Spring fever has hit me more intensely this year than it has done in some time. The explanation is simple: just as spring was arriving, I was allowed to open my door to it — the balcony door. As you can see, the balcony is not much to look at yet, but that’s not the point. The open door is the point. (The open door is remarkably unphotogenic.)

It was too chilly to spend time on the balcony this weekend, which was just as well, since there is only one chair out there at the moment, but I spent almost every minute reading, quite as if I were taking a holiday in the fresh air. I went back and forth between two books, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, which I haven’t quite finished, and Geza Vermes’s Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea. I hardly know which is more sensational.

I don’t recall what pointed me to Vermes’s book. (I really must learn to make a note of such things.) The dust jacket is a bit waffly, identifying the author as “the first professor of Jewish studies at Oxford,” but not clarifying that this is his current post. He has certainly written a number of other books on early Christianity, and he is a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls. An air of controversy hangs over the pages of Christian Beginnings.

My critics complain that I rejected the authenticity of the passage from Philippians because its Christ picture did not agree with my theory. As a matter of fact, I argue against its Pauline origin on the grounds that it does not fit into Paul’s understanding [sic] of Jesus, as reflected throughout all his genuine letters and in particular in his numerous prayer formulas and doxologies.

But the book is thrilling to read. Step by step — chapter by chapter — Vermes shows, on the evidence of Scripture and later well-known writings, the transformation of the charismatic healer of Galilee into the Second Person of the Trinity. Claims for the divinity of Jesus, Vermes argues, are not even hinted at until the Gospel of John (written some time after Paul’s Epistles), and do not appear unequivocally until the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written about 110. Even then, the details of this new theology took a further two centuries develop, with the “orthodox” view erupting in Alexandria in 318, in the clash between Arius of Libya and two successive bishops, Alexander and Athanasius. It interests me no end that this fight over the nature of the Trinity boiled over almost as soon as it was legally able to do so publicly — it was only in 312 that Constantine reversed the persecution of Christians, beginning the process that would transform an illicit sect into the state religion. It was at Nicaea, the first ecumenical council of the newly-recognized church (325), that the Athanasian view became established dogma. This did not prevent the Visigothic kings of Spain, for example, from adhering to the Arian view until they were extinguished by the Moors in the 600s. The Arian formula insisted on the understanding of Jesus’s subordination to God the Father that had been common, if not quite universal, right up to the beginning of the Fourth Century. Only after Nicaea was Jesus proclaimed to be consubstantial with, and co-equal to, God.

So, Christian Beginnings is in large part a history of “Christology” — the nature of Jesus qua Messiah. Other matters are discussed — the virgin birth, the Second Coming, the meaning of the Eucharist — but it is the gradual deification of Jesus that interests Vermes most. Vermes isn’t neutral about this. He closes his book with the hope that a new reformation will restore Christians to the “pure religious vision and enthusiasm of Jesus,” at the expense of “the church attributed to him.” Once upon a time, I’d have found a book such as this one to be shocking as well as thrilling, even though I myself have never been a believer, because it “exposes” Roman Catholic orthodoxy as a fabrication cobbled together by men who never knew Jesus and who dealt in a cavalier fashion with the Hebrew scripture that Jesus never repudiated. (The first chapter does a fine job of establishing the charismatic tradition in Judaism, “alternative,” but never altogether unorthodox.) But I find that I have outgrown the shock.

Granted that the Church’s claims about its divine origins are bogus, there remains the rather amazing history of the institution’s expansion over the course of four centuries. Although contentious, the early church was necessarily not on the offensive, and its administrators gradually assumed the secular burdens of a fading empire. How did that happen? Clearly, men and women found meaning in Christianity. But Christianity, as Vermes shows, developed meaning as it grew. I think that it is unreasonable to talk about a settled Christian doctrine as existing prior to the death of Augustine in 430 — at the earliest. And it was at just about that time that the embrace of a nascent European aristocracy began to warp ecclesiastical priorities.Whatever becomes of the Church in the future, its role in European history is clearly a leading one, and the roots of Western civilization in its modern phase are entwined in its teachings. Conversely, the Church is not eternal, but as historical as any other work of mankind.

I found Christian Beginnings to be an easy-to-read exposition of a patiently-made case. For anyone who wants to read the New Testament by its own light, the book is indispensable.

***

Armadale is the third of Wilkie Collins’s four “sensation” novels, and arguably the least successful. It has been too long since I last read The Moonstone or The Woman in White, the two that remain on college reading lists, for me to make comparisons, but I can say that No Name, which I read last year, has the advantage over Armadale of an irresistible heroine for whom no reader can fail to root. What we have in Armadale, in contrast, is the fast friendship of two men who, unbeknownst to one of them, bear the same name. There is a superb villainess, Lydia Gwilt, but she takes a while to appear, and we don’t get the lowdown on her career until well past halfway. The two men are complete opposites, and both somewhat  irritating. One is amiable but thick and bull-headed; the other is inclined to morbid superstition. The extracts from Lydia Gwilt’s diary, which dominate the latter part of the book, make for much more appealing reading. In fact, Miss Gwilt is an anti-heroine for whom it is difficult not to root.

The satisfaction of Armadale, however, is that of each of the big novels: a rich variety of voices and characters. I don’t know why anyone bothers with Dickens’s paper-doll creations when Collins, with a few bold strokes, creates such ferociously realistic figures as the bedridden and insanely jealous Mrs Milroy, whose complete lack of grounds for doubting her husband’s fidelity simply excites her mad capitulation to the green-eyed monster. Collins’s people are excessive, but they’re never implausible (although there is something dubiously virginal about the young men at the center), and sentimentality is beaten back by cheerful cynicism. The plotting (and counter-plotting) is engrossing because we care about the plotters rather more than we care about their victims.

I can’t wait to see how it all comes out in the end — so, you’ll excuse me.

Kathleen is having a big birthday today: Certain Age + 1. There is a zero in the actual figure.

At a favorite French restaurant down at the other end of 86the Street, a small group of usual suspects will gather to celebrate.

***

When I finished the bowl of cereal and stepped back into the apartment, I couldn’t see a thing. My eyes had narrowed in the morning blaze out on the balcony. I did not linger after my  small breakfast; although my head was in the shade, my knees weren’t, and I’ve learned to dislike the feeling of sun on my skin except in the very coldest weather. It now feels like planting cancer. So I came back inside.

But for a few moments, I felt in the city. I felt a part of the bustle, even though I was sitting still in an armchair. That is the luxury of a well-placed balcony. Not too much wind, and plenty to look at. Soon,  Roofhampton season will begin (thanks, Roz Chast!). The sight of young people stretched out on beach towels on the tarred roofs of the nearby walkups makes me feel especially comfortable in my armchair.

Planes coming into land at LaGuardia from the south are visible, flying low to the ground, between two buildings a few blocks east of here. You expect them to reappear beyond the second building, but they never do, possibly because they have landed, probably because they have dipped behind a low hill just to the west of the airport. No matter how many times I see planes vanish,  they still vanish, and it’s minutely unnerving.

It happened very quietly, without the whir or the grind of tools. When I came out of the shower, the men were on the balcony, moving about silently. As soon as I was clothed enough to approach the window, I saw that the plywood block on the balcony door frame had been removed. And I never heard a thing! The duct tape was pulled from the HVAC intakes. The men boarded the gondola and went down a floor.

Paralyzed rapture.

In the living room, I pushed the potted ivy — nearly as tall as I am, with its obelisk trellis — a bit to one side and squeezed toward the door, which I opened just a little. The cable connecting the router to the WiFi booster in the bedroom had been neatly garlanded around the doorknob by the workers. I reached round and cast it free. Now I could open the door all the way, and step down onto the balcony. The rush of repossession was acutest joy.

I went out to lunch, and then took a walk to Carl Schurz Park, passing Holy Trinity (above) on the way. It was a beautiful day, and I took a lot of photographs in the park. Then I ambled on home.

As soon as I was changed into house clothes, I dragged the pot of ivy out onto the balcony. I lugged a number of other things that had been cluttering the apartment for the past seven months — large ornamental clay pots, a garden tool kit, and the bag of potting soil with which I’d amazingly managed to coexist in the kitchen. I swept up the debris shed by the potted ivy. I sat down on the garden kneeler (which also serves as a little bench) and put my tea on the blue Chinese garden seat. For the first time in a million years, I wished that I had a million friends to call up with the news. I did get hold of Fossil Darling, which was something. I sat outside for over an hour, getting up from time to time to peer at the men down below, in the workyard that they had set up on the roof of the garage. From time to time, they looked up — this part of their job was done.

I ordered a “beer garden” table, with two matching benches, from the Williams-Sonoma Agrarian catalogue. I’d seen at once that the table was right for us because, like our balcony, it is narrow. It ought to arrive in early May. I also ordered the French watering can that Gardener’s Supply sells — in blue. It’s offered only in blue at the moment, but I should have chosen blue anyway, because when the blue watering can that I had for years and years finally disintegrated, because I neglected to empty and invert it before what turned out to be a rough winter, I replaced it with a red one. Very bad idea! On the small balcony, the red watering can was like a buzzer that couldn’t be turned off.

The next item on the agenda is to plan to bring the things that we saved down from the storage unit up at the tip of Manhattan. Ray Soleil will help me with this. There’s a wooden bench, three metal garden chairs (in great shape), and boxes and boxes full of plastic faux bricks (also from Gardener’s Supply). The bricks interlock and provide a handsome and comfortable flooring for the balcony. Taking them apart was one of the last things we did last fall, in the course of stripping the balcony for this railing replacement project that has now come to an end — at least on our front of the building.

It’s going to be very different, the next incarnation of our outdoor room. There won’t be any florists’ étagères to fill with potted plants, or huge faux marble planters to fill with floral whatnot. I’ve come to accept that the balcony’s climate is not salubrious for plants, probably because of all the particulate matter sent up by the trucks that take a free ride on First and Second Avenues on their way to and from Long Island. The potted ivy does well, and so does parsley (which must of course be well washed). In the paper this morning, I read about a mildew that has attacked the common impatiens plants — so that’s why I haven’t seen any in the shops. What about geraniums? I suppose we’ll have a few, but nothing like the lineup of former years (done). As soon as I can replace the leggy nepenthe in the living room with tight new plants, I’ll move them outside. The balcony won’t be a garden. It will be a sitting room — outside. With a table for the occasional dinner. Kathleen plans to order a six-foot bench, so that she can stretch out completely for luxuriant naps.

Ray is on his way uptown by now. Before lunch, we’re going to carry the wicker club chair that spent the winter in the blue room back outside. I’m in the course of ordering an indoor arm chair to take its place, from the Canadian firm that made the identical chair that we found in our hotel room in Cincinnati in January. (Ray tracked that one down — bravo!) In the meantime, we’ll just play musical chairs, the oldest game in the house.

This morning, as Kathleen and I were having tea, I heard the sound of metal clanking right outside, behind me. Could the men be back? I hadn’t heard the hum of the gondola’s motor — a sound to which I had become keenly attuned. Looking outside, I saw nothing. The gondola cables were invisible. How had the men slipped past? I leaned over the railing (such fun!) and saw that the gondola was still on the roof of the garage. It was only the cables that had been hoisted. As I stood there, one of the hemp safety ropes began to shimmy, and soon it was pulled past. At the moment, two heavy black cables that I never saw until yesterday are the only lines. I won’t be surprised if they disappear before lunch time. But I won’t mind if they go on hanging around.

I’d better get dressed. But first, I’m going to close the windows; the weather is not so nice today. (I forgot to say how wonderful it was to have the balcony restored to us on the finest day of the year so far!) It’s much easier to open and close the windows now; I can do it from outside.

Somewhere in our storage unit, there is a stack of two dozen bound notebooks. These notebooks were designed for permanence, with numbered pages ready to betray any tear-outs, no matter how neatly done. Are the notebooks blue and grey, or blue and blue? I don’t remember. I must dig them out on my next visit, because, I now realize, I can no longer put off the horror of reading the twaddle with which I filled them, forty-odd years ago. I began keeping these notebooks in college, and continued writing in them for several years afterward. Whatever the contents, the notebooks themselves are documentary evidence of a period of my life. There can’t be much worth reading, but it would be clarifying to know when I began, and when I ended. There’s a bitterness about the notebooks now that I couldn’t have imagined then: if I were forty years younger, I would never resort to the medium of a notebook. I should go straight to blogging.

My writing and my thinking would have been better for it. The fact that anyone with a link can read what I’m writing here keeps me sharp, even if no one does. My notebooks were not only unpublished but unventilated. Since I never re-read them, I repeated myself, lost in self-absorption. I wrote in them because I thought that doing so would lift me out of the sad futility of my life. But I never felt the futility of my life more acutely than when I was writing in the notebooks, because I had nothing to write about. When I did have something to write about, I wrote a letter to a friend. Or I wrote a spontaneous paragraph or two about a piece of music for the radio station’s program guide, inserting it right in the listings. I wrote two rigorous essays, for reasons that I do not care to discuss, about (a) Beethoven’s late quartets as reflected in Eliot’s Four Quartets, with passages of music alongside passages of verse — cool, huh? — and (b) the vision of the earthly paradise at the end of the Purgatorio.

I was able to write about music and literature because I was reading a great deal about them, more than as an undergraduate, and I saw how writing about them was done. There were no such templates for writing about myself. The only thing that I grasped about myself was that I was different, in defective, non-special ways. Even my strengths were bent. The proof of my worthlessness was that I had wound up in Houston. If I’d had any sense, I’d have turned my back on myself as a subject and got on with the life less troubled — sooner than I did. But I had been taught that the unexamined life was not worth living; and how was I ever going to be like Virginia Woolf if I did not keep notebooks? For my notebooks, unlike the pieces on music and literature, were aspirational in nature: I wanted to become the sort of person who keeps a notebook. I have yet to become it. When I write notes now, it is to remember thoughts and passages that I’ll want to write about here, when and if I get round to them. Genuine secrets I never commit to writing: quite aside from the imprudence of doing so, the true test of a secret is whether it’s worth remembering. Most, in my experience, are not. Most of mine have dissolved in oblivion.

Reading the notebooks and diaries of writers and other accomplished people was of little help. I rarely agreed with them about anything. And I already knew that I preferred the uneventful life — although I was ashamed of this and regarded it as a weakness. Turbulence shuts down the part of my mind that I find the most congenial to exercise. On a good day, nothing unexpected happens, and the expected happens as expected. (Kathleen’s raisin toast is always browned to perfection after exactly two minutes in the toaster — unless the toaster is already hot because I made myself an English muffin first, so I don’t.) The surprises are all quiet and interior. They jump out of books, or off of video screens. I hear something new in a familiar piece of music.

I can’t really say how I felt, back in the Seventies, about writing about people I knew. I’ll have to go over the notebooks before I determine that it made me uncomfortable, because (as I now believe) writing about other people becomes interesting insofar as it is heartless. To size someone up dispassionately may be useful for hiring purposes, but in humane letters it is a kind of murder. Because you can’t murder the dead, it’s probably best to wait.

I’m afraid that, when I open the notebooks, I am going to be knocked down by the stale breath of my immature vacuity.

***

Here’s a little surprise from this morning: I’m reading, as I think I mentioned, Alexander Stille’s The Future of the Past, a collection of reports about various conservation and ecological projects that was published in 2002. It’s impossible not to wonder about the future of this book, which is of course the present: how’s that linked-ponds water-treatment system working outside of Varanasi? What has happened to the Biblioteca Alexandrina since the Arab Spring, and how was it doing before that? This morning, I read a piece about Ranomafana National Park, in Madagascar, home to many species of lemur. According to Stille, the Park was established at the instigation of a Brooklyn woman called Patricia Wright. Wright was a social worker when she and her then husband bought a nocturnal owl monkey as a pet — and, the next thing you know, she became a credentialed primatologist.

Dr Wright maintains a Web site, and there is a Wikipedia entry that appears to have been written by an extremely sympathetic hand. Stille’s essay is not online, and its account of Wright’s efforts is complicated by conflicting estimations of their merits. I came away thinking that, however good at tracking lemurs she might might be, Wright is negligibly equipped to run a complex conservation and development program in a third-world town, and from abroad (she teaches at Stony Brook) — an inaptitude made locally catastrophic by her apparent ability to charm pots of money out of anybody, once. But the Wikipedia entry for the Ranomafana National Park does not mention her, or anybody else.

As for the Biblioteca Alexandrina, it seems, from its Wikipedia entry, to have turned out to be the extravagant dud that Stille was too polite to predict.

This has been a bad year for the ticket drawer. Too many tickets have gone straight from the drawer to the trash. Although Kathleen and I have decided not to renew our theatre and concert subscriptions for next season, I’ve tried to strike a compromise by taking advantage of the programs at the Museum, which is more or less in the neighborhood. Even that has been difficult, though, what with late-winter low spirits.

Last Friday, however, we did actually show up for something, and were delighted to have done so. A new outfit calling itself the Salomé Chamber Orchestra backed up violinist Philippe Quint and violist David Aaron Carpenter (one of the Salomé’s founding siblings) in a performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K 364. I’ll say right away that I’ve never heard the work played nearly so well. Live performances have, in fact, tended to disappoint me. Friday night’s was just the opposite: a surprise.

It has long been my conviction that K 364 is Mozart’s angriest work. There is a lot of mockery in Mozart’s catalogue, but anger is rare, and perhaps K 364 is the only instance. The anger, tucked in between every well-mannered note, is directed at the Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart’s employer, who refused to let the young musician travel. (And at Mozart’s father, whose idea of a career didn’t suit his son at all.) The violin and viola cry out in competition: “I hate this town more than you do!” The slow movement, which Maynard Solomon likens to a tragic opera seria duet, mourns the opportunities in Vienna, Paris, Milan, and elsewhere that Mozart is missing because he is stuck in a hick town by a contract. A hick town that would become a major destination on the music circuit simply because he couldn’t wait to get out of it.

You don’t have to know any of this background to grasp the passion; you need only read the music — which, when dutifully played for the archbishop, I’m sure went right over his head (or perhaps gave him a slight headache). Friday’s musicians did not play dutifully. They played the music by its edge. That’s how I describe what gypsies used to do — the faux gypsy musicians of old Vienna. They played as if entranced as dervishes, but every note would be where it belonged. Like such gypsies, Messrs Quint and Carpenter and the Salomé players flaunted the tension between precision and abandon, with all the playful ostentation of a sword-swallower. I couldn’t have liked it more. The performance was enthusiastically received, with booming applause after each movement. The musicians’ intensity fairly demanded it.

We stayed on for Lera Auerbach’s Sogno di Stabat Mater for violin, viola, vibraphone and orchestra. Aside from a few wild patches, mostly at the beginning, this is a neo-baroque work such as Arvo Pärt might inspire. I’d like to hear it again, and I look forward to a recording. (The program materials neglect to identify the gifted vibraphonist.)

***

In the old days, which is to say the first six years of blogging (this site will be nine years old in November), I used to buy a lot of things on the basis of other bloggers’ enthusiasm. I got the mugs and T shirts out of my system fairly early, but it took a while to stop buying books that, months later, I could no longer recall a reason for ordering. Lately, I have been getting rid of a lot of such books, even though I haven’t read them. Because I haven’t read them. I shall, of course, name no names.

One book that I didn’t discard was Bill Morris’s All Souls’ Day. I can’t think why I bought it, but I do know that I had it long before my interest in the American War in Vietnam flared up late last year. Set in 1963, All Souls’ Day is a crisply-written romance. The hero is a burned-out Navy vet who is running a Bangkok hotel with a Thai buddy from the war. The heroine is the daughter of a prominent California family. Working in Saigon for the USIS, she is shocked to discover the discrepancy between reports from the field and the twaddle dispatched to Washington — where, it is clear, leaders from Kennedy on down have decided to punish those who tell them what they don’t want to hear. The hero is, naturally, unshockable. The heroine puts her foot down: she can have no respect for a man who knows what the hero knows but refuses to act. So the hero thinks up something to do. Action!

There is just enough well-written, intelligent discussion of the war to keep the book afloat in its sentimental sea of hyper-handsome lovers, thrilling sex scenes, and lovingly described meals. In the course of the novel, both the hero and the heroine read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and they’re amazed by how little has changed in the ten intervening years. It is clear that the author loves The Quiet American, but he is really too upbeat and — I can think of no other word — automotive to stretch for Greene’s dark-hearted gravity. The lovers are appalled by the American conduct of the war, and resolve upon an expatriate existence that seems to suit them well. There is none of Greene’s ambivalence.

As an accompaniment to reading serious histories of the American War, All Souls’ Day is a treat, evoking without pedantry a world gone by. Oh, the fall of ’63! It was my first term at boarding school, and everything that happened, from the explosion of the Beatles to the assassination in Dallas, is bound up in the delight of being away from home at last. Beyond the antics of Madame Nhu and the downfall of her husband and brother-in-law, I don’t remember giving a thought to Vietnam. Youth!

What, really, does “the life of the mind” mean? Not much, say I.

The phrase is a swirl of connotations and implications. A kind of tranquil thoughtfulness is envisioned. Meditation — that two-faced concept, which can mean either concentrated reflection on a matter of great importance, or the rigorous expulsion of all particular ideas — figures in it somewhere. For some reason, I tend to associate the life of the mind with the quotation of poetry, preferably Goethe: in order to lead the life of the mind, you must stock your mind well with memorized bits and bobs of wisdom, which you may, at leisure, turn over in your (mental) hand like polished stones. The life of the mind is aloof, conducted up there somewhere. It embraces significance and eschews triviality.

There are monks in monasteries who may be leading life along these lines, but of course they would call it the life of prayer. (Prayer is the only mindful thing that I recognize as arguably existing outside the life of the body.) Somehow, I don’t think that “prayer” is what most people who talk of the life of the mind have in mind.

So, who amongst us, living in the everyday world, is really leading the life of the mind — and how can you tell?

I strongly suspect that the life of the mind is a state of grace into which we imagine other people to be capable of entering, whilst we ourselves are fallen, distracted by swarms of vague and inexpressible mental flashes, to dwell on which would lead to madness.

***

In contrast, there is the life of reading and writing. It would be nice to have one word for “reading and writing,” and I hope that somebody comes up with it soon, because reading without writing is vain, and writing without reading is senseless. You really must do both if you are going to do much of either. There is a third element: attentiveness to the life going on around you. This is the current’s ground. The lack of such attentiveness is what powers the life of the pure intellectual, who studies philosophical systems and spins more of same. Lawyers are grounded intellectuals, dealing with abstractions in terms of actual cases. They are not, like pure intellectuals, fantasists.

It is very easy to tell who is reading and writing and paying attention.

***

I wrote the other day that my parents’ way of life was meaningless. I ought to have noted that it was meaningless to me, not to them. I believe that their lives were rich in meaning, and that the center of all meaning, for them, was the large and stable American corporation. (They would have strenuously countered that, as observant Roman Catholics, they believed in higher things. But faith and God were taken for granted, like the contents of a medicine cabinet.) They believed in the power of the corporation, moreover, very much as a married couple. They both found meaning in my father’s career, which my mother fully supported, at the company of which he eventually became chairman. It was like Far From Heaven, but without the sex problems. They believed in “the company” in the same way that French courtiers believed in Louis XIV: as the fount of honor and riches. Like the aristocrats who were invited to Marly, my parents shared an aptitude for this way of life.

It was a life, I now think, divorced from any thought of history. History was over. The two world wars and the intervening Depression had redeemed the (free) world, which could settle down to enjoying affluence. If it ever occurred to my parents that the era of the benign postwar corporation would not continue indefinitely, they did not dwell on it. Like all beneficiaries of a boom, they saw no point to imagining unpleasant sequels, especially as (quite correctly) they did not expect to live to see any.

If I am right about the association of their belief in the corporation with a disbelief in history, then it is easy to see why their lives were meaningless to me. I don’t remember not being aware of living in history. History is the story of how we got to where we are, and we are always rewriting it as we understand ourselves better. Although it appears to be about then, it is always about now. The questions asked about the past are always questions that seem important in the present. That is why, for example, the history of the Reconstruction period that followed the American Civil War is so persistently unsettled.

For my parents, history was what happened. Scholarly research might give us a better picture of what happened, but what happened was what happened. It was itself as immutable as the Bible. The idea that history is forever being rewritten by evolving minds would have struck them as fatuous and perverse. Minds didn’t evolve — not any more, thank you very much! And there was a word for taking an alternative approach to the events of history: propaganda!

Kathleen spent this morning at home, less unwilling to brave the dank weather than determined to finish drafting a document in the peace and quiet of our apartment. While she worked, I read. I read Persuasion, right to the very end. (I read almost half of it yesterday.) This was a great treat — more than a treat. No book could distract me from a real crisis, but Jane Austen never fails to intensify the felicity of actual tranquility.

Is Persuasion becoming my favorite of her novels? It is unlike all the earlier ones in having a very decided chapter-bound march step. There are two volumes, each consisting of twelve chapters: no arrangement could be more deliberate. Each chapter contains some very definite plot-advancing event. (In this, it is very unlike Mansfield Park.) There is a great deal of authorial impatience with the fools in her pages, an edge of contemptuous dismissal that is not softened by humor. Of Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliot at Bath, she writes that their “evening entertainments were solely in the elegant stupidity of private parties…” She writes a couple of quite heartless paragraphs dismissive of the Musgroves’s near-do-well son, Dick, lost at sea and transformed by his death into “Poor Richard.” What’s funny is the apparent impropriety of her candor.

If I had a better memory, I might not enjoy re-reading Austen as much as I do. Emma, which I have read more than all the others and actually studied, has few surprises for me now, but the complications of the other books always prove to be more extensive than my recollection of them; and then there are the movies to set aside. The generally excellent Roger Michell adaptation of Persuasion (1996), for example, sheers off the first two chapters of the novel’s second volume — a good decision, I think, in cinematic terms. By the same token, no movie in the world could begin to capture the wicked subtlety of third chapter’s beginning.

Sir Walter had taken a very good house in Camden-place, a lofty, dignified situation, such as becomes a man of consequence, and both he and Elizabeth were settled there, much to their satisfaction. [Emphasis supplied]

This reads like the introduction to one of the young Austen’s absurd little plays, its deadpan, just-so patness requiring no filigree but the smug, “happy-ending” coda. I can’t help feeling that “lofty, dignified situation” is meant to be satirical and ridiculous. Who inhabits a situation? Austen might have subordinated the phrase with a preposition, such as “of” or “with,” but she didn’t, as if to invite the charge of grammatical carelessness. In any case, Austen immediately rolls up her mockery and restores us to the passionate world of Anne’s feelings.

Anne entered it with a sinking heart, anticipating an imprisonment of many months, and anxiously saying to herself, “Oh! when shall I leave you again?”

To Anne, this bright sparkly bit of Bath, with its two drawing rooms and abundant mirrors, might as well be the castle of Otranto. But it is worse. Instead of dungeons and demons, Anne faces the unfeeling vacancy of her inane family.

***

In Montrose, at some point in early 1974, I moved in with the dear friend who had taken refuge in my garage apartment in late 1971. The landlord of the bungalow into which I had moved with my wife and my daughter, but which I had to abandon alone, put me through something of a ringer about finding a replacement tenant; I think that he thought that he was teaching me a lesson. (He was.)

My dear friend shared what was called a “duplex” apartment — one of two matching flats, the one atop the other — with a young woman whose family lived in River Oaks. They had the two bedrooms. I took the breakfast nook, which really was quite small, just wide enough for the length of my bed to stretch beneath the window, not much deeper. I can’t remember how long this jolly arrangement lasted, but shortly after I became friends with the man who lived in the duplex’s garage apartment, the two of us decided to share a flat in an apartment complex out in the part of Post Oak that lies just inside the Loop. I could and did walk to work from there, but the roommating didn’t work out — we soon became an odd couple, only without the laughs. By now, my dear friend had moved into a smaller apartment of her own, next door to the duplex in Montrose. In this building, there were four apartments. My friend lived on the bottom right, and I took the top left. I really think that I might have remained in this apartment forever, but the owner sold the building to buyers who planned to cancel all the leases and renovate. I moved a few blocks away, to an odd apartment walled with planks of wood. Not paneling, but planks. There was a story about the builder’s connections to the world of lumber. This would prove to be my last independent abode in Houston. By the summer of 1976, it was clear that my mother’s non-Hodgkins lymphoma was going to kill her — but of course it was the treatment that did that — and I moved back to my parents’ house to help out. I had been gone for five years, and everything was different.

For one thing, it is not true that I might have remained in that top left apartment indefinitely. That’s where I began studying for the LSAT. I had shown up to take the LSAT in 1970 or ’71, at my father’s behest, but I had walked out on the exam after about twenty minutes. I was really not equipped for the study of law at that time. By the time I took the LSAT more seriously, in 1976, the earlier score had disappeared, as if by the operation of a statute of limitations. I studied very hard the second time, and was quite proud of my respectable score. I had never done so well on a standardized test before.

My father wanted me to stay in Houston. He agreed to support me through law school only at a school in the South or Southwest. Happily, his alumnus’s pride induced him to make an exception for Notre Dame. It is difficult to imagine now, but Notre Dame really was my Window on the East.

The first letter of acceptance, from the University of Oklahoma, arrived a week after my mother died, in February 1977. So she never knew that I got in. I never knew how pleased she might have been, or even if she would have been pleased. She was very grateful for my help at home during her final months, and not shy about saying so. But I think that she had given up on my long-term prospects. Not without reason! I would practice law, in one way or another, for less than seven years, after which I would not work again. My father got something of a short end, too, because I settled in New York with Kathleen, whom I doted upon from the first day of law school, and not in Houston.

***

All that moving about — it’s oppressive and wearying to think of now. In the five years that I lived away from my parents’ house, I dwelt beneath seven different roofs. For the past thirty-three years, I have dwelt beneath the same one (albeit in three different apartments — but for nearly thirty years where we are now). As I said in an earlier installment, I could not take life in Houston seriously. And I’m glad that I didn’t, because it was much better to take it experimentally. This entailed a lot of jackass behavior, of course. But one of the experiments hardened into a viable way of life. I learned how to take women seriously.

It was a great decade for taking women seriously, because second-wave feminism was spreading out beyond its radical origins and engaging the lives of a lot of ordinary women. Women certainly took life experimentally in the 1970s — the ones I knew did, anyway. For one thing, they abandoned the veneer of respectability. This did not mean that modesty and virtue were thrown to the winds. Rather, modesty and virtue were newly grounded in personal conviction, and not fenced by appearances. Women continued to fall for the wrong guy. But they didn’t inevitably marry him. I watched a lot of women discover life apart from romance. Women would perhaps never become as detached from romance as many men manage to be, but they stopped defining themselves in exclusively romantic terms, with a man either at the center of things or glaringly absent. In a way, women discovered the freedom of nuns, even if they weren’t celibate.

Watching women become, in their own eyes, regular people was a serious business, because the meaning of “regular people” changed as they did so, requiring men to do some fixing-up as well. Attentive men, anyway. “Honey, I’m home!” became an ironic banner, because honey was no longer necessarily at home when her husband got off work, and there were cases — I am one — in which the honey at home was male. The domestic world that our parents had taken for granted was shattered. We are still rebuilding.

The other big experiment of my Houston years was the reconstruction of bourgeois stability. Every time I moved house, I became neater and more organized, my affairs more regular and less crisis-prone. I became a better cook of better-balanced meals. Every change of address really was a fresh start, and by the time I returned to Tanglewood in 1976, I was the tidy emptier of dishwashers that I am today. It turned out that I was not cut out for bohemian life. I was mistaken to think that it was an alternative to my parents’ way of life (which I must learn to describe); it was just another kind of meaninglessness. And ultimately inferior. Having been brought up in a bohemian household, I should never have had the habit of good manners. The habit may have been all that I got from my parents, but it was there to invigorate when I finally grew up.

In the first chapter of The Future of the Past, “The Sphinx — Virtual and Real,” Alexander Stille reports an argument between an American conservationist and an Egyptian tour guide who specializes in “Atlantean” groups — people who believe that the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx were erected by remnants of the people of Atlantis, that fair, doomed continent. As it happens, the American, Mark Lehner, started out as a believer in such New Age nonsense. Eventually, hard research changed his mind. There is a pointlessness to the argument, in that Ahmed, the Egyptian, is inclined to doubt the Atlantis “theory” as well; but there’s money in it. What, Lehner wonders (forgetting his youthful enthusiasms, perhaps), makes the bogus explanation so attractive to so many people?

We have thousands of tombs, thousands of hieroglyphs. If I climb the Pyramid with you, I can show you pottery in the mortar between the stones. We have carbon-dated it. What more do we need? You work with these people. You lecture to them. Why do people need to believe in myths? Why can’t they believe in Khufu and Khafre? It’s a great civilization. The boat of Khufu is as beautiful and sophisticated as anything produced by ancient civilizations. The statues of Menkaure and Khafre as as beautiful as anything produced by any civilization of any age. Why are they not good enough? Why do people need them to be by somebody else?

I share Lehner’s exasperation. I was reeling it with just last week, reading John Lanchester’s LRB piece on Game of Thrones. I read it because I hoped that Lanchester could explain its folly, patent in the publicity materials that have been junking up newspapers and magazines. (I will say at the outset that I never dreamed, as a boy, that I would live to see grown men discuss comic-book superheroes. I think that I just might have regarded such a forecast as more horrifying than that of a Communist take-over.) Lanchester is a sensible man; he has written not only brilliantly but lucidly about the financial disasters of the last decade. Sadly, I discovered that Lanchester is a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire — the cycle of fictions by George RR Martin — and the television adaptation. The piece would have been blather to me if not for a moment of connection with the real world: “Martin,” Lanchester writes, “has said that his ambition was to create an imaginary world with the atmosphere of the Wars of the Roses. A small number of aristocratic families are contending for power in the kingdom of Westeros, an island with a cold north….”

What, may I ask, is insufficiently interesting about the real Wars of the Roses?

This sporadic sequence of three dynastic wars, stretching over thirty years (1455-1485), that transformed England from a medieval kingdom into the foundation of a modern state, was not called by its now-popular name until the Nineteenth Century. (Was it Scott who made up the term?) The “roses” were the badges of the contending families, red for Lancaster and white for York. A weak king, whose grandfather had usurped the throne, was unable to neutralize the tensions of an aristocracy idled by the end of a disappointing war in France. Factions collected around men with claims to the throne that were arguably as good as the king’s — and who were prepared to argue with force. When the king (a Lancastrian) passed into insanity, his queen turned herself into the greatest harridan of English history by trying (often foolishly) to stand up for her husband’s interests, and those of her infant son. Scuffles and skirmishes metastasized into open rebellion, and, by 1461, a Yorkist sat on the throne. The Yorkist would in turn be ejected ten years later, but only for a short period; restored to the throne, he would rule for another dozen years. Then his teenaged son would succeed him — but only on paper. The late king’s brother was determined to seize the throne, and the young king and his brother — the “princes in the tower” — were made to disappear from this world. Two years later, a Welshman with extremely tenuous Lancastrian claims overthrew the Yorkist in a great battle. This turned out to be the end of the “wars,” but no one knew this at the time. Happily, the new king married a Yorkist princess and was very strong. So was his son. There would be a few seditious events every now and then, but by the latter part of the sixteenth century — just as France was sinking into its religious civil wars — the English monarchy was secure, at least from overmighty subjects, and an unmarried woman was able to rule the land in (domestic) peace for forty-five years. English kings and queens would no longer have to face the challenge of powerful aristocratic clans. In the future, political contentions would be waged nonviolently by men (and, later, women) who were elected, by ever more democratic constituencies, to represent the people of England in an ancient assembly called Parliament.

I have omitted all the proper names (except for those of the two factions). I have also neglected to mention the pervasiveness of the bloody violence. This was no palace coup. As we know from the Paston letters, the conflict wore a gangland face on the local level, with thugs seizing property in the name of whichever faction was prevailing at the moment. Every time I pick up a book about the Wars of the Roses, I discover some new atrocity, or at least a new snake in the grass. The constellation of titles and family names, and the endless shifts of allegiance, make it very hard to keep score, and the career of the Earl of Warwick, known as “kingmaker” after his ultimately vain attempt to restore the insane Lancastrian, is one that I find I must always re-learn. Convulsions on this scale, no doubt bewildering to live through, remain confusing on the page.

At the beginning of his career, Shakespeare rendered a sort of four-episode Game of Thrones from the records of the Wars of the Roses. The records were tendentious, and favored the Lancastrians — the Yorkists, particularly the antihero of Richard III, were drawn with a lurid brush. Shakespeare’s “history plays” are not history. But they are not fantasy, either. For the most part, his characters represent people who actually lived, and who died more or less as he said they did. These are not Shakespeare’s greatest plays by any means, but they are very good, and, if you’ll pardon the inanity of my saying so, beautifully written. Please tell me why you would prefer to watch a television show about a wholly imaginary concoction. No — don’t tell me. Just try to square it with yourself.

***

The first thing I did when I finished reading Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers was to check out what James Wood had to say about it in last week’s New Yorker. I was very surprised by what I read; it seemed at times that Wood, in his praise and enthusiasm, was describing some other book, even though all the characters’ names and doings checked out. It seemed that, while Wood had read the book carefully, he had not heard its heartbeat. I thought that I had.

The proof of our difference lies in the single paragraph that Wood devotes to Ronnie Fontaine.

But perhaps his stories are his best works. We soon understand that nothing Ronnie says can be trusted. Yet he has all of Kushner’s uncanny novelistic confidence.

Yes, yes. But what about the narrator’s obsession? Isn’t it obvious that Reno (as the nameless narrator is nicknamed — by this very character) is locked into orbit around Ronnie? The last chapter preceding the novel’s triple-headed finale closes with a searing passage of anti-romantic romance.

“Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”

My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.

“You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained?  Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. … Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that —”

“Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

Ronnie — maybe I’ll get used to that name, but it doesn’t fit the description that accompanies his first appearance in the novel, by which, Reno tells us, “I was struck”; it’s the novel’s only flaw — is the Lady Brett of The Flamethrowers. No matter how close he comes to Reno, he remains unattainable, a very good-looking trickster. He sleeps with Reno the night they meet, and then she doesn’t see him again until he turns up as her new boyfriend’s oldest New York friend. (The boyfriend is Sandro.) Ronnie eschews serious attachments, and carries himself like a demigod who swims above séquences et conséquences. Reno needs a serious attachment so badly that she tries to see her relationship with Sandro as one, even though she doesn’t really love him — as Ronnie says, Reno doesn’t know herself — and can’t stop from violating the fundamental rule of his artist’s life in New York, which is that his connection to a powerful Milanese industrial family be overlooked, as a kind of embarrassing celebrity. Reno’s foolishness here, which plays out like a very extensive fermata in the moment (to cue in a famous opera that comes to mind) between Elsa’s asking Lohengrin what his name is and the ensuing calamity, propels the action of the book, even though Reno presents herself as an ingenue conceptual artist who can’t see beyond her next project. She is too naive and callow, and too ambitious to stake a claim to fame in the Soho art scene (the novel is set in the mid-Seventies), to acknowledge her own ignorance and inexperience. I came to think that Sandro’s ferocious old mother was right to treat Reno rudely. She is simply not serious enough for her son. She’s just another vacant American.

Reno is not serious enough to understand the novel she’s in. But I should have thought that James Wood, serious enough for twenty, would have gotten it.

***

Nick Paumgartner writes about James Salter in the current issue of The New Yorker. I read the piece with interest, although I should not read anything written by Salter himself. His last book, a collection of short stories about rich New Yorkers and other top people whom I should shudder to know, put me off him entirely. I was prepared to make an exception for A Sport and a Pastime, and to give it a second read. Like everyone (it seems), I was knocked out by it the first time. But now I’m pretty sure that the shock was meretricious, as though you could improve pornography by making it Slow. Here is Paumgartner on the novel:

It’s an odd little book. A first-person narrator tells the story of an affair between a Yale dropout named Dean and an eighteen-year-old girl named Anne-Marie. They travel around provincial France in a convertible and make love in hotel rooms. There are astonishing evocations of France and explicit descriptions of anal sex. The narrator, a tentative, rueful photographer and friend of Dean’s, states on many occasions that he is imagining this affair — that he is making it all up [something that would come easily and untentatively to Rachel Kushner’s Ronnie Fontaine], which makes the novel something of a puzzle. Salter has said that he devised the narrative conceit out of necessity. “You could not tell Dean’s story, I don’t believe, in the first person without losing the reader’s sympathy, some essential sympathy,” he told me. “And in the third person it merely becomes an account. It dries up a little and becomes a dossier, a report on something, no matter what the language does to enrich it.” The inference: to tell the story of his own affair, with intimacy and allure, he had to make it not only someone else’s but someone else’s as imagined by someone else. The novel is an Alhambra of narcissism and self-erasure.

(Typing out that final phrase, cumulus-grand but deadly, I feel that the wind has been kicked out of me. I live to say things like that.)

I remember “the astonishing evocations of France,” and how badly they made me want to see Sundays and Cybèle again, although it was unavailable at the time and nobody seemed to had heard of it, notwithstanding its Best Foreign Film Oscar win in 1962. Now I have a DVD of the film (Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray in the original), so I don’t need Salter.

“Salter once told his close friend the poet and novelist William Benton,” Paumgartner writes,

that one of the functions of a writer is to create envy in the reader — envy of the life that the writer is living.

So, so wrong. The function of a writer is to enrich the reader’s actual life, whatever it might be. Envy, quite certainly, oughtn’t to come into it at all.

In 1970, I packed up my stuff at Notre Dame and flew to the house that my parents had bought two years earlier, in the Tanglewood section of Houston. This subdivision, not far from the brand-new Galleria Mall, resembled most postwar developments in that it thumbed its nose at Colonial (and European) traditions. The houses were all one-floor “ranches,” with low-sloping roofs and broad, rather than tall, windows. But they were not all alike. They were small at the south end, by San Felipe, and grew, block by block, larger toward the north, by Woodway. The house across the street from my parents’ house backed on to Woodway, from which it was hidden by a high brick wall.

I came to see the house as irretrievable ugly on the outside but very well laid out within; indeed, I had fantasies of transporting the floor plan, all 5500 square feet of it, to an apartment in New York.

I was impatient to get on with my life, and the way of life that I intended to lead, but not that impatient, not in my parents’ 5500-square-foot virtual apartment, with my own bedroom and huge bathroom at the other end of the house (it had been built as the dining room, and the bathroom as a pantry). After a year, my parents had to give me a poke. I have no idea how I found my first apartment; it was the sort of experience that I try to forget even before I find out whether it’s going to be good or bad. I have a general dislike of transactions, and also of changes. The before and the after might be great in their ways, but the shift from one to the other is essentially unsettling. I close my eyes.

I had already got a job. I worked at the radio station from soon after arriving in Houston after graduation until shortly before leaving for law school, seven years later. I was a staff announcer and then I was the music director. The pay was really quite awful, but that made sense (at the time), because I was doing something I loved. Well, I was not doing something I hated. I was not doing manual labor. Nor was I locked into the train of desolate ambitions that, to me, constituted corporate life. I was living in clouds of music, listening to it all day and learning to hear it better. But the glory days were still to come. For the first year at the radio station, during which I lived at my parents’ house, I was just a staff announcer, discovering that my poor opinion of Ravel was seriously premature. Then came the expulsion from the garden, and I moved to Montrose, a shabby-genteel neighborhood just west of downtown. I rented a garage apartment from a school.

Is this the time to talk about the school? It was an experimental school for pre-schoolers. A sort of day-care center. “Alternative.” “Free” (but with fees). It had just been started up, and I was helping out by renting the garage apartment. But this is not the time to talk about the school. I’ve just finished reading Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and it’s awfully easy to imagine Kushner telling the story of the school — which did not last very long. (Nobody died, but some Hell’s Angels showed up as friends of the house.) By the end (whatever that means — but it did all end), even I knew that the school was not cool. The mere thought of my grandson’s being stuck in such a hole prompts an involuntary scream.

In my garage apartment, I had an old kitchen table, some chairs to go with it, a desk that my parents bought before I was born, and a mattress on the floor. I kept my books and LPs in corrugated-cardboard boxes that didn’t take long to sag towards collapse. I don’t remember any kind of regular life; I suppose that merely renting the garage apartment was insufficiently transactional. There were still too many loose ends. A few memories persist. Punching holes in the wallboard when I couldn’t find my keys — I’m glad that I got that out of my system early on and cheap. (Living with the holes afterward was a mortification.) I bought my first piece of Spode Fitzhugh during those months — and at Tiffany, in the Galleria. And with the new charge account that the saleswoman had insisted on setting up for me, smelling the money somehow behind my denim overalls. (Maybe I was also wearing one of my father’s cast-off alligator shirts.) But the months of solitude were few.

I moved into the apartment on the eve of a hurricane — September, say. By the new year, or shortly thereafter, I was no longer alone in the apartment. I was no longer alone in bed, certainly, but there wasn’t there someone else living in what had been the tiny dining room? A refugee from the free school — and a dear friend during all my years in Houston? When did we all move out? Suddenly my bedmate and I were engaged, and living in one of those cheesy two-storey efficiency apartments, with outdoor access to each unit providing something of the funk of a motel. Soon married, we didn’t stay there long, either, although that’s where I took up the study of Chinese characters, if “study” is the word. Soon we were back out near the Galleria, in a period Fifties house that backed on to railroad tracks along which an occasional (but slow and endless) freight train would roll. By now, there was more furniture, and, presently, a baby. We stayed at the house for a year. Our landlord, who lived across the street and who had let us rent the house as a favor to my wife’s mother, declined to renew the lease. We moved back in the direction of Montrose, taking a neglected but stylish craftsman bungalow. This time, the landlord would hold us to the lease. Hold me, that is. Within two years of quietly minding my own business in the garage apartment, I had lost my wife and the daily company of my daughter, and I could not afford the rent on my own. Also, the Opal Kadette that my parents gave us as a wedding present was totaled while parked in front of a bar — maybe being at a bar, with a wife and child at home, was not a good idea. My mother-in-law bought her daughter a Vega as a replacement. I drove that car only briefly, perhaps for a week or two. Then it was back to the bicycle, and, soon, the Westheimer bus.

Looking back, I can see a handful of points where it might appear that choices were made, but they were never really made by me. I did choose to try to get a job at the radio station, and, years later, I did choose to study hard for the LSAT, spending my evenings going through sample tests (and learning that ETS was, to me, a foreign language). Going to law school was the only way I could think of putting an end to my improvident ways. Until deciding to try for it, however, I rarely did more than default. Whatever was easier, simpler in the short term, less disagreeable — that’s what I did. “Choice” didn’t come into it, not sensibly. While living in Houston, I was unable, or at least profoundly disinclined, to take life seriously.

Houston is one of the mysteries of my life, second, perhaps, only to my adoption. It can never be explained one way or another. It was deeply uncongenial, almost hostile to the likes of me, and I generally wish I’d never been there. But I’d never have gotten such a job at a classical radio station anywhere else (in New York, such positions were staffed by musicologists, with advanced degrees), and the job turned out to be a sort of prolonged seminar-for-one during which my mind expanded both faster and more strongly than it had done in school. Also, without Houston, no Megan and no Will.

***

This page has not taken me quite where I had in mind. I meant to explore my bohemian style, which involved innumerable furious renegotiations of the bourgeois platform. My parents might have found my way of life outlandish, but it was never, not really, bohemian, because it was always in the process of becoming both less careless and less carefree. Only this moment, however, does it occur to me why the process took the direction that it did.

It was because the idea of being the kind of man who lets women take care of everything was repulsive to me. I used to like to think that, by the time I got out of law school, I was a genuine gentleman. But it can’t be true, because everything that I learned about being a good man, I learned from women.

“Going regal” is something that I do about a number of subjects. I regard being asked about them, even by the closest friends, as impertinent. They are all either painful or boring personal matters, usually both. Health is an example. If I am walking around, then I am well enough for public purposes. If I am not walking around, then I maintain the right to succumb the vapors without inquisition.

I will say to a friend, “Now, this is really bothering me, and I’m telling you so that you won’t be puzzled. But please don’t ask me about it if I don’t bring it up myself.” That is going regal. That is how the Queen’s conversations work. Of course, you can’t bring anything up with her. The Queen doesn’t “go regal,” because of course she simply is.

I’ve just got back from my annual physical exam, and, as usual, there is nothing much the matter with me. The ten days of shifting maladies from which I emerged yesterday, feeling “normal,” were not a medicable event. A stitch is a stitch. Coming down with a cold (even if the cold fails to show up) is what it is. Feeling old and tired — some people never do. I think they’re very lucky.Virtue doesn’t come into it.

I took a taxi to the doctor’s office, but I walked home. It is a lovely day, and I felt very grateful for it. Soon I hope to enjoy the spring on my own balcony. The repair project inches toward completion, but I don’t think that we’re too far. Something happens at least three days in every week.

Only Rachel Kushner could make me want to read about the sorts of things that stuff her new novel, The Flamethrowers. Motorcycles. The Seventies Art Scene in Soho. The Red Brigades (only mentioned so far, but I gather there’s plenty to come). She writes with the authority of of Ernest Hemingway, but with a more replete sense of the possibilities of journalism. Impressive! Also un-put-down-able.

***

Trying to puzzle out why Anthony Kimmins’s 1953 vehicle for Alec Guinness, The Captain’s Paradise, isn’t better known — doesn’t make anybody’s top-ten list of high comedies — I conclude that the film was ahead of its time. If I was squirming with agony of irony as I sat through the video yesterday, that might well have been because I was doing so sixty years later. The movie is funnier now, that is, than it was when it was made.

And it is funnier because of Celia Johnson, who gets third billing, after Yvonne DeCarlo if you please. We all know Johnson’s immortal performance in Brief Encounter, arguably the most deliciously sad movie ever made, and most of us have seen her her as Miss Jean Brody’s adversary, the formidable Miss Mackay. But these movies are as sleepwalkers compared with The Captain’s Paradise, because they make no call on Johnson’s surprising aptitude for burlesque. “Burlesque!” you splutter — I have gone too far this time surely. But, just as strippers send up the provocations of jeunes filles en fleur, so Johnson devastatingly mocks the fortitude of the bored housewife.

I’ve never been sure just what it means for a movie to have been an “Ealing comedy.” I don’t know, that is, what expectations an audience would have before the houselights went down. Certainly a comedy that begins with a bedraggled Alec Guinness being led before a firing squad, visibly enduring the “ready” and the “aim” but not the actual “fire,” which is only heard offscreen (crows scatter from their perches), is not going to be a story about how Guinness’s character died. But you have no idea why he was led before the firing squad until the very end, by which time you’ve exhausted yourself trying to connect the “paradise” that he has discovered to a capital offense. Entertaining in the foreground, the film is subliminally exhausting. And then, when it has you sitting there helpless, it whacks you with what Aristotle called “peripeties,” and the movie is over — hugely satisfying — before you’ve caught your breath.

The paradise of the title is, of course, bigamy. That’s why Jeanine Basinger discusses it briefly in her new book, I Do and I Don’t, which is how I discovered the film’s existence. “What a movie man wants in a movie woman can easily be summed up: everything.” The synopsis of The Captain’s Paradise that immediately follows is good so far as it goes, but it says nothing about Johnson’s performance, perhaps because, after all, the topic sentence here is about men. Seen as a movie about a scheming ferry captain who is playing with matches, keeping Maud, his proper English wife in Gibraltar and, and Nita, his peppery chiquita in North Africa (in a town that seems to be fictional, perhaps in the interest of discouraging vice in English audiences) in a state of mutual ignorance, The Captain’s Paradise is a farce in which a highly unlikely modus vivendi is upended by a pair of negligent acts: the captain mixes up his little anniversary presents, giving his babe an apron and his lady wife a bikini, thus “triggering hidden longings in the two wives,” as Basinger puts it. By this time, we have been through a delightful first act in which the suave Captain — and who could be more suave than Alec Guinness? — enjoys the fruits of his paradise, partnering the fiery DeCarlo in heated Spanish dances and calling for “beddie-byes” at ten every night in Gibraltar. He has it all, and we are waiting for him to get caught at it.

He almost does get caught. The passage, which is set in the North African town, is a model of Ealing economy, lasting no more than a couple of minutes, and its plot foundation only appears to have a connection to the captain’s carelessness about those mixed-up presents. In fact it rests an earlier bit of farce, based on the fact that the captain is the only member of his crew with a British passport. This means that not even Ricco, his second-in-command (played by Charles Goldner), can debark at the English base. Ricco knows all about Nita, but he has never heard of any Maud, and when he meets her — something has happened to the ship while in port, the captain can’t be reached by phone, and a British officer vouches to oversee Ricco’s mission to his house (wonderfully called “Mon Repos” — after a spell of wild North African nights, repose is precisely what the captain requires) — Ricco takes her to be the captain’s cook (she is wearing the apron that the captain was able to retrieve from Nita), and leers appraisingly at her physical charms. The looks with which Celia Johnson responds to these unimagined addresses ought to go into an encyclopedia. Outrage plays no part in them. It is Ricco who helpfully brings along the present that the captain left on the boat, “for his mother.” This is how the bikini comes into Maud’s possession. Not the captain’s fault at all, if one can say such a thing. The bikini turns out to be just what Maud wanted — much to the captain’s disconcerted surprise.

Years go by after the captain’s narrow squeak — which, at Maud’s end, he quieted by making her pregnant with twin boys — and we cannot imagine how he is going to screw things up a second time. And then, boom! Matters are literally taken out of his hands. Or perhaps they were never quite in his hands. Again, the movie slily farcifies something that would have happened anyway. A mid-voyage engine mishap on the ferry occasions an unscheduled return to North Africa, where the captain finds Nita packed and ready to leave him. It turns out that her next man was as deceived about the variety of her attachments as the captain, and a gun is fired. The captain is not even in the room when this happens, but now we begin to see a path to the firing squad — which we will completely forget about, however, as the captain’s paradise continues to crumble. In shock at the collapse of one half of his ideal arrangement, the captain soon finds that the other has given way as well: Maud is leaving him. Why? Because he is a cheat? Heavens, no! She has no idea of that. She is leaving the captain because he is so “colossally boring.”

We accept her verdict at once, because it triggers a recent memory: some bounder of a cousin of Maud’s has recently paid a visit and plied Maud with gin. The captain is obliged to accompany them to a dancing venue no longer familiar with the waltz. It is only 1953, but Celia Johnson and her cousin (Walter Crisham) cut a mean boogie-woogie. Now it is Guinness who is shocked. You want to weep, just as you do when you see Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire — what was wrong with the producers who didn’t see the comic potential that these actresses realized when given a chance?

Nita’s complaint about the captain boils down to the same thing. He’s boring in that he wants to do the same thing all the time. Nightclubs at midnight and beddie-byes at ten can be equally monotonous. The captain gets to alternate. His wives do not. He is a complete fool to imagine that they have no requirements by way of change of pace. In fact, he essentializes them, as I believe the word is, one of the nastiest male vices. Describing paradise to Ricco, the captain blithely postulates that Maud is supportive while Nita is beautiful. As though that were all there were to it. It never crosses his mind that Nita will, one fine day, say that he is “getting old.” The horror!

So the problem with The Captain’s Paradise is that it sets up a situation that ought to be resolved by some sort of catastrophic disgrace, but that it clears up in an entirely unrelated, but deeply wise and humane way. The unraveling of paradise is humiliating to the captain, but completely unaccompanied by the public shame that usually belabors discovered cheats. This cheat is never discovered! It is not hard to see the film — now — as a wry feminist fake-out, once you’ve connected the dots that are actually there and stopped looking for the ones that aren’t. The captain of paradise has bored his chosen companions to desperation! To his credit, Guinness knows how to make his debonaire manner curdle into fatuousness —”But you’re cousins!” he objects, when Maud goes off with hers — but this cannot have been a lesson that many audiences in 1953 were going to find amusing. And it is not the lesson that the movie’s ending leaves you with. Remember that offscreen fusillade? That’s the one eventuality that I won’t spoil.

The next time you see Brief Encounter, and are adrift in that “I can’t go on/I’ll go on” limbo that it dumps you in, reach for a copy of The Captain’s Paradise, and Celia Johnson herself will, I assure you, exorcise the ghost of her earlier performance.

***

Upon discovering that there were lots of people at Oxford much smarter than herself — or at least more disposed to do the scholarly — Lynn Barber, whose memoir, “An Education,” was expanded into a life-long memoir after the film adaptation of the Granta chapter, marked another stage of growing up.

But it made for yet another shift from my parents. Cleverness, and academic attainments, were almost the only values they had taught me to aspire to and, as far as they were concerned, I had ticked off all the boxes by getting into Oxford. But once I got to Oxford I realized that cleverness was not all it was cracked up to be — that there were other qualities, like sensitivity, like kindness, like charm, like tact, that I had never given a moment’s thought to, but that were actually far more important. I didn’t quite swing round to Charles Kingsley’s view — ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ — but I was beginning to think I should pay less attention to being clever and more to being good.

On top that, the Simon debacle [he’s called David in the movie] left me with a strong distrust of book learning, which I still to some extent retain. My feeling was: I’ve read all these books, I’m supposed to be so clever, and yet I couldn’t even spot the most obvious con trick in the world. I felt that what I urgently needed to understand was Real Life and that Milton and Spenser were of no possible help. This was a poor attitude for embarking on a three years study of English Literature. It meant that I read the classics impatiently, instead of luxuriating in them as I had at school, because I was dying to learn about the present day. I think it was this attitude that propelled me toward journalism — I still have a somewhat exaggeratged hatred of anything to do with the past. I must have done some work because I got a perfectly respectable upper second degree for essentially the Eng Lit course that was wasted on me.

I wasn’t just sitting about watching movies yesterday, as I had done earlier in the week. No, now I was well enough to do the ironing. (I was about to run out of handkerchiefs.) After The Captain’s Paradise, I picked An Education, just flipping through one of the DVD drawers. The minute it was over, I rummaged around for Barber’s book, which stood on one bookshelf for years but was recently moved. Reading the passage that I’ve extracted caused me to reflect that I have never been betrayed by anyone. No one has ever surprised me by turning out to be someone other than expected. I don’t know why this is so. Do I see people really clearly from the start? Do I simply never trust them to be consistent? Do I count upon being let down?

I know what betrayal feels like, but from a harmless cause. It happened when a secret, which had been withheld from me during a time in which I might inadvertently have betrayed it had I known it, was told to me after that danger had passed. I was shocked and felt miserably wronged. I soon got over it, but part of the shock owed to the fact that the experience was absolutely new.

I ask because I think that this is one of the odd things about me. I do count upon being let down, all the time, and by everyone. I know that I have no reason for such universal doubt, and I’ve long since learned not so much to act as to be a person untroubled by this fatality — a job made easier by the conviction that I probably ought to be let down. I must say that my ease with this view of things makes me worry a bit about being psychopathic. But psychopaths, as I understand it, feel just the opposite: completely deserving of the good things in life. When I was a child, I assumed that I was being punished because I did bad things, but before I was out of my teens I knew that I was usually punished simply for being myself — mostly for not doing things. (Sports, for example.) The inevitability of punishment was such a settled feature of life that I stopped worrying about it, and so took a long time to notice that anything that could be construed as punishment ceased with the death of my parents. The punishment was, of course, their disappointment, which couldn’t be construed as letting me down because it was so vocally a matter of my letting them down. It took a long time to see that they were the wrong parents for me, and that this was not their fault, because they were not my parents, but had been set up to think and pretend that they were by what I call the Adoption Racket.

The point isn’t that my life might have been better if I hadn’t been adopted. From a material standpoint, it would almost certainly have been much, much less fortunate. The point is that the particular adoption to which I was an involuntary party made me a little strange around the edges. All that disappointment.

I was at a wedding recently when a wave of recognition almost crushed me. My parents would have preferred me to be any other man in the room. (The wedding did not take place in New York City.) Because then I’d have been more congenial, more athletic, smarter, or more popular? They might have said so. But what they’d have meant was: more normal. More like other people.

When Kathleen says that she has never met anybody like me, and that she can’t imagine being married to anyone else, she sweeps away great drifts of pain. Or, not of pain, but of the memory of pain. She doesn’t care if I’m not like anyone else, and that makes two of us. But pain isn’t everything. I’m still a little strange. Book-learning or no, I should never have fallen for Simon Goldman.

Like Lynn Barber, though, I got by on cleverness (usually without her good marks); and I also had to learn about those other qualities that are more important than cleverness.

Floundering has characterized the morning. Am I well enough? Too sick? Am I sick? And, if so, with what? On Monday, I’ll have my annual physical checkup, and it can’t come soon enough for Kathleen, who has been urging me to call the doctor all week. She worries that it’s my heart. I’ve had a few moments of worrying the same, but I think that I’ve been right to regard this as an idiosyncratic ailment that will never really be explained. Well, we shall see on Monday. The short-windedness has abated, but the stitch in my side still makes itself known from time to time.

Twenty minutes ago, I stretched out on the bed with a book, and presently felt too tired to read it. But I could tell that I was not drifting toward sleep. What I needed was simply to lie down for ten minutes. So it seems — a ten-minute lie-down has never done me the slightest good or harm. It appears that I can lie down for ten minutes without being painfully bored. If nothing else signals a profound change in life, that certainly does. In any case, I soon jumped out bed, filled my tea mug, and started going through recent photographs, desperate for something usable. On my walk yesterday — I went out to lunch, got a haircut, and stopped at Fairway for soup and salad, which even Kathleen could prepare for the table if I felt poorly (in the event, I didn’t) — the walking itself was such a chore that I never thought to stop and take a photograph, even though I’d changed the camera’s battery before going out.

One of the things that I am floundering about at the moment is whether to go to Crawford Doyle in search of books that will hold my attention without my making much effort. There’s a new book about Nancy Astor that’s sort of up my alley, and that I’d have bought already if I weren’t afraid that my vague but longstanding dislike of the woman (I, too, would drink that coffee) might blossom into irritated hostility upon closer acquaintance. (And I’m not sure that the book is any good, either.) Were I to visit the bookshop, it would be by taxi, round trip. Far more likely is a trip across the street to Gristede’s (on which I can take more photographs for my Callot-inspired collection, Les Misères de la Subway Station Construction). I’d already have run that errand, if it were only warmer. The Times predicts a high of 56º, and so does my smartphone; but said phone tells me that it’s 34º out there now. Weather.com puts it at 43º (“feels like 40º”). I’m not going to Gristede’s until I can go in shorts.

When The New Yorker didn’t show up in yesterday’s mail, I thought about running across the street to the newsstand, just to be sure to have a copy. But the magazine had already arrived, just when it ought to have done; I felt too lousy on Monday afternoon to go through the mail. I’m especially glad that I didn’t buy a second copy, because it has been a long time since I was so turned off by an issue of this great magazine. It seems, surreptitiously, to be “The Men’s Issue.” There are two media stories of very dubious importance, one about Henry Blodget and one about Vice. Vice! Even Paul Rudnick’s piece (about a mommyblogger) seems more verisimilitudinously misogynistic than hilarious. (I shall, however, endeavor to add “Sonnet, Cascade, Nebula and Diaspora” to the my treasury of bits and bobs. Those are the names of the mommyblogger’s wonderful children, one of whom has entitled a picture of incinerated stick figures, “While They’re Asleep.”) Hendrik Hertzberg and James Surowiecki don’t have anything uncharacteristic to say, but in my current delicate condition they seemed both hectoring and blinkered. I am finding it harder and harder to read business writers who don’t recognized that we should make the Dunbar Number the key of our corporate tax code: organizations employing fewer than 150 people ought to be taxed far more lightly than those with bigger payrolls. It is time for economists to accept the fact that growth, in business as in life, inevitably leads to death. And any enterprise that truly requires armies of employees ought to be run — by the army. (Let’s learn from the Chinese!)

After my errands yesterday, I sat down and read what remained of Robyn Annear’s The Man Who Lost Himself, the book about the Tichborne Case. It was probably not the best thing to read while under the weather. All that Australian bush, for one thing. Just as unappealing as the scenery in a “Western.” (And only a few of the many locations mentioned in the text appear in my world atlas, depriving me of the one minor satisfaction that might have been extracted.) Then there is the sordor. The whole impostery of Arthur Orton depended on relatively primitive photography, rhetoric, and a rather widespread discontent among the English élite with the Victorian status quo. (Had Trollope written it up, he would have pitted gentlemen — anti-Claimant — against betting men.) The words of Judge Mellor, a member of the bench in R v  Castro, sum the whole thing up so perfectly that there really seems no need for a book.

Indeed, it is difficult to conceive how any person who has considered the intrinsic improbabilities of your story, and has intelligently considered the evidence which has been adduced in the course of this trial, could have come to any other conclusion.

The wonder isn’t that the Claimant lost, but rather that he ever got into court in the first place. For this, his sporting supporters must bear responsibility for wasting torrents of money and creating feeding frenzies in the popular prints.

While writing here this week, I have been listening to the latest playlist, which is built on music by William Walton. There are plenty of chestnuts in the mix, and also a work that I have never really known at all, Handel’s Alexander’s Feast. I am going to slip into this playlist the three Arvo Pärt pieces (out of four) that Paul Taylor set to danse in The Uncommitted, and that I’ve been able to get my hands on. (Fratres, Mozart Adagio, Summa) Not next to the Handel, you can be sure.

Why did I buy a book about the Tichbourne Claimant in January? And for the Kindle? All I can recall is that something I read or saw or heard about reminded me of this famous imposter, whom I discovered in law school, reading John Torrey Morse’s magisterial Victorian account of the Tichborne trials, Tichborne v Lushington, 1872, and Regina v Castro, 1874. “Castro” was the name used by the Claimant during his butchering days in Wagga Wagga, NSW, but the man was probably born Arthur Orton, in Wapping. The question in the case was whether Roger Charles Tichborne was lost at sea in 1854, or rescued and carried to Melbourne, where he began a new (and very different life). It is hard to imagine trying to make the Claimant’s case, for the simple reason that it could not be done without visions of the payoff of the Tichborne estate — by no means immense, but capacious enough to reward betting men — blinding one’s sense. Sadly, a search of my email accounts turns up nothing, and, as regular readers will recall, I lost a couple of notebooks this winter.

I found the book on my Kindle Paperwhite yesterday when I crept into bed after lunch. I had watched Antonioni’s L’eclisse and it had worn me out. I tuned into Richard Peña’s commentary, but learned nothing from it — perhaps I’d listened to it before. It was a pillar of scholarship, however, compared to Peter Brunette’s commentary to Blow-Up, which I watched in the evening. At least twice, Brunette voices doubts that film photographs can in fact be enlarged to yield the images that suggest to David Hemmings’s character (whose name, Thomas, is never mentioned in the film) that he has witnessed a crime. And he doesn’t get around to mentioning the soughing of the leaves in Maryon Park (which he also doesn’t name) until the photographer pays his third and last visit. This is the most beautiful thing about Blow-Up, and it always makes me sad that I don’t live in a place where it can be heard often.

L’eclisse famously begins with a long, excruciatingly dull scene between a man and a woman who have clearly exhausted themselves arguing their future all night. He wants to marry her, but she doesn’t want to marry him. She says that she doesn’t know whether she wants to marry him, but this is just a way of being nice, I think. What she does know is that she doesn’t want to cause him pain; she wishes that he would just let her go, or at least stop talking about marriage. At the other end of the picture, Alain Delon puts Vittoria (the woman, played of course by Monica Vitti) through the same drill, which is even more surprising given the young man’s obvious indisposition to settled life. (Delon, youthful as he is, goes out of his way to make Piero even more of a boy.) Why do men want to marry Vittoria? Because she’s elusive? What do they expect marriage to solve?  Do they think that there will be no more long exhausting nights of talk, talk, talk?

I came away from the first viewing of L’eclisse, which happened some time during my undergraduate years, when the film was (five or six years) old, green with envy.  About those two miserable people in the first scene — with nothing really to worry about! The guy (Francisco Rabal) had a great apartment, and was probably a successful architect. Monica Vitti had a great dress. Money, check! In those days, I didn’t believe that there were problems that weren’t caused by the lack of money. This conviction was bolstered by an awareness that I was never going to do anything serious about acquiring any.

I still believe that money fixes most problems. But I have learned that the second-greatest cause of life’s miseries (aside from actual organic disease, of course) is, without question, youth, and the inexperience that naturally accompanies it. Youth is all unknown unknowns, and nobody suffers more than the really smart kids, because they can’t help projecting their relatively more extensive awareness of things upon the vast blankness of their innocence, and mistaking it for something far more comprehensive than it is.

In L’eclisse, Vittoria’s real problem is that, for all her up-to-date appearance, she’s stuck in an old world of traditional gender roles. Nobody has brought her up to have a job, and doubtless her playful thoughtlessness is one of the things that endears her to men. I wonder if the new sense of authority that will have to be developed if society is to survive the coming century might not be a respect for wisdom and experience that is shaped by women, not men.

Also I am warmed by the hope that we are moving into a world that older people will understand nearly as well as their juniors. The technological warp that has twisted business and society into positions that few greybeards are capable of grasping seems to be cooling. The parents who are giving their toddlers iPads actually know how iPads work.

***

I rallied a bit yesterday, but I also took a two-hour nap in the early evening, an unheard-of thing, and I do mean unheard-of. After watching Blow-Up, I powered up the Livescribe pen. During this illness, whatever it was, and the interlude of Easter Dinner, I had neglected the Livescribe notebooks, and I’d have probably neglecting them even if I’d been in perfect health, because, inevitably, I passed from the exaltation of discovering what Evernote could do to the disappointment of learned what it couldn’t. (Emptying the dishwasher, folding the laundry, coping with Fairway &c). But I’m back on track. For years, I’ve had a rectangular wooden thing with a handle — basket? bucket? Levenger, which doesn’t offer it any more, had a fancy word — in which to place books, magazines, pens and whatnot, everything that a reader needs. It has never ever found a use. I’m not sure that it has done so now, but I am stuffing all the Livescribe notebooks into it, along with, yes, books that I’m reading, or a few of them anyway. And the pen! My Evernote kit.

The idea is to keep the Livescribe pen charged (not a problem; I can do it while I’m writing this) and using it every time I have an interesting idea. Because even the most interesting ideas will be forgotten. Age, fatigue, who knows what — short term memories with no objective prompts simply don’t survive. Not for an hour. I have boxes full of old notebooks that I never look back onto, because I no longer remember the context in which the notes were made. I really do have a hope that Evernote and the Livescribe pen will make my notes worthy of having been written. (Or prove that they’re not!)

You may ask why I don’t simply run to the computer, which is always on, to note my thoughts. The simple answer is that the computer is hostile to thought. I have never had an interesting idea at the computer, unless I was already writing about a related matter. I find it hard to think in front of computers, and that makes sense: there is far too much information on even the most rudimentary screens. I also find that I expect what I type to be more presentable than what I write by hand. Like Evernote in particular, the computer in general, however necessary, is insufficient to many of life’s tasks.

So far, in any case, Evernote has proven to be flexibly capable of organizing my handwritten notes — with a just a little help from me. A little everyday attention. I may not be at the top of my game, but it’s good to be up to that.

Last Thursday, I recall, I urged readers not to worry that I was having a “low day,” because I was fine, really. This turned out not to be true. But I’ll be damned if I can say how sick I was, or with what ailment. I doubt that it was simply one. Friday and Saturday, I was good for very little. When I woke up feeling generally “all right” on Sunday, I decided to go ahead with Easter dinner. And it all went well enough, even if my timing dragged a bit. I owe the success of the afternoon entirely to my guests, who kept up a genial and inspiring buzz throughout. But by Sunday night, having washed the dishes but not the crystal, I felt the beginnings of a sore throat. This continued to bother me yesterday. It faded in the evening and seems now to be gone. But the stitch in the left side of my diaphragm (if that’s what it is) continues to come and go. I’ll be seeing the doctor for a physical exam next week, and I expect that I’ll live that long.

The most palpable symptom is fatigue, and for this there are many contributory explanations. Beginning the day we got back from Fire Island last September, we have experienced a string of shocks that abated only after the holidays, when a season of dismal weather set it. Now it is clear, but it is very cold. I’m staying in today. I do have to go out tomorrow, and I’ll simply make a day of it. Today: more movies.

Yesterday, I watched WUSA, the adaptation of what I believe is Robert Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. You have probably never heard of the movie, and I’m mildly surprised that it survives, because a more insidiously unflattering portrait of Nixon’s America hasn’t been painted. Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Tony Perkins and Laurence Harvey play four variously damaged people in late-Sixties New Orleans, a town headed for strife in the wake of Civil Rights legislation. (Frankly, the horror Katrina — the cold-blooded ethnic cleansing that few will acknowledge — can be foretold by WUSA.) I read Stone’s novel right after reading his Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, which came out in 2007. That memoir ends, I recall, with an exciting account of making WUSA, which I couldn’t get my hands on. The novel was difficult in many ways, not the least of them trying to imagine Paul Newman playing Rheinhardt, a soul more deeply lost than Newman could ever be. As indeed the movie proved. I found a copy a few months ago, but I kept putting off watching it, because, as Roger DeBris says, it’s too depressing! Actually, the movie is not depressing. It is breathtaking. Watching Pat Hingle, playing the radically conservative broadcaster Bingamon, make his spiel to Rheinhardt, smiling and soothingly assuring his cynical recruit that he is only trying to make Americans feel comfortable — white Americans only, he doesn’t need to say — is one of the most horrifying things that I have ever seen on film. Perhaps the most, because Bingamon implicity calls for the polarization of the United States that continues to this day.

Then I watched Jacques Becker’s 1954 Touchez pas au grisbi, starring Jean Gabin, with René Dary and Jeanne Moreau, among many others. “Hands off the loot!” is what the title means, and this is very much a gangster movie. But there is a twist that it took me several viewings to notice. The “grisbi” is a haul of gold ingots that Gabin’s Max intends to be his final prize, and he has parked it in metal suitcases in the boot of a car that he drove straight to a garage the day before the heist. The theft is still news; when things cool down, he’ll start fencing the gold through his uncle Oscar. But Max’s partner, the bumble-headed Riton (René Dary) ruins everything by blabbing about the gold to the showgirl (Jeanne Moreau) who has grown tired of him and who promptly tells her prospective patron, Angelo. One thing leads to another. There is a shootout on a remote country road that bursts with an American vitality that one doesn’t expect from “foreign movies” of the period. But Max is as serenely laconic at the end as we was at the beginning.

Here’s the twist: these gangsters are always wearing impeccably tailored suits, none more so than Max. Max lives in a tidy apartment, but he maintains a more stylish “crib” for emergencies. It is clear that somebody comes in to the stock the champagne splits and to fold the pajamas — unless it’s Max, who can’t be too careful, himself! Max has a showgirl to squeeze, too (Dora Doll), but his true lady love of the moment is Betty, a wealthy American woman (Madge Buferd), who is always beautifully dressed in chic clothes and diamonds galore and a mink stole off one shoulder just so. It occurs to me that some people might think that Max is keeping Betty, but only now that I’m writing about it. Watching the movie, I feel certain that a rich (and independent) young American beauty would be the nec plus ultra of trophies for someone like Max. Someone like a gangster who might be mistaken for a formidably cautious banker. Even when the machine guns are blazing, the men are dressed for the lunch with the archbishop. It is almost a joke.

Touchez pas au grisbi is hardly unknown; it’s available in the Criterion Collection. But it’s a movie that I think more people would enjoy if they gave it a chance. The first act seems a little slow if you haven’t seen the movie before, but not the second time.

As we were unwinding after a very agreeable Easter dinner, Kathleen posed the most amusing parlor-game question: what will Kate call her daughter? I’ll cut right to my vote: Princess Matilda of Lancaster.

People my age tend to regard “Matilda” as both archaic and awkward — who’d want to be saddled with such a moniker? Then we remember to think of Tilda Swinton, neither archaic nor awkward, but not the girl next door, either. Now there’s that  big show about a little girl who bears the name bravely. One envisions an impending flock of Matildas floating from birthing centers. So Matilda is cool. It is also very rooted in history. Henry I (r 1100-1135) married one Matilda of Scotland, and their daughter (and Henry’s only survivor), married for a while to the Holy Roman Emperor, was known ever thereafter, notwithstanding her subsequent marriage to Geoffrey Plantagenet, as “Empress Matilda.” This Matilda never got to be queen of England, but her son, Henry II did, and he was certainly one of England’s top-ten monarchs. And he got to the throne as the result of deal made by his mother, who spent the previous reign battling with her cousin, the incumbent. A warrior queen! But who knows this anymore? It has been so long that “Matilda” has been put to use by the royals that associations, unpleasant or otherwise, no longer trail it.

“Elizabeth” seems a very, very bad choice. I could spend the rest of the day musing why, but I’ll keep it simple. Neither of the queens who have borne that name was plainly destined for the throne at birth, and Kate’s daughter will be. (Even if she has ten younger brothers, the only way to avoid following her father in line will be death or serious organic illness.) That Elizabeth I survived to succeed is semi-miraculous, given the Machiavellian temper of the times. And it was not foreclosed, when Her Majesty was born, that her uncle might not marry appropriately, with the usual results. Also: who wants to invite comparisons with Elizabeth II, especially with that other Elizabeth, the late Queen Mum, standing so clearly behind her?

Victoria and Alexandra and even Charlotte, lovely names on most people, are really too fon-fon for a modern monarch. Also too Continental, don’t you think? Anne and Mary are not only plain, but their associations are more negative than not. Bloody Mary (Tudor), for example. Sisters Mary and Anne Stuart were much more popular, but Mary couldn’t have children, while Anne couldn’t have any who lived.

Whatever her name, she will be a Princess at birth: that has been declared by Buckingham Palace in a revision of the 1917 Letters Patent. (Without the change, she would simply be “Lady,” as her great-grandmother was.) There will be no need, for the first few years, to attach anything to this title, but eventually she will have to be Princess of Something. And she ought to be princess of something that has never had a prince. That consideration, and the hope that her own mother will bear the title, rules out England’s one existing principality, Wales. The Duchy of Lancaster, however, might easily be upgraded, since it has belonged to the Crown since 1399, which is when the last duke usurped, ahem, his cousin claim. (Long story!) Training to be an able CEO of this diverse and remunerative property would be a grand training for life in the world ahead (and so superior to military training).

***

Don’t even think about not reading The Dinner, Herman Koch’s smashing sixth novel (translated by Sam Garrrett). Everyone you know is going to read it and urge you to do likewise. Yield, because The Dinner is something new and thought-provoking. I call it an “ethical thriller,” because the thrills consist in the subtle, usually horrific ways in which the narrator’s situation changes as he tells you more about himself and his family. Rather than write up The Dinner now, without having a second read, I’d like to quote an entry in today’s “Metropolitan Diary.”

Walking along the crowded lunch-hour sidewalk on Madison Avenue in January, I felt something unexpected on the top of my right foot. I looked down at a “wheelie” rolling off my shoe, being pulled along briskly by a well-dressed woman, eyes straight ahead, oblivious of where her suitcase had just been.

Like hit-and-run drivers who don’t notice the bump of the person they ran over, she hadn’t noticed the interference in her bag’s progress.

She rushed along. I walked at a slower pace, limping a little, but a block later we were next to each other at the traffic light. I turned and said pleasantly: “You might want to keep closer track of your suitcase. It ran over my foot.”

I expected, as she saw my gray hair and the evidence that I had about 30 years on her: “Oh, I’m so sorry. Were you hurt?” Silly me.

What I got was this stern reproof: “You need to watch where you’re walking!” Barely taking a breath, she asked, “Were you behind me or in front of me?” “Behind.” (I had been next to her until she elbowed her way in front.) “Well,” she said, clinching her case, “you need to be more careful. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head!”

“You’re very good at not taking responsibility,” I said, and was amused when, taking this as a compliment, she said, “Thank you.” And the light changed.

When the young man next to us raised an eyebrow in her direction, then rolled his eyes and grinned at me, I enjoyed sharing this moment with a stranger and was reminded why I love New York.

This exchange confirmed an impression that I’d gotten from The Dinner: we need protection not only from guns but from Ayn Rand’s praise of selfishness, both of which, in the hands of the weak-minded who are so disproportionately drawn to them, conduce to make the world a much worse place.

When I say that I’m having a “low day” today, I don’t mean to sound alarms or elicit sympathy. I have at least one low day every week, and I don’t see how I couldn’t. Low days are for the back office of my brain to sort out all the incoming. Ever since high school, when I returned from summer vacation to find that I actually understood the subjunctive mood, a matter to which I had given no thought for months, I have known that my brain needs time off, time away. I don’t need months anymore; a day in bed will do. As I myself do not require a day in bed, I thought that today would be a great day for lunch at the Seahorse Tavern. I got dressed after our cleaner left (now the apartment is ready for Easter dinner, but for a bit of superficial tidying), and headed over to 85th Street. There was something about the lighting at the Seahorse that always made it look closed from the outside during daylight, but today, it really was closed — “for renovations,” as the euphemism has it. C’est fini! The Seahorse ran for about two years, and I soon learned that it was much nicer at lunch than at dinner. At dinner, the room was even noisier than it had been as the New Panorama Café. At lunch, it was pretty quiet (too quiet, it seems), but more than that, there was the view. I would take a table by the window and sit with my back to the room. I would look up, now and then, from my reading, and lose myself in the local. Once, I remember writing, I felt I was sitting on the edge of a backstreet canal in Venice — last spring, I think. The windows were open and the whole immediate world was vernal. Today, it wouldn’t have been so pleasant. But it was what I needed, on my low days: sitting by the window and looking out on the passersby and their incalculable missions, my attention completely diverted from the static and buzz of neural reset. I will miss it.

Soon, however, I hope to be making salads for lunch on the balcony, which it seems certain we’ll regain access to within a month. Instead of gobbling them down, as I tend to do at meals taken alone at home, I shall try to take my time, enjoying the view. Passersby there will be none, but there are always planes landing at LaGuardia, and I know the two flight paths that come in from the south.

***

When her children went off to school (or thereabouts), Elizabeth Bogert Stille took a job a Reader’s Digest, condensing books. She had done a lot of work as a copy editor, and at one publication she was known as “the queen of the cutters.” It embarrassed her to work at the Digest, not least because of its owners’ staunch support of the Republican Party’s sweep to the right, but it was steady work, and she had to show up in Pleasantville (Chappaqua actually, of course) only three days in the week. This left her the long weekends to spend either in town or at her refuge in Great Barrington.

Reading what her son, Alexander, has to say about growing up on West 11th Street, collecting coats from the great and the good people who came to his parents’ cocktail parties, I saw the awful truth of my life: I grew up at Reader’s Digest. By the time I came along, Bronxville had lost the minor legion of New Yorker writers and other “creatives” who had lived there between the wars (including Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis — that improbable and unhappy couple). The Kennedys were gone, too, so the Village seemed designed to protect its inhabitants from any contact with interesting people. (That is undoubtedly why Jack Paar lived there — he knew he’d be left alone.) There was never the remotest chance that a house down the street would be blown up by an amateur Weather Underground bomb — as happened, of course, to Stille, foreshadowed moment he mentioned that Dustin Hoffman lived on his block. (After the explosion, which tore a hole in the actor’s living room that exposed it to the open, “we never saw Dustin Hoffman again.”)

Life is very,  very unfair.

At Crawford Doyle yesterday, I bought three books: Alexander Stille’s memoir of his parents, The Force of Things (which I’ve very nearly finished), Herman Koch’s novel, The Dinner, and Jeanine Basinger’s new film book, I Do and I Don’t. I haven’t read any of the cinema doyenne’s earlier books, but I bought this one because I’m up for a rethink. Over a quarter of a century ago, my way of watching movies was strikingly upgraded by James Harvey’s Romantic Comedy in Hollywood. In those heady days, videocassettes, while not exactly new, were beginning to make it possible to conduct personalized movie festivals, and to see films that had become all but inaccessible. Had The Awful Truth ever appeared on television? I don’t think so. And it wasn’t easy to obtain — the first copy that I could get my hands on was a laser disc. Now at or near the top of almost everybody’s list of comedies from the studios’ golden age, The Awful Truth was not well known when Harvey put a still from it on the cover of his book.

In a preliminary Author’s Note, Basinger hails the work of Stanley Cavell, who developed the concept of the “comedy of remarriage” to reformat the screwball comedies of the Thirties and early Forties into fodder for philosophical reflections on marriage. “My book differs in one simply way: he uses movies to think about philosophy. I use them to think about movies.” What she really means is that, while Cavell considers marriage from its breakdowns, Basinger wants to have a look at how marriage — committed domestic life — is presented in the movies. On the first page of her Introduction, Basinger notes that, when asked to name a few “marriage movies,” friends would almost invariably name The Awful Truth. But Jerry and Lucy Warriner are never, in Basinger’s sense, married in the movie. They have effectively broken up before the movie begins, and the film closes on their almost illicit reunion. They never actually live together.

So, The Awful Truth is not a “marriage movie.” I was a little sad to read this, true as it is. But it confirmed my need for a rethink. I’ve never given marriage movies any particular thought. And if The Awful Truth isn’t about marriage, well, then, what is it about? Beyond the comedy of remarriage and all that.

***

Fans of the movie will complain that the second scene of The Awful Truth takes place in the Warriner’s drawing room — so of course they’re married at the start. Here’s why I disagree.  Jerry has brought a group of carousing friends back for egg nog; then Lucy shows up with her music teacher. Everything they say about where they’ve been and why is dubious if not obviously untrue (as Lucy points out by tossing Jerry an orange stamped with the name of a state other than the one he’d pretended to visit). But let’s consider the drawing room. It is the most white-on-white stateroom that I’ve ever seen on screen. Full of Georgian furniture, it is not so large as the huge hall of the Seton house in Holiday, but, in it’s way, it’s grander: all that fine furniture and intricate plaster work crowd the scene with a jungle of curlicued pomposity. At the end of the film,  this room will be mirrored in the larger drawing room of the Vances, who are pompous and vacuous. And by then we shall have seen the rooms that Jerry and Lucy have chosen for their separate journeys toward divorce, rooms of the latest art-déco sophistication and restraint. Modern rooms. What were the Warriners doing, living à la Chippendale? One can draw any number of conclusions. Jerry and Lucy have outgrown an earlier, less considered taste. Or they have inherited the house, and never bothered to redecorate. But it is obviously not their house. Their marriage is technical. All they have to show for it is a dog. (And only in the comic inversion at the Vance’s will they ever be so incongruously attired.)

It is also fairly clear that the Warriners haven’t just started playing with matches. They’ve been pursuing their respective indiscretions for some time, but now each of them has begun to feel sore about pretending not to know what the other one is up to. The “comedy of remarriage” reading of the movie holds that Lucy and Jerry have never really been married, and that only the pratfalls and humiliations that attend their separation can bring them really and truly together. I’m not so sure. I think that there’s more of Les Liaisons Dangereuses here that is entirely comfortable. Jerry and Lucy are rich, handsome, spoiled and sexy. Fending off boredom is their principal occupation in life. I have this awful feeling, which came to me last night as I was reading Basinger, that the reconstituted Warriner marriage is going to differ from its predecessor by having an explicit policy about “sidebars.” Which will make the Warriners even more worldly and European than they were at the start. But what about the havoc that such people wreak in the lives of others? What about the hopes of next year’s Dixie Belle Lee or Daniel Leeson? The cabin in the woods in which The Awful Truth comes to an end is no more faithful to the aesthetic that the Warriners share than was the lobby at the beginning.

Basinger writes that, “watching marriage movies, I felt that they were pitched at the audience’s own level of experience more closely than any other type of movie I had seen. These movies were about content. They were talking to an audience who knew the subject, knew the subtext, knew the reality. I think this is one of the reasons that the topic of marriage in the movies, unlike the American West, horror, melodrama, combat, crime, and others, has not yet captured the full attention of academics.” I’ll be very interested to see how infidelity figures in the movies Basigner chooses to write about.

If you think that “Ladies in Aprons” will do just as well as “Dames à Tablier” — well never mind. Consider it a branding issue. My thoughts about women lately have run under the rubric “Dames.” This is “dames” as in grandes dames, not as in Guys & Dolls. The women I’ve been thinking about were born into prosperity (or arguable dreams of it), and nothing was expected of them beyond marriage and children. But that was not enough for them, and often they needed to help out with the family finances. Diana Vreeland is my number-one dame, but Julia Child (who always regretted the lack of children in her marriage) comes close. I wonder if they ever met!

The phrase dames à tablier came to me yesterday, while I was mulling over Julia Klein’s piece about Betty Friedan and the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique. Klein tells us that the book’s origins lay in a survey that Friedan conducted of her fellow Smith ’42 classmates, in the late Fifties.

Most had since married and had children, and few worked outside the home. In interviews, Friedan discovered evidence of “the problem that has no name,” which manifested itself in discontent, depression and physical illness. She would ultimately define that problem as “simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities.” (Her focus, as critics have noted, was on middle-class women who could afford to renounce paid work, not the millions in mostly menial jobs outside the home.) Feminism, for Friedan, was fundamentally humanism, seen through a psychological lens: a question of growth, maturation and identity.

Something about this passage suggested a name for the problem. It was confirmed by a quotation from Mystique:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”

The nameless problem was the servant problem — and we still haven’t addressed it.

Betty Friedan’s grandmothers were perhaps not very affluent women, but surely most of her classmates’ very much were. Consider the difference between such a grandmother, circa 1900, and her granddaughter, circa 1955. Both women would have had similar ideas about domestic hygiene, meals, and, given changes in style, décor. (Both would have been horrified by stained upholstery; both would have insisted on clean-looking draperies in the windows.) Both would be involuntary participants in the display of bourgeois respectability, giving dinner parties and volunteering for charity work. But the granddaughter, unless she had married into great wealth, would have had, at best, the help of a “cleaning lady,” a working-class servant who might show up every day or just one day a week. Our alumna would not employ a cook. She would not have a personal maid to manage her wardrobe and to help her to dress (essential for ladies of 1900). She would not have a flock of nannies to shepherd her children from point to point. No, our Smith ’42 housewife, in 1955, aided by a car and a batterie of domestic appliances, would have found herself up to her eyeballs in housework. And — here’s the clincher — she would have done it all in a nice dress.

Somewhere around 1980, everything changed. I would peg it, somewhat whimsically, to the introduction of the food processor. The food processor made it possible to reproduce a number of hitherto unthinkably difficult dishes into everyday cuisine. It also made preparing them tidy and kind of fun. The “California kitchen,” now ubiquitous in new construction, brought the dinner guests into the kitchen, because, by 1980, it had been established that well-run kitchens are neat, clean, and convenient spaces — nothing to be ashamed of. Guests could be handed a glass of wine and asked to tear apart a head of lettuce. The making of food became part of the meal. Younger people who grew up in this environment cannot imagine how unthinkable it was in 1955, when a proper dinner party entailed a host of jobs — pressing table linens and polishing silver, just to name the two least popular — that had once been seen to by servants, and seen to well out of sight. It took ladies in aprons — my dames à tablier — about thirty years, not to take their aprons off, but to change what they were wearing underneath, and to simplify what they were expected to do. In the course of this time, feminism was put into practice on a front that few of even the most visionary suffragettes would have foreseen in 1900: well brought-up housewives had freed themselves from the postwar obligation to maintain prewar standards of living. They no longer did the work of servants.

But as any good butler will tell you, scrubbing is the easy part. Women are still saddled with domestic management problems that nobody seems to be able to talk about. Men diddle with their project management apps, but the laundry and dry cleaning remain obdurately inflexible. Cars and houses are full-time maintenance headaches. Untended bathrooms go swampy with the speed of a fatal fever. Dishwashers must be emptied and refrigerators restocked. Don’t get me started on lawn care! If feminists eliminated much of the “menial” work that servants had done for their grandmothers, they stalled at the next step, and that’s where we still are. And while the man in the house can never help out quite enough, I think that most women (my wife excluded) would be very unhappy to have a man, even their beloved husband, running their homes for real.

There remains much to be learned.

***

Must run, but I want to say how much I’m enjoying Diana Athill’s Somewhere Toward the End. I feel the oddest contradiction: beyond polite conversation, I don’t think that she and I would get on very well; we like different things. But our ideas about “life” are quite similar. I’m thinking especially of her modest, humane, but rock-ribbed atheism, which she writes about in Chapter 4 so beautifully that I’m going to hunt down my Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins books and give them the heave-ho. There is no need to say more than what Athill has written.

Around this time of year, a handyman shows up with a vacuum cleaner and a bin full of HVAC filters. Everything by the windows has to be moved away so that he can clean the units. Although it’s no fun really, I’ve turned it into a sort of rite of spring, a cleansing purge. When I’ve put everything back where it belongs, there’s less of it than there was. This year, it was the bedroom that needed renewal. Beneath one end of the window, there’s a small bookshelf that holds up a boxy HP printer with document feed that I’d like to put somewhere else. But there is nowhere else, not at the moment anyway, and I hold on to the thing because I just may need to send or receive a fax some day. Beneath the printers, on a shallow shelf, there was  a range of neglected, forgotten supplies — paper, envelopes, labels — and an old copy of the Yellow Pages. Most of this will get the heave-ho.

In every room in the house, you will find what we call rattan boxes. They’re made out of some woven organic material, somewhere in Asia, and they’re surprisingly stout as well as handsome. They come in a few unobtrusive colors: tan, reddish brown, black, and dark olive, and I’ve got them stacked up beneath and behind everything. I have no idea what’s in any of them. Periodically, I open them all up and, sometimes schematically, sometimes with the aid of photographs on which I paste helpful dymo labels, I make a record of what’s in what. But what happens to the record? It goes into a folder somewhere. I’ve experimented with Word documents, but that excludes the visual aspect.

But I’ve hit upon what at the moment promises to be a solution so perfect that it’s a dream I didn’t dare have. Evernote. I am not going to chatter on about Evernote. You’ll either wonder what took me so long or scroll down until something interesting catches your eye. And the fun part isn’t Evernote, either. It’s the Livescribe pen that I picked up weekend before last.

With an hour to kill between dinner and the evening Paul Taylor show, Kathleen and I, desperate for shelter from the inclement weather, resorted to the local Best Buy, where, astonishingly, Kathleen found a store map that showed a rest room, which by then I needed even more than the warmth. It was when I came out of the convenience, suffused with relief, that I saw a rack of packaged Livescribe pens and notebooks. Because I misread the price, underestimating it by fifty dollars, I thought, what the hay, I’ll give it a whirl. I brought it home and stashed it in a corner. The next day, I asked my daughter and son-in-law to recommend good project management apps. Ryan suggested Evernote right away, and Megan mentioned Toodles. I checked them out on Monday, but was not motivated to go further. It was not until this past Saturday that I opened the Livescribe pen and had a go at installing it. I soon discovered that it wanted to work with Evernote, so I downloaded the program onto both computers and was amazed to discover that the pen really did work. On Sunday,  I made a list of questions and to-dos about Evernote, and synched it to the computer. Then I downloaded the Evernote apps onto my smartphone and onto the Kindle Fire, which I want to put to use as my personal assistant. (I read Internet pages on the iPad, and most ebooks on the Kindle Paperwhite. The books that I don’t read on the Paperwhite are books that I’m not going to read for pleasure, such as Evernote for Dummies.) This allowed me to strike one item from the to-do list. I synched the updated list to Evernote and, voilà: this strike-out was visible on the Fire.

There is still much to learn. But I’ve already accommodated the pen and the application to my penchant for writing notes and lists by hand, away from the computer and its barrage of information. I can’t quite believe it!

***

I’ve just read the strangest book, Douglas Gomery’s The Coming of Sound. I’d llike to say that it is one of the most illuminating business books that I’ve ever read, but it’s also the most unedited, syntatically messy book that I’ve ever read. Because I read it to learn about the history of the movie studios — always a fascinating subject — I did not take note of every garbled passage, and most of them have proven to be difficult to retrieve. Here’s one, though: “They even knew of Warner’s plan for The Jazz Singer, but figured the first star chosen for the role, George Jessel would create not hit.” Everything seems to go downhill after the comma that ought to follow “Jessel” is omitted. I wonder not only how this survived editing (of which there is little evidence throughout the book), but how it got written down in the first place. Gomery often writes like someone who hates to write.

Providing motion pictures with synchronous sound was first undertaken in 1892, and, for the next thirty years and more, every scheme flopped, even Thomas Edison’s. By the Twenties, the major producers, such as Adolph Zukor, didn’t even want to hear about sound; they were doing fine without it. When engineers at Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT & T, finally developed a truly viable solution to the problem, the company couldn’t get anyone in Hollywood to take a meeting. Eventually, at the end of a long and complicated contredanse, a front-man for Western Electric, an investment banker from Goldman, Sachs, and Harry Warner came together on a project for making short subjects featuring vaudeville acts — and sound. One thing led to another. Sailing would have been much smoother if John Otterson had not taken over representing Western Electric. Otterson was, at least in Gomery’s telling, a complete asshole, and probably — this, Gomery doesn’t even suggest — an anti-Semite. But the deeply interesting aspect of the story is the leaching, from the technology companies to the studios, of highly collusive practices that, at the end of the day, furthered competition by eliminating an entry-level problem. By the time that Paramount and MGM were ready to sign contracts with Western Electric, the two cinema giants, along with some other studios, had researched the matter collectively, and the contracts were all but identical. The studios had followed developments at Warner Bros and at Fox Films, where Movietone newsreels were the primary sound project, and were convinced by the huge success of Al Jolson’s second Warner’s feature, The Singing Fool, that, this time, sound would not only work but pay. This was in the spring of 1928. Within two years, silent movies were no longer being made. The transition could not have been more orderly. Almost everything you know about the coming of sound (from film courses and Singin’ in the Rain) is wrong, or incomplete at best.

AT & T and RCA (the child of General Electric and Westinghouse Electric) had already partitioned the territory between them: RCA got radio transmission, and AT & T got wire services. All patents were cross-licensed. Movies with sound didn’t figure in this division of spoils, and when RCA took its superior technology to Hollywood, everyone was already committed to AT & T’s subsidiary, Electrical Research Products Inc (ERPI). So David Sarnoff, head of RCA, got together with Joseph Kennedy and some others and founded RKO (which was therefore the studio that never made silents.) Eventually, the ERPI engineers had to redesign their technology in imitation of RCA’s.

The Coming of Sound, however, is a collection of essays, and, quite apart from the shoddy editing, it is burdened with narrative backtracking and superfluous re-introductions. Although Gomery hammers home a few theses (the most singular of which is the unimportance of The Jazz Singer), he has not quite created a book out of his material. Stepping back and reorganizing the material might have inspired a series of portraits of the major characters, some of whom, like Zukor and the Warners, are better known as film moguls than as businessmen, and many of whom, such as the infamous Otterson, will not have been heard of. This is a story that richly blends conflicting personalities with developing technologies, and my sense of how things work was shaken by it — always a good thing. I have to thank Douglas Gomery for taking pains.

The Coming of Sound is a thwacking rebuttal of free-market notions. The cross-licensing and collusion practiced by AT & T and RCA, and among the Hollywood studios (which were all headquartered in New York when this was going on), served to free the individual companies from the destructive competition that doesn’t accomplish anything and for the productive competition of manufacturing ever-better products. It’s hard not to be wowed by the sound business sense of men like Zukor, who managed to bring stability to an industry fraught by its uncertainty.