The first thing I did when I got home was to head for the iTunes store to buy the soundtrack album, and I’m listening to it as I write. (Our modern world!) Instead of suggesting things to say about The Grand Budapest Hotel, however, Alexandre Desplat’s score is simply projecting a series of faces, all lively and mostly smiling, or at least twinkling: Ralph Fiennes, Saoirse Ronan, Mathieu Almaric, F Murray Abraham, Tom Wilkinson and Jude Law (playing the same person), Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton, even Adrian Brody, whose character is very wicked, and Willem Defoe, wickeder still but outfitted with a prosthetic lower jaw. Harvey Keitel! Tilda Swinton, of course, although she’s not around for very long. I wouldn’t have recognized Léa Seydoux if I hadn’t known she was there — her part is small and distant. The members of the Society of the Crossed Keys: Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Waris Ahluwalia, Fisher Stevens, Wally Wolodarsky. Tony Revolori, a new actor who seems almost manufactured to suit Wes Anderson’s specifications. Last but not least, Jason Schwartzman and the aptly named Owen Wilson: “Monsieur Chuck.”

The Grand Budapest Hotel is an enormous trifle. It has the look and feel of a massive old-time studio spectacle, Grand Hotel meets Ben Hur. And yet it relies ingenuously upon obvious miniatures, and the story itself is so slight that even to sketch it is to feel foolish. Let’s just say that Monsieur Gustave, the concierge at the Grand Budapest (Ralph Fiennes) spends a lot of time either on the run or in a tight spot. His predicaments are looted from the disasters of the Twentieth Century and the many movies made about them, but we are to take none of them seriously, except as film. The old nightmares are transformed into a dream of pastry — a sacrilege, were it not a success.

As M Gustave, Ralph Fiennes talks like a beautiful fountain on a lovely day: it doesn’t matter what he says, especially when every third word is “darling.” His performance is all the more vivid because the other actors deliver their lines as stock characters. The point is that M Gustave is not an ordinary mortal (although he is certainly mortal), but rather, as his heir tells an inquiring writer, a figure from an age that ended before he even stepped into it. As such, he embodies the very movie in which he appears.

A concierge does not invent possibilities, but he arranges for them to be made available to those he serves. He is in that sense a purchased deity. He is also very much like a filmmaker. Wes Anderson is welcome to attribute the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel to the writing of Stefan Zweig — and I hope that the acknowledgment will bring readers to Zweig’s rich sensibility — but the movie that Zweig may have inspired Anderson to make was itself inspired by nothing other than “the movies.” Complete with cast and crew of thousands.

***

If I didn’t say very much — or anything very coherent — about Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future, that’s partly because I was given the impression, somehow, that that book is a continuation of thoughts initially set forth in The Human Condition, a collection of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in 1957. Also, I felt that I needed to read more in order to understand where to place Arendt’s thinking. What, for example, is her field? Is she a philosopher? A political scientist? The back cover of The Human Condition (Chicago, 1998) labels her “one of the leading social theorists.” I didn’t know that “social theory” was a field — is it? Certainly Arendt’s type of theorizing has little in common with the “Theory” that had taken over academic life by the time of her death in 1975. And yet, what she was doing was new: she was responding to particularly novel problems that faced civilization after the two world wars. One of these, of course, was the sweeping advance in technology. People were capable of new things, from splitting atoms to launching space ships; from refashioning the human body to automating not only labor but also information. Another problem was the thoughtlessness of modern life.

What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experience and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness — the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty — seems to me among the the outstanding characteristics of our time.

Hardly had Arendt written her books than they became somewhat unfashionable. She was read, and even admired, but she was not followed. Now that the fashions that displaced her way of thinking have themselves been swept into trivial emptiness; now that the immediate future that she foresaw has passed from the speculative to the concrete; now, moreover, that we no longer have occasion to pause with wonder at the capacity of a woman to think both so deeply and so fruitfully — now, perhaps, we are ready to listen.

I’ve not gotten very far into The Human Condition, but already on page 8 there is something remarkable and something memorable. The remarkable thing is her grasp of the difference in repercussions caused by the two creation stories in Genesis, respectively. Here is Genesis 1:27, to which Jesus refers in Matthew 19:4:

And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them.

Whereas Paul, in I Corinthians 11, prefers the version given in Genesis 2. Here, “man” is created in Verse 7, but woman is not created until Verses 21-2. What difference does it make? “The difference indicates much more,” writes Arendt, “than a different attitude to the role of woman. For Jesus, faith was closely related to action; for Paul, faith was primarily related to salvation.” Action, Arendt has already stipulated, is what men do to and among each other, and this is indeed Jesus’ overriding concern. What men do, either to the world or to themselves, in order to make themselves more acceptable to God — that is not action even when it leads to action. Proper action manifests what Arendt calls “plurality,” and it is about plurality that she says something memorable:

Plurality is the condition of of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

We know this from just looking around us, but we have a strong tendency to forget it when we are tempted by ideas of “human nature.” So the first, one might say hygienic, rule of humane discourse is to abandon all talk of humanity (as a substantive) and of man or mankind. (It is pertinent here to remind regular readers that by “people” I invariably mean “men and women” or “women and men.”) The recognition and acceptance of plurality is the first step in any political thought. Our understanding of equality, moreover, must harmonize the “same but different” character of every person alive.

What’s the real attraction of reading Hannah Arendt? Simple: when I read her, I feel that the Enlightenment is not only alive but ongoing.

Fay Weldon’s Kehua! is a smart and jolly book, and I enjoyed almost every page. Especially surprising was author’s ability to pause the fictional action for interruptions in her own voice, “I your Writer,” without damaging the integrity of her creation, which sprang to life every time she returned to it. Held up to the light just so, Kehua! is an object lesson in the psychology of reading novels, circa 2015 CE. Does it really make sense, anymore, to speak of “the willing suspension of disbelief”? In regular asides, Your Writer appraises her characters, frequently telling us that she only just now learned something about one of them, a detail that figured in the previous chapter. Is she indeed making things up as she goes along? It doesn’t matter, because when the characters resume their interactions with the world that she has created, they are as convincing as the subjects of nonfiction journalism, and we completely forget about having been taken backstage. We forget about the second set of characters in Kehua!, a party of ghosts, people who used to inhabit the house where Your Writer lives and works. It would be more reasonable to speak of involuntary amnesia.

Some readers will object to the Writer’s intrusions, preferring to get on with the story of the McLean women. There is Beverley, a septuagenarian, born in New Zealand but long resident in London; her daughter, Alice; Alice’s daughters, Mary and Joan, who have rechristened themselves Cynara and Scarlet, and Cynara’s daughter, teenaged Lola. The action begins with Scarlet’s decision to leave her partner, Louis — they have never actually married — for her lover, Jackson, an ageing movie heartthrob; and for a long time Louis and Jackson are the only men in the story. We are told that Beverley has been widowed three times, and that she had a son, now in Hollywood, but Weldon’s storytelling is so convivially generous that we never miss the unmentioned fathers. When Weldon takes to identifying them, later in the book, a rather gothic pattern emerges, but quite without gothic horror.

Horror has been disarmed from the start, with the introduction of figures from Maori mythology. The tone is set by the kehua of the title. In the glossary at the back, kehua are described as “the wandering spirits of the homeless dead, whose task is to shepherd the living and the dead of the [clan] toward the [soul of the extended family].” But Weldon has a lot of other things to say about kehua. If you squint, you can see them: they look like fruit bats. They “chatter and clatter” whenever they’re aroused, and they’re always aroused by excitement. They give advice, but the advice is often bad advice, because kehua are not very bright. Kehua are, in short, rather clownish — a nuisance, perhaps, but not a dangerous nuisance, unless you heed their warnings to run, run, run. Kehua have followed Beverley to England, an unwonted voyage that gives rise to many droll remarks but that results, not surprisingly, in the kehua going native in Highgate. (English trees are easier to hang from.) Why have they followed her? Because the proper rites and rituals were not observed when her parents met their untimely, gory fates. The gruesome murder-suicide in Beverley’s past is just that: in the past. Once it is disclosed in the present, the kehua will quiet down.

Why not? Why not introduce a troupe of exotic supernaturals from a relatively unknown culture? Our myths could use a bit of competition. (The only vampire in this novel is a movie role, played to death by Jackson.) Forget everything you know about women and witches and occidental afterlives. Let’s go Lévi-Strauss instead. The overt “anthropological” note harmonizes so beautifully with the metafictional incursions and the constant deconstructions of romance.

Will Scarlet actually leave Louis? Weldon makes a joke out of prolonging the uncertainty, all the while piling up the flaky reasons for and against. More than half of the novel “takes place” on a single morning, and when the first part comes to an end (to make way for the story of Beverley’s quietly lurid childhood in New Zealand), Scarlet is merely on her way to the assignation. Fifty pages earlier, Weldon assures us that kehua will follow Beverley and her clan wherever they go, even to Jackson’s “shagpiled” apartment in Soho: “should Scarlet ever get there, and I am beginning to think she will.” [Emphasis supplied.] Weldon is a past-master at keeping us thoroughly entertained even while “nothing happens.”

I do ask myself, however, if I’ll ever reread Kehua! I know that it won’t be entirely up to me. Something will have to trigger the itch — wouldn’t “itch the trigger” make more sense? — to have another look at it. For the moment, I’m amply entertained: I’ve been to a marvelous party. But there’s no hangover. I’ve not been haunted by memorable characters like Kate Nolan (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) or Kate Croy (The Wings of the Dove). But the demand for soulfulness might be wrong-headed. Alison Lurie winds up the review that got me to read Kehua! thus:

Kehua! is not only a good story and a lot of fun to read, it is a remarkable account of what it’s like to write a novel by someone who’s been doing this for over fifty years. Of course, Your Writer is not really Fay Weldon, but another metafictional invention, whose house and husband have different names from those of the author. Still, what she says about the process of writing a novel seems authentic, and matches experiences that Your Reviewer, who is perhaps not really Alison Lurie, has had.

***

After lunch, I read Andrew Solomon’s New Yorker piece about meeting and talking with Peter Lanza, father of the Sandy Hook shooter. The killings at the elementary school are mentioned, of course, but only in passing: Solomon’s focus is the mounting difficulty of Adam Lanza’s brief life — and the corresponding difficulty of living with him. After his parents separated, in 2001, Adam, aged nine, was asked by a psychiatrist how he felt about it. He is said to have answered that “his parents were as irritating to each other as they were to him.”

Assuming Solomon’s story to be comprehensive — assuming that he hasn’t left out some chunk of detail that would lead to a different conclusion — it stands as a demonstration of the ludicrous extent to which today’s Americans are abandoned to their own autonomy. From the moment that then-thirteen year-old Adam refused to accept the diagnosis of Asperger’s, his family had a problem that it could not be expected to handle on its own. We have largely dismantled the institutional resources that used to provide some help, to families if not to patients; they were usually invasive and often inhumane.

(Having been happiest, as a teenager, at boarding school, however, I am seriously open to the idea of institutionalizing all adolescents.)

It is heartbreaking to consider the task that Nancy Lanza — shot by her son four times before he headed to the school — believed that she could perform. Living alone with Adam, she gradually closed ranks around him, saying nothing about his difficulties to her friends and barring Peter from visits, thus denying the boy’s father a chance to form first-hand impressions. Nancy worried that Adam would withdraw completely into himself, but it never occurred to her that this withdrawal might occur in a convulsive form, ending with violent termination. Perhaps a less interested observer might have insisted that the firearms be removed from the house, but we’ll never know that; all we do know is that there was nothing to protect Nancy from herself.

All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the child must learn to eat vegetables). Nancy’s error seems to have been that she always focussed on the day, in a ceaseless quest to keep peace in the home she shared with the hypersensitive, controlling, increasingly hostile stranger who was her son. She thought that she could keep the years at bay by making each day as good as possible, but her willingness to indulge his isolation may well have exacerbated the problems it was intended to ameliorate.

By this time, Adam had been seen by enough doctors and therapists to wear a halo of red flags. Routine reviews ought to have been mandated, including placing Adam under observation at regular intervals. It seems the merest common sense to suggest that living alone together in a relatively secluded suburban house cannot have been healthy for either mother or son, especially when the boy refused to go out. Adam’s Internet activity ought to have been monitored, and teased into real-world encounters. Why are bright but asocial young men thrown back on themselves, when it seems obvious that they could be harnessed by research and military institutions?

Why are we satisfied with a culture that delights in lending a helping hand to those already marked for success, while dismissing everyone else as a loser? What are we afraid of?

Not Adam Lanza, it seems.

Phew! I’ve just finished reading Andrew O’Hagan’s lengthy account of his participation in the writing of Julian Assange’s autobiography, “Ghosting,” a muddle of the first magnitude. Most of it is a portrait of one very self-defeating narcissist. If O’Hagan weren’t the gifted writer (and thinker) that he is, the performance would be merely unedifying. Without his byline, I should have skipped the piece altogether. I’m not unhappy to have read it, but I’m not sure how much would have been lost had I confined myself to the following paragraph — which in fact I read first and which seduced me into reading the rest:

And here’s the hard bit. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the United Kingdom under Thatcher and Blair, those of us who lived through the Troubles and the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the deregulation of the City, and Iraq, believed that exposing secret deals and covert operations would prove a godsend. When WikiLeaks began this process in 2010, it felt, to me anyhow, but also to many others that this might turn out to be the greatest contribution to democracy since the end of the Cold War. A new kind of openness suddenly looked possible: technology might allow people to watch their watchers, at last, and to inspect the secrets being kept, supposedly in our name, and to expose fraud and exploitation wherever it was encountered in the new media age. It wasn’t a subtle plan but it smacked of the kind of idealism that many of us hadn’t felt for a while in British life, where big moral programmes on the left are thin on the ground. Assange looked like a counter-warrior and a man not made for the deathly compromises of party politics. And he seemed deeply connected to the web’s powers of surveillance and counter-surveillance. What happened, though, is that big government opposition to WikiLeaks’s work – which continues – became confused, not least in Assange’s mind, with the rape accusations against him. It has been a fatal conflation. There’s a distinct lack of clarity in Julian’s approach, a lack that is, I’m afraid, only reinforced by the people he has working with him. Only today, he sent me an email – hearing I was writing this piece – telling me it was illegal for me to speak out without what he called ‘appropriate consultation’ with him. He wrote of his precarious situation and of the FBI investigation into his activities. ‘I have been detained,’ he said, ‘without charge, for 1000 days.’ And there it is, the old conflation, implying that his detention is to do with his work against secret-keepers in America. It is not. He was detained at Ellingham Hall while appealing against a request to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions relating to two rape allegations. A man who conflates such truths loses his moral authority right there: I tried to spell this out to him while writing the book, but he wouldn’t listen, sometimes suggesting I was naive not to consider the rape allegations to have been a ‘honey trap’ set by dark foreign forces, or that the Swedes were merely keen to extradite him to America. Because he has no ability to see through other people’s eyes he can’t see how dishonest this conflation seems even to supporters such as me. It was a trap he built for himself when he refused to go to Sweden and instead went into the embassy of a nation not famous for its respect for freedom of speech. He will always have an answer to these points. But there is no real answer. He made a massive tactical error in not going to Sweden to clear his name.

What stood out when I read this paragraph the second time, in the course of reading the whole piece, was the beginning, in which O’Hagan expresses the optimism felt by himself and his cohort when WikiLeaks disclosed all those cables. I never shared it. My misgivings remained unfocused; there were other things to worry about. But I can thank O’Hagan for my sense of what ought to have happened instead, because his experience of Assange’s feckless sensationalism lead him to it. The release of classified information ought to have been vastly more disciplined and strategic. The material ought to have been organized, redacted, and presented in a coherent manner, not tossed like so many leftovers as scraps to a pack of hounds. Instead, it was largely compromised by the unseemliness of Assange’s Swedish problem, a brace of rape allegations that, indeed, he ought to have faced directly, for the sake of his own mission, at whatever personal cost.

What I fear young people miss — and I include O’Hagan among them, his age (46) notwithstanding — and miss especially when they focus on new ways of doing things, is that old power structures persist, whether or not they’re held in high regard by intelligent digerati. Parliaments and Congresses remain powerful, but so do swarms of smaller power centers: sheriffs, school boards, town councils, district attorneys, and regulators of all stripes, corrupt and otherwise.  One side effect of democracy seems to be a profusion of public elective and appointed offices at every geopolitical level. To the extent that things work at all, they do so with the consent of people of power. Many of them can be voted out of office, but it’s depressing how often they’re replaced by others just like them. It’s as though political power were an athletic skill, nurtured in apt youngsters with the skills, say, of Chris Christie. People who don’t play the game don’t get into office, because they never get the chance to run.

This has to be changed, but it cannot be changed by being overlooked and ignored. That’s what the Julian Assanges do. They believe that outmoded structures will whither away for lack of their attention. On the contrary: neglected power structures grow entrenched. They may become unresponsive, but people of power continue to seek the benefits of holding office, however empty and pointless the office might be. The chasm between public will and political action deepens, to be filled with dead bodies after insurrections or invasions. Such shocks are rarely productive, and only young people — young people who have grown up far from bloodshed — can believe in their efficacy.

I’m deeply troubled by a dystopian vision that recently occurred to me. Reading about income inequality, and the pile-up of colossal fortunes, together with the lack of interest in public life that young people display — surely they must be forgiven for seeing private action as more effective — I dread a particularly dark resolution of our political impasses. What is to stop men and women whose power flows from not from political office but from vast private riches, riches ample enough to pay for private “security forces,” riches generated by the production of goods valued by society (such as medicine, for example) — what is to stop such people from holding democracy, and indeed all other forms of regular government, hostage? Will it not seem a small price to pay, to sacrifice dysfunctional political power structures to the promise of general welfare?

We’ve made a terrible hash of democratic freedoms, and lost our way in the pursuit of chimerical liberties. But we will not be better off without them.

When I went out to lunch, I did so without wrapping a muffler around my neck. No gloves! In the taxi, I lowered the window, and let the fresh air rush in as we glided down the FDR Drive. I had the driver pull over on 53rd Street midway between First and Second, because the traffic was backed up a bit by the light and I wouldn’t mind walking. I didn’t mind walking! It was lovely to be outdoors! Ditto coming home!

What did I do when I got home? I went straight out onto the balcony! I tidied up a bit — nothing serious; spring isn’t here yet. I beat the dust out of some pillows, and swept a bit of dirt that had fallen out of overturned pots. I saw that the ivy by the wall was doing fine, and that the ivy in the planter by the railing would probably start putting out new leaves. Over the in the far corner, I spotted a pot full of dessicated stalks and thought, “Papyrus!” Time to order papyrus from White Flower Farm! Which I thereupon did. The plants will be sent at the appropriate time — I don’t have to give the matter another thought.

I even sat outside for a little while. That was probably rash; I came in the moment I felt chilled, but, more than an hour later, I still feel chilled. I’ll be fine, though: the possibility of spring will see me through. I didn’t realize, until today, that I had really given up on spring. Which made today a lovely surprise.

***

As if spring weren’t enough, I’m unsettled by a movie that I watched yesterday afternoon, after I’d done what I had to do for the day. I’d been looking forward to it, but worrying about it, too, as is always the case when you get your hands on the DVD of an old movie that has languished in obscurity for decades, and only just recently been released for easy purchase. The movie was Roberto Rosselini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954), which I prefer to call by its Italian title, even though almost all the dialogue is in English. “Journey to Italy” sounds plain stupid. (“Italian Sojourn” would have been acceptable.) The movie is all about what happens to a married couple in Italy — in and around Naples, to be precise. This couple has been married for eight years, but the trip is their first time “really alone together.” This is to say that being in Italy forces them to see themselves and one another for what they are.

The actors playing the couple are Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, and if they’re even better than you expect them to be, it’s partly because they’re in a foreign movie — a movie shot without regard for Hollywood (or even Shepperton) conventions. One of the first great things about the film, in fact, is that the speaking of English sounds so foreign. Although the surface of Viaggio in Italia is rough and sometimes even crude, it displays the unmistakable structural elegance of a great baroque church. Rarely has a movie been so vividly “shot on location,” but never has a location been more integral to a movie.

We meet Alex and Catherine as they are nearing Naples in their car. They have driven down from London, and it’s clear that they haven’t been having a good time. Something has made them feel like strangers, and they don’t like what they see. It doesn’t take very long for their hostility — or at least their impatience — to become overt. The bald directness of their remarks is somewhat shocking, not because of what they say but because they’re so cool about it. They seem determined to deal with the newly-discovered unpleasantness between them as if they were still back in England, forging ahead dispassionately. But of course this is impossible in Italy, where ubiquitous invitations either to enjoy life or to remember how short it is only intensify their discomfort. Once actual pain has been acknowledged, the relation breaks down quickly. But the marital climax is swamped by another, richly cinematic one: Alex and Catherine must immediately, although they are hardly in the mood, put in a social appearance that they can’t wriggle out of. This is not a matter of attending a dinner party, either; rather, they are obliged to accompany their host to the ruins of Pompeii, where workers are unearthing plaster casts made in the cavities left by the long-decomposed bodies of a man and a woman. This is so much more than a mere metaphor for the love that has died between Alex and Catherine that the living husband and wife are nearly as crushed as the ancient victims of Vesuvius. In what I was sure would be the final scene, they stagger away, seemingly yards apart, across the stone pavement in front of a majestic arcade, fated to stumble off into insignificance.

I would bet that Rosselini wanted to end the film there, and that the producers wouldn’t hear of it. Alex and Catherine get back into their car, and soon resume bickering, but now Catherine seems to desire a reconciliation. When they are stalled by a grand religious procession, and are very nearly swept apart by the crowds, Catherine gets her wish, and the couple end up in a clinch. I found all of this very unconvincing, but it did no real harm; the departure from Pompeii, like the eviction from Eden, couldn’t be gainsaid. It was a moment of shattering cinematic truth, and I am still shaking.

Bergman and Sanders are transformed by the movie; or perhaps it would be better to say that their professional, actorly masks are pulled away, leaving them with little more than the muscle memory required to walk in and out of a scene. Alex is every inch the man to, as George Sanders would, claiming to be bored, kill himself, and Bergman’s search for salvific meaning is reduced to a tic. The whole thing would be unwatchably embarrassing with lesser talents; Sanders and Bergman make the experience just bearable. That is, they make it bearable enough to appreciate the grandeur of Rosselini’s filmmaking.

Apart from and despite the forgettable surplusage of the “happy” ending, Viaggio in Italia is the starkest of masterpieces.

It’s no wonder that I loitered away the morning beneath the counterpane. Skies were cloudy, the barometer low and falling. I was equally exhausted by reading done over the weekend, in two books that couldn’t have been more different on the surface, yet whose roots palpably intertwined in the soil of a rich, womanly humanism. The first was the Hannah Arendt book that I’ve written about already, Between Past and Future, and the second was a volume that I’ve mentioned, too, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Having closed Arendt’s book after breakfast on Sunday and then written a doubtless bewildering letter about it to a friend, I sat down with the novel, intending to read for an hour, or sixty pages, whichever came first. I ended up doing nothing else for the rest of the day.

What do I mean by “womanly humanism”? An anti-heroic cast of mind, unimpressed by pointless bravery. Take the following, from Arendt’s final essay, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”:

The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man — the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropomorphic considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him.

A habit of regarding humanity as an element in the landscape, not distinct from the rest of nature but in fact inconceivable without it.

Francie knew that autumn had come. Let the wind blow warm, let the days be heat hazy; nevertheless autumn had comed to Brooklyn. Francie knew that this was so because now, as soon as night came and the street lights went on, the hot-chestnut man set up his little stand on the corner. On the rack above the charcoal fire, chestnuts roasted in a covered pan.The man held unroasted ones in his hand and made little crosses on them with blunt knife before he put them in the pan.

Yes, autumn had surely come when the hot-chestnut man appeared — no matter what the weather said to the contrary.

As to the difference between the two books: there are nearly thirty Post-it flags in Arendt, and only three in Smith.

***

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is, above all, an odd book. The only reader unlikely to find it odd is the beginner, someone who hasn’t read very much before and who is probably a teenager. Such a reader can’t yet know that novels tend to be either much more shapely or much less thoughtful. “Literary” or “mass-market.” Almost all novels are more focused and restricted in register. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is hardly artless, but its anecdotal construction, stitching together episodes of widely-varying length and style, indicates a lack of interest in discrimination that is sometimes no less awkward than a glimpse of the hem of a slip. We might more comfortably read it as a memoir were it not for the modulated, sometimes high-flying prosody and the slipperiness of the speech patterns. Somewhere in the middle of the book, a sympathetic teacher warns the heroine, Francie Nolan, that she must tell what really happened, reserving what might have happened for writing down. Smith seems to be alternate between the two.

I have a hard time reading about hunger, especially the hunger of children. It is an injustice, like torture, that swamps my readerly tranquility. The Nolans, working-class German-Irish living in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, at the beginning of the last century, spend what little money they have on clothes and rent, and freeze in their flat during the cold months while bobbing just above starvation. Pride makes reliance on charity impossible. The father, although a dear man, is fecklessness personified, and his death is both a deep loss and a liberation. The widow lands in comfort at the end, but not before a period of hair-raising reliance on her daughter, who is not only clever but able to pass herself off as old enough for work in an office. Characteristically, I read the last chapter early on, so I knew that Francie would (phew!) go off to college, but this only heightened the suspense of approaching that outcome. The finale of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is nothing less than the dénouement of five or six possible novels.

The tree that grows in Francie’s yard, an ailanthus that springs back after having been chopped down, is as much weed as tree. Despite its delicate canopy, it is not made for landscapes. It may not have much to do with the stories that Betty Smith set out to tell, but it is the perfect symbol of her manner of telling them.

***

David Carr, exulting with faux guilt in the glories of “TV’s new golden age,” reports that the profusion of dramatic series offered by cable networks is leaving him little time to read.

My once beloved magazines sit in a forlorn pile, patiently waiting for their turn in front of my eyes. Television now meets many of the needs that pile previously satisfied. I have yet to read the big heave on Amazon in The New Yorker, or the feature on the pathology of contemporary fraternities in the March issue of The Atlantic, and while I have an unhealthy love of street food, I haven’t cracked the spine on Lucky Peach’s survey of the same. Ditto for what looks like an amazing first-person account in Mother Jones from the young Americans who were kidnapped in Iran in 2009. I am a huge fan of the resurgent trade magazines like Adweek and The Hollywood Reporter, but watching the products they describe usually wins out over reading about them.

And yet he continues to write. He reminds me a little of Kant’s thief, a figure whom Hannah Arendt is fond of mentioning.

The thief, for instance, is actually contradicting himself, for he cannot wish the principle of his action, stealing other people’s property, should become a general law; such a law would immediately deprive him of his own acquisition.

Quite aside from the tendency of non-reading writers’ pens to dribble into cant.

Never have I read anything quite like Hannah Arendt’s essay, “The Crisis in Education.” True to form, Arendt writes a piece far more compelling than her title portends. By the time she’s done, not only has everything familiar about “education” been upended, but a clear and workable “solution” has been proposed. And yet, although Arendt writes in fluent English, her points of reference derive from foreign conventions, presumably German ones, giving her performance something of the strangeness of a handball game played on a tennis court.

For example, I want to quote a passage that, while perfectly sensible as to content, struck, for me, an alien note: it is not customary in the United States now, and I don’t believe that it was any more so when Arendt was writing, to speak of family life as she does, at least in connection with education.

Because the child must be protected against the world. his traditional place is in the family, whose adult members daily return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls. These four walls, within which people’s private family life is lived, constitutes a shield against the world and specifically against the public aspect of the world. They enclose a secure place, without which no living thing can thrive. This holds good not only for the life of children but for human life in general. Wherever the latter is consistently exposed to the world without protection of privacy and security its vital quality is destroyed. In the public world, common to all, persons count, and so does work, that is, the work of our hands that each of us contributes to our common world; but life qua life does not matter there. The world cannot be regardful of it, and it has to be hidden and protected from the world.

Arendt ignores the liberal precept that respects privacy by refusing to discuss it. “Liberal” privacy is simply whatever happens behind closed doors; so long as no harm is done, private matters are of no public concern. We should not be surprised that this less-than-robust standard has been skeletonized by security agencies preoccupied with the harm that might be done behind closed doors, and Arendt is not content with such lassitude. She insists that there are things that must take place, because they can only take place, within the family. The personhood upon which civilization rests, she claims, can only take shape behind “these four walls.”

This idea of the family as a secure bastion of privacy is fundamental to Arendt’s expectations of education, which takes place in the prolonged transitional stage between infancy and adulthood. At the root of Arendt’s thinking about education is the concept of natality. I have never come across this idea anywhere else, and I cannot tell how much of it is all Arendt’s own. Natality describes civilization as under perpetual invasion by newborns. Civilization must be protected from the ignorance of these newborns, whose imagination in turn must be protected from civilization. “Education” is nothing more nor less than the reconciliation of civilization and newborns. If successful, education informs newborns about civilization in ways that allow them to adapt it to unforeseen circumstances. Ideally, education teaches children how to help a civilization to grow.

For this to happen, it is essential to have teachers who embody the authority of the civilization, who say, “I will teach you about the world in which you are about to take your place.” This means taking responsibility for the world as it is, “although [teachers] themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is.”

Anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them.

This startling outburst is clearly aimed at the countercultural drift that was taking hold of American education when Arendt was writing. It is a breathtakingly simple rule, and when I use it to look back on teachers good and bad in my own experience, it is obvious that the best ones were the most emphatic about taking responsibility for the world, even as the foundations of that world shifted beneath their feet. Such teachers were rare. By the end of the Sixties, American adults generally were prone to a self-pitying irresponsibility that Arendt clearly despises:

“In this world even we are not very securely at home; how to move about in it, what to know, what skills to master, are mysteries to us too. You must try to make out as best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you.”

It was a bleak time. The only common alternative to this lament was an unthinking, fundamentalist denial that the world had changed at all. Taking responsibility for the world as it is means understanding that the world is ever-changing. No one can ever expect to be certain about skills and careers. Nor is the world as it is simply the world of today. In order to grasp changes that are in process, the world as it was yesterday must be understood, too. If you are going to help a civilization to grow (or at any rate to keep fresh), you must understand how it has grown.

Arendt is very clear that education and learning are two different things, separated pretty much at the line between high school and college. (It is axiomatic for her that adults cannot be [re-]educated.) Pointing out that she is not herself an educator, she does not concern herself with educational curricula. I am confident that she would have best approved of a high-school program devoted to languages, living and classic, and to the history of science and politics, and that she would have been happiest with a perspective from which languages and histories were seen as two faces of the same quantity. Education prepares some people for lives of learning, but it must prepare everyone to function in civilization.

Since Arendt wrote “The Crisis in Education,” the world has been swept by a tide of technological change that is far from spent. It has, if nothing else, provided a powerful distraction from the problems that beset mid-century America; it has also begun to yield a crop of adults who have not been infantilized by an ignorance of new technology. Many of them are engaged in developing possibilities for a better world. I pray that they will not take long to recognize the importance of taking responsibility for the world as it is.

A cousin from Maine wrote the other day to say that she would be in town this weekend. I asked her to come to dinner on Friday night. When she accepted, she asked if she could bring her sister and her daughter, both of whom live here. Of course, I said. Then I wondered what on earth I would make for dinner.

I haven’t had anyone to dinner in months, and there haven’t been more than four people at the table in a very long time. Between my post/pre Remicade sluggishness and Kathleen’s crazy-busy working life, we’ve been ordering in a lot. For variety’s sake, I’ve made simple dinners once or twice a week. It seems that I am never in the mood to cook. So now what was I going to do?

I had lunch with Ray Soleil, that’s what I did. Gradually, a plan of campaign took shape. For starters, we’ll have ravioli from Agata & Valentina, in a sauce from the same place. Then, a lobster soufflé. This might sound daunting to some, but it’s a dish that I’m very comfortable with. I’ve already parboiled the lobster (and set it out on the balcony, where, strangely, things don’t freeze). I’ll shuck some corn tomorrow, sauté it with butter and oregano, and then toss in the lobster meat to finish the cooking. The rule of soufflés is that you can put three-quarters of a pound of anything into the basic veloûté, and I may just add an extra egg white. I’m taking full advantage of the fact that I’ll be the only gent at the table. Also, I’m bearing in mind that it’s a Friday in Lent, a consideration for Kathleen.

I’ll whip up some hollandaise for the soufflé, and serve it with a salad of asparagus, raspberries, and heirloom tomato. The raspberries and the tomato are pickling in sweet vinegar as I write. For dessert: fresh pineapple and little chocolate eclairs. (There will be almond cookies for Kathleen, who gives up chocolate for Lent.)

I also picked some frozen hors d’oeuvre. There’s plenty of champagne, which to my mind lobster always call for.

To be on the safe side, I set up the boombox DVD player in the kitchen. A boatload of movies arrived yesterday, including Celeste and Jesse Forever, and I slipped that into the boombox. I haven’t seen it since it was showing in the theatres, which I guess is a while ago. I love it when the two friends talk in their dry German accents; I wish I’d known somebody to do that sort of thing with when I was young. But I see the downside: Jesse and Celeste are too busy being knowing to understand much of anything properly. That’s what the movie is about.

Another thing that I like about Celeste and Jesse Forever is that it reminds me of the days when I wished that my life were interesting enough to inspire a feature film. Happily, I put away this childish longing decades ago — but I find that it has been resurrected by Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt. Although it was made only a year or so ago, however, Hannah Arendt is set in the Sixties, when people still thought things through with a passion. (They smoked then, too. I’ve begun to wonder if nicotine had any measurable impact upon intellectual life for the fifty-odd years during which intelligent people smoked as much as they drank, and a lot more than they ate.) Today, Eichmann in Jerusalem is no longer seriously controversial. Is anything controversial anymore? In one sense, we’re too polarized for controversy — we tune out adverse views. In a deeper sense, we conduct discourse in such different modes that what stands for intelligent conversation between these two people over here sounds like incoherent yakking to those two over there.

***

Another movie that showed up yesterday was Beat the Devil. Why had this been on my mind? I hadn’t thought about it in years — since the early Eighties, in fact, when then-new VHS tapes provided an unprecedented medium for personal film libraries, and all sorts of “forgotten” titles were “discovered.” Beat the Devil had a lot going for it: Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Truman Capote. How could a movie written by Huston and Capote, directed by Huston, and starring Bogart fail?

But fail it does — as indeed I recalled. It’s an interesting failure, however, a movie made up entirely of interesting scenes. They simply fail to cohere, fail to tell a single story. The cast falls apart as well. It might have been expected that neither Huston nor Capote would write really good parts for women — meaning, good parts for the women they had to work with. But even the four fraudsters — Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Ivor Barnard, and Marco Tulli — dfail to constitute a real quartet. Indeed, Peter Lorre seems to have only one line: “I want to be in another picture!”

The heart of the problem, however, is Bogart himself. He, or his character, doesn’t give a damn about anything or anyone, beyond getting through the day in reasonable fighting trim. The two women who dangle themselves in front him, Gina Lollabrigida and Jennifer Jones, fail to make his temperature rise by so much as one degree. Where did anyone get the idea that Bogart could play comedy? The most he can manage is breezy insouciance.

It seems that John Huston wanted to spoof The Maltese Falcon. Why, I can’t imagine, but Beat the Devil could have used a falcon, or anything properly tangible —visible — to fight over. Subterranean lodes of uranium in distant Kenya don’t play well on film. It also seems that Huston, Capote et al wanted to have a gay old time on the Amalfi Coast. The Wikipedia entry for the film states that the script was written “on a day-to-day basis.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing; Roman Polanski has claimed the same to be true of Chinatown. But the night-to-night revelry may have clouded the collegial judgment. Another interesting facet of the disaster is that Beat the Devil often seems on the point of developing into an Ealing comedy, only and invariably to poke off in the direction of a Western.

I must see the movie again before saying anything much about Jennifer Jones. At times, she seems very capable, very good, even, but then you wonder: is she capable of being good in this particular picture? I don’t think so: she turns in a performance that is too “professional” for what is really a very eccentric movie. Her character is forever spouting preferable but fictional alternatives to the reality at hand. These little speeches are delivered with brave conviction. Perhaps Jones was trying to tell us something. As for Gina Lollabrigida, oh dear — she had a reputation for hotness so Venusian that it is still surprising to see her with her clothes on. It was as though “Lollabrigida” were the Italian for “D cup.” I’m not kidding! Some members of the audience must have been disappointed to see her play a nicely-dressed Italian lady with a head for dollars and sense.

Also, although I can’t speak from experience, I believe that it is impossible to row away from a sinking ship so fast that it slips over the horizon before it disappears under the water. I can hear the two Americans cackling, late one night in the bar. “And then we’ll have the Nyanga sail back into port. Won’t that be something!” Well, it’s something, all right. But it’s not good film.

Pretty soon, Roz Chast will have been publishing funny drawings in The New Yorker for forty years. I remember liking her right away. Kathleen didn’t, at first, but by the time “Other Hamptons” appeared (“Tubhampton,” “Fanhampton,” and, one that we still have occasion to use whenever we gaze down from our balcony and spot a young person stretched out on a towel, “Roofhampton”), we were united in giggling admiration. Roz Chast is almost always very funny, and the fun is weirdly amplified by its appearing in The New Yorker, where, at first, her scribbled style seemed deeply transgressive. Now that the magazine has developed a few other rough edges, not to mention a flock of other scribbling artists (Danny Shanahan comes to mind), and now that she has been appearing in The New Yorker since before a lot of readers were old enough to enjoy it (or even born), she might not stand out in such sharp contrast. Then again, she might, for her drawings have always been acts of gleeful misbehavior.

Chast’s graphic memoir, “Can’t We Talk About Something Pleasant?”, appearing in the current issue of the magazine, is a protracted exercise in what used to be called “being fresh.” The subject is the decline and death of her parents. This is a topic for which Chast’s graphic style and campy sarcasm are wholly unsuited, and the result could not be more delightful. Noting that her parents were “a tight little unit,” she has her mother say, “‘Codependent’? Of course we’re codependent!” To which her father adds, “Thank GOD!!!” Later, Chast shares her impatience with the leisurely pace of her mother’s subsidence. Finding her mother, neat and cheerful, at lunch with her Jamaican nurse, Chast complains, “I knew her retreat from the abyss should have filled me with joy, or at least relief. However, what I felt when I saw her was closer to: ‘Where, in the five Stages of Death, is EAT TUNA SANDWICH?!?!?” There is no direct evidence in these pages of the five stages of grief — except, of course, for the last one.

That Chast’s artistry is deeply verbal is clear from these quotations, which require no description of the accompanying artwork to make sense. Indeed, the artwork seems to me to be an extension of the verbiage. When Chast draws herself in a state of trembling jealousy — her mother gets on better with the nurse than she does with her daughter — she gives us something close to a pictograph, illustrating not so much a woman being jealous as jealousy itself. Her drawings are dashed off, like Chinese running script, and her rare attempts at prettiness are always heavily ironic. Certainly, Chast commands the graphic skill to make her primitive-looking figures funny — goofy, silly, pompous, idiotic, and every shade of brain- from -dead to -storm — but it is her language that bites. She uses text to display a persona of utterly disrespectful exasperation, and she offers her drawing as the justifying explanation. If the world looked like this to you, you’d be screaming, too.

And that’s the key: the most ridiculous figure in Chast’s work is her personal stand-in. She presents herself as either unremittingly incompetent or dangerously unstable, and here, too, her slapdash manner of drawing slyly tempts you to agree. In “Can’t We Talk About Something Pleasant?”, Chast faces a series of hurdles. She clears each of them, but this is not shown; what’s shown, lovingly, are the hurdles. She attempts to tease out her parents’ thoughts about funerals and burials; she tries to convince them to move into an assisted-living facility (called the PLACE); she keeps her mother stocked with Depends; and she gives herself oy for effort. Her parents die — but not in the frame. All we see is the kvetching. What it adds up to is a memorial-by-omission that is both poignant and heartwarming. Like a grand drag queen, Roz Chast draws attention to the unspeakable by leaving it unspoken, and gesturing around it. Where drag queens meditate on the mystery of gender, Chast contemplates the conundrum of growing up normal and Jewish in Brooklyn. Equally muddlesome! The comparison has another point of interest: a drag queen is a kind of stand-up comic. Chast is not a performer in this sense at all. She is a writer and an illustrator. The humor is in the ink.

“Between their one-bad-thing-after-another lives,” she writes of her parents, “and the Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust, in which they both lost family — it was amazing that they weren’t crazier than they were.” Even more amazing is Roz Chast’s wonderful long run at The New Yorker. May it continue for decades to come!

Even a day later, we were so traumatized by Kim Novak that we were still talking about “work.”

Kathleen and I know nothing about cosmetic surgery — nothing — except, of course, what we can see with our own eyes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We have drawn two inferences from this experience. First, that surgeons have gotten better at what they do (especially when this means that they don’t); second, that some people respond better to cosmetic procedures than other people do.

“Take Steve Martin,” I said last night, as we were rehashing the subject. Kathleen was getting ready for bed, slipping in and out of her bathroom. “Steve Martin looks better than ever.” It’s true. Mr Martin is really quite distinctly more classically handsome now than he was thirty years ago — a fact brought home with force by a recent re-viewing of an old Carol Burnett show. Over time, his features have grown more regular, his face more lean and fit. Perhaps he has no one to thank but Mother Nature. Assuming that this is not the case, we may conclude that the actor has benefited from a course of small, effective operations.

“What about Clint Eastwood?” Kathleen asked. “Do you think that he has had work?”

No, I did not. I didn’t think, that is. There’s no need, when you’re rehashing. Clint Eastwood is a member of my Pretty Boy Trinity. The others are Nick Nolte and Harrison Ford. When you look at photos of these actors taken in their twenties, before they became famous, they’re disturbingly baby-faced, almost queasily beautiful. It was only after time (Mother Nature) was allowed to rough them up a bit that their faces suited their otherwise manly personas. Now, of course, they are obviously reveling in being crusty old patriarchs.

“What about Paul Newman? He was really cute when he was young.”

“That’s true,” I replied. “But Paul Newman always had the eyes of a predator.”

What I meant by this, I think, was that Paul Newman, from the start, looked as though he had been transfigured by an encounter with the transcendent — in the form of a cosmic joke. He had only one way of sharing this joke, and that was to look at you with his still, dancing eyes. “Predator” wasn’t the right word, but perhaps it came to me because I was thinking of the woman with the ice cream in her purse. Have you ever heard the story about the woman who was so flustered by the sight of Paul Newman in person while waiting for an ice cream cone that when she paid and took her change, she couldn’t find the cone? Until the actor very gently told her that she had put it in her handbag.

What an exalted topic to be writing about! But that’s the glorious freedom of blogging, and I’m lucky that Kathleen is second to none in her belief that, if I’m writing about something, then it must be worth writing about.

At the same time, she clearly thinks that I’m a complete idiot, because she said, “What do you mean, ‘Paul Newman has the eyes of a creditor’?”

“‘Predator’!”

We laughed for a moment about that. I can’t believe that Kathleen thinks I say these things. “Well, it did sound a little odd,” she said. But what she never does say is, “I must have misheard you — could you repeat that?” She assumes that I have said something absurd.

“Paul Newman would have laughed at ‘creditor’,” I ventured, “given that his father ran a hardware store.” Don’t ask me why I thought any such thing. Standards are never very high in connubial rehashings.

Kathleen was half in, half out of her bathroom. “What do you mean, ‘Paul Newman’s father ran Harvard’?” She sounded alarmed. She might not have any idea what the eyes of a creditor would look like, but she knew a thing or two about Harvard.

Who needs work?

So, we pulled back the doors in front of the big screen last night, turned on the cable box, and watched the Oscars. I’m not feeling particularly well this morning, as a result. It’s as though I’d consumed a cubic foot of popcorn. I think it was the disaffected bonhomie of Ellen DeGeneres that did me in. Passing around slices of pizza as if the A-list stars in the front rows were hanging out in her rec room — she must have given the dressers heart attacks!

And then there was Kim Novak. I tried closing my eyes, but that only made it worse.

And the very offensive exceptionalist-American Cadillac ad, with the polished brute who delivered a sermon on personal responsibility. Hard work –> Cadillacs in the driveway! It was just a shade less objectionable than overt Nazi propaganda. I was glad to see that it didn’t run a second time.

Matthew McConaughhey’s thanks-be-to-God remarks made me wish for a rule that would confine expressions of gratitude to the members of the Academy generally and to the colleagues who assisted and/or supported the prize-winning efforts. These colleagues would go unnamed.

Finally, there was Sandra Bullock — but I hasten to say here that Sandra Bullock was a very good thing about the evening, possibly the best. As the movie in which she starred, Gravity, piled up awards, I found myself wanting more and more for her to win one, too, because, after all, it was she who brought all that technical wizardry to life. I loved Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasime, and recognized her performance in that film as an unprecedented achievement: never, as I think I wrote at the time, had Woody Allen put one of his films so completely in the hands of an actor, to do with as she would. The result is an extraordinary study of opportunistic evil. Ms Blanchett certainly deserved her Academy Award. But I wanted it for Sandra Bullock.

When the show was over, we closed the doors. The cable box will shut itself off after a while. Barring fast-breaking news occasioned by a genuine catastrophe, the video equipment in the living room, which we never use to watch movies, will be untouched until next March. I don’t know how long it will take to shake off the hangover of broadcast television production values. What visually toxic stuff!

***

The novelist and screenwriter Diane Johnson grew up in Moline, Illinois, right across the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa, the town my paternal grandmother came from. My father grew up a few miles upriver, in Clinton, Iowa. When I visited Clinton for the first and only time in 1962, I was reminded of home, because, just as in Bronxville, the bluffs that rose from the flats by the tracks and the river (the rather humble Bronx River, in Bronxville’s case) were dotted with elegant, half-secluded manor houses. It was at the local country club that I first tasted boiled Maine lobster. What might have seemed out of place in even the fanciest of restaurants, so far from Maine and the sea, was perfectly normal as a country club stunt, although whether the crustaceans were flown in or trucked, I never did learn. I wouldn’t have cared, being only fourteen years old.

My father had an aunt, not vastly older than himself, who lived in Clinton with her husband, several pets, and no children. She was somewhat stout, but she was as sporty as her wiry mate; they were great golfers. They were also, at least for Clinton, quite sophisticated. To my eyes — I had met them before, in New York, but never seen them on their home ground — they were more sophisticated than my parents, or, for the matter of that, any of the other Bronxville adults I knew. (Notwithstanding the sprinkling New Yorker contributors who apparently lived in Bronxville, all unbeknownst to me, it was in Clinton that I first saw the magazine in the brown paper wrapper in which it was at that time mailed to subscribers.)  My father’s aunt and uncle liked me and I liked them, and when they asked my parents if I could stay on a few days with them while my parents went to Chicago, I was bitterly disappointed that the invitation was declined.

I think about the Mooneys quite often, and what that week in Clinton might have been like; doubtless my hosts would have been unpleasantly surprised by my disinclination to make friends of my own age. But what really strikes me is that the life that I’ve grown up to lead is so much more small-town than theirs. This was very much on my mind as I read through the later chapters of Diane Johnson’s new memoir, Flyover Lives. Once she left Moline for California, Johnson exchanged the stability from which she had always longed to escape for an almost nomadic worldliness, as a result of which she knows a lot of famous people, a few of whom are good friends. I, in contrast, seem to have migrated to an interior Clinton, quietly surveying from my house on the bluff the world that passes below. Aside from a handful of friends, all of them accomplished but none of them remotely famous, I know nobody.

It’s the films that brought Johnson into collaborating with Stanley Kubrick Mike Nichols, and others; but even as a budding writer at UCLA, she knew Alison Lurie. I have never known any writers at all. I did meet, one time, a fellow who was trying to write a television show, but that’s it. For a long time, I thought that there must be something wrong with me, that I didn’t know any writers, but I got over that years ago, at about the time I began writing online. I learned that there would be nothing to learn from writers as such, only from what they wrote — and, even more, from what I wrote. And didn’t write.

It’s what isn’t written that makes Flyover Lives more than a mere treat, and, instead, a considerable work of art. The homely simplicity of Johnson’s voice is occasionally spiked, but it never bogs down in details. Johnson doesn’t bother to spin a continuous narrative; rather, she picks through a box of anecdotes and documentary remains with the calm dispassion of an old lady sitting in a rocking chair on a fine summer afternoon, and taking her time about it. Loose ends abound, to the extent of constituting a positive motif. We never learn a thing, for instance about the college-age romance that led to Johnson’s first marriage and four children; only an astringent, one-page chapter disposes of it (“… he struck me once,” screams the only note of violence). In what year did Johnson take her children and an au pair to London? We’re not told. Such information would clutter the page. Johnson is not aiming for timelessness. On the contrary, by withholding the date stamp, she demonstrates how memoir, as distinct from autobiography, inhabits a double now, the now of life and that of recollection, which makes a now of a then. These nows have no inherent dates, because they are now.

This is true even when the recollections are not her own, but those of her great-great-grandmother, Catharine Martin, who, old as the century, composed a sheaf of memoir in 1876. There is an immediacy to Catharine’s reports that redeems her somewhat stolid style. Either Catharine was surprisingly well-read or, as seems much more likely, she was able to write as she spoke, to transcribe a story as she would tell it — no common gift! The extended passage in which she narrates the loss of her first three children to scarlet fever is quite ironically lively, the rich surface detail pregnant with unspoken grief.

The occasionally querulous understatement of Johnson’s writing is not really funny, but it certainly twinkles, and every now and then a spark flies.

The children were thriving in England. Off they went to school each day in their little gray shirts, neckties, knee socks, and navy skirts or short pants. We drank big cups of tea in the morning, with lots of milk, and sometimes we had bacon, and always had porridge. We felt very English, though they reported being called in their school “the Yanks.” Simon, aged five, had a disappointment at his kindergarten when another child was chosen instead of him to play Jesus in the Christmas pageant. It came out that this was because Davey, a thalidomide child, could take off his legs, and thereby fit into the manger.

The last bit set off in me an explosion of laughter that did not stop when Kathleen, to whom I just managed to read the passage aloud, squealed in horror. “That’s awful!” she protested — but I only laughed the harder. Yes, it’s horrible, but you don’t see it coming, and when it does arrive it quite fails to strike the “appropriate” note of maimed disability. Not only is Davey capable of removing his legs, but he gets a leading role in the pageant! With luck, even the most awful disadvantage might be turned inside-out. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the forebears who migrated from New England to Ohio and Illinois would have survived their ordeals and lived to produce Diane Johnson’s parents without the benefit of such resilient flexibility.

Flyover Lives tells me a lot about what Diane Johnson’s life is like, but it does not trick me into imagining that I know her. What is written points to what is not written, and what is not written is none of my business. I come away persuaded that I have been told everything that’s interesting, and that everything withheld would mean little or nothing to me. No illusion of intimacy haunts the memoir’s pages, or persists when it is closed.

It’s exactly that discretion and pertinence that was so flouted at the Academy Awards ceremony. Happily, Sandra Bullock never said a word.

It was as though I had never read the book — Sense and Sensibility. Only the opening chapters were familiar as writing; everything thereafter stood out as differing, in some way or other, either from what I remembered or from Emma Thompson’s screenplay. (Thompson wisely does away with several characters, such as Lady Middleton, who would clutter a movie but who garnish the novel.) Beyond that, the texture was uncanny. I expected something a little more serious than Northanger Abbey and a lot more satirical. I encountered instead something far more serious and not at all funny. There were smiles, to be sure, in Elinor’s wry resignation, but no laughs; all the surprises were horrors. By the end, I was reading Sense and Sensibility as a first run at Mansfield Park.

It’s easy to let antithesis carry you away; that’s part of its charm. But Austen uses antithesis (a well-worked device by her time) to deflate it. Elinor is reserved; Marianne is expressive. But if Elinor is sensible — in the predicate sense of the word that we use today — it is not the case, antithesis notwithstanding, that Marianne is frivolous. She is every bit as serious-minded as her sister. And if her passion for Willoughby is reckless, it is in dead earnest: there is no doubt but that she is in love with the man, and not at all with merely being in love. She has a capacity for deep attachment beyond her years, and she suffers accordingly. In the very middle of the book, Austen rips a gash in the polite text: Marianne,

though unable to speak, seemed to feel all the tenderness of this behaviour, and after some time thus spent in joint affliction, she put all the letters into Elinor’s hands, and then covering her face with her handkerchief, almost screamed with agony.

If Austen were not already at this stage in her career an expert writer, those last four words would seem excessive if not ridiculous, but as it is they pull us behind the screen of civility for an instant, to give us a brief but unblinking look at raw human misery unparalleled in her work.

In Fanny Price, Jane Austen would pack Marianne’s emotional vulnerability within Elinor’s composure. Sense and Sensibility, though not as great a novel as Mansfield Park, is nearly as powerful. Its principal defect is its garrulity; there are too many things that Austen says more than once. There are perhaps too many characters; at the same time, there is not really enough of Colonel Brandon. (There cannot be more of Edward Ferrars, for the same reason that prevents Elinor from being forthcoming about Lucy Steele.) Because such drawbacks would all be overcome in the later novels, they have a certain piquant interest: they foreshadow (in their elimination) the extent to which Austen would become a master of compression. And, despite them, Sense and Sensibility is a very strong read. I closed the book with a regret that the young Marianne Dashwood would certainly applaud.

***

I knew that I should be going out today, but my plans didn’t really make sense: I was going to have lunch with Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil, and then meet up with Mr and Mrs NOLA at the Museum in the early evening. What to do in between? At the last minute, Fossil had to cancel — owing to an emergency, he was needed at work. Having booked a table at Demarchelier, I went there myself. Then, as long as I was out, I proceeded to Crawford Doyle (for the new Fay Weldon, of all things, Kehua! I read Alison Lurie’s rave in the NYRB at lunch) and from there to the Museum, where I took in the Marville show. By now, it was half-past three, and I wanted to get off my feet. I texted my regrets to Mrs NOLA and walked to the Orpheum, where I saw a showing of The Monuments Men.

When I read Robert Edsel’s book of the same name late last year, I knew that the movie would be coming out, and that George Clooney and Matt Damon would star in it. I pasted their faces, as it were, on the characters of George Stout and James Rorimer, and this made the book even livelier. (It was impossible to do this in the case of the woman impersonated by the beautiful Cate Blanchett.) I expected the movie to be a roaring success. Now I see why it hasn’t been one. The connection between the monuments and the men lacks vitality, leaving us with a rather quirky pseudo-military expedition that real fighting men were probably right to scorn. There is plenty of reverence and awe in the face of great art, but as the movie doesn’t tell us what made these men passionate about art, they come across as only slightly more mature versions of Indiana Jones. (John Goodman and Bill Murray are particularly loopy.) For a climax, it is necessary to fall back on the swashbuckling attempt to preserve masterpieces from the Russians. I did not expect The Monuments Men to be a great movie, but I did expect it to be about grown men. Top marks, though, to Alexandre Desplat, for yet another dazzling score.

The extent to which our culture might be characterized as visual has been brought home to me by the Facebook selfie that I mentioned yesterday. I’ve been writing updates about Remicade infusions since I signed on at Facebook, however many years ago, but I’ve illustrated them with pictures of the Hospital for Special Surgery and suchlike. Responses to the image of an ailing older man suggest that some friends and even relations do not slow down for pictures of buildings. I’d had no idea that the selfie post would be news.

***

Freedom — what a conundrum. After her crystal-clear, authoritative essay on authority, Hannah Arendt begins the corresponding one on freedom with an almost desperate cry. “To raise the question, what is freedom? seems to be a hopeless enterprise.” I’ve reached the point, a few pages in, where Arendt argues that freedom was a concept that could have no place in pre-Christian Greek philosophy, because it was political in nature and there could be no politics in philosophy. Floundering in bed this morning — I couldn’t have called it “thinking” — I had one of those lightbulb moments. “Freedom” is a negative state, the absence of being something else, to wit, a slave. Without servitude, freedom makes no sense. Only slaveholders — such as the Virginian planters who co-founded the United States — could have a proper understanding of freedom. There’s nothing like beginning the day with a tart irony.

This is Isaiah Berlin’s freedom from, I think. Christianity introduced freedom to: the freedom, specifically, to override the dictates of fear and desire. In vernacular terms, this is the freedom to go on a strict diet, something that Americans, freedom from junkies that we are, don’t practically associate with “freedom.” Freedom to is austere; it is really freedom not to.  I delight in the freedom not to watch television — a freedom that I shall forego on Sunday night, to watch the Academy Awards ceremony. Watching television is an annual event for us; we haven’t turned it on since last March. The freedom not to watch television affords me lots of time in which to exercise my freedom to read and write. My freedom to read and right is therefore made possible by my freedom from television.

I have never taken the problem of free will seriously. I don’t see anything in it but a bone of contention for intellectual terriers with nothing better to do. I’m also inclined to believe that chaos is the key. Chaos is the key because it introduces unpredictability into determinist systems. Physics, in other words, is not all clockwork. I do not require metaphysical “free will” to rescue me from slavery to carnal procedures; I can look for luck. Yesterday, at the Hi-Life, where, given my recent habits, a regular staffer would have brought me a Manhattan the moment I sat down, I was confronted instead with the need to make a decision by a woman who didn’t know me. In the moment of ordering my lunch, I felt so good and clear and thoughtful and generally happy that the idea of pouring a wooze-making cocktail down my gullet was sharply repellent. In that moment. Two moments earlier, however, I’d been looking forward to the “Take it easy!” feeling that envelopes me with the first sip of a Manhattan. I have no idea what intervened to cancel my desire to “take it easy.” At no time did I have the sense of exercising willpower. Indeed, it was a mere postponement: I’d have a Manhattan for dessert. Only, when the moment came to order it, I asked for the check instead.

Besides, we are learning more every day about the physiology of decision-making. A healthy blood-sugar level is required, for one thing. For another, the number of decisions that can be made in any given period is limited. As an affluent white man with steady habits, I am rarely called on to make difficult decisions. (And for the most part, my difficult decisions concern getting rid of surplus possessions. I don’t have to worry about needs.) Nothing disgusts me more than the allegation that poor people are kept in poverty by their bad decisions, when in fact they are kept in poverty by their poverty, which denies them the resources and the stability to make a smaller number of decisions with well-fed composure. You might as well argue that the blind man has the “freedom” to see, if only he would learn to exercise it.

Rule of thumb: be wary of urging other people to exercise the freedom to. As for yourself, look for luck.

Sitting in my chair at the Infusion Therapy Unit yesterday, I was so pleased and relieved just to be there that I wished to share my good news with all the world — the world of my Facebook friends, anyway. So I took a selfie, careful to show the infusion pump behind me, and the by then almost empty bag of Remicade behind it. Modified rapture.

I didn’t pay much attention to the photo when I posted it; only when I got home and saw it on a larger screen could I savor the unflattering nature of my self-portrait. There was the obvious incongruity of my eyeglasses, askew as they often are — sooner or later, something about the configuration of my head warps glasses so that they seem to list on my nose from a high on the left to a low on the right. I might have given them an adjusting tug, though, and achieved a less loopy look.

Beyond the weird spectacles, there was the woolly-mammoth aspect of the selfie. I was holding the phone where I usually hold it — to look at it. It seemed not to have crossed my mind that a photograph might require a different point of view — or that point of view was even involved. The angle exaggerated (if I may say so) the fact that I was a few days late — five or six — for a trim at the barber’s. Waves were beginning to form in my beard — although “rivulets on a mud flat” is what actually came to mind.

Finally, there was my overall facial expression. I could not complain about this. It proved me beyond question to be a man in need of some sort of medical treatment. In this regard, the entire photograph was a documentary triumph.

***

Today, I’m feeling pretty good, thanks. Much better than I expected to do. Although it was snowing this morning, lightly, I got dressed for the weather, putting on my bad-weather oxfords, always a pain to tie, and went to the barber shop. In Willy’s gleaming, well-lighted mirror, I looked even worse than I did in the selfie. Who was this person? Had he just been rescued from a desert island? It is true that my standards are high. Willy himself calls me “Capitán,” because (a) I remind him of Captain Smith in Titanic and (b) he hails from Lima. As a commanding officer of the White Star Line lookalike, I have a duty to keep tonsorially spruce. Arguments could be made that I had indeed been rescued from an iceberg: the weather here in Gotham, together with my wilting somatic condition, made for a life barely more comfortable.

Back at home, after several subsequent errands, I found myself so bursting with high spirits that I hadn’t an idea in my brain.

One of these days, I want to write more about Hannah Arendt on authority, but I knew that I just didn’t have, today, what it takes to sell that sort of piece. The very idea of authority was at odds with the elation of health restored. For lack of anything better to do, I went through a pile of mail and came across the current Atlantic, which in turn came to my rescue. The cover story was in tune with my playful spirits: “The Fraternity Problem: It’s Worse Than You Think,” by Caitlin Flanagan.

Now, I don’t know anything about fraternities first-hand. They didn’t, and I presume still don’t, exist at the University of Notre Dame, from which I hold both undergraduate and law degrees. That was a great relief to me at the time, because I’m sure that my mother would have pestered me to join, or whatever it is that one does, some prestigious Greek house. It’s an even greater relief to me now, for after reading Flanagan’s report, I’m sure that I should have fallen at some point from a great height. That’s apparently what lots of kids do: they fall out of windows and off of roofs. Or drainpipes. Such incidents are 2% more likely to lead to liability claims than hazing accidents. (That’s, at least, how I read, or possibly misread, the bar graph in Flanagan’s piece.) Looking back on my college years, I tremble at the sight of a sort of carnival in which tremendous intellectual excitement alternated with tremendously foolish high-jinks. High jinks like swimming across a small lake, under the influence of various intoxicants, on a March night when there was still snow on the ground. Mind you, this was all my own idea. I didn’t have to be put up to it; there may even have been an attempt to restrain me. The structural imprudence of a fraternity would have finished me off.

Back then, common wisdom held that fraternities, like golf, would disappear within a couple of years. Membership declined; chapters closed. Then came Animal House. John Belushi has a lot to answer for: as Flanagan points out, he was the one actor with enough “radical cred” to make Greek life look subversive. No longer was there a divide between those who got stoned and those who got drunk, those who flipped out on acid and those who drove cars into trees. Now, all the vices were on offer, together with battalions of young women who took it for granted that they would be safe in rooms full of drunk adolescent males. Women had certainly advanced, but the new fratmosphere was a catchment for men who hadn’t.

I’m unlikely to get worked up about fraternities, however, because, as regular readers know, I’ve altogether given up on American higher education. I do not believe that it can be salvaged; it can only be scrapped. I’m not preaching a replay of the Cultural Revolution in China; clearly, there must be institutions of higher learning. But we’ve got to build them from scratch. The buildings, actually, are the last thing that need replacement — although “student centers” and athletic facilities of all kinds ought to be sold off to entertainment providers. Nor need professors be lined up against the wall and shot. It’s the university administrators who have to go. Out with the presidents and the deans and the development officers and the duffers in alumni affairs — everything implicit in the pregnant phrase, “Larry Summers at Harvard.” Every effort ought to be made to reduce tuition to levels that pay teachers well and keep the lights on, period. The only gift acceptable from alumni, or from any outsiders for the matter of that, must be the endowed chair.

Most important, undergraduate life ought to begin where it currently ends, at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two. The final years of teenaged existence are probably the most uncongenial to academic learning that post-pre-K life has to offer.

But listen to me — I’m sounding like an authority!

A friend of mine who also takes Remicade insists that he can feel it coursing through his system during the infusion, kind of like Popeye with the spinach. Wouldn’t that be cool! It doesn’t happen for me. I leave the hospital in pretty much the same old shape. Usually, that’s not a bad thing: I go in feeling pretty well. (That’s the idea.) This time, I envy my friend. I’ll envy him even more tomorrow. The day after the infusion is always the lowest ebb of energy.

The rheumatologist came into the Infusion Therapy Unit shortly after the pump was turned on, expressed his satisfaction with the state of my eye, and ordained another infusion in six weeks. I have no objection, no objection at all. I like the idea of spacing the infusions as widely as possible — as a general proposition. This one time, I’m already looking forward to the boost in early April.

People ask me: what does Remicade do? It’s complicated, but I came up with homely metaphor — homely in that I’ve borrowed it from a DVD that I watch at home all the time, The Hunt for Red October (one of the best kitchen movies ever made): countermeasures. Countermeasures are decoys that the target throws off to distract the weapon. The gazillions of Remicade molecules that get pumped into me every so often are countermeasures that protect my body from my overeager, underemployed autoimmune system, which, rather like an adolescent sociopath, sends out nasty thingummies that inflame tissues for no good reason. Remicade prevents frolics like the attack that turned my left eye into an orb of blood last week. It prevents Crohn’s-like symptoms that, happily, I was largely spared, although there were intimations that my colon was about to go haywire. A lot of the inflammation is very low-grade, presenting nothing worse than a persistent fatigue. Nothing worse — considering the things that can go wrong, I have to say that. But persistent fatigue is insidiously demoralizing.

I did very little over the weekend, but yesterday I experienced a little burst of vim, and the simple project that I had asked Ray Soleil to help me with — adjusting the height of a particular shelf in the bookcase alongside of which I work in the blue room — launched a cascade of local fixes that, among other things, arranged all of my Penguin Classics (some of which date to the 1960s) on two neighboring shelves and unearthed my collection of Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness travel guides. Are you familiar with the DK Eyewitness guides? These books are priceless, and more or less timeless, guides to cultural artifacts around the world, and the entry for India is the one book that I recommend to anyone who wants to begin to learn something about the Subcontinent. The cover of the Istanbul guide nearly matches the view that we had from our room at the Swisshotel in 2005. The Upper East Side chapter of the New York guide includes two images that closely resemble photographs that I’ve taken myself and published here. Molto simpatico.

About a year ago, I began to wonder where they were, the Eyewitness guides. I knew where they’d been, but I’d moved them and forgotten whither. It turned out that they were sealed behind a brick wall in my brain, upon which it was written (in amontillado), This shelf is stuffed with NYRB editions. Of which I have an overflowing supply. Only yesterday did it occur to me to put my conviction to the test. The range to the front were all NYRB, but, behind them… Ordinarily, you find things when you’re not looking for them, a bittersweet experience because you don’t find what you were looking for. If I was looking for anything yesterday, it was bookshelf space — and I found that, too, when the Eyewitness guides were moved back into the bedroom, where they belong. Sweetsweet!

At the hospital, I read Sense and Sensibility, with the mounting conviction that it has been a long, long time since I last read the novel. I had rather allowed Emma Thompson’s screenplay to stand in for it. You could do much worse and probably not any better. But: accept no substitutes! Give me the plain Jane, black and strong and clear as a bell:

I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly. Has not his behaviour to Marianne and to all of us, for at least the last fortnight, declared that he loved and considered her as his future wife, and that he felt for us the attachment of the nearest relation? Has not my consent been daily asked by his looks, his manner, his attentive and affectionate respect? How could such a thought occur to you? How is it to be supposed that Willoughby, persuaded as he must be of your sister’s love, should leave her, and leave her perhaps for months, without telling her of his affection — that they would part without a mutual exchange of confidence?

Jane Austen, of course, completely disagrees with this oration, delivered by Mrs Dashwood shortly after Willoughby’s unexplained defection. We are meant to understand that it is foolish for the doting mother to dispense with formalities where sentiment is so unmistakable. In fact, Mrs Dashwood’s consent has not been asked, daily or otherwise. Mrs Dashwood has simply given it — a meaningless gesture.

Now it’s time to go back to my easy chair for another episode of Lewis. (Something from Season Three, I think.) I just watched the one that ends with Juliet Stevenson immolating herself with gasoline. It’s not my favorite episode, but, hey — Juliet Stevenson. I will leave you with a crumb from Hannah Arendt’s magnificent essay on authority in Between Past and Future:

This is also why old age, as distinguished from mere adulthood, was felt by the Romans to contain the very climax of human life; not so much because of accumulated wisdom and experience as because the old man had grown closer to the ancestors and the past. Contrary to our concept of growth, where one grows into the future, the Romans felt that growth was directed toward the past. If one wants to relate this attitude toward the hierarchical order established by authority and to visualize this hierarchy in the familiar image of the pyramid, it is as though the peak of the pyramid did not reach into the height of a sky above (or, as in Christianity, beyond) the earth, but into the depths of an earthly past.

This passage gives expression to a sensation that has been mounting powerfully but wordlessly within me: I can see the past so much more clearly that I used to be able to do. I don’t know much more about it, and I’m certainly not talking about my past. It’s the past, all of it. What I see wouldn’t make much sense if literally transcribed; it wouldn’t seem to say anything. So I have to talk about it obliquely. I do know this: until enough of us see the past clearly, the past is where we are all headed. And I’m no Roman.

I knew I knew her from somewhere. The actress playing Mrs Hudson in the BBC Sherlock series, Una Stubbs. Her face seemed familiar, but that was only because she looked like any number of other pretty English actresses. It was her voice that drove me to track her down. At IMDb, I had to scroll away for quite a while — all the way to the bottom, and even then I didn’t spot any likely titles. Scrolling back up more cautiously, I found what I was looking for in 1979: Fawlty Towers. In “The Anniversary,” Una Stubbs plays Alice, who with her husband (a cutup, played by Ken Campbell, who’s got all the laugh lines) is the first to arrive at the disastrously miscarried fête that Basil has planned as a surprise for Sybil on their fifteenth anniversary — a date which he thinks it’s funny to let her believe that he has forgotten. Ms Stubbs’s speaking voice is something of a squeal, high-pitched and “girlish” and almost, but never quite, annoying. It contrasts wonderfully with the hearty contralto of Pat Keen’s Virginia, the stout nurse who insists on palpating “Sybil’s” glands only to be socked in the eye by Polly. I recognized Ms Stubbs’s silvery voice because I’ve watched “The Anniversary” countless times. It’s locked in my head.

IMDb! Isn’t the Internet amazing!

You’re not quite so thrilled, eh? Of course not.

I came across an update at Facebook last night that made me holler. It was one of those posters that people share, like the one about shouting “Plot twist!” whenever something really bad happens. (Mmm, yes.) Here’s the one that caught my attention:

Q: If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about life today?
A: I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.

The joke about trivializing the Internet with LOLcats and flame wars, I see more clearly now than I did last night, clinches my objection to the answer. It might, indeed, be difficult to explain smartphones to a visitor from the 1950s, but only because it would be hard to convince the visitor that smartphones were anything but a crazy new gimmick. After all, the Fifties witnessed the introduction of a remarkable device that had almost immediate repercussions outside the developed world: the transistor radio. Far more baffling to a visitor from the 1950s would be the way women dress — or don’t, as trouser-like garments have replaced skirts in the intervening decades. Only fashionable women, and women with dating in mind, wear dresses anymore. Oh, and very old ladies. Some of them, anyway.

Then our visitor would demand to know why even the men look like they left the house in their pajamas. It would take days to create the context in which a visitor could grasp the smartphone. Until then, he’d say, “Why would I need a smartphone?”

***

Remember when people used to say that about computers? There was always someone, back in the late Eighties or early Nineties, ready to assume a posture of defiant resistance. And the thing was, the challenge was unanswerable. There was really no way to persuade a computer illiterate of the uses of computers, a subject almost as inexplicable as parenthood. In the end, almost everyone had to use a computer at work. The Internet changed things — although perhaps I ought to point out that personal computers were around for about fifteen years before Internet use took off, a fact that younger readers might well overlook. Eventually, though, everyone had to find out for himself why he needed a computer.

And then, guess what! — nobody really needs a computer! Well, some people still do. Writers, designers, professionals in one line or another. But that’s all for work. The personal computer has evaporated. Rather, it has shrunk to such proportions that “computer” just isn’t the word anymore. “Pocket computer”? So Texas Instruments.

It turns out that, what you needed a computer for, was to learn how to make the most of a smartphone. So: not only was the “Why do I need a computer question” unanswerable, but nobody knew the answer — except, just maybe, Steve Jobs.

My eye, by the way, looks almost normal. I’m good to go — so I’m told. Tomorrow, alas, is another day.

For the first time in ten years, I was sent home yesterday from the Hospital for Special Surgery without the benefit of a scheduled Remicade infusion. The reason was a very bloodshot eye. It might be infected. For reasons that I’ve never quite understood, an infusion of Remicade is said to make existing infections much worse. That my eye probably wasn’t infected — that it was, instead, inflamed by precisely the kind of autoimmune attack that Remicade is designed to prevent — cut no mustard with the rheumatologist. He’s not an ophthalmologist, after all; it’s not up to him to diagnose bloodshot eyes. I ought to have called the ophthalmologist on Monday, when my eye began itching. That way, we’d have known for sure. Now we almost do. I’ve been, and the eye has been swabbed, and I’m no longer itching. I’m to take eyedrops every hour on the hour for the rest of today, and then four daily over the weekend. The drops contain both an antibiotic and a steroid; between them, they’ll return my eye to normal in time for the rescheduled infusion, on Tuesday. The ophthalmologist will call the rheumatologist and tell him not to worry.

So, although I’m still dragging myself around, the burden of hopelessness and futility has been lifted. It has been lifted, and I am not going to discuss it: Eccomi. But yesterday was not a good day. Wednesday was not a bad day; Ray Soleil was kind enough spend most of it with me. It was only when, after he left, I began thinking about writing an entry here, that all literary aspiration was snuffed by a rocketing anxiety about how the rheumatologist might respond to the bloodshot eye. I was so alarmed that I unearthed a bottle of eyedrops from the medicine cabinet and began fairly ladeling them onto my cornea.  These other, older eyedrops also contained a steroid, so I was not surprised that they made me more comfortable; but they had no real effect on the inflammation. No antibiotic effect, I should say. I looked no better in the morning.

I was so upset by yesterday’s decision that I walked home from the hospital in the wet, my inner despond perfectly matching the outer. You might ask just how depleted I really am. The fact is, anger is a stimulant. Once home, I was a useless rag, an ashen, barefoot Cinderella, good for nothing but watching movies. This morning, I had to wade across a very sizeable swamp of self-pity and misery-me before I could even think about getting dressed.

I was so encouraged by the ophthalmologist’s preliminary opinion this morning that I walked over to Madison, popped into a taxi, and treated myself to lunch at Demarchelier.

***

I finished reading The Wings of the Dove in the morning yesterday, and surely a small portion of my unhappiness later in the day owed to missing it, to being done with it or to its being done with me. At lunch today, by which time I was once again capable of thought, I was amazed by the novel’s perversity, mentioned by John Bayley in the introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of 1986 but not really explored. I’m not up to much exploration myself at the moment, but I’ll venture this: imagine that Maud Manningham Lowder, the wealthy and far from malignant dragon in the novel, really existed, and had taken out a sort of patent on all of the interesting facts behind the story that Henry James set out to tell us, and then refused permission for the author to be specific about any of them.

All of the things that would stuff a conventional novelist’s budget are withheld. The list of things that we don’t really know is almost as long as the novel itself. All we get are hints. What’s the disgraceful, “bad” thing that Kate Croy’s father did? Who was Mr Lowder? Does Merton Densher have a family? What’s Lord Mark’s last name? Where did Milly’s millions come from? What catastrophe wiped out her family, leaving her alone to own everything? And what’s wrong with her? We’re only told that it isn’t what she thought it was, but something else. I’m not kidding! And the really theatrical scenes, such as Densher’s final interview with Milly, are shunted “offstage.” We don’t witness any of them.

All of this suppression, of course, makes the moral drama of the novel throb unremittingly. We are never distracted from it by “interesting background.” Such stuff is of no interest to the three principals (and even less to the wonderful Mrs Stringham) as they weather, aware of doing so or not, Kate’s conspiracy, and we’re left with nothing to do but to judge, from page to page, just how wicked (or not) her scheme really is.

More anon, though, after I’ve copied out all the flagged passages — something that I can once again imagine living to do. Another book of recent interest is the Melville House publication of four interviews given by Hannah Arendt, as part of its “Last Interview” series. I recommend this book very highly, because it is a serious exposure of Arendt’s thought in a highly readable format. It is not a substitute for reading her big books, but I believe that any serious reader, otherwise unacquainted with her writing, will be moved by it to explore further. There are also topical matters, relating to current events at the times of the interviews, that wouldn’t pop up in books; one of these, which I take to be an eloquent if tacit indictment of Henry Kissinger’s baleful influence on the political culture of this country, I hope to mention next week.

Right now, though, I have a swamp to drain. The blue room is a mess!

When I sat down to write a brief entry this morning, the server was down, having developed a problem over the weekend that didn’t surface until this morning. The site — both sites, actually — had to be restored, and yesterday’s entry would have been lost to the ages (perish, &c) had I not saved a preview copy. From now on, I’m backing up the entries myself, using Notepad. Considering all the other mindless hoops that I have to jump through every day, the backup is not much of an extra. It will be my way of signing off, as it were, on the proofreading.

But this entry will be brief. I have a little rule that forbids me to say that, unless there’s a good reason for the brevity, as today there is. The Remicade infusion is scheduled for Thursday. I’ve been doing fairly well, covering the terra incognita into which I crossed when the infusion couldn’t be given at the normal (for me) 13-week interval; but on Sunday afternoon, I fell into a kind of stupid fatigue for which there was no ordinary explanation. The same thing happened yesterday: I breezed through morning routines only to run out of energy after lunch.

It wouldn’t be worth talking about, if I hadn’t had what seems to me an interesting insight into what life is like when the Remicade runs out. It’s not like illness. I don’t feel that I’m sick, or even getting sick. No, what I feel goes at the other end of malady: convalescence. The crisis is over, the pain abated — but the body is ravaged by the fight. Convalescing, your strength comes back to you in small waves. But for me, it’s precisely that that’s reversed. It’s like going at illness from the wrong end, and I have no idea where it will take me. I don’t expect to be ill, quite, but every day, I feel my strength ebbing. It’s not altogether physical, either. Decisions are hard to make, especially where desire ought to factor into the choice. For example: what to eat when you’ve no real appetite. It would be heaven if someone would bring in trays of bland food from time to time. Some of my best memories of undergraduate life are of just such meals, brought to my bed in the Notre Dame infirmary, where I spent a few weeks one year with mononucleosis, and then again, sometime later, with pneumonia.

As it is, I have only to pick up the phone. But which number to dial? I’m very tired, as this long winter grinds on, of everything that’s available in the the neighborhood’s subway-shriveled cornucopia.

***

A word about Barbara Stanwyck, who has been much in the buzz, what with the chattering classes’ awakening to the idea that Stanwyck was one of the great Hollywood stars. Not requiring any persuasion on this point myself, I’ve simply nodded sagely at hearing her mentioned. But I was reminded, casting about for a movie to watch this afternoon, that a DVD of one of her films has been languishing at the back of the cupboard, a loan from Ray Soleil — a loan so overdue that it has been converted into a gift by Ray’s purchase of another copy — Lady of Burlesque (1943).

This is not to be confused with Ball of Fire, the terrific action comedy that she made with Gary Cooper and Dana Andrews in 1941. The closest to a “costar” that Lady of Burlesque has to offer is Charles Dingle, a Will-Rogers-y character actor who plays one of Regina’s nasty brothers in Bette Davis’s Little Foxes. Everyone else — you’ve never heard of them. (Although Michael O’Shea, the jeune premier, kept reminding me of Bill Clinton.) The production values are a notch better than those of the average Charlie Chan feature. The music is barely passable, and the screenplay is corny and boring by turns — whatever colorful bits might have held the reader’s attention to Dixie Rose Lee’s G-String Murders has been bleached to beige.

What makes the movie awful, though, is Stanwyck herself. She’s simply too good for it, too good by light years. She makes everyone else onscreen look like a high-school thespian. Much as you want her to, she makes no attempt to steal the spotlight. It would be a stretch to argue that her part is inherently better than anyone else’s, even if it is the lead; she doesn’t really have “more to work with.” But every time that she is in the frame, Lady of Burlesque is worth watching. And then — she’s gone! — it is maddeningly not.

That’s why I recommend seeing this movie at least once. I don’t know what brought Stanwyck to Hunt Stromberg’s production company, but my guess is that she was doing somebody a favor. Did it cross her mind that she might be making a bomb? Probably not. Movies with budgets like this one’s didn’t bomb; because of the exhibition system then in place, they couldn’t. Only big, ambitious, expensive movies could bomb. And Lady of Burlesque isn’t a bomb, insofar as it involves here: that’s the miraculous point. The role suits her (as anyone seeing Ball of Fire could have predicted), and she flies with it. You get to see what a star can do with almost no help at all.

Regular readers will be astonished to learn that I did go to Jazz at Lincoln Center on Friday night, accompanying my dear wife to a Valentine’s Day recital by Dianne Reeves in the Rose Theatre. And I’m glad that I went, but only for Kathleen’s sake. Had I known what the event would be like, I think I’d have stayed away.

The Rose is a great venue for jazz musicians, but there is much to be learned about microphones and amplification. I believe that sound engineers ought to ratchet down the volume with which popular music is conventionally performed, and to try more closely to approximate the output of a chamber ensemble (where there is no sound enhancement beyond the hall’s acoustics). Instead, they’re taking it in the direction of stadium rock. After more than an hour of rumbling throbs, I can’t take it any more; the music, whatever else might be said of it, becomes annoying. This is not the complaint of an old man, by the way; after two or three rock concerts in the prime of my youth, I decided that such events were essentially unmusical, and I stayed away ever thereafter. I don’t mean to single out Dianne Reeves and her Beautiful Life band; the problem is in the Rose.

What I do fault Ms Reeves for is a certain confusion. Is she a jazz musician or a showcased singer? Is she a colleague, as everyone in a jazz ensemble must be, or a diva? The question wouldn’t come up if the Beautiful Life musicians weren’t the virtuosos they are, or if the audience didn’t appreciate their solos (which, man, they did), because Ms Reeves spends most of her onstage time on the diva side of the line. There weren’t many solos on Friday night. Dianne Reeves has a great big beautiful voice — it’s a wonder of the world, really, like Old Faithful or Niagara Falls — and that, together with what appear to be her temperamental inclinations, lead me to conclude that she would be more successfully herself if she were backed by a well-charted orchestra of the Nelson Riddle grade. She might no longer belong in the House of Jazz, but her concerts would be more satisfying. Less embarrassing, anyway: no one would fault her for not being generous to her fellow musicians. Peter Martin, Peter Sprague, Sean Jones, Tia Fuller, Raymond Angry, Reginald Veal and Terreon Gully at least ought to have had a jam for themselves. And the backup girls were so tamped down by the sound desk that they were audible only because they were visible.

Dianne Reeves’s CDs were on sale at a table in the lobby. I bought two, the new one (Beautiful Life) and and old one that I had missed. I expect to enjoy them a lot. Also: if I were planning a trip to Brasil, I’d try to time it to coincide with one of Ms Reeves’s visits. They must go crazy down there.

***

On the Bookends page of the Book Review this week, Francine Prose and Zoë Heller argue in favor of the negative book review. Their arguments must be dealt with.

Prose begins by pointing out something for which I admired her: for a long time, she refused to write negative reviews. In Reading Like a Writer, she collected so many lovely passages from books that meant a lot to her that the very existence of inferior fiction dropped out of sight. I regarded Prose as an ally on the bad-review front until recently, when I came across a review under her byline that displayed a dismaying number of the irritating characteristics common to bad reviews that don’t set out to be funny. (I ought to have made a note of it, but I didn’t, and now I can’t find it.) So I was not entirely surprised to read what she had to say at Bookends.

Prose gives two reasons for writing an unfavorable review. (1) “It depresses me to see talented writers figuring out they can phone it in, and that no one will know the difference.” (2) “I also tend to react when something about a book strikes me as indicative of an unfortunate trend.”

Zoë Heller’s piece is a response to some recent verbiage on the Internet, by Lee Siegel and Isaac Fitzgerald, that urged reviewers to be nice and to bear in mind that authors have feelings, too. Why Heller takes such spongy, sub-literary vaporizing seriously enough to debate is beyond me. She seems to think that (3) Siegel and Fitzgerald are infantilizing writers, who, in Heller’s view, have more than feelings at stake: they want to provoke reactions. Above all, they are adults; they can take it.

Yet they accept with varying degrees of resignation that they are not kindergartners bringing home their first potato prints for the admiration of their parents, but grown-ups who have chosen to present their work in the public arena.

Heller also claims that a signed unfavorable review “seems an altogether fairer way of dealing with a book one deems “bad” than banishing it.” This is not a fourth argument in favor of unfavorable reviews, but a recapitulation of Prose’s first argument.

Regular readers of long standing will recall that, for five or six years, I “reviewed” the Book Review every week. Whatever else this undertaking accomplished, it taught me the limitations of book-review form. Good reviews — by which I mean well-written and -thought-out reviews, not necessarily favorable ones (although, as I learned, good reviews were almost always favorable) — were uncommon. Bad reviews proliferated, and while there were many ways of writing a bad review, the one thing most bad reviews had in common was a focus on the reviewer. Most of all, I learned to ask what book reviews were for, anyway.

More precisely, what is the purpose of a Book Review book review? We must admit that, for many readers, the book reviews are gossip. They retail “book talk,” functioning as indiscreet baseball cards. They provide cheat sheets for the reader who doesn’t intend to read the book but who might want to mention it at a cocktail party. We cannot imagine, however, that supplying gossip is the purpose of the New York Times Book Review. Never!

Nor is the Book Review intended to weigh and consider matters of political and social importance as they are reflected in new books. Almost every other source of book reviews — the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Atlantic — does a much better job of that. Every now and then, an “important” topic gets front-page coverage in the Book Review, as often as not in the form of two reviews, printed side-by-side, of two different books. This week, Al Gore, no less, reviews Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction. Or, should I say, no more?

The Book Review also publishes reviews of books for children, and here we find the purpose of the Book Review unsullied by the blandishments of gossip. The purpose of the children’s-book reviews is to alert readers to new titles so that they may buy them for their children.

To say that the purpose of Book Review is to sell books is not to imply corruption. No, corruption is quite another matter, a matter of deceitful reviews. We must take it on faith that the Book Review‘s editors keep deceit to a minimum. It’s in their interest to do so, because propaganda will out.

The purpose of a Book Review book review is to present a book to as many potential buyers — readers who will enjoy the book — as possible. People who won’t buy the book, who wouldn’t like it, are of no account. I can think of no instance in which the Book Review ever published a piece in which, clearly, few-to-none readers would take an interest. Indeed, a good many unfavorable reviews are infused with the kinds of resentment, spurred by the very success of allegedly dodgy books, to which Prose confesses in both of her arguments. No, the Book Review assumes that the titles that it covers are out there and selling. Not best-selling, of course; the Book Review doesn’t review best-sellers either. There would be no point. The readers of best-sellers don’t need the kind of help that the Book Review, at its best, has to offer.

The good reviewer begins by liking the book. (This is what the editor is for.) Liking may not be love, but a favorable breeze of some strength will inspire the reviewer to present the qualities of the book as attractively as possible, thus drawing in more readers. I want to stress the note of presentation: the good reviewer is genial and more or less transparent. The good reviewer also knows how to warn readers who probably wouldn’t like the book to stay away. Cleverness is required.

I am not going to talk about the bad reviewer; instead, I am going to propose that the unfavorable review is not a presentation, but rather a kind of personal essay. It is about the presenter. The author of an unfavorable review may tell you that she didn’t really get the book, or he may complain (at length), that the author of the book ought to have written a different book — a book that the reviewer would have liked (is there any purer way of talking about oneself?). The reviewer might, as Prose would, charge the book with meretriciousness, making a culturally-rooted moral argument outside the scope of a platform like the Book Review. Or, again like Prose, the reviewer might regret a “trend.” This, too, would be outside the scope of the Book Review, because writing about trends takes up a lot of column inches, and necessarily addresses more than one book.

Is there a place for personal essays of this kind? I certainly think so. But the Book Review isn’t it.

Heller’s argument justifies the unfavorable review that scolds an author for something worse than “phoning it in.” If you follow the link at the bottom of this entry, you will be directed to Rick Pearlstein’s essay in the current issue of The Nation, “From & Friends,” an engrossing takedown of Al From’s self-puffing book about the Democratic Leadership Council. It is not a personal essay, but a summation of recent political history, written as a corrective to From’s party line. As book reviews go, it is strongly unfavorable. But it appears in The Nation, not the Book Review. Just as the Book Review ought to show us things that we might like, The Nation warns us about things that are bad. That is why we read The Nation if we do.

Having said all of this, I’m almost too weary to observe that the newspaper’s daily “Books of the Times” column, for which three or four professional critics write most of the contributions, does a much better job of reviewing books. Could it be that the Book Review really is all about the gossip, paid for by ads for books that are never, in its pages, reviewed?

Daily Blague news item: Ghosts and Zombies

It’s Valentine’s Day, and the weather is sunny, bright, and cold. Kathleen and I have tickets to hear Dianne Reeves sing at Jazz at Lincoln Center this evening. To spare me the risks of falling on icy pavements, Kathleen will have a car pick me up beforehand. If, for any reason, she can’t get a car, then she’ll give the tickets away or, possibly, go by herself. But I’m sure that a car will be available.

I’ve heard about older people losing interest in novels, and I hope that that won’t happen to me. But I do seem to have lost interest in the performing arts. There’s more to it than the inconvenience, such as it is, of going out in the evening (which overlays a dislike of leaving the neighborhood). It has something to do with being tired of watching people perform. Sitting in a concert hall, my mind wanders far more than it does when I’m sitting in the blue room and listening to a recording.

When I am feeling rather more robust than I do these wintry days, waiting for Remicade, I can snap on an urbane carapace that fools even me: I become the seasoned theatregoer, the music lover who knows when to applaud at a concert. I would hate for it to be known how much time I spend stewing in vanity while actors, dancers, and musicians knock themselves out, simply because I can appreciate what they’re doing. Every now and then, performers manage to carry beyond mere appreciation and out of myself. But such moments are rare. It is much easier to respond to music without the burden of the sophisticated mask that I instinctively don when I leave the neighborhood.

Solitude is important to me. (I am convinced that some aspect of my neural circuitry is autistic.) That’s, I think, why I’ve become so much more interested in the visual arts as I’ve grown older. As with books, I can be alone with them. I can spend as much time with them as suits me. And I can do something of which I’m pathologically incapable when other people (with whom I am not in conversation) are around: I can think.

Then there’s the fact that almost everybody onstage and in the audience is younger than I am, largely by a generation or more. This is depressing because youth, I now see, is an infirmity that only a very few people are allowed to outgrow.

The only thing that redeems the effort of going out and sitting through things is the delight of talking them over with Kathleen afterwards. It’s when I’m with her that my enthusiasm achieves a genuine flush. If there was anything to be enthusiastic about.

***

I re-read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent the other day. I bought my copy in 1970, in my last undergraduate term. (It’s the Doubleday Anchor paperback of 1953 that sports a cover drawn by Edward Gorey.) Inside the back cover, there’s a note indicating a second reading in 1976. Did I read it again at any point in the nearly forty years between then and now? I don’t recall. I rather think not, in fact, because, this time, the novel was very surprising. If you’d have asked me to sketch a thumbnail, I’d have told a story much like the one that Alfred Hitchcock tells in his 1936 adaptation — entitled Sabotage, by the way, not The Secret Agent (a different picture altogether).

It would focus on the dissatisfactions of the Verloc household, with the remote head of the household and his mysterious friends, his attractive, younger wife, and the wife’s mentally-challenged brother, whom the husband sends to his doom by instructing him to deliver a parcel to a certain destination by a certain time. The boy is incapable of ignoring the many distractions that he encounters on his mission, resulting in the explosion of a bus and the death of many passengers. When the wife, who was devoted to caring for her brother, discovers what happened, she murders her husband in cold-blooded rage. I can rattle this off so readily because I watched Sabotage last year, and it seemed an excellent and not significantly unfaithful adaptation. There was no movie theatre in Conrad, I knew, but this addition was really the interpolation of Hitchcock’s signature.

That Sabotage is a freely unfaithful adaptation of Conrad’s novel is unimportant; what’s interesting is that it captures what I remembered of the novel. What I remembered was the merely sensational part. The actual novel is rich and complex, and the story does not unfold in a straightforward, linear manner. (It also, I’d argue, goes off the rails at the end.) There is no exploding bus, and in fact the bomb detonates prematurely, because boy carrying it trips on a tree root in his path and stumbles. He is blown to smithereens, but there is no other damage. More interestingly, we find out about this from news reports read by other characters. The omniscient narrator does not witness the event. This is part of a greater indirectness that characterizes the sabotage itself: we never understand just why Verloc, the husband, didn’t plant the bomb himself, or why he thought that his seriously impaired brother-in-law would be able to carry out the task. The answers to these questions would be too uncomfortable for Verloc to handle, so he does not so much as acknowledge them, even in the miserably great scene in which he tries to talk his wife into getting over her grief.

The novel begins with a bit of stage-setting; we’re introduced to the Verlocs — Mr Verloc, Winnie Verloc, Winnie’s mother, and Winnie’s brother, Stevie, and to the unprepossessing shop which, fairly transparently, is the front for other, surreptitious activities. We’re presented with the considerations that made Mr Verloc a good catch in the eyes of Winnie and her mother, but the more we’re told about him, the more we doubt his soundness. The soundness of Verloc’s position is shown to be wanting in the very next scene, which takes place in a West End embassy. A Mr Vladimir, newly assigned to his country’s London mission, expresses extreme dissatisfaction with Verloc’s efforts as a secret agent. Mr Vladimir is tired of reports; he wants action. He wants to provoke the English authorities into clamping down on the anarchists who roam freely (if under surveillance) in British liberty. He proposes an attack on “science” — that will scare the public.

Verloc leaves the embassy in shock and despair. He is far too indolent to dream up a plot, much less to implement one. He’s capable of little more than hosting sedentary gatherings of highly feckless revolutionaries, such as the one we’re shown in the third chapter. Knowing that such “news” as might be gleaned from these meetings will no longer earn him the stipend upon which he depends for his livelihood, Verloc goes to bed foredoomed to insomnia. It is all excellently dismal. Conrad writes as if he were refashioning Henry James’s work to suit the impatience of his brother, William. The sensibility is there, but not the abstraction. Verloc’s hopelessness is like a carpet in which he has been rolled and tied, prior to being tossed into the sea. We can’t imagine how he’ll get out of it.

We find out a few pages later. Conrad has elided the passage of a month or so; Verloc’s attempt at escape has just occurred, with the explosion of a bomb in Greenwich Park, near the Observatory. (We can’t know it, but almost the entirety of the remaining story will take place on this day.) One of Verloc’s revolutionary friends confronts a fearful little man known as the “Professor” with the news, and the Professor readily acknowledges that he designed the device and delivered it to Verloc. This meeting is followed by an encounter in the street between the Professor and Chief Inspector Heat. Heat surprises the Professor (and the reader no less) by asserting that he’s not interested in the Professor just yet, even though he is investigating the Greenwich Park bombing and has no reason not to connect it with the Professor. It may be that Heat is aware that the Professor is “armed,” like a terrorist martyr, with an explosive that will certainly take the life of anyone who tries to apprehend him, but Conrad seems to be pointing to the Chief Inspector’s blustery careerism, which renders the dispensing of justice an incidental consideration. From this encounter, we follow Heat, who presently discovers a clue, in the remains of the dead bomber, that leads straight to Verloc. The investigation promises to be wrapped up with dispatch.

It is at this point, however, that the tale deviates from the conventions of crime genre fiction and becomes contrapuntal. Heat’s report on the case to his superior, the unnamed Assistant Commissioner, reveals not only that the two men are mutually antipathetic but that they seek to pursue contradictory ends in resolving the case. The only thing that they have in common is a lack of interest in arresting Verloc. During the evening that follows, the Chief Inspector and the Assistant Commissioner conduct competing inquiries into the case. We see more of the latter, which takes us into the great world of elegant salons and cabinet offices. The class divide between the Assistant Commissioner, who is a “gentleman,” and the Chief Inspector, who is not, is more salient than the one between owners and workers that would motivate the revolutionaries if they were not so sluggish. The Assistant Commissioner astutely senses the pressure of Mr Vladimir behind the bungled terrorist act, and he consults with a “Great Personage” — who happens to be the Secretary of State, but who would be a great personage in or out of office — before proceeding. The discussions between these men (including Heat) are the marrow of the novel; they outline the different ways in which the vested authorities propose to deal with the plots against the national security. They give the novel the form that in Mozart’s music is known as a romance, with an interlude of contrasting material separating the outer, mutually reflecting thirds of a piece.

It is only after the Assistant Commissioner has spent some time with Verloc that we return to the depressing shop. After a brisk, but not brief, account of the elided month, Conrad delivers a scene of virtuoso drama that would be operatic if it were not so suspended. Winnie, overhearing the Chief Inspector talking with her husband,  learns most of what has happened, and the news launches her into what can only be called a catatonic fury. For what seems a great deal of time only because the pages take a great deal of time to turn, Winnie lurches from pillar to post, unaware of what she’s doing. All the hopelessness that Verloc felt in the third chapter is reprised in Winnie’s bosom, and it, too, eventually climaxes in violence and death.

And now, I think, Conrad loses his grip. Winnie, we are repeatedly told throughout the body of the novel, is not a talker; she does not make a habit of getting to the bottom of things. I should have been more satisfied if, having murdered her husband with a Chekhovian carving knife, she put the matter out of her mind, as Verloc would have done. But no; she sinks into arias of confusion and dread. These arias are sung, as it were, to the revolutionary who informed the Professor of the blast, Comrade Ossipon, a strapping and exotically handsome young man who has made his way to the Verloc establishment with a precise view to charming the new widow into sharing her fortune with him. This, I think, is what ought to have happened. It would have constituted not a happy ending by any means but a just ending deferred. And it would preserve the tonal register of the Verloc flanks of the novel. Instead, Winnie Verloc undergoes an unwonted character transformation, apparently driven to mad loquacity by her crime. It is unconvincing stuff, and it goes on and on.

But by this time, Conrad has ferried us to something quite as awful as the heart of darkness. Verloc’s bland egotism, and his habit of seeing himself as the victim of what are in fact his own mistakes, are not as exotic as Kurtz’s jungle-bound megalomania, but the man’s sheer common vernacular puts his senselessness much closer to our everyday world. Conrad masterfully transmutes Verloc’s self-pity into cackling mockery.

A great discouragement, the result of fatigue, came upon Mr Verloc. He had had a very full day, and his nerves had been tried to the utmost. After a month of maddening worry, ending in an unexpected catastrophe, the storm-tossed spirit of Mr Verloc longed for repose. His career as a secret agent had come to an end in a way no one could have foreseen; only, now, perhaps he could manage to get a night’s sleep at last. But looking at his wife, he doubted it. She was taking it very hard — not at all like herself, he thought. He made an effort to speak.

George Packer has an interesting piece about Amazon in the current issue of The New Yorker. There’s not a lot that’s actually new in the report, but, as usual with Packer, deeper depths are sounded, and one of these helped to clarify my vision of an unexamined “truth” in today’s political economy: lower prices for the consumer are the highest good.

Well,  hardly “unexamined.” In 2009, Ellen Ruppel Shell published an excellent survey called Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. I mentioned this book at the time, but I did not do much more than that. (As I now see. You can too, if you do what I did.) Perhaps the book is worth a re-read. Here’s a fascinating quote from the prefatory “Note to Readers”:

And why was there such a scarcity of things reasonably priced? It seemed that almost all consumer goods were cheap, like the Chinese boots, or extravagant, like the Italian boots. Where, I wondered, was the solid middle ground that offered safe footing not so very long ago?

This is eerily like asking, What happened to the middle class? I believe that they’re the same question.

Do you remember Amazon’s 2012 FTC complaint against Apple and five of the largest publishing houses, which were attempting to introduce the “agency model” into e-publishing? Amazingly, the government, in both commission and court, came down for Amazon — leading to some malignant conspiracy theories that everyone involved ought to have foreseen. But even the substance of the government’s position, Packer writes, seems mistaken:

Apple, facing up to eight hundred and forty million dollars in damages, has appealed. As Apple and the publishers see it, the ruling ignored the context of the case: when the key events occurred, Amazon effectively had a monopoly in digital books and was selling them so cheaply that it resembled predatory pricing — a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Since then, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped, levelling off at about sixty-five percent, with the rest going largely to Apple and to Barnes & Noble, which sells the Nook e-reader. In other words, before the feds stepped in, the agency model introduced competition to the market. But the court’s decision reflected a trend in legal thinking among liberals and conservatives alike, going back to the seventies, that looks at antitrust cases from the perspective of consumers, not producers: what matters is lowering prices, even if that goal comes at the price of competition. Barry Lynn, a market-policy expert at the New America Foundation, said, “It’s one of the main factors that’s led to massive consolidation.” Judge Cote’s opinion described Amazon’s business practices in glowing terms, and she argued, “If Apple is suggesting that Amazon was engaging in illegal, monopolistic practices, and that Apples combination with the Publisher Defendants to deprive a monopolist of some of its market power is pro-competitive and healthy for our economy, it is wrong.

It is right, Judge Cote, and you are wrong. I remember the migraines that studying anti-trust law gave me in law school. No other body of the law seemed remotely so infected by the party-line opportunism of totalitarian pronouncement. There was no logic whatsoever, only a desirable outcome: low prices. Healthy competition, supposedly the objective of anti-trust jurisprudence, was jettisoned whenever it got in the way of low prices.

The cost of these low prices is jobs, and, behind the jobs, the very fabric of the national polity. The unintended side-effect of these low prices is the consolidation that Barry Lynn mentions, and therefore these low prices are also the cause, not only of income disparity (a matter of wiping out the middle class) but of grotesque wealth accumulation by a tiny number of Americans. These low prices have driven the sensible, well-made shoes from the stores. And for what? So that we can all have closets full of stuff that we don’t use? Storage units crammed?

There is an unseemly demagoguery here. The fact that liberals and conservatives agree about low prices is disturbing; it suggests that low prices per se can’t be very important to either tribe, but that they serve as a distraction from differing partisan objectives. Lower prices (usually in the form of cheap goods afflicted with Homer Simpson’s “fallapart”) will obviously make Republicans less objectionable to lower-income voters. Less cynically (but not much), liberals desire to make consumer goods “affordable” to the same voters. But it’s a bad bargain, because the pressure to lower prices has no internal governor, no brake. Workers are beginning to fight back. We can only hope that they understand that success will entail some sacrifice in the range of things that they are able to buy.

I thank George Packer for putting this all so neatly, for bundling the Apple/publisher challenge with Barry Lynn’s observation and Judge Cote’s dismal wrongheadedness in one paragraph. What goes in there comes out here.

Competition is a subtle concept. Everyone understands competition on price: that’s what I’ve been writing about here. But when prices are fixed, competition emerges on other fronts, such as quality and design. One might well argue that the “lower prices” mantra leads to fixed prices, or at any rate to successive plateaus of them, where it is the consumer who  effectively fixes the price. Sadly, the consumer is not as savvy as the producer when it comes to manufacturing. Nor is the consumer as conscious as a government agency might be of the effects of lower prices on general economic health. Anathema it might be to Tea Partyers, but the ordinary American is not the best judge of most things. Especially the ordinary American living under the noisy hairdrier of a big screen.

You can call me a cultural snob if you like. I’ll even go along with you, as long as we agree that you’re not imputing any hypocrisy with the application of “snob.” But my snobbery has a purpose beyond the propagation of Matthew Arnold’s “all the best.” I want to live in a society that affords its members opportunities to do meaningful, or at least not-degrading work. This seems to me to be the only stable, sustainable model. It requires that more attention be paid to the operation of social institutions (including jobs), but the objective is to improve those institutions. There is no worthwhile alternative.