struggles to retrieve it, stretching his arm down into the disgusting muck of a drain, our sympathies are, for the moment, entirely with him.

Twenty years later, we’re not quite so eager for Bob Rusk to retrieve his stickpin — not if it involves breaking poor dead Babs’s fingers.

The end of June is always melancholy, as is the end of every green month from April to July. (August has a strange way of spilling over into September instead of coming to an end.) I remind myself that we will probably be enjoying the balcony throughout October. I hope that we get to enjoy it tonight — we’re having another picnic, and the weather is uncertain. (It’s unlikely to be too cold.) I’m a bit jumbled, having been called by a truck driver shortly after nine this morning. He wanted to deliver a piece of furniture but they weren’t letting him use the service entrance. Of course they weren’t. We had had no notice of this delivery, we had not filed the appropriate insurance letter with the management office, and the guard was not going to let me carry in the chair myself, no matter how much I bribed him, because of the surveillance cameras. It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that no one is looking at the surveillance tapes until after there has been some sort of problem — highly unlikely in the case of my carrying in a chair. By the time we’d come up with a workaround, the driver had taken off. Understandably: the service entrance is partially obstructed by the subway-station construction site.

We’re told that the blasting will cease this fall, and that the construction site will be cleared away next fall. (The subway itself won’t be running until 2017.) Meanwhile, the three sides of the building that face the street are still heavily scaffolded, at sidewalk level, in connection with the balcony railing replacement project. Which, if you ask me, is somewhere one side or the other of halfway done. Living in a construction site is never fun, but this has gone on for so long that one’s imagination of deliverance has been flattened, and the year to come stretches out into infinity.

***

The other night, I did watch Psycho, and I was, to my surprise, wowed. I was right to fear the dreariness of the television aesthetic that Alfred Hitchcock employed in order to make the movie on the cheap (he produced it out of his own pocket), but this disadvantage only intensified the excellence of the performances, especially in ensemble. There are two really riveting scenes in Psycho, and they are not the ones you’re thinking of; no one gets killed in either. Anthony Perkins is featured in both of them, but in his proper young-man clothes. In the first, he talks to Janet Leigh, and in the second, to Martin Balsam. The scenes are very different, because, of course, Norman Bates has done something very wicked in between them. With Marion Crane (Ms Leigh), Norman is a bright if strange young man who wants to make a good impression but cannot help himself when Marion inadvertently trips his wiring. With Detective Arbogast (Mr Balsam), Norman is an anxious dissembler whose discomfort makes Arbogast smell guilt. Martin Balsam adopts a breezily insincere persistence, as if he’s interrogating Norman in a nice-guy way. (There is something about the light that falls on Balsam’s full lower lip that highlights the menace that makes Norman so jittery.) But the scene is all the more uncomfortable because we know that Arbogast, for all his calm cockiness, his worldly assurance that he knows what Marion Crane is up to, has no idea that he is dealing with a dangerous, psychotic murderer.

The first great scene, in Norman’s office parlor, plays out a far more subtle drama. For one thing, it is the first moment of calm in the movie. Marion’s life, until now, has alternated between frustration and despair, culminating in a drive through dark, heavy rain. The conversation that she has with Norman, as she eats the sandwich that he has brought her (nice boy that he is), convinces her to abort her criminal flight and return to Phoenix. The other subtlety is Anthony Perkins’s posture. When Norman sits back in his easy chair, his affect is normal, but when he sits forward, and the camera picks out his glittering eyes, he is possessed by his disease, which springs from his inability to accept the fact that he killed his mother. Marion, distracted by the weight of her own problems, does not back away when Norman responds with inappropriate hostility to her sympathetic suggestions. She is calm, too. She, like Arbogast, makes the fatal mistake of seeing Norman as a harmless weakling.

The tremendous power that reverberates from these scenes, together with that of the visceral brutality of the murders that follow each, floats the movie well above the TV-grade production values that work themselves even into the script at the film approaches the end. Psycho is a departure for Hitchcock in that he ordinarily made pictures that are more powerful the second time, when you know what’s going to happen. The fatality of his pictures is rich and deep, and can’t be appreciated in a first viewing. Psycho, in contrast, is a shocker, a film famous for riveting audiences with completely unexpected violence. Such moments are self-extinguishing. A second viewing will bring out the ironies — ironies that are embedded primarily in the two scenes that I’ve discussed — but it pushes the murders into grand guignol that was never Hitchcock’s stock-in-trade, even though these celebrated scenes suggest a great deal more violence than they actually show.

Repeated viewings also deepen the impression that Anthony Perkins makes, not so much as a crazy person but as an extraordinarily interesting subject for Hitchcock’s expressionist photography. By the time he’s finally apprehended, we’re so relieved that he’s no longer at large that the somewhat bogus psychoanalytic evaluation, delivered in the earnest, “doctors call it iron-deficiency anemia” television style of the day by Simon Oakland, comes as a welcome debriefing, instead of the insufferable padding that it would be otherwise.

***

Watching Marion recoils apologetically from Norman’s overreaction to her suggestion that he put his mother in care, I felt an enormous sympathy with her, because I have triggered such unexpected hostility all my life. Maybe we all do, and I’ve just noticed it more; or, maybe I’m more like  Norman Bates than I think, and am seriously out of touch with common human nature. I have at any rate become extremely circumspect about giving advice. I’d rather seem callous.

It was time to get out of the house for a bit, so I went to see an early-afternoon showing of The Bling Ring. It’s a powerful and unsettling movie, nothing like the whimsical trifle that I was expecting. On the page — not in Vanity Fair; I didn’t read Nancy Jo Sales’s piece, but somewhere more recent, written about the movie — the thieves and their parents sounded laughably fatuous, but onscreen they’re much darker than that. They’re zombies. They look like human beings but have lost all moral grounding; they’re exactly what conservative social critics have been dreading since the French Revolution. But conservatives have only themselves to thank, pushing free markets as they do into every sphere. Coppola’s clutch of young wannabes live in a world sandblasted by mere celebrity.

The story of the bling ring is compelling because it poses an uncertainty: when kids who don’t really need anything help themselves to bits and pieces of the monstrously swollen wardrobes and accumulations accessories of people who are rich and famous for being rich and famous, just how bad is it? We allow teenagers a latitude in minor crime — think of vandalsim — that we don’t tolerate in adults. It’s always obvious that the girls and boys in The Bling Ring have greatly exceeded that latitude, but they have done so in a way that obscures the limits.  Their victims practically invite them into their homes: doors never need to be forced, nor houses broken into. (Negligence seems to have taken the place of smog.)  And only once is theft followed by thief-like behavior (Marc, the semi-closeted gay boy who, unlike his accomplices, seems to be in possession of good sense, sells some stolen watches to a nightclub owner/fence). The thoughtlessness with which the girls use Facebook to post pictures of themselves wearing their loot approaches genuine innocence. Surely these pranksters don’t belong in prison? (The fact that some of them do go to prison merely continues the senselessness of American life.) And while the kleptomania here on display is unusual, the dangerous joyriding is not — not nearly unusual enough.

Sophia Coppola is an impressionist filmmaker rather than a plotter. She creates very powerful moods and lets their pressure power the drama. In The Bling Ring, there is never any doubt that the crime spree will be stopped, but, when it is, Coppola intensifies the catastrophe by inflicting swarms of briskly determined police officers on hitherto unsuspecting parents, creating a mood so violently different that the change in atmosphere has the impact of a surprising plot twist. The horror of having one’s home searched is nightmarish rather than inevitable; given the carefree boisterousness of the teenagers’ escapades, the arrival of the law is much more harrowing than we might have expected. (I’m not quite sure how Coppola pulls this off, but the visitations are more humbling than any I’ve seen in the movies; there’s something very real about them, as if the LAPD itself had been called in to stage them.)

Leslie Mann, who plays the airhead mother of one of the girls, injects a note of real comedy into the movie: every time she opens her mouth, the movie becomes a satire. But her daughter, played by the amazing Emma Watson, is one of the most vicious human beings to have squirmed onscreen, and her best friend, with whom she has shared a bed for years — played by Talissa Farmiga — seems wholly unmoored and possibly sociopathic. Coppola is right to direct our sympathies to Marc, who has clearly allowed himself to be swept up his friends’ wrongdoing because they accept him as himself. Israel Broussard plays Marc as closeted gay man, not as a caricatured pansy; stretched out reading in bed, wearing jeans, T shirt, and pink stilettos, Marc looks incongruous but not implausible. And touching, somehow, rather than funny. His dress-ups are as earnest as anything men do.

The adult males in the film — those who don’t work for the LAPD, anyway — don’t seem to be gifted with alert concern for their children, but I wish that Coppola had shown a bit more of them, because the slightness of their parts exposes the film to exploitation by patriarchs, as Exhibit A for the argument that strong fathers would have precluded its escapades. Such tiresomeness ought not to be facilitated.

***

As I went down to collect the mail, the elevator stopped at the seventh floor, one of the other floors that Kathleen and I have lived on in this building. As I almost always do, I idly noted the fact before the doors opened. When they did, I saw an unfamiliar burly man in black, and the edge of a gurney. My curiosity on autopilot, I leaned forward to see who might be stretched out on it, but that was not possible, because the bag was zipped from one end to the other. Nor were there any tubes or bottles dangling from above. There was no above. There was just the body bag on the gurney. Everything black, except for the attendants’ FDNY badges.

The attendants, seeing that there were two passengers on the elevator, decided to wait for the next one. When I was coming back upstairs, they appeared in the elevator that had just come down to the lobby. The gurney was tilted at an angle, the better to accommodate the attendants and, possibly, a passenger. You don’t tilt gurneys that are carrying living people — as if I needed further proof of someone’s death.

The surprising thing is that I don’t recollect ever seeing such a departure before, despite the size of the place and the ubiquity of the elderly. I’ve seen a few very sick people who, as they were carried out, certainly appeared to be at death’s door, but they hadn’t passed through it yet. Perhaps the zipped-up body bag is new. Perhaps the Fire Department used to conduct these procedures at quiet hours. Was the body not being conveyed to an undertaker? Questions, questions! Not to mention the identity of the late tenant — I wouldn’t mention that even if I knew.

It appears that I’ve come late to the technique of aiming a camera without putting it in front of my face. What keeps this picture from being simply foolish is the irregular band of greenish light, which seems supernatural because it isn’t really there, if you know what I mean. This photograph is also a change from the brutalist pictures of the subway-station mess outside my door. Our driveway has been shut down for eight weeks, four weeks to undermine and replace each of the drive’s crossings of the sidewalk. It gets harder every day to believe that one will outlive the chaos.

This morning, I finished Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. I bought the Kindle edition after watching the lovely picture that Sasha Gervasi loosely adapted from it. Reading about Hitchcock has developed something of a déja vu problem: I’m more aware of revisiting (very) familiar territory that I am of learning new things. I suppose I owe that to Donald Spoto. It has been nearly thirty years since I took his Hitchcock course at the New School, a thrilling experience that ranked with the very best classroom experiences. The lectures were followed by screenings, which could be attended separately, as it were. Kathleen signed up for the screenings only, so we would watch the movies together, but I would be exploding with observation. I hesitate to call Spoto’s lectures “academic,” not because they were somehow less than that but because they were so passionately devoted to simple attentiveness. I learned a lot more than Hitchcock — I learned to watch movies. Hitchcock, of course, rewards attentiveness more than most directors do; he was a formidably intentional artist. I’m about due for a serious retrospective — or should I say that Hitchcock is, chez moi — and Psycho, which I held off watching while reading Rebello’s book, would be a great way to open it. It’s not a favorite movie of mine, probably because it is stamped by the aesthetic of television that makes so many of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes look cheap and depressing. (In contrast, I don’t in the least mind the pronounced staginess of Rope or Dial M for Murder.) And, as Hitchcock’s films go, Psycho is uncommonly gruesome. If we must have psychotic mayhem, let it be the more suave brutality of Barry Foster, in Frenzy. (Plus, of course, Frenzy has all those lovely bits in which Vivien Merchant serves up exotic French dishes to Alec McCowen, who finds them repulsive.) But, as Rebello reminds me, Marion Crane’s ordeal is extraordinarily dramatic.

Rope, I always say, is the perfect party movie — never has there been a more intriguing party in the movies. Yes, it’s perfectly horrible that poor David Kentley has been murdered and tossed into the chest, upon which dinner is served — ghoulish! But one man’s ghoulish is another man’s goulash. As party stunts go, this one can’t be excelled; it is a true ne plus ultra. It doesn’t stop there, however, David’s body quite literally embodies all the domestic realities that must be swept aside in order for a party to sparkle. It’s the sweeping aside that makes a party sparkle. Finally, it’s startling to imagine that one might have been to a party where  dead body lay just out of sight, and never known it.

***

Hostile as I am to the pro-corporation bent of the current Supreme Court, I cannot say that Shelby County v Holder, the voting rights case, bothers me very much. The gerrymandering of congressional districts, apparently unhampered by any preclearance rules, has created divisive feedback loops that give us a fun-house mirror version of representative democracy. The Voting Rights Act, as passed nearly fifty years ago, was necessary at the time, but instead of being replaced by something more suited to changing times, its provisions were tinkered with. That’s why American regulation doesn’t work. The fact that most of our securities laws still radiate from a template established in 1933 and ’34 shows an astonishing want of imagination. And if the Glass-Steagall act was seen to be somewhat outdated, then it ought to have been replaced with a law that retained its essential safeguards, which of course turned out to involve proprietary trading with customer money.

To say that just about every law in the land ought to be replaced sounds cranky, but it wouldn’t, if we could only learn to replace our “build to last” mentality with a more supple “build to upgrade” outlook. Things that last tend toward sclerosis: pipes get clogged, and regulations get unworkable. Bridges fall down. The most powerful committee in every legislative chamber ought to be the one that decides which old laws must be updated, and it ought to be staffed by men and women who know how to cloak the inexorable impermanence of things with the appearance of stability. We also need to develop a better model of the regulatory agency. Requiring heads of agencies to have degrees in civil administration would be a great start.

I might not be so complacent about the voting rights decision if it weren’t for US v Windsor and Hollingsworth v Perry.

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.

Our weekend was so peaceful and quiet that, instead of feeling refreshed, I’m unnerved, and would prefer things to go on being peaceful and quiet. That’s because the peace and quiet were external. I spent most of the time in the life of a remarkable man, a man whose political and cultural outlook seemed to resemble my own more closely than that of anyone else I’ve ever read about, but whose life was altogether unlike mine. A heroic life, really, and an extraordinarily active one, for a worldly philosopher.

Worldly Philosopher is the title of Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert Hirschman, and it happens to be the mot juste to describe Hirschman’s interdisciplinary career. It is impossible to think of him as economist, so stunted have economists become in our time. He was almost everything but an economist. He boasted no overarching theories about anything, except for his conviction that theories and economies don’t mix. His slim books were well-received — outside the bubble in which economists talk to each other. Hirschman prized the specific and the actual, not the abstract or the probable. He called himself a social scientist, but he railed against “scientistic” thinking — Physics Envy.

But: what a life! Born in Berlin in 1915, he fled the city on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, after Hitler’s consolidation of power. He continued his education in Paris, London, and Trieste, and he took time out to take part in the Spanish Civil War on the eve of Franco’s sweep into Catalonia. When it was time to think about getting out of Europe, he headed for Marseille and hooked up with Varian Fry, the agent of the Emergency Rescue Committee that smuggled dozens of intellectual and artistic Jews across the Pyrenees — Hannah Arendt and Marcel Duchamp among the best-known. When he himself reached the United States, he settled into a program at Berkeley, where he met his wife, Sarah. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army and was soon seconded to the OSS, as a translator, in North Africa and Italy. He wondered why he wasn’t given more interesting intelligence work, as he would wonder, back in Washington after the war, why he had so much trouble getting a government job. He never did find out what the problem was; by the time that Adelman obtained his FBI file, with its flimsily-based “concern” about a social-democratic youth group to which Hirschman belonged as a teenager, Hirschman had declined into dementia. (He died only last December, aged 97.) Through better-established refugees, he eventually got a job at the Federal Reserve Bank, where he did the “thinking behind the thinking” for the Marshall Plan, but this hardly burnished his reputation as the political climate in Washington deteriorated. In desperation, Hirschman accepted a job offer from the World Bank, to participate in a massive developmental planning scheme for the government of Colombia.

Which, as you can imagine, was hardly the gateway to a settled life. Shuttling between various Latin American projects and three elite universities in the States, Hirschman lived a restless-looking life. At Columbia University, he also discovered that he hated teaching. It made him throw up,  and he wasn’t very good at it. Relief came in 1975, when he was asked to join the faculty at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, which has everything a scholar could want, including no students.

By this time, the field of “developmental economics” was in decline, if not disgrace; Latin America and the Third World were dotted with egregiously failed projects and defeated ambitions. Hirschman did not regret this: he was one of the first to understand that treating “developing” economies according to rules not in general use was a big mistake. (So many times did Hirschman’s observations, as quoted by Adelman, remind me of Jane Jacobs that I was sure that she must have been some kind of student of his, but his name does not appear in the indexes of her books. The two thinkers appear to have worked in true parallel, never meeting on any level.) So, Hirschman turned himself into an intellectual historian. with three remarkable little books about passions and interests. The Passions and the Interests was the first of these, but the other two, Shifting Involvements and The Rhetoric of Reaction pursue the same train of thought, which is that economists and political scientists ruin their work by insisting on gross oversimplifications. You might say that Hirschman embraced the messiness of life, but it would be better to say that he didn’t see the mess, only the life.

***

Hirschman wanted to change his last book’s title to The Rhetoric of Intransigence, because as he demonstrated in the book’s bracing last chapter, people on the Left could be as obstinately optimistic as conservatives were the other thing. “Intransigents of all stripes only serviced a dialogue of the deaf,” writes Adelman,

and thus ensured that the failure of reform was sealed from the start. The ability of a society to sustain open conversations among rivals that admitted the possibility of being wrong was a gauge of its democratic life and its ability to promote nonprojected futures for its citizens.

In the terms that I’ve been developing in the wake of reading George Packer’s The Unwinding, the health of a democracy depends upon the system of loyal opposition. I should rather say, the convention of loyal opposition. I’m not sure that loyal opposition has ever been quite conventional in the United States, but it is the bulwark of the parliamentary system, and multi-party legislatures cannot function without it. As we see in these hard times. The convention of loyal opposition would prohibit such remarks as George H W Bush’s insinuation that Michael Dukakis was a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” (Adelman’s book recalls this). In the convention of loyal opposition, it is impermissible to charge an opponent with disloyalty to the nation. Opponents can be wrong-headed, deluded, misguided, or even deranged, but they are not to be attacked with innuendos of treason.

My thinking on the convention of loyal opposition, as an intramural code for legislators and other politicians, has developed out of an earlier, vaguer application of the term, to the lesson that I learned from the Jeff Connaughton story in The Unwinding: there is no “loyal opposition” to the embedding of almost all of our governmental apparatus within the shell of “organized money.” I have yet to be clear about the meaning of “organized money,” but I’m sure of one thing: it’s the money that is organized, not the people with the money. In Washington, money finds its way into the pockets of those who generate money, almost hydrostatically. There are no conspiracies of billionaires. By putting money first, the people with the money are kept at some remove, regardless of occasional cooperation.

Organized money is generally felt to have a tighter grip on Washington than it used to do. (Indeed, I believe that it has simply swallowed government whole.) But is this the case? People with money have always been influential in government. Somehow, though, “influence” doesn’t seem to be the right word anymore.

Two things are missing from the photograph. The shambolic bar — now out of ice, now out of glasses, now out of vodka — was partly my fault, mine and a lot of other people’s: we hadn’t RSVP’d. The other thing missing is the blaring music, which I suppose was some sort of punk rock. Nothing less harmonious with the setting can be imagined, not, at least, without somebody pointing a loaded pistol.

The punk show itself, two floors below, was appropriately anti-social, a sort of un-fun house. But the staging was interesting. Mannequins were posed in niched arcades designed to simulate the near-ruined beaux arts décor in which the downtown scene evolved. (Out-of-towner note: “Downtown” Manhattan lies between Canal Street and 14th Street. Plus, of course, the rather small TRIangle BElow CAnal. Below Canal Street — further downtown in geography if not terminology — lie Chinatown, City Hall, and Wall Street, three different neighborhoods that are not “Downtown.”) We did not linger. As soon as we met our friend, we got back on the elevator and went up to the roof, where I should have liked to stay a bit longer, not only for the sunset snaps, but Kathleen wanted to sit down, and all the benches had been removed (?). So we pushed along to dinner at a nearby restaurant, and that was very nice. On the way, I persuaded Kathleen and our friend to strike poses before the ghastly statues that are still standing outside the stadtpalais across from the Museum even though I was sure that the first thing Carlos Slím would do when he bought the place was to have them carted off.

***

This morning, while Kathleen went through the Times, I read Frederick Seidel’s wearily dismissive review of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, in the NYRB.

So much New York, so much Seventies, such bursting-apart-at-the-seams liveliness! What a splendor of invention! These passionately alive and not believable characters! Heat without heart. Such an abundance of life and liveliness and language! It’s a glorious novel Rachel Kushner has written with heat but without warmth. Maybe that’s a new kind of novel.

**

What’s this book interested in? It’s interested in being made into a movie.

I found myself asking, “Is it true, this heat without warmth thing?” Is The Flamethrowers a mere scenario? For a few moments, I engaged with Seidel’s critique. Then I came to my senses. Bad reviews, especially bad reviews of novels, oughtn’t to be taken seriously. They should be wearily dismissed themselves. I do not speak as a partisan of Rachel Kushner’s art. (I rather preferred her first book, Telex From Cuba.) I’m just repeating the lesson that I learned from years of reviewing book reviews. Bad reviews, however entertaining, fail in their essential purpose, which is to show why a book, or anything “under review,” is worth talking about. The fact that other people are talking about something may warrant comment, but never a review. You review something if and when you yourself see something valuable, and you want to recommend it to others. Seidel’s piece is unworthy of the NYRB, and ought not to have been published, more or less as a matter of principle.

I’ve read two bad, or at least diminishing, reviews of George Packer’s The Unwinding. While I doubt that Seidel’s review will seriously dent sales of Kushner’s novel, I fear that The Unwinding might not be so hardy. I was expecting that the Times might be unfavorable, but not that David Brooks would write the review, which in turn would be buried in the middle of the Book Review. No one could be deadlier than Brooks at dispatching a book such as Packer’s. The writing, the reporting, are lavishly praised. But analysis is found wanting.

I wish Packer had married his remarkable narrative skills to more evidence and research, instead of just relying on narrative alone. Combine data to lives as they are actually lived.

This plausible comment belongs to the class of dismissals that fault a book not being something that its author probably didn’t intend it to be. Packer clearly means to paint a powerful picture of American dysfunction, and he’s faulted for doing so, because there’s no data to back up his poetry. But who would read the analysis that Brooks has in mind? And what if the data that we have doesn’t really tell us anything? What if Packer is calling for a new kind of analysis? Reviewers like Brooks also like to scold Packer for having an implicit political agenda, as if this were somehow unprofessional.

He paints an admiring portrait of the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, whose political views seem to coincide with his own.

I’m not sure that I would characterize these particular coinciding views as political. I see them as moral.

Michael Lind’s somewhat harsh review in Bookforum came as a surprise. (Sadly, it is not online.) It is also a piece of disappointed praise.

The unwinding of the New Deal proceeds. There is much to lament, and Packer strikes the elegaic tone well in a brilliant and innovative book that transcends journalism to become literature. For inspiration, readers will have to look elsewhere.

That doesn’t really make sense: what, so far as written words goes, exceeds literature as a source of inspiration? I’m still basking in the glow of inspiration lighted by Packer’s bit of  literature. When I began to get a sense of what “organized money” might really be, I didn’t fault Packer for letting the term stand for nothing more precise than an offstage bogeyman. The bogeyman actually does come onstage, in all of the sections having to do with Jeff Connaughton, and in some of those relating Dean Price’s tale of woe, not entirely but just enough to get a sense of its anatomy. I thank Packer for laying out food for inference. And the Jeff Connaughton story alerted me to the fact that there is no loyal opposition in today’s America. There hasn’t been one since Reagan’s persistent demonizing of Democratic-Party values (such as they were). There is only the organized money, a nexus of corporate lobbyists, deep-pocketed think tanks, government contractors, and politicians who want to make some real money someday. There is no serious opposition to organized money that can be considered truly loyal, to the Constitution as well as to its protection of the right to fairly-gained personal property. Opposition — consider the Occupy movement — is not only ideologically straitjacketed and fatally underinformed, but manifestly insurrectionist. The Tea Partiers may think that they’re in opposition, but in fact they are both paid for and distracted by organized money.

After one long excerpt from the book, Lind writes,

This illustrates the most serious weakness of Packer’s project, which is also the weakness of a certain strain of American liberalism — the failure to distinguish the villainy of particular individuals and selfish elites from the lamentable collateral damage caused by technologically driven economic progress.

Sign me up as a willing failer! “Technologically driven economic progress” is necessarily paid for by “selfish elites,” and the villainy is systemic. There is no justification for the existence of billionaires. Not all the hospitals and education programs and charitable whatnot in the world can redeem the sheer wrongness of such concentrated wealth. I’m not arguing for “confiscatory taxation” here but for something deeper, something that would making the piling up of such vast fortunes impossible in the first place. We might, for example, and without doing violence to any core beliefs, put a cap on patent and license fees, effectively denying protection after a (very generous) figure has been reached. Once Bill Gates had amassed a fortune of a certain size, had such a scheme been in place, no one would have had to pay for a license to use DOS — the germ of that pile. (We already impose similar restraints on pharmaceutical companies.) It is simply not in anybody’s interest — certainly not in the billionaire’s family’s interest — to allow colossal properties.

***

The weather is seasonably pleasant today, which bodes well for our picnic. I’ve just steamed the potatoes for salad, and now I’ve got to cut them up and drizzle them with oil while they’re still warm, something I learned from Julia Child. What I did not learn from Julia Child is to use fingerling potatoes, which bring to potato salad something of the deep pleasure of a good baked potato.

Off we go, then. Bon weekend à tous!

Having done everything that I had to do, with plenty of time before dressing for the evening, I sat and listened to the end of Fiona Shaw’s reading of Emma, which had beguiled an hour or two of housework. Then it hit me that I’d neglected to write my daily entry.

There is a good deal on my mind, but it is rippled by preparations for another Friday-night picnic. This isn’t so much a matter of making dishes as it is one of doing so without breaking a sweat (given the season, I speak figuratively). I am determined not to hustle. I am also determined to have a picnic almost every Friday night in the summer, even if Kathleen and I are the only picnickers. We are reveling in the balcony. Today, a cushion arrived for one of the benches, and two boxes of papyrus plants from White Flower Farm. Why papyrus? Then I’d have to kill you.

So I can’t decide whether to write about James Salter here, or at the old blog. I hate disliking a good writer’s work, but that is what it has come to with Salter, and James Meek’s encomia in the LRB go a long way to explaining why. I’ll get to that eventually, because it really is on my mind. But my thoughts are also rippled by the evening’s prospect: a members’ preview at the Museum, and for two shows, the roof garden and the punk. I have no interest in the punk, none whatever; the very idea of punk revolts me. It’s nothing but rudeness, and the look of it makes me wince with pain. (Surely the pose is uncomfortable?) No, I’d much rather spend the evening at the Roof Garden. I don’t know what I think of Imran Qureshi’s installation (the painted floor), but it has the welcome side effect of opening up the space for a change, with unimpeded vistas from almost every spot. (What a change from Big Bambú!) I’d head over to the Museum right now, but I’m waiting for Kathleen to pick me up in a taxi, so that we can go together, with our one invitation to get in the door.

I linked (at the old blog) to an interview that Rachel Kushner gave The Millions, but I didn’t call attention to her interesting comment about Flaubert (to whom critic James Wood compared her). “I am still mulling the fact,” she said, “that Flaubert created a seminal mode of realism (emulated by most writers since), in order to skewer bourgeois values (a topic only taken up by some).” I will never understand skewering bourgeois values, except as a childishness, because in order to do the skewering you have to be pretty bourgeois yourself, however desperately you attempt, as Flaubert did, to set yourself up as an aristocrat of art — quite as ridiculous as Emma Bovary’s pretensions. Every time somebody talks about Flaubert’s “seminal” achievements, I am very glad that I got over the idea of writing a novel myself.

Fiona Shaw’s reading of Emma is delightful, as you might expect, but it’s very curious that her impersonations of Miss Bates and Mrs Elton are so close, at least to my ears, to those of Sophie Thompson and Juliet Stevenson in the Douglas McGrath adaptation, the one starring Gwyneth Paltrow — whom Ms Shaw does not call to mind. Which reminds me: Juliet Stevenson still holds the cup for Most Diverting reading: if you’re looking for a good time, let her tell you Lady Audley’s Secret. It’s as exciting as a circus!

***

In a corner of the blue room, I keep Will’s smaller toys in a chest by my closet, next to a table on which I pile books to be shelved. Last night, I found Will imperturbably riffling through the drawers, even though a stack of books had collapsed in a heap in front of it. I was worried that the books might have fallen on him, but there was no sign of that. The heap is still there, and I have to do something about it when I’m through here.

I wish that I could think of something to do with the books on the floor other than stacking them again. Evidently, I’m not wishing hard enough, because nothing comes to mind. At some point, I will be carrying books out of the apartment, presumably in shopping bags, and carrying them uptown to the new storage unit. But which books?

I’m not discouraged, though, because I’ve just come from the old storage unit, where, on the third try, I managed to open the Readerware file, which permitted me to register the titles in two piles, the donation pile and the uptown (keeper) pile. In about half an hour, I processed nearly forty books. The MiFi connection was a tad slow, so I had plenty of time to think about what I was doing. I had the advantage of a completely clear shelf: this year, the Christmas decorations stayed in the apartment. (I know myself well enough to foresee how really unpleasant a holiday-time schlep from  (and then back to) the uptown storage unit, at the tip of Manhattan, would be.) As soon as this staging area fills up, I’ll go downstairs and buy some boxes, and, when there are enough boxes to warrant the expense, I’ll arrange for a van to take them away, either to HousingWorks or to the new unit. It feels great to have begun the project at last.

At some point, I’ll lure an accomplice to the downtown unit, to read the ISBNs of older books, published before the advent of the bar code (I’ve still got quite a few of those), and the titles of books that don’t have numbers at all. This accomplice may have to be Kathleen herself, as a lot of the books are hers.

All this, after having a squamous cell burned off my scalp and then delivering a housewarming present. The present was for our friend who lives surrounded by museum-quality treasures, and I’d have been at wit’s end trying to think of something that wouldn’t be positively unwelcome if he hadn’t mentioned a predicament that owes to his not having explored the world of online shopping. There being few-to-no amply-stocked record stores anymore (we still call them that), he was at a loss to replace a recording of Der Fliegender Holländer that he had come particularly to dislike. It was one of those late Karajan recordings, ruined by the conductor’s delusions of expertise in the sound-engineering department. I went to Arkivmusic and selected three almost certainly better ones, led by Otto Klemperer, James Levine, and Sir Georg Solti. Kathleen wrapped them up nicely and I left them with my friend’s doorman on this morning’s rounds. When I got home, there was a message of thanks on the machine. “I’m pleased as punch!” he said. We’ll see him tomorrow night, at a Museum do, and perhaps he’ll have had a chance to do a bit of listening.

***

Why didn’t I read Edna O’Brien when I was young? Because I was put off by wild Irish pagans. They interfered with my study of English as it is spoken at the source. And they had, I thought, nothing to teach me about the world, except how backward Ireland was. The only good thing about Ireland, in those days, was that it made me feel lucky to live in America.

Oh, well. I’ve lived long enough to change my tune. When Country Girl, O’Brien’s autobiography, appeared earlier this year, I noticed that no one was carrying her novels, except of course Amazon. So I ordered a few, and I’ve been enjoying The Country Girl quite a lot, even to the point of deriving no small pleasure from discerning the passages that would have displeased my greener ear, and laughing at my fussy old self. Colm Tóibín has taught me to hear music in what once seemed to be gruff silence. There are also genuine wonders. For meshing all layers of narrative meaning, the following can’t be beat. After  a Halloween party, the girls file into chapel “to pray for the Holy Souls.”

We prayed for the souls in Purgatory. I thought of Mama and cried for a while. I put my face in my hands so that the girls next to me would think that I was praying or meditating or something. I was trying to recall how many sins she had committed from the time she was at Confession to the time she died. I knew that we had been given too much change in one of the shops and I said I’d bring it back.

“You will not, they have more than that out of us,” she said, and she put the change into the cracked jug on the pantry shelf. And she had told a lie too. Mrs Stevens from the cottages came up to borrow the donkey and Mama said the donkey was in the bog with Hickey; when all the time the donkey was above in the kitchen garden asleep under the pear tree with its knees bent. I saw him there because Mama had sent me to look for the black hen who was laying out. Every year the black hen laid out and hatched her chickens in the ditch. It was a miracle to see her wander back to the hen-house with a clutch of lovely little furry yellow chickens behind her. When I had stopped crying my face was red and my eyelids hot.

I was fairly knocked down by the presumption of the girl’s imagining that she might know what those sins were — that’s Ireland for you, I suppose — but even more impressive was the authorial trick of thereby introducing a couple of picturesque anecdotes into the story.

How nice it would be to stretch out in my chair out on the balcony and finish the novel! But I’ve a pile of books to attend to.