Kathleen flew home from Phoenix yesterday, and there was rejoicing in the land. There was also sleeping-in.

Kathleen’s flight landed about an hour before I expected it. I was busy with CDs in the blue room. Yesterday marked an era: all of the CDs in my collection have been “processed” — a term that it makes me queasy to use so soon after reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. The jewel boxes have been discarded; the discs slipped into labeled sleeves, and the associated paperwork (booklets and such) arranged just so about each of them, and all are somewhere more or less appropriate in the filing system. The filing system is not as coherent as it might be, largely because I altered the “process” quite a bit in the early days of organizing the library in a way that would take up less space, but clearing up the filing inconsistencies is the only job that remains.

In this prolonged tear through the project, I came across a lot of music that I haven’t heard in five or six years. The only time I play a CD these days is when it’s new. I load it onto iTunes right away, and, from there, sometimes, onto playlists. It’s the playlists that I listen to. So, if the music isn’t iTunes, I haven’t heard it in a while. (The first playlist dates to September 2008.) And, now that I can breathe — now that there aren’t any stacks of jewel boxes tottering accusingly on my desk, in my closets, or anywhere else — I can see what I have, especially among the odd labels.

I’ve wondered a lot, lately, how different my life would have been had I studied library science. Any at all? It seems, rather, that the organization of a small collection of items — and any collection that can be housed in an apartment is small, no matter whether three or six thousand books are involved — is a terribly personal matter. I’m the only user, after all. I don’t aim to be arcane; I daresay anyone who had the run of the place would figure it all out in a month or less (and learn a lot about me). But as I’ve got older there has been a shift. I used to organize things in a way that made sense. Now I have a different objective: I want to suit myself. Yes, the history books are in one book case, and the novels in another. But I do seem to understand myself a lot better than I know what makes sense in some abstract way. I have a lot of books that don’t lend themselves to glib classification. Biographies of great composers, for example — music? or biography? At the moment, they’re in music, just as political biographies are in history. The biography section, such as it is, is reserved for books about writers. It stands alongside all the other books — and sometimes, I think that this is the heart of the library — that could be classified as non-fiction literature. What it comes down to is that the reallocation of a shelf or two of books is indeed, as someone (Borges?) once put it, a form of literary criticism, and I believe that, in my case anyway, this criticism is progressive, that I’m getting better at it, that I’m learning what literature is. My bookshelves are the essay in which I express what I’ve learned. So I do wonder what I should have learned from professional study.

I rarely mention it, but managing my library is made considerably more difficult than it might be by my insistence that all these books and bookcases be presentable. A very this-worldly thinker, I cannot tolerate heaps and piles and stacks of things. The blue room must masquerade at all times as a gentleman’s sitting room.

***

Which it most certainly did not for most of this week. Oh, my dear (to quote Mrs Grimmer), it was a fright. There was folded laundry everywhere, and a litter of scraps on the writing table, not to mention that final stack of CDs — one of which, a recording of Cherubini’s Missa Solemnis, seems to have gone missing when an inadvertent armswing sent the stack flying. Now there’s just an overflowing basket of Reviews of Books, copies of The Nation, and other mail. No, now that I look more closely, there’s also wire-mesh thingy that is wildly overstuffed with papers to be acted upon in some way or other (not bills!). I know how I’m going to deal with these disorderly remains. I’ve just called the Video Room and asked them to send over a copy of Now You See Me. This was the feature on the plane flying home from San Francisco, as I could tell from occasional glances at the screen, but I was busy with The Golden Bowl. I expect that it’s a not-very good movie with a very good cast. I’ll put it on to ease the drudgery of playing Russian clerk.

***

I’m in the middle of so many books at the moment that a charge of ADD could fairly be made against me. But two books in the rear-foreground are related in a highly piquant compare-and-contrast way. One is Neil Harris’s book about Carter Brown and the National Gallery, Capital Culture, that I mentioned the other day. It is scholarly and dutiful. By contrast, Robert Edsel’s Monuments Men is hard-charging and, in a way that seems to appeals to most male readers of history (ie, military history of the you-are-there stripe), artlessly complicated. Monuments Men has been adapted for film and will be released early next year, with George Clooney directing as well as playing a leading role. The leading role, I gather, belongs to Matt Damon, who plays James Rorimer. I have to stop when I say that, because, to me, “James Rorimer” is the author of the guide to the Cloisters that I grew up with, and they are one and the same man. Much as I admire Matt Damon, I can’t quite see him at the Cloisters, not yet. It’s just as hard to imagine, though, that the movie won’t be a hit, at least among people who liked The American, and I hope that the good folks at the Museum are planning some kind of tie-in — surely this is the time to name something after Rorimer, who was also a Director of the Museum, with a benefit dinner attended by Mr Damon.

(One link between these two books is that John Carter Brown, the gallery director’s father, served on the Roberts Commission, which oversaw the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Allied recovery of Europe after 1944. Another one is the business — and recklessness — of moving artworks around.)

But the book in the near-foreground is Michael Anesko’s Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship. The subtitle makes the book sound deadly, I know, but fear not: this is one delicious read. Serious but provocative, Anesko’s book is a giant bon-bon, a guilty-pleasure glance at high-minded people behaving, er, not so highly. Beginning with the Master himself, who rewrote William James’s letters and then destroyed the originals! All this is a mere warm-up for the exposé of Leon Edel as a mediocre opportunist whose “skill” consisted in missing much that is important (ambiguous, queer) in James’s writing. Anesko reminds us that the James family fortune was rooted in real property, and the Jameses seem to have little trouble regarding literary output as a kind of fruitful acreage, to be husbanded with assiduity. I’ve only just begun the second chapter, and already the temptation to drop everything else is very strong. Anesko can’t be charged with imitating the voice of Henry James, but he echoes its modulations — certainly more than does Colm Tóibín. who, by the way, isn’t even mentioned in the index! Here is Anesko on William James’s well-known remark about his brother’s nationality.

Though James obviously prided himself on his deliberate cosmopolitanism, even members of his own family sometimes wondered about the cost entailed by cultivating it. William most famously addressed this when he described his younger brother (in a letter to their sisterr, Alice) as only superficially Anglicized, despite “all the accretions” from his years of living in London. “His anglicisms are but ‘protective resemblances,’ William pithily observed. “[H]e’s really,  I won’t say a yankee, but a native of the James family, and has no other country.” If citizenship in that country conveyed extraordinary privileges, it also imposed peculiar defensive obligations: and all the Jameses seem to have understood and accepted the need to shield the family and its sometimes vulnerable members from critical scrutiny.

That “that” sets the very cadence of James.

Reading about Nelson Mandela’s achievement in South Africa has had a special piquancy picquancy, because Mandela seems to be exactly the antithesis of Hannah Arendt’s Adolf Eichmann, that clown about whom I’ve been reading. Mandela was intelligent, he was in possession of a simple truth (revenge is every bit as wrong as apartheid), and he was determined to press this truth home. He suffered badly, but he survived his suffering, or at least appeared to have done so; he was not broken by the eighteen-year stay on Robben Island. Above all, Mandela made a habit of doing the right thing. Moralists from Aristotle on down have insisted that this habit is the key to the good life.

In today’s Times, Thomas Friedman contrasts Mandela’s “moral authority” with the “formal authority” that is vested in duly elected officials. This distinction has been on my mind for decades, but I have never been able to put it so neatly. I can safely say that the overarching experience of my life has been witnessing the collapse of formal authority on almost every front. It is never enough, not anymore, to command respect. The best it can do is to command the police in an attempt, more or less successful, to preserve the status quo; formal authority can usually depend on the support of the propertied classes. The word for this abuse of formal authority is tyranny.

What is “moral authority”? To answer this question, Friedman turns to Dov Seidman, a “governance” coach and author of the book, How. Seidman, Friedman writes,

argues that another source of Mandela’s moral authority derived from the fact that “he trusted his people with the truth” rather than just telling them what they wanted to hear. “Leaders who trust people with the truth, hard truths, are trusted back,” said Seidman. Leaders who don’t generate anxiety and uncertainty in their followers, who usually deep down know the truth and are not really relieved, at least for long, by having it ignored or disguised.

Well, yes — although people trusted with the truth don’t always “trust back” right away. Sometimes, the leader has to spend some time in a place like Robben Island. But Seidman’s idea shows us, I think, what authority is going to be like in the future. What it means to be “moral” in this context is to pursue the truth as seriously and intelligently as one can, and to express it in language that allows its clarity to shine forth. What it means to be a “moral authority” is to trust other people to receive the truth into their hearts.

Let’s grant that the truth is sempiternal, always the same. At the risk of sounding condescending, I want to respect the grave need that many very intelligent people have to believe that truth is incorruptibly “out there.” I don’t believe this myself, but I don’t believe that it isn’t the case, either. I don’t know — and I don’t need to know. What I do know is that the truth is very complex, far too complex for comprehensive understanding by mortal minds. The history of civilization is essentially a sequence of shifting perceptions of the truth. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, it was “true” that the earth stood at the center of the universe. That’s just one example, but I think it sufficiently demonstrates just how massively wrong the truth can become in human hands. What is true, in this case, is that the world generally appears to stand still. So often, we are seduced into untruth by the powers of a meretricious logic — few words are as worrisome to me as “extrapolate.”

Human beings appear to have grasped an elementary set of commandments, or truths, about the conduct of life, but the application of these commandments is rarely straightforward. (How does a military chaplain parse “Thou shalt not kill”?) In our own time, we are bewildered by conflicting claims about truths of an economic nature. These claims appear to me to be both premature and self-serving (a combination characteristic of moral failure). Competing for attention, other people advance claims about the damage that human beings are doing to the Earth’s environment, and urging various courses of action that nevertheless have in common a dimness about the economic fact that human beings need good jobs in order to live meaningful lives. The only voices that come close to making sense of everything are the preachers of apocalpyse.

Most truths are not as simple as the evil of apartheid. They require questioning in the dark, measured discussion, and genuine humility. Grasping the nature of true humility is difficult enough all by itself; in great men, it looks more like an athletic skill than anything else.

What is so inspiring about Mandela, explained Seidman, “is that he did not make the moment of South Africa’s transition about himself. It was not about his being in jail for 27 years. It was not about his need for retribution.” It was about seizing a really big moment to go from racism to pluralism without stopping for revenge. “Mandela did not make himself the hope,” added Seidman. “He saw his leadership challenge as inspiring hope in others, so they would do the hard work of reconciliation. It was in that sense that he accomplished big things by making himself smaller than the moment.”

I can hope only to be fractionally as inspiring as Nelson Mandela, but know this: I trust my readers.

Can I tell you about this dream I had? No? Not even if Frederica von Stade, the beautiful mezzo-soprano, was in it? She sat down next to me at a large party, something between a wedding reception and a barbecue, and, without saying anything, communicated to me the complete collapse of her interest in me as a human being. Never having made enough of a commitment to feel disappointed in me, she was merely irritated at my having imposed upon her attention. This done, she stood up and walked away, as nonchalant as an espionage agent quitting a park-bench interview.

I blame Facebook. For some reason, Ms von Stade’s picture has been showing up alongside Tom Meglioranza’s, as a “musical interest” of mine, or somesuch, on my page. Mr Meglioranza I do know. As for Ms von Stade, I sat in on an interview with her once, at the radio station, when she was singing Octavian in the Houston Grand Opera production of Der Rosenkavalier. This was in the early-mid Seventies — ’74 or ’75  (I can’t find a list on the Internet) — the darkest years of my Houston sojourn. Who knows? Maybe she contributed to my determination to get my act together and go to law school. She was lovely! She was smart! She was just like the girls I’d known from King Street. She was a reminder that I was in the wrong place, in so many ways. As things were, I didn’t stand a chance with the likes of Frederica von Stade.

My colleague at the radio station couldn’t have been pleased that I was hanging around in the cramped studio while he tried to establish a rapport with the singer. I don’t know how I came to be in the room. Perhaps I greeted her when she arrived, by happenstance, took her where she needed to be, made pleasant chit-chat, and then wouldn’t leave. In any case, shortly afterward, I did study hard. I got into law school and actually passed the Bar exam! If I did not make a success as an attorney, I did marry someone who did, and she happens to be an alumna of 91st Street.

It is all right, then, for Frederica von Stade to walk away from me in my dreams. Now, if I can just remove her from my Facebook page…

***

It is a day for dreaming. Snow is falling outside, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m engrossed in a new book, on a subject with which I am no more than passingly familiar. Capital Culture: J Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience, by Neil Harris, tells an important story; I only wish that he told it a bit better. He writes well enough, but that’s just it: the story deserves brilliance, and Harris is too dutiful to dare to be brilliant. He has undoubtedly written the correct book, and I am going to learn a great deal from it. I have already recommended it. But, just as he writes of the National Gallery, that it is in the Smithsonian Institution but not of it, so Harris is of the crowd that he’s discussing, not above it.

It’s an interesting crowd, to be sure, about as interesting a crowd as the American patriciate could produce. But the interest is somewhat smothered by the typically American horror of flamboyance. None of Harris’s characters (so far) is extraordinary, except to the extent that anyone who does well at Groton or St Paul’s and Harvard or Yale is extraordinary with respect to the American in the street. The air is purer up there, and it used to be even purer still. Virtue and merit flourish there as nowhere else — which is not to suggest that everyone who breathes in that atmosphere displays either. But those who do can accomplish more with their talents than other people can, because they’re better-connected. They’re better-connected to everything worth being connected to, from important people to opportunities for travel to highly privileged access to the truly fine things in life. It’s a pity that their outward manner is so deliberately dull.

And when one of them manages not to be dull, as, say, Thomas Hoving did, relieved gratitude is not always one’s lasting response. Carter Brown was not as “charismatic” as his counterpart at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and rival for, well, buzz, and I’m hoping that Harris’s finished portrait will show him to have been neither dull nor unbearable — we shall see.

All the men in this crowd (and their wives) had to cope with Washington, DC, arguably the most beautiful city in the United States but also (aside from New Orleans) certainly the strangest. It is a world capital that behaves quite as if it were the only capital, making it about as provincial as one of those thriving merchant towns in Galicia during the Hapsburg sunset. There is simply no other explanation for Mamie Eisenhower, who in my view was the rule to which Jacqueline Kennedy was a striking exception. At the same time, it denies that it is a capital at all: the Capitol is nothing less than the meeting-house of representatives of the sovereign States, whose various capitals — dreadful backwaters, most of them — are the actual constitutional wellsprings of power. (They may not be able to tell the President what to do, but they can certainly deny him the money to do it with.) Of all the cities in the world — since it’s snowing, I’ll throw in Moscow — Washington probably has the highest per-capita population of people one was glad to see the last of in high school. On bad days, it seems to be a sort of Third Life, the real-world version of a computer game.

There is simply no other explanation for the very strange story that appeared below the fold on the front page of this morning’s Times. “Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games,” by Mark Mazzetti and Justin Elliott, never gets round to drawing the only possible conclusion, which is that a consortium of knuckleheads and opportunists has convinced itself that money, and plenty of it, needs to be spent to make sure that World of Warcraft and Second Life are not chat rooms for terrorists. The reporters go no further than to quote a gamer:

“If they ever read these forums,” wrote a goblin priest with the user name “Diaya,” “they would realize they were wasting” their time.

I’ve got a strong hunch that no sphere of human activity is more likely to produce unpaid whistleblowers than the world of online games. Third Life is paid for, of course, by tax dollars. On bad days, I sympathize with Grover Norquist. But I always sympathize with Edward Snowden, to whose indiscretion we owe news of this activity.

Even before television, Washington life required an outer blandness characterized by dark-suited men attending committee meetings. Reading about it can be depressing, and I’m doing so now only because I do believe that Andrew Mellon’s dream of creating an American counterpart of Britain’s National Gallery was substantially realized by the institution whose fairy godfather he was. If the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a galaxy of different worlds, bringing together good, and sometimes great, things from everywhere, the National Gallery of Art is a diamond necklace put together by Harry Winston. How this necklace has been worn, and how it is worn today, is a matter of no small interest to anyone interested in the display of fine art in a museum.

Then there’s the bonus: S Dillon Ripley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and thereby in some queer way an overseer of the National Gallery. I’m perfectly willing to set aside my passion for crazy characters for the sake of a good yarn about a turf battle.

Nothing starts off the week like waking up to an Internet connection problem! I’m limping along with my trusty but sluggish MiFi card while I wait to find out whether there’s a cable problem or it’s just me. But limping along is a bad pace for writing.

What’s really in the way this morning is Eichmann in Jerusalem, which I finished last night. I want to copy out all the flagged passages — somewhere between twenty and thirty, I should think — into an Evernote, and see what I have. There is a great deal of wisdom in Hannah Arendt’s book, and so much legal savvy that she might have trained as an attorney. I think that she’s absolutely right to conclude that, having tried Eichmann, Israel ought to have kept him in jail pending a mandate from the United Nations or some such international organ.

Arendt’s discussion of genocide (as a crime wholly distinct from murder or even mass, indiscriminate murder) got me thinking: genocide and nationalism grew up together, you might say. Killing everything that lived in a city — we read about this in the Bible, and we know what the Romans did in Corinth — is not quite genocide. Punishing a city is not exterminating a race. The very concept of race in its current form is new, having been more or less figurative until Darwin and others explored the nature of inheritance. This isn’t to say that race itself is a scientific concept — it’s very much not. Neither, therefore, is nationalism — the idea that a proper nation comprises, exclusively, the members of one race.

Something like genocide inspires anti-immigration hysteria in certain parts of the United States. The race that this hostility targets is the tribe of Mexicans and other Latin Americans who dare to enter this country illegally. If they die in the crossing,  it’s their own damn fault. But they’re targeted because they’re Latin American, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t mean to disparage those who would build a palisade along the Mexican border so much as to suggest that this sort of impulse is inevitable in any nationalistic context.

What’s next, after nationalism? Can something more positive take its place, or will nationalism put an end to modern civilization, as it has tried to do several times since its appearance on the world stage just over two centuries ago? I hope that it is not a necessary stage in civil development, because most of the Arab world has not yet arrived at nationalism. (This can be seen as the secret of Israel’s success.) The step beyond nationalism would be a way of thinking that provided people with a sense of social coherence, but now without depending on the demonization of other societies. It would fold a horror of violence into the sense of self. A pretty tall order.

I keep coming back to the euphoria with which Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem. It’s palpable on the page, in her sparkling, contemptuous wit, which glitters in almost every sentence. Some readers might find this inappropriate — the Eichmann case is no occasion for Arendt to prove herself to be the smartest person in the room. I see it differently, with less ego. Being the smartest person in the room was probably old hat to Arendt when she sat down to write about this trial. The possibility of being smart, the power of thought — these are what the book celebrates. It celebrates courage, too — the courage of the Danes, for example, and the courage of Anton Schmidt — but courage for Arendt is simply the determination to do the right thing. She certainly demonstrates that the Nazis were no more courageous than they were thoughtful. Writing her book, Arendt may have felt that she had discovered something as mighty as, and vastly more meaningful than, a nuclear warhead.

***

It was just me, after all. I should recover from the panic attack shortly. Maybe by Thursday I’ll be able to keep my eye off the connection icon.

This morning was so dark and dispiriting — and we were up so late last night — that, instead of making the bed, I got back into it. When I wasn’t dozing, I was reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. After a few hours of this, various events along the alimentary canal brought my day into focus, and here, accoutered with sandwich and slippers, I am.

I had been a regular reader of The New Yorker for the better part of a year when the first installment of Hannah Arendt’s “Report on the Banality of Evil” appeared the magazine. I don’t recall deciding not to read it; I may even have given it a try, and then given up, defeated by Arendt’s allusive manner — writing about the most enormous horror of modern times, she was not about to begin with a précis of events — as well as by her tone of mordant, at times comical, contempt, which is by no means focused exclusively on the defendant and his Nazi past. I’d have missed the references, and passed out on the ironies. The book was in every way too old for me.

But there was, or must have been, I’m sure, a certain additional peculiarity to my resistance. What the Nazis had done to the Jews was an abomination, everybody knew that; and yet I lived in a town where realtors uniformly advised Jewish inquirers that no house within the sacred square mile of Bronxville would be sold to them. This was one of our civic achievements. My mother, in any case, was quite proud of it. She was not shy about expressing her anti-Semitic views. The vague but persistent feeling that there was something wrong with these views made me very uncomfortable (she was my mother, after all), and as long as I myself lived in Bronxville I preferred not to think about them. The thinking would start later in 1963, when I packed off to prep school, which abounded in Jewish classmates. In February, when Eichmann began its serial run, I almost certainly felt that it would scold me for something that I hadn’t done.

I’m reading the book now because — presto! — it’s fifty years old, and everyone’s getting a word in. So far, I subscribe without reservation to Arendt’s core idea, which is that truly thinking people could never have committed such atrocities; if you disagree, then you don’t understand what thinking really is. I also accept her portrait of Adolf Eichmann as a bureaucratic clown, a doofus whose braggadocio was concocted from stock phrases and decked out in borrowed plumes. I haven’t reached the most controversial part of the book, in which Arendt comes down hard on the Judenräte, the Jewish “elders” who helped the Nazis “organize” the Jews.

One thing that can’t be said of Arendt, I feel, is that she was a “self-hating Jew.” She no more struggles against her Jewish ancestry than she does against her gender. It is not the most important thing about her, certainly; she is most passionate about the soundness of her intellectual life. She was the kind of idealistic Zionist who could only be dismayed by the disappointments of the actual Israel. She belonged where she wound up, here, in Manhattan, although by that I don’t mean that she deserved the drubbing that she got from American Jews, whose principal settlement has always been this city, after everyone had a chance to read her Report. Mary McCarthy made a very interesting remark about the character of the debate (I can’t find it, so I’ll have to paraphrase): one felt either like the only child in a room full of reproving adults, or the other way around. People on each side claimed that there was something that their opponents didn’t, or wouldn’t, understand. Philip Rieff (in The Nation) and Mark Lilla (in The New York Review of Books) both argue that Arendt was, at best, “tone deaf.” But Eichmann in Jerusalem refuses to be bewildered by the Holocaust, and I admire that.

The Holocaust was the purest expression of the nationalistic passion that infected Europeans during the French Revolution. Tribes and “peoples” had always been recognized, but no one had ever seriously considered building states atop them.  Quite the reverse: civilized life, in (admittedly slave-bound) classical antiquity, was seen as post-tribal. When you became a Roman citizen, it didn’t matter if your mother tongue was Latin or Greek or something else: you were Roman. Why this broke down in the early modern period I’m not quite sure, but the emergence of England’s maritime power must have had something to do with it. England was a natural “island nation,” notwithstanding the inconvenient persistence of Celtic aboriginals. France was just the opposite, a small heartland along the valleys of the Seine and the Loire, surrounded by ambiguous marches. Without a monarch to unite them, the French fell back on being French, even though most subjects/citizens weren’t. But there had always been a France, for ages and ages anyway. There had never been a Germany, and fashioning one out of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire called for a lot of invention. In retrospect, it seems obvious that these new Germans would inevitably need to define themselves by expelling the Jews. That was indeed Eichmann’s original objective: “helping” Jews to leave the Reich. The war made genuine emigration difficult — impossible, really — but Eichmann kept going, shipping Jews from here to there. What happened “there” was not his department.

This isn’t to say that Eichmann wasn’t a criminal, that what he did was somehow excusable. But what he and the other actors did on the Nazi stage was made possible by the virulence of the terrible sickness of nationalism that infected the general population, and that the interventions of a racist American president, Woodrow Wilson, wrongheadedly exacerbated at the end of World War I. (“National” is, after all, what the party’s nickname comes from.) What happened in Germany could happen anywhere similarly afflicted. And it does.

***

I am haunted by a passage from late in The Golden Bowl. It’s about the Prince, and his imperturbable self-possession in the wake of being confronted by his wife’s awareness of his infidelity.

He had taken from her on the spot in a word, before going to dress for dinner, all she then had to give — after which, on the morrow, he had asked her for more, a good deal as if she might have renewed her supply during the night; but he had had at his command for this latter purpose an air of extraordinary detachment and discretion, an air amounting really to an appeal which, if she could have brought herself to describe it vulgarly, she would have noted as cool, just as he himself would have described it in any one else as ‘cheeky’; a suggestion that she should trust him on the particular ground since she didn’t on the general. Neither his speech nor his silence struck her as signifying more or signifying less, under this pressure, than they had seemed to signify for weeks past; yet if her sense hadn’t been absolutely closed to the possibility in him of any thought of wounding her she might have taken his undisturbed manner, the perfection of his appearance of having recovered himself, for one of those intentions of high impertinence by the aid of which great people, les grands seigneurs, persons of her husband’s class and type, always know how to re-establish a violated order.

What came into my mind as I read this was the Marschallin counting, in the third act of Der Rosenkavalier, “eins, zwei…” and sending the Baron back to the boonies. Copying out the passage just now, I think of another Strauss opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, in which grandiose elements commingle with vulgar ones.

There’s no doubt in my mind that those two titles, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Ariadne auf Naxos, come out of the same box of classical allusion.

Kathleen Moriarty

Schadenfreude isn’t one of my weaknesses, or so I like to think. When bad things happen to other people, my response is usually sympathetic, because merely imagining bad things makes me feel vulnerable. Especially self-inflicted bad things. The older I get, the more astonished I am that I manage to get through the day without being arrested or inadvertently killing myself. And that’s now. When I was young and reckless — but I can’t be thinking about that. No, the possibility of bad things happening is far too vivid for me to derive any satisfaction from the misfortune of others.

And yet, this morning, I found myself sunk up to my neck in a bath of agreeable wickedness, as I read a tittle-tattle story in the Times about Nigella Lawson. I am so bad.

Back in the mid-Aughts, not quite ten years ago, Lawson had a weekly column in the Times, which I think was called “At My Table.” I didn’t know who she was at the time, except that she was obviously British and just as obviously in possession of a well-upholstered wallet. And she could cook. She could cook for a crowd without breaking a sweat. Her recipes, which always sounded both straightforward and interesting, never seemed to have more than four ingredients, and these ingredients seemed to cook themselves immediately upon introduction. She had an enormous kitchen in a townhouse somewhere — Greenwich Village, was it? Every now and then, the existence of not just a cleaner or a nanny but a considerable domestic staff would be hinted at. I hated Nigella Lawson. My envy had nowhere else to go.

Later, I discovered that she was the daughter of a Thatcherite Chancellor of the Exchequer whose name was Nigel Lawson, and I felt very sorry for her. Nigella, indeed. What was he thinking?

Now I find out that she really did have a domestic staff. Not back then, maybe, but more recently, while she was married to Charles Saatchi. (Why?)

When a friend offered her cocaine, she said, she took it, adding that she had smoked marijuana from time to time in the last year of her marriage to Mr. Saatchi. Not knowing how to roll a marijuana cigarette, she asked others in the well-staffed household to do it for her. “This was not behavior I’m proud of,” she said.

It seems that two members of that staff, or two employees of her former husband, were stealing from the couple. The thieves claim that they were given “free rein” to use their bosses’ credit cards, in exchange for keeping mum about Lawson’s drug use. This is why my mother disliked having servants. You just never know.

How is it possible that a “celebrity chef” doesn’t know how to roll a joint? Boggles! Even  I know how… But, really, Grey Lady, “marijuana cigarette” is carrying the “family newspaper” thing a little too far!

A proper teatime is a meal, not a snack, so it’s good to have something savory to hand around. My salmon sandwiches are not exactly traditional — in the old days it would have been fish paste spread between the slices — but rather a new take on an old theme. The star anise in the poaching water for the salmon and the ginger in the mayonnaise (along with the shredded Chinese leaf, or, easier to find, romaine) give a vaguely Asian flavor, but this is still a substantial English offering.

That’s from a column published ten Thanksgivings ago. Isn’t it hateful? I’m going to make the sandwiches this weekend. Ha, you say. How do you know that I’m not going to waltz into my huge kitchen and tell the staffer in the white apron what I want for tea?

Kathleen Moriarty

My eyes rarely stray to the editorial page at the Times — what is one supposed to do with all that pious exhortation? — but I was immediately drawn to commentary on the other day’s Metro North derailment. This disaster seemed awful but faintly ho-hum to me until I learned that the train was barreling along at 82 mph, on track where 30 mph was the limit. That, and the queer fact that the driver bore a plutocratic name, got me interested. The editorial complained about foot-dragging in the railroad industry, which has heretofore resisted attempts to require “positive train control,” as the latest in safety mechanisms is known. Since 1969, no less.

You have to wonder why a business concern would have to be admonished on the subject of safety. No, you do! What kind of moral fail enables the managers of unsafe systems to get to sleep at night? I’m not talking about guarantees; nothing can be absolutely safe. But the automated prevention of excessive speeding is a no-brainer. Ideally, speeding trains would be brought to a stop at the nearest station — an inconvenience for travelers, yes, but a sure way of focusing attention on mechanical problems and/or human negligence before harm is done. The expense of implementing safety procedures is no argument against them, unless the cost be proved to be staggering. How demoralizing it must be, to work in a business that shrugs off such obvious responsibilities.

Metro North is not an ordinary business, It spends more on operations than it takes in in revenue — as do all modes of human transport, in one way or another. Airlines are subsidized by “free” airports and a federal traffic-control system. Automobile drivers do not have to pay to use most roadways. Railroads are cursed by having been set up as moneymaking companies, back in the Nineteenth Century. Freight haulers still run in the black — witness Warren Buffett’s investment in Burlington Northern. Passenger trains used to make money, just as ocean liners did, by carrying the mail. But history does not point the way here. It tells us only that American railroads were altogether ramshackle at inception, a characteristic that evidently still clings. My own bright idea would be to replace American bosses with French and German ones, and to mandate a European stint for every manager of operations. The devastation of World War II provided Europeans with the opportunity to rethink their rail systems after 1945. We could use a similar reset.

That Metro North is operated by the State of New York emphasizes the drawbacks of governmental regulation. David Brooks wrote about this yesterday, in the broader context of national affairs.

It is just too balky an instrument. As we’re seeing even with the Obamacare implementation, government is good at check-writing, like Social Security, but it is not nimble in the face of complexity. It doesn’t adapt to failure well. There’s a lot of passive-aggressive behavior. In any federal action, one administrator will think one thing; another administrator will misunderstand and do something else; a political operative will have a different agenda; a disgruntled fourth party will leak and sabotage. You can’t fire anybody or close anything down. It’s hard to use economic incentives to get people moving in one direction. Governing is the noble but hard job of trying to get anything done under a permanent condition of Murphy’s Law.

We don’t really know how to set up regulatory schemes, because we still expect that the people who run them will be enlightened and reasonable. As they might be, I think, more often, anyway, more consistently, perhaps, if we shared a strong sense of civic commitment, which it’s quite obvious we don’t. Just to be clear about it, civic commitment is the opposite of patriotism, that worst of self-inflating vices.

“Civic commitment” — talk about pious exhortaton! What makes the notion interesting to me is my belief that it’s an undiscovered country. We imagine that there used to be a better time in American life, one characterized by vibrant public spirit, but that is a mirage; what we’re really seeing is the boosterish optimism that intoxicated our forebears for several generations after the Civil War. We don’t, in fact, know what civic commitment would look or feel like. We never have.

We don’t know a lot of things, and we have four dead passengers to prove it.

Kathleen Moriarty

Grand settings — impressionistically sketched, to be sure, so as not to bog down the drama in inorganic detail — are common in the novels of Henry James, but in his final masterpiece, The Golden Bowl, they become the rule rather than the occasional exception. James’s treatment of Fawns, the immense country house in Kent, is characteristic: he suggests that the place is simply too large to compass, so he doesn’t even try. The terrace front at Matcham, before which one of the novel’s most thrilling — and most hushed — scenes plays out, is also unimaginably long, and with its view of three cathedral towns it appears to float on a magic carpet over the Cotswold countryside instead of rudely surmounting it. We are encouraged to imagine that the London houses occupied by Adam Verver and his daughter, Maggie, in Eaton Square and Portland Place, respectively, are larger than they might possibly, in actuality, be. Colonel and Mrs Assingham live in Cadogan Place, not meant to be especially grand by James but grand enough today. Even the queer little antiquarian shop in Bloomsbury, however faded in 1904, has been polished up by that quarter’s subsequent history, and it is also associated with the one great old pile that the reader can visit in person, the British Museum. Everywhere in The Golden Bowl, one stands as if in halls too vast to make out, the distant corners of which, far from being dark or obscure, seem to dissolve in mists of great wealth.

The irony of this gift for imaginative stage-setting is as immense as Fawns, for it embodies James’s dismal failure as a playwright — the great disappointment of his professional career — in a novel that is as intensely dramatic as anything ever performed on the stage. James’s demands of the theatre and of theatre audiences were so excessive that he would be completely forgotten today if he had not learned to mount his productions, on tour as it were, in individual readers’ minds, where among other things he could count on finding the necessary props, flats, and costumes ready to hand and supplied at no charge. (Most important, James could take full advantage of the novel-reader’s willingness to devote not hours but days to sitting through the show — with all the comforts of home.) All he need do was to write out the lines of dialogue. Even then, however, he might not have amounted to much, for the dialogue in his novels usually follows a crisis, instead of leading up to one, and works primarily as a relaxation of dramatic tension. The stuff of his novels is something beyond the reach of the most accomplished theatrical company. The bulk of The Golden Bowl, as it is in all of James’s novels, is given over to the description — in this case, sharply, even bewilderingly articulate — of his characters’ impressions, and the inferences that they draw from these impressions. James is, profoundly, not a psychological novelist. He could not be less interested in motivations; he takes them completely for granted. And why not? His people want nothing but money and/or love. (More rarely, as in The American, they want power as well, but this, too, is an elemental lust.) The complications of James’s mental interiors lie not with the observing character but with the character observed, to whose interior we are not, for the moment, granted admission. It is probably best to conceive of these interiors, not as located within any of the characters’ minds, but rather as observatories into which certain characters are placed by the stage-directing author. These observatories, it must be noted, are very unlike the houses and gardens in which James’s characters outwardly move. They are as dark as deep caves, and lighted only, when lighted at all, by pinpoints of insight.

But I would propose that, if James is reluctantly happy to liberate his reader from prolonged confinement to a chair in the stalls, he is nonetheless not willing to dispense with the salience of location that reminds us where we are when we go to see a play. Re-reading The Golden Bowl for the fourth or fifth time last week, I found myself not only sitting up straight but, unaccountably, fretting that my shoes needed polishing. I was also quite conscious of my perch, in a well-appointed hotel living room, with an interesting vista of San Francisco that might, thanks to my ignorance, stand in for the view of Florence from Fiesole that it has not been my good fortune to see for myself. The suite was quiet and everything was in order. This seemed unnaturally important until I recognized that James was solemnizing the reading of his story by creating for it a virtual architecture that adds, to all the emotions triggered within the tale, a readerly awe. The Golden Bowl is itself a palace, an assemblage of rooms, great and small (mostly great), indoors and out (always thrilling when out), through which the reader is guided, in a sequence of scenes that are as clearly demarcated, as by the fall of a curtain, as are the acts of a play.

Movement from one room to another occurs during the intermissions. Between Book First and Book Second, for example, several years pass, and the Prince and Maggie not only marry but become parents, their little son, the Principino, born in New York, of all places. Between Book Second and Book Third, a deeper transformation occurs, as Charlotte becomes not only Mrs Adam Verver but also a bored housewife. Then we have the jump from Part One, “The Prince,” to Part Two, “The Princess,” which is a shift in focus that entails no gap in time whatsoever. Both Parts, all six of the Books, and most of the constituent chapters transpire in different wings, apartments, or parterres of the huge palace conjured by Adam Verver’s millions. The longest of the Books, also the most exciting, is the Fourth; for the re-reader who can remember what’s going to happen, it takes place in a long dim nave, at the end of which stands the vessel of the title atop a chimney-piece, bathed in a sullen glow.

The golden bowl is the physical token of everything that happens to Maggie Verver in this novel. It represents the secrets that were deemed too dark, or at any rate too unsettling, to share with her before she married the Prince. It represents the righteous American morality of a respectable American heiress whose good name is her only important asset. It represents the girl whom Maggie outgrows in the course of Book Fourth; in fragments, having been sent crashing not by Maggie but by her sometime deceive, Fanny Assingham, it represents her molted skin. When the bowl is broken, Maggie becomes in reality what she has long been in title, a true Italian princess, as ruthless as a Borgia in keeping what belongs to her. Not so much as a whisper of outrage at her gross betrayal at the hands of her husband and best friend (and mother-in-law!) crosses Maggie’s lips. Not a scintilla of recrimination takes shape in her throat. Maggie contents herself with a couple of hard, silent stares. Then she packs her rival off to the trans-Mississippian wastes of American City (oh, the horror!), and lets her husband give her a big hug.

It kept him before her therefore, taking in — or trying to — what she so wonderfully gave. He tried, too clearly, to please her — meet her in her own way; but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed: ‘”See’? I see nothing but you.” And the truth of it had with this force after a moment so strangely lighted his eyes that as for pity and dread of them she buried her own in his breast.

I run ahead; that’s the end of the novel, not the end of Book Fourth, which consists of a very different exchange between Prince and Princess. It is this earlier exchange that shows Maggie to her husband in a new light. To put it into the language that we might allow ourselves today, what Maggie says to the Prince is this: “Bearing in mind that you are still my husband, and that you are going to go on being my husband, go fuck yourself.” And, in that moment, the Prince abandons his lover, not just out of duty or prudence but because he has fallen in love with someone else, or at any rate — it comes to the same thing — discovered that his wife is more interesting than his mistress.

The curtain thuds to the boards. When it rises, the scene is familiar but the atmosphere new and rather awful. In Books Fifth and Sixth, Maggie is the spectator of a passion play that she has written and produced, entitled The Agony of Charlotte Stant. Fawns has become a chamber of horrors through which Charlotte stumbles in miserable ignorance, denied access to one of the author’s observatories because there would be nothing to observe, so in control of the situation is our “little” princess. True, Maggie has a few lines in this melodrama, but their importance consists entirely in their perverse incommunicativeness. Like a well-prepared and disciplined witness under cross-examination, Maggie volunteers nothing and concurs in no speculative lines of inquiry. Unlike a good witness — and unlike the nice American girl that she used to be — Maggie also perjures herself. She does so in part to bundle herself offstage, so that the show may go on. The virtual room in which James has placed us is the bustling saloon of an auction house, where everything in the plutocratic collection is being knocked down, not least its mistress and principle cicerone, the tall, proud, glorious, but unenviable Charlotte.

***

It had never occurred to me before I conceived the heading for this entry, but “Verver,” which sounds a lot like “fervor” in English, takes on a Venetian cast — Vairvair — when placed next to the Italian for “palace.” In either language, the name speaks to truth, but the truth of the novel is not one with which Americans are comfortable even yet. It is this: virtue, in the end, is inescapably an abstraction, acknowledged in its generality by millions, but love is the most peculiar, and therefore precious, reality in the world.

When I went out to lunch yesterday, I made sure to have my shoes shined. I even toted along a second pair.

Whether or not I had planned to post entries from San Francisco — and I rather think I hadn’t — the question went moot when the new little machine that I brought out with me failed to work. I expected to be very put out by that, but I wasn’t. If it had worked, I’d have made notes of the novel that I was reading, that’s all. I wasn’t in San Francisco to work, which is to say, think. All the thinking that I did do was in relation to that novel, Henry James’s final masterpiece, The Golden Bowl.

I began re-reading the novel — for the fourth or fifth time  — as the plane taxied out from JFK, and I reached the last page about five minutes before we landed back in New York. Reading late James on a plane isn’t easy, and I didn’t make much headway. Our suite at the Fairmont Hotel, atop Nob Hill, provided a far more congenial environment. My freedom to attend to the novel’s intricacy was amply guaranteed by chambermaids and room-service waiters. When I wasn’t with my daughter and her family, or on my way to or from their house, I kept my nose in the Penguin Classic. But more about The Golden Bowl anon.

***

Kathleen and I did step out for one brief bit of local sightseeing. We crept down the hill to the shops around Union Square. Kathleen had a list of three to visit. One sold yarn, and another sold fabric. We bought nothing. We bought nothing at the third stop, either, and that was rather sad, because I’ve always found something at Gump’s that I had to have. Actually, there’s a Gump’s box on its way to me right now, containing things that I ordered from their catalogue before we left. I thought about that box as we trod the thick carpets at the otherwise rather depleted-feeling store. Gump’s isn’t what it used to be. But then, neither is San Francisco. Gump’s was just the sharpest symptom. And how curious it was to reflect that the Internet was the disease! In San Francisco, of all places!

San Francisco’s physical setting is remarkable, and will presumably remain so for years to come. Let’s hope that its climate is steady, too. But even as the city intensifies as one of the world’s hubs of information technology, its unique character fades. The simplest way to capture what San Francisco used to be like is to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I made my first trip to the city not very long after that film was made; indeed, I stayed at the same hotel where, on this latest junket, I re-read The Golden Bowl. That was 51 years ago. San Francisco was unlike anywhere I’d ever been. Yes, there were the hills, and the cable cars, and gaudy Grant Street’s Chinatown fronts. But there was also a sporty formality that was kissed by the fair weather. Why not dress up? Nowhere in the United States, outside of midtown Manhattan, did so many women seek and find their chic. I didn’t know it at the time, but San Francisco was still a high colonial city, an outpost abroad. It might as well have sat on the other side of the Pacific — if any other city that I’ve visited was anything like it, it would have been Hong Kong.

And, just as New York City had Tiffany — just the one, in those days, at Fifty-Seventh and Fifth — so San Francisco had Gump’s, and you had to go to San Francisco to shop there. Gump’s specialized in pearls and jade, rather than gems, and it offered household furnishings with an Asian air, as indeed it still does. But you don’t have to visit the store anymore, and, if you do, you can’t count on finding something that you never imagined. We saw some very fine things, but we might just as easily have found them back at home. There was nothing for sale that would have floated over the bar against new acquisitions.

In this, of course, San Francisco is just like anywhere else. Bazaars, for so long a principal attraction of travel, have dwindled to naught. I don’t blame the Internet entirely. I remember the misgivings that I had when Gump’s opened a branch in the Galleria in Houston, way back in the Seventies. No good will come of this, I thought.

The Internet has not, I can report, diminished the warmth of being in the same room with loved ones. You still have to travel to spend time with people who live elsewhere.

Megan’s new home has a large kitchen, with a table and chairs at one end. A kitchen table! Kitchen tables are as rare in Manhattan as are kitchens big enough to hold them. I planted myself at my daughter’s and didn’t budge, except to give Will occasion to announce that “Doodad goes potty a lot.” We walked along the beach a few blocks away, and Megan took us for a spin down the coast to Half Moon Bay, but what I’ll remember best is sitting with my back to the front window and talking with Megan while she put Thanksgiving dinner together. Dinner was served; I didn’t have to move. It was delicious. Later, we had a serious discussion about the world that Will will inherit from us, and I took another chair when I returned from a bathroom break. But aside from testing an armchair in the living room and finding it quite comfortable, I stayed in the kitchen. It was perfect.

Need I add that I was under orders to remain idle. Kathleen was permitted to trim the beans, and Ryan did a bit of chopping, but I didn’t so much as offer advice. You might have mistaken me for an old-school patriarch, unfamiliar with wooden spoons and measuring cups.

It was perfect.

So was The Golden Bowl.

As for San Francisco, it may no longer be as distinctive as it used to be, but it’s still a grand old town, and, but for the distance, we couldn’t be luckier that it’s the one for which Will and his parents forsook New York.

It is time to haul out a suitcase and pack for a short trip. Although I dislike travel itself, I’m looking forward to the rest of the adventure, which will take me to beloved people in a favorite city. As luck would have it, this will also be the perfect occasion for considering what I’m doing here, on these pages. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, as I suspect discerning readers will have at least sensed. For the first time, I’ve been thinking that I actually know what I’m doing — that I know what it is that I am really writing about. Rather than blurt it out, however, I’ve decided to look at it from every which way, just to make sure that I’m not mistaken, and also to prepare the ground a bit, so that, when I finally do come out with it, those readers will sigh, Of course! The topic sentence will appear at the end.

Over the years, a few people have said words to this effect: You write about books, right? Wrong. When I began this Web log, I suppose that writing about books was a big part of what I was doing, but in recent years, I have drifted away from that, toward something else, where books might better be described as points of departure than as objects of inquiry. But: points of departure whither? Two weeks ago, as I was walking to the subway on my way to see The Glass Menagerie, I was assailed by the answer to that question, which I wasn’t aware of having asked. It came all unbidden, as these things so maddeningly do.

The immediate effect has been exactly that of putting on a pair of much-needed reading glasses.

For all readers who will be celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I wish a day of warmth, connection, and good food. To everyone, I send my thanks for reading. I do look forward to sitting here next Monday and getting on with it.

It seems that I’ll be staying home today after all. I had thought of going out, having lunch, touring the Museum and perhaps seeing a movie. But I didn’t want to do any of these things terribly badly, and the weather’s wet and gloomy. What decided the matter was the showerhead in my bathroom, which has been coming loose, and now sprays water everywhere but on me. I shall have to wait for a maintenance man to come up this afternoon. I could certainly run out for lunch and be home in plenty of time, but why?

My new armchair beckons. Well, it was new in the spring, but I didn’t sit in it during the summer; the blue room is stuffy in warm weather. But it’s very cozy now, and I find that I can stretch out in the deep club chair, put my legs on the very same hassock that I propped myself up on when I was learning to walk, and fall into a pleasant doze. Yesterday, I seemed to spend hours reading about Norman Mailer, because Harper’s kept falling into my lap. Mailer is an almost tragic figure, because although he was supremely gifted as a writer of durable sentences, his thinking on almost every subject was regrettable and quick to stale. He seems to have had no personal imagination, and as a result he was sunk in the facticity of his masculinity. To recall Mark Edmundson’s phrase, the punch in the mouth was a part of his repertoire, and not just in real life. Reading first Christopher Beha and then Andrew O’Hagan (at Harper’s in print and at the LRB online, respectively), I was appalled to see the effect that the old fighter had on their young minds. Here’s Beha, posing as the “Young Writer” or YW.

In 1994, Mailer complained that the place in the culture once reserved for the novelist had come to be occupied by Madonna. The YW would say that in his own time this place belonged perhaps to Kanye West, but that Kanye more or less deserved that place, insofar as he had not just talent but Mailer’s fascinating combination of megalomania and vulnerability, Mailer’s willingness to make a fool of himself, Mailer’s belief in his own importance, and Mailer’s determination to take the case for that importance straight to the people. The YW remembered what Schiller (the German poet, not Mailer’s buddy) had said — that a man must be a good citizen of his age, as wedll as of his country. What the literary world needed was a few good citizens willing to tell the age tough truths.

The problem is that Mailer was such a poor citizen. He was barely housebroken, and incontinently rude. He may have been in possession of a few tough truths, especially about Vietnam, but his delivery mirrored the insensitive belligerence that characterized our profoundly “masculine” misadventure in Southeast Asia. Mailer’s comment about the place of the novelist is sheer fantasy, the opposite of a tough truth, for serious novelists (and Mailer wasn’t a very good one) have never been at the center of American culture, and rarely anywhere near it for much longer than the display at a newsstand of an issue of Time Magazine’s cover. And to propose that the writer of novels can be replaced by a calculatedly meretricious pop star is to betray the passion for celebrity — his own — that flogged Mailer throughout his career. Beha compounds all of this by extolling a chain of vices; I very much doubt that Schiller (the poet) would have urged his readers to pay attention to Kanye West.

Mailer was right: the old standards were rotten. But his life and his art suggested that one might live without standards, without discrimination. Folly! O’Hagan reports that Mailer attributed his failure to win a Nobel Prize to the Swedish Academy’s refusal to reward a man who had stabbed his wife in a drunken rage. Good for them, if it’s true.

O’Hagan is just as upsetting as Beha.

I came to him via Marilyn Monroe. I was always reading about her and trying to work out why her story felt so personal to so many of the people I knew. ‘She was every man’s love affair with America,’ Mailer wrote. I remember reading that sentence and going to Kilwinning library for more books. They had Ancient Evenings, his vast Egyptian tome (I read the first ninety pages) and The Naked and the Dead, which was filled with the word ‘fug’ and seemed both plain and good. The others came in quick succession, half-read, skimmed or devoured, and his book about the killer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song, became for me a book that defined good taste in journalism. I read some biographies in between and quickly saw how far, in many ways, he was from the writers I considered my favourites. He didn’t do location or quiet suggestion; he didn’t do family history, grace, silence or epiphany. He didn’t do the human heart or the things that are left unsaid. Mailer was a celebrity who knew what he wanted to say and who wasn’t afraid of the loudhailer and the truncheon. He was never a subtle writer and never a complete novelist but as a navigator it seemed to me he was one of the heads of the profession. In any event, he was an intellectual who wanted to deal in headlines not footnotes, which wrecked him for some but made him a hero to me.

All I can say is how happy I am never to have sensed this hero-worship in anything else that O’Hagan has written. I can’t make up my mind whether I’d like him to dilate on that bit about Mailer’s excellence as a navigator, but it would be interesting to now more about “trying to work out why [Monroe’s] story felt so personal to so many of the people I knew.” The awful truth about Mailer’s Monroe book is that it obfuscates the simple basics of the case. Marilyn Monroe disliked the hard work of memorizing lines and the inescapable tedium of shooting films; she was a star in fame only. She was accommodated by the Industry because her big-girl body was comically and lubriciously inhabited by a stubborn little girl, and not just any little girl, but a close relative of Eloise de Plaza. I’m willing to grant a magnetic personal presence that could weaken the knees of very strong men, but it stops there; on film, she is just another pin-up, and it doesn’t say much for America to propose that her celluloid desirability embodied it. Monroe’s appeal and Mailer’s surrender are alike in heralding a period in American life when adulthood was merely genital.

***

In the kitchen, I am watching The Remains of the Day, which is twenty years old this year. I was startled to see Mike Nichols’s name in the credits; I hadn’t noticed before that he was a producer of the film, and I watched for twenty or minutes or so in a daze of having been mistaken about thinking that this was a Merchant/Ivory project. (Keeps life interesting.) I don’t think that I had seen Hugh Grant before, although very soon afterward, I had the pleasure of watching him impersonate Chopin in Impromptu, a wonderful movie that seems to have been swept out of the way so as not to interfere with Grant’s shooting stardom, which took off a year after Remains of the Day, with Four Weddings and a Funeral, the previous kitchen movie, to which I’d linked from Easy Virtue. Kristin Scott Thomas was new to me in Four Weddings, and I liked her so much that I disliked the movie for pairing Grant with Andie MacDowell, who though admirable in other contexts was here both American and Southern. I guess that you would have to be English to prefer the likes of her to Ms Scott Thomas, whom I still adore. I have always wished that Kristin Scott Thomas and Charlotte Rampling would make a movie together, set in the Thirties, about the English wives of wealthy French aristocrats — perhaps they’d be mother- and daughter-in-law. There would a touch of murder, maybe even a royalist plot. Perhaps the Windsors could be off-screen presences. You figure it out! I’ll be watching Zardoz next, at this rate.

The maintenance man has made an appearance, only to go off with the old shower-head and, for good measure, the kitchen-sink sprayer as well. I await his return with unabated hunger pangs. Ah — the door squeals!

In the new Harper’s (December), Jenny Diski makes a statement about advertising, consumerism, and capitalism that I take issue with. I agree with everything that Diski was saying about the book she was reviewing, Virginia Postrel’s book about glamour, which sounds perfectly awful. The remark that raised my eyebrows was something of a sideline, a bit of obiter dicta.

Instead, she seems satisfied to make glamour virtually synonymous with the function and activity of advertising: “By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure even as it heightens our yearnings. It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.” This she directly equates with the undeniable fact that advertising is the heart (if that’s the word) of capitalism.

Whoa! Whoa!

I’m no fan of advertising, although I have more trouble with its making a lot of entertainment “free” than I do with its consumerist content; and I’m certainly no supporter of free-market capitalism. I understand the temptation to cast both of these devils into the same boiling cauldron. But it must be resisted, because the resulting fumes are confusing rather than clarifying.

The heart of capitalism is: buy low and sell high, with the help of as few employees as possible. Industrial capitalism was a transitory phase, in many ways a perversion of capitalism. True capitalists don’t make things. They use their capital to buy things that other people make, which they then sell elsewhere. Think spice, think diamonds. Or think finance, for that’s pretty much what capitalism has come to in our time. True capitalism is rare.

Capital accumulations are also put to work starting up businesses. This can be done in either of two ways, directly (as equity) or indirectly (as debt — think bank loans). The industrial revolution witnessed the creation of many large corporations, some of them businesses, but large, innovative, profitable corporations have become difficult to sustain. Most industrial products and services, once their market steadies, tend to look more like public services, more properly paid for by taxes than by purchases.

Free-market capitalism is a chimera. It exists only for those who devote their lives to some form of trading, and it is confined to the specific market(s) in which that trading is undertaken. True free-market capitalism would be paralyzingly complex for the human organism; not even Eugene Fama could bear it.

A lot of what people call “capitalism” is nothing but a constructed receptacle for everything that’s meant by “not communist.” This construct stopped being even marginally useful when communism vanished from the political scene. Communism, unlike capitalism, is a moral system, with a great deal of internal coherence. If it doesn’t work, that’s because human beings aren’t sufficiently self-effacing to meet its minimum demands — and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future. Communism is a dream, a hope for some better future. That’s a problem, too, because people are impatient; they want to live the dream. Communism belongs in the same closet where we keep projects for perpetual-motion machines and philosophers’ stones.

What most people mean by capitalism, in contrast, is moral rubbish, amounting to no more than “do your own thing” and “leave me alone.” There’s nothing wrong with doing your own thing if you can swing it without hurting anybody else, but this is hardly the foundation of a moral system. And healthy people do not really want to be left alone. “Give me some space” is more like it; that is truly a moral, social claim.

Talk about capitalism and communism is highly colored by moral biases. On the one hand, the moral neutrality of what people call capitalism leads to objectionable outcomes, such as incidental accumulations of enormous wealth. (By incidental, I mean that making lots of money, while probably always the hope, is usually not the project that wins great fortune. Making hula hoops, or electric cars, or Viagra — those are projects. Most projects do not lead to wealth.) This makes capitalism a bad thing to many people, such as, I suspect, Jenny Diski. (But note: she is not talking about true capitalism.) On the other, communism cannot tolerate human nature as it is, and it also deals poorly with natural differences. Most experiments in communism have been more or less vengeful antidotes to capitalist excess. This makes communism a bad thing to many people, and instills in most Americans an unthinking dread of something called “socialism.” So, instead of moral analysis, we get grievances from both sides. Talk about capitalism and communism has preempted serious moral discussion since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

***

Consumerism is also a consequence of the industrial revolution, and it also perverts social relations. It is best thought of as an infectious disease, to which survivors eventually develop a resistance. Sometimes it seems to me that we’re still in the middle of the consumerist plague; sometimes it seems that the end is truly nigh. We are always going to want stuff, but we are going to be a great deal more discriminating. And advertising, beyond telling us when and where to go, and how much to expect to pay, is going to have nothing to do with our desires.

Advertising is the nexus of industrial capitalism and the consumer. It announces the promise of realizing the desires that it seeks to create, if some sort of purchase is made. People with a resistance to consumerism already know their own desires, and so remain unmoved by advertising’s announcements; they also mistrust advertising at a visceral level. Postrel and Diski seem to be fascinated by a Louis Vuitton ad showing Angelina Jolie  and a leather bag by the side of a stream in Cambodia. The ad promises that a certain kind of leather bag exists. You may want the bag, and you may save up the money to buy it. That is the only part of the ad that will make money for Louis Vuitton. But the ad obviously announces other promises, only some of which are actual possibilities. You may travel to Cambodia, if you save up for that. You may even be photographed by Annie Liebovitz. But you will never be Angelina Jolie. This is not a problem for the survivor of the consumerist plague. The survivor may wish to be more like Angelina Jolie, or in the alternative may wish to marry her. But no survivor wants to be Angelina Jolie. The sign of survival is determination to be yourself, only better, because that is the only dissatisfaction capable of putting a stop to the consumerist itch. For the survivor of consumerism, the Vuitton ad is nothing more than a more or less appealing postcard.

Museums and libraries are the ultimate consumers of everything truly valuable. That’s as close as we’re going to come to communism for a very long time. But the world would be a duller place if Jenny Diski stopped taking swings at “capitalism.” I could watch her all day.

The most trenchant passage in Walter Goffart’s generally trenchant book, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire, concerns the Frisians. Unlike most of the tribal groups described in Goffart’s book, the Frisians are still very much with us; their language, distinct from Nederlands and German, lingers on in the remoter wastes of this very inhospitable North Sea territory. And that is the point.

Dwellers in a land that no one would dream of migrating to, the Frisians came from nowhere and went nowhere: they were in place as far into the past as anyone need look and remained so, confidently, into the Middle Ages. The physical evidence of their presence impresses us still in the majesty with which it traverses the centuries, proof of a single-mindedness not to be shaken by so flimsy a historian’s fancy as the Völkerwanderung.

If the Frisians were content to hang on in Friesland — some of them joined the Saxon flow to England, which crossed their land, but most stayed home, eking out an existence on terpen, precarious man-made mounds that rose above the tides (this is before dikes) — why would all those “peoples,” settled at various times and places along the length of the Danube, have felt the need to push toward Italy? Does the very idea of “migration of peoples” (Völkerwanderung) make sense? Goffart thinks not, and I agree with him. It goes without saying that I also concur in his judgment that there was never enough cohesion, internal or across group lines, among Goths and Lombards and others to support the idea of a “Germanic” infiltration of the Later Empire.

That the Later Empire swarmed with barbarian military men is not in question. Some of these barbarians, such as Constantine’s father, came from “backwoods” origins within the perimeters of the Empire; in the Fifth Century, emperors and general came from almost everywhere, inside or out. By Diocletian’s reign (c 290) at the latest, the imperial throne was occupied by military strongmen of varying durability, and a military aristocracy that drew from the top of all the more successful tribes was soon established. (Goffart mentions an eye-popping factoid: twenty-seven family connections link Diocletian to Charlemagne.) This aristocracy was highly meritocratic, if in a somewhat negative way: heirs without leadership capacities were bumped off. But it was already sustained by the sort of dynastic marriage that would characterize the European aristocracy right up to modern times. Already, Goffart tells us, we find that an illustrious family tree was indispensable for the major posts. It would only be in the High Middle Ages that such trees would be expected to go back before the times of renowned grandfathers or invincible uncles; by then, people without such backgrounds rarely had access to equine-centric military training.

Goffart’s book makes it difficult to believe that the Roman Empire ever “collapsed” or came to any kind of end. Its leadership rather passed into the hands of men (and women — women were far more powerful in this early aristocratic age than any Roman matron ever was) with interests completely different from those of the Julians or the Flavians. What did crumble was the veneration for the Athens of Pericles that so obviously motivated a great did of what the Romans of the Late Republic and Early Empire said, did, and, most of all, built. As we’ve been reminded ever since Gibbon, this loss of respect for Greek manners (which was of course even more completely discarded in Imperial Greece itself) is as attributable to the spread of Christianity as it is to anything else. Certainly the idea of “Rome” that Latin humanists have cherished since the Fourteenth Century eventually petered out. But this was because imperial institutions were steered in new directions, not because they were crushed.

***

Before reading Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, I could not have written a hundred words about Transylvania without consulting a very general reference book. Now I could possibly make it to five hundred — not that there’s a need. I might have learned a good deal, had I read it when it came out, from Between the Woods and the Water, the second installment of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Walk” trilogy, in the second half of which he ventures into Transylvanian territory. He doesn’t penetrate very deep, and he visits none of the places mentioned by Bánffy, but both writers are quite clearly describing the same earthly paradise.

Hills enclosed the north bank of this particular reach and the monastery was hardly out of sight before the tapering ruins of the castle of Solymos jutted on a pedestal of rock: it was a stronghold of the great John Hunyadi but much older than he. Then the trees of the foothills began to pile up in waves, with sprays of wild lilac scattered among the branches. The hills on the other shore stood aloof, and between the two ranges the great river lazily unwound. Sometimes it looped away for a mile or two, then meandered back and the clouds of willows and aspens that marked its windings were interspersed with with poplars tapering in spindles or expanding like butterfly nets. The women in the fields worse kerchiefs on their heads, under hats of soft plaited straw as wide as cart-wheels; leaves like broken assegais plumed the tall maize; an occasional breeze ruffled the wheat; the vines, all sprayed with sulphate, climbed in tiers. Pale cattle with wide, straight horns grazed by the score and the fens and water-meadows that lay about the river were wallows for buffaloes; lustrous as seals, or caked in dried mud as armour against insects, they were sometimes only to be spotted in the slime and the swamps by bubbles or an emerging nostril. Wherever horses and mares with their foals moved loose about the grass, a few ragged tents were sure to be pitched. Everything in these reedy windings was inert and hushed under a sleepy spell of growth and untroubled plenty.

I’d be dying to visit Transylvania myself if I thought that it still bore a strong resemblance to the land laid out in the pages of Bánffy and Fermor, but one might as well wish for a time-machine. But the foothills piling up in waves — perhaps that might still be seen. Every now and then I recall with a jolt that this is not the Transylvania of Bram Stoker or the movies. Nothing could be further from Count Dracula’s predations than Count Bánffy’s dream of a cosmopolitan but agrarian Transylvania.

Fermor is certainly more Virgilian than Bánffy, while the earlier writer’s word paintings are all inflected by a deep possessory pride. Nevertheless it is pleasant to remain tucked in my armchair Transylvania. Fermor’s summary of the local history, with particular bearing on the insolubility of the sovereignty problem — since resolved, by a brutal communist regime, in favor of the Romanians — is a masterpiece of lucidity, and I should happily copy it out if its length did not threaten to carry me far beyond the outermost rim of fair use.

This morning, I woke for the first time since Friday without feeling under the weather. The wear and tear of Friday’s library-management project has finally worn off. I did nothing all weekend — nothing! I sat and read. I fixed a simple meal or two. Maybe I even did a load of laundry. But nothing is pretty much all I was up to. The blue room remains just as disordered as it was when Ray Soleil and I called it a day on Friday evening — bits of discrete mess here and there, each a little problem to be solved. Bulk projects always turn up a dozen such.

I woke several times, actually, and each time I fell back to sleep, I returned to an archipelago of dreams that had an unusual weight or urgency. All I can compare this urgency to now, hours and the morning paper later, is the hypersensitivity to new people and places that attends starting at a new school. I don’t think that I should be so sensitive today, at my age, for I am too weightily settled in my own self to feel, as one does (or did) during the first couple of weeks in a strange dormitory, that absolutely everything of importance is (was) happening outside of me — and that everything that is happening is of equal importance. Even the unfamiliar now has a certain familiarity to it, which is perhaps only another way of saying that unfamiliarity itself is no longer enough to attract my attention. I have to have some reason to feel that, upon becoming more familiar, the unfamiliar will also be interesting — unlikely, in most cases, as I know from experience. I read that there are people for whom the unfamiliar is per se interesting, but I am not one of those people, evidently enough. In any case, the urgency of this morning’s dream owed to the “feeling,” or whatever it is that one has in dreams, that I had to work out just how I knew the other people in the dream, and why they were so eager to welcome and oblige me.

Waking from this dream left me with a sense of its architecture. I could not begin to describe this architecture, which was also a kind of logic, but I felt its strength, as though I were watching my mind handily push a loaded wheelbarrow across a yard. So much of what our minds do is unknown to us, or understood only in the merest fragments! It’s to be expected that we’ll know more in future; but, for now, we’re morally obliged, I think, to wait until that knowledge is secure to begin speculating on what it tells us about what’s going on beneath or behind or around our conscious selves. I have never had a dream that I could believe was “telling me something” about my own life that was otherwise invisible. I’m not sure that anyone who goes to the movies a lot has that kind of dream anymore: movies that we see when we’re awake do a much better job than our closed-off, sleeping brains can do of telling us what our lives look like to others, and of highlighting affinities of which we might never otherwise be consciously aware — hence the urgency of warning dreams before the advent of cinema. My dreams all seem to depict alternative lives, roads not taken, in most cases because they never quite forked off the route of my daily life.

“My dreams” — makes you shudder, doesn’t it? Please don’t tell me about your dream! Because you can’t. You can only report the aspect of the dream that you can remember and frame in words (two sides of the same thing). The necessary incoherence of your account will be all that you can communicate. No, there’s one other problem with dreams: they’re often quite unpleasant. My first reaction to hearing about a bad dream is to feel as sorry for the dreamer as I would had it all been real. Then I resent being made to pity the victim of purely imaginary (self-induced!) events. And, without going into detail, I must say that I dislike being libeled in someone else’s dream.

What we know, and what we don’t. The things we know are all very small. The spatulas are in the left-hand drawer. Our intestines are lined with microbes that participate in the digestive process. Oleanders are poisonous — even the smoke of burning oleander! The United States was founded in 1789, which also saw the beginning of the French Revolution. Earth is the third planet from the sun, and I forget how fast light travels but I could look it up in a jiffy. (The speed of light is profoundly meaningless to me; light is simply instant. And I know — another small thing — that this perception is “incorrect.”)

The things we don’t know are large. What is love? Might it be something slightly different for everyone who claims to have experienced it, and therefore incapable of generalization? The small things that we know about love don’t begin to add up to an explanation of the whole. Love seems to me to be a weak fact — its weakness being that nothing can be inferred from it or built upon it. It is best to take love as a miracle. As we ought to take dreams. They’re real, but their large reality is fully appreciable only to those who actually experience them.

This is not to say that love and dreams are purely private, that they have no social reality. One of the small things that we know about dreams is that a pattern of unusually vivid dreaming, followed by a cessation of dreams altogether, warrants consultation with a medical professional. Similarly, we know that people who are truly loved do not display contusions caused by the violence of their ostensible lovers. We positively bristle, as a culture these days, with myriad small facts about proper parenting — which don’t, however, explain the special love that binds parents to children, or the quite different special love that binds children to parents. Or that, sadly, doesn’t.

It used to be a humane conceit to assert that mankind is a blend of the bestial and the angelic. My updated version, which I’m sure could be put better, is that we confront a world of mysteries and miracles that we can only partially grasp in terms of sure knowledge. The first principle of any humane morality must be to respect this partiality humbly, for what it is.

In this week’s Nation, Tara Zahra reviews three books about what caused the outbreak of World War I. She disagrees with their consensus, which pins blame for the war on a handful of diplomats and military men, because she feels that it slights the broader factors that alone can explain the explosive public enthusiasm that immediately preceded the gunfire. Zahra is also uncomfortable with the three writers’ insistence that the war was not inevitable.

I’m inclined to agree with her, now that I’ve finished The Transylvanian Trilogy, which ends at that moment, the rush to the front. Miklós Bánffy, a Hungarian statesman as well as a writer, is not shy about interpolating a good deal of political discussion into the three novels that comprise the Trilogy, and while these passages are not a substitute for conventional historical accounting, they capture an atmosphere in which powerful men interact with interest groups and more or less robust popular movements. Set in the ten years before the war, they repeatedly illuminate the opportunism, the distraction, the wishful thinking, and above all the moral inertia of a country that no longer exists, but the fact that the Dual Monarchy has long disappeared, and Hungarian Transylvania with it, does nothing to diminish the pungent familiarity of the political vices on which so many of Bánffy’s characters are hooked.

I believe that the “great men,” in Vienna, Berlin, and St Petersburg, were directly responsible for the chain reaction that set off the war. But their “success” capped years of experiment. Their objective was never the stagnating death swamp that spread across the Western Front for four years. Nobody imagined that — which is certainly a way of saying that no one was directly responsible for the war that played out in reality. Something quick, dashing, and decisive was envisioned, a move so bold that rivals would have no choice but to assent. The great men played with military flourishes for years before 1914, many of them in the Balkans, where the withdrawal of the Ottomans engendered shimmering colonial dreams in the neighboring Christian empires. A local skirmish — between the Albanians and the Montenegrins, say — might invite the participation of the great powers, or a great power might indulge in belligerent gestures — as Germany did in Morocco in 1911 — but in each case the contestants quailed.

I still believe that World War I resulted from this troublemaking climate, but Bánffy has persuaded me (implicitly; he never argues this) that the event that sparked it was quite different from the earlier near misses, and not just because an Austrian grandee was the victim of an assassination. In The Transylvanian Trilogy, Franz Ferdinand is usually referred to as “the Heir,” meaning not just that he was next in line to succeed the very old Franz Josef but that he had policy objectives of his own, not necessarily congruent with the Emperor’s, and that he planned to implement these objectives as soon as he took the throne. (Bánffy regards the Heir and his objectives as malignant, and claims that the Heir openly disliked Hungarians). In Bánffy’s nutshell, the Heir planned to emasculate representative government wherever he found it, and in fact had neutralized the Hungarian parliament well before his death. He also planned to divide the Balkans, as well as the Austrian possessions that bordered on Russia, into petty kingdoms; he would replace the Dual Monarchy (in which the Austrian ruler was also King of Hungary) with a genuine empire, with local princes reporting to the emperor. This, in any case, is what emerges from Bánffy’s account. Never having given Franz Ferdinand much thought, I’m now on the lookout for a good biography.

If what Bánffy says is correct, then the death of the archduke was more than an insult. It was a successful attack on the future envisioned by the Heir and his lieutenants — like him, vigorous men in their prime. These true believers had no attractive option but to wrest an advance of their dream from the death of their leader, by subjugating the kingdom of Serbia to Austrian influence. They must attempt this even though Serbia was affiliated with the rival Russian empire. In 1914, the great men who had been itching for a chance to show their mettle, and who had toyed with opportunities in a series of foreign sideshows, found themselves with internal wounds that obviated the possibility of peace.

And suddenly, the citizens and subjects of the European sovereignties, most of them enfranchised within living memory, had the simplest of reasons to identify with their homelands, and to rush to their defense. The everyday realities of representative government meant very little to most people — they still do, unfortunately — but war was not rocket science.

Until it was. World War I was inevitable, because no one imagined anything like it.

***

In the middle of the third book of the Trilogy, Emperor Franz Josef threatens to abdicate, partly from old age, partly from frustration with Hungarian intransigence. Our hero, Balint Abady, has a long discussion with an old diplomatic colleague, Count Slawata, whom Balint has long known to be the Heir’s point man in Budapest. Balint is appalled to learn that the Heir’s immediate plans are those of a demagogue.

“The monarch who turns demagogue and who puts himself at the head of popular revolutionary movements may fancy that he’s featheering his own nest, but what he’s really doing is preparing the way for a republic, or for the ruin of his country!”

Slawata smiled ironically and said, “All that is sheer Montesquieu — esprit des lois!“

“Of course! But it is no less true, however long ago it was written. Anyway, we are only guessing. All this is purely hypothetical and I, for one, don’t believe His Majesty has any intention of abdicating… so all this talk is really about nothing, at least for the moment. Khuen-Hedervary will resign and a new government will be formed which will reform the suffrage laws, which in my opinion should have been done long ago. I hear that Justh is quite ready, at least for a year, to drop all that tiresome obstructionism, especially as regards the army estimates. So, if the army question is out of the way, the other reforms the Heir wants to see could well be presented without upsetting anyone.”

Slawata’s reply took Balint by surprise.

“But we don’t want anything while Franz-Josef is still on throne. Indeed we’ll make quite sure that no real reform is possible. Perhaps some little concession here and there, but only if it proves unavoidable. His Highness wants to do it all after he succeeds to the throne, and until then he’ll do everything in his power to prevent any changes. If Laszlo Lukacs becomes Minister-President, which seems likely, he’ll forbid it outright!”

“Even if that means holding up the defence proposals?” marvelled Balint.

“Even that!”

The cynicism of the Heir and his minions chills and disgusts me as much as anything on this earth can. It is not so much power as the prospect of more power that leads men to evil.

There won’t be much of an entry today, because I spent the entire afternoon moving books from one bookshelf to another, and vice versa, with the incomparable help of Ray Soleil, who dealt with my impatience as if he were a god above, serenely free of the anxieties that made me worry about where my books were.

Kathleen came into the room after work and said that she couldn’t tell what was different, but she was joking. Of course she couldn’t tell; she pays no attention to the arrangement of books in the blue room, and she’d be an idiot if she did. So the idea that she might know was very funny. Ray said the same thing, however: when we were done, and all the immense piles of books that had covered tables and desk during the project had found places in the bookshelves, he couldn’t see what we had acccomplished. But I saw it, and so clearly: all the novels, magnificently organized in the bookshelf that happens to be hard to get to, row upon magnifcent row! While the “artistic” books, about music (at least thirty titles about Mozart), art, poetry, cooking even and even philosophy (The New Organon — why?) are all tucked into the breakfront behind my writing table — while,  while, while. They’re all completely disorganized; we just threw them onto the empty shelves. But they’ll be easy to arrange, and I look forward to the settlement.

Books: what do you do with them?

Bear with!

A friend of mine broke her foot the other day, so I offered to bring her lunch. I didn’t cook it myself; I walked up the street to Demarchelier late this morning, and ordered to go. Coq au vin for my friend; seafood ravioli for me. I didn’t have to wait too long for a taxi, and despite tangled traffic caused by cement trucks trying to get to the subway-station site, everything was still quite hot when I reached my friend’s apartment, so there was no need to reheat anything. We put the food on plates, poured ourselves glasses of wine (supplied by us), and sat down at the coffee table. The coq au vin looked good, and my friend tucked into it with relish. The ravioli were scrumptious. Stuffed with shrimp and other not-fishy morsels, they were coated with the lightest of sauces — butter, mostly, with diced tomato and flecks of herb. It was a generous serving, and I certainly got enough to eat, but when the ravioli were all gone, I wanted more. It was an odd dish to order to go, but I knew that it would be easy to eat. I didn’t think that it would be so tasty, though. I always order the same old things that I love at Demarchelier, and they’re great, but I forget that everything on the menu is usually very good.

Later in the afternoon, I found myself walking up 86th Street again, but this time I went only as far as Barnes & Noble. I was looking for a copy of The Glass Menagerie, having given upon finding one at home. (Having made a big mess, pulling books out of the case that is hardest to reach — the case where I really ought to put novels — and not put them back, so that I can hardly think in this room, it is such a bordel.) A cheap paperback would have been great, but I didn’t even look for one when I saw the Library of American edition of Tennessee Williams, Plays 1937-1955.

Amanda: That’s right, now that you’ve had us make such fools of ourselves. The effort, the preparations, all the expense! The new floor lamp, the rug, the clothes for Laura! All for what? To impress some other girl’s fiancé!
Go to the movies, go! Don’t think about us, a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job! Don’t let anything interfere with your selfish pleasure! Just go, go, go — to the movies!

Tom: All right, I will! The more you shout about my selfishness to me the quicker I’ll go, and I won’t go the movies!

Amanda: Go, then! Then to the moon — you selfish dreamer!

What ‘selfish pleasure’? What selfishness? Who could live with such a parent?

***

My attention was called to a series of entries that Tim Parks has been posting at NYRBlog. I’ve read two of them, and read them again, and I still don’t know what they’re about, beyond Tim Parks’s unhappiness with “traditional” novels. At the end of one, Parks retails a truly sad story.

To conclude: in 2011 I had occasion to visit an old university tutor, a rather severe and demanding professor, who nevertheless played a generous part in encouraging me to write. He read my first attempts at fiction and introduced me to writers who would later be important to me, most notably Henry Green. I had not seen him in thirty years. Long since retired, he was now restricted to a wheelchair and, with time on his hands, had been re-reading old favorites, all the great novels that had inspired a lifetime’s career in reading, writing, teaching. We talked about Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Henry Green, Elisabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell.

“How did they hold up?” I asked cheerfully.

“Not at all,” he told me. “They feel like completely empty performances. Like it wasn’t worth it at all.”

It’s a sad story because it highlights a terrible want of imagination. Why, once the sense of emptiness took hold, did the professor continue reading the books that “had inspired a lifetime’s career” — hadn’t they done enough? Why not read new things? Is the professor even remotely aware of the extent of his self-indictment? Does either he or Parks have any idea how childish the old man looks, whining as though there were something wrong with the books?

I often hear that old people lose the taste for novels, sometimes from the old people themselves. It makes a certain sense, but I don’t care to spell it out, lest I tempt fate and wind up with a plate of words. I hope that such a loss of appetite doesn’t happen to me, but I don’t suppose there’s anything that can be done to insure against it. What, I wonder, is it about novels that fails for these older readers? Is there a connection between story and hope? If you’re not much interested in the future, do you lose interest in how the story comes out?

Any danger of losing my taste for fiction seems remote at the moment. I am literally enchanted by The Transylvanian Trilogy. I’ve reached the final book, They Were Divided, but despite its rather grim title I’m having a great old time, and so are Miklós Bánffy’s characters. Why, there has just been a Bal des Têtes in Kolozsvar.

The occasion had been eagerly awaited by all those who would attend, by the men because they would not have to make themselves ridiculous in some idiotic costume, and by their womenfolk because they could go in a classic ball-gown and not spend a fortune on some elaborate fancy dress, and also because they would be able to dazzle their friends, and hopefully outdo them, with some amazingly original and magnificent and hitherto undreamed-of ornamental head-dress.

For weeks before there had been to-ing and fro-ing and thought and planning and much pleasurable secrecy as to what all the fashionable ladies would wear. While everyone tried hard to find out what the others had chosen each was determined to keep their own ideas secret lest anyone should try to imitate what they had planned, thus leading to that social disaster when two or more women were dressed alike.

Nevertheless, in spite of, or perhaps because of, all this manic secrecy several women found themselves in just the situation they had most dreaded. There were eight Turkish turbans, five Dutch bonnets, three Andalusian head-dresses complete with high tortoiseshell combs and lace shawls, six country maidens from the Kalotaszeg district, two Cleopatras and four Little Red Riding Hoods. Not a few extremely cross society ladies had to console themselves with the thought that they had been first in the field with their wonderfully original idea and that somehow and with low cunning the others had stolen the idea from them. The one to be blamed was always their closest friend — that two-faced snake in the grass!

Someone with a brain at Random House ought to arrange for Part II, Chapter Two to appear as a short story in The New Yorker, as “The Anti-Duelling League.”

Not being a fan of Tennessee Williams’s work, I agreed to see the current revival of The Glass Menagerie because Cherry Jones was to play Amanda Wingfield, and I didn’t want to miss that. I didn’t know how Ms Jones would play Amanda, but I did know that she would play the role in several ways at the same time, as indeed she did. The actress has a knack for bringing out the antagonisms within all of us without allowing them to cloud the coherence of her presentation. There is a great deal of sparkling naughtiness in Cherry Jones on stage, even when she’s playing an allegedly dour old nun, as in Doubt. The role of Amanda Wingfield offers many opportunities for romping subversiveness, and Ms Jones makes the most of them, brightening the play’s tone considerably. Grim The Glass Menagerie may be, but it need not be dreary. As it turned out, Cherry Jones wasn’t the only member of the company with a darting pulse. It was a quality that she appears to have shared with every one of her colleagues.

The Glass Menagerie is set in a lower-middle-class living room in St Louis:  dreary. But Bob Crowley, credited with the scenic and costume design of this production, sets the show on an airily expressionistic course before the house lights go down. Taking our seats, we see a few sticks of furniture, and a sofa that I’m sure would have been called a “davenport.” These are all suitably dingy. But the walls aren’t dingy, because there aren’t any walls, and the draperies aren’t dingy, because there aren’t any windows. Instead, there are fire escapes, as we call them: rickety-looking metal terraces connected by equally exiguous stairs to terraces above and below. From the Wingfield apartment, a fire escape climbs dizzily into the rafters, suggesting with the assurance of a Brahms finale that real escape from this apartment is going to be difficult, perhaps perilous, and possibly impossible: how do you cross the infinite? The Wingfields live in the dark, at the bottom of something. They appear to come and go — all but Laura, the crippled daughter of the house — but they never really leave this dismal space that is, nevertheless, strangely exhilarating for the audience, not only because the fire escape climbs so crazily but because the living room is set atop an inky lake that not only replaces the view outside with a reflection of the life within but underscores the precariousness of that life, which might at any time tumble into it. The pool creates a visceral anxiety in the audience, in accordance with Chekhov’s Law. If you have a tank of water onstage, somebody is going to get wet. That nobody does fall into the water acts, almost maddeningly, to heighten the anxiety, which goes undischarged.

That’s what I didn’t like about The Glass Menagerie when I was an undergraduate: it offered a ticket to nowhere. The problem faced by the Wingfield family remained unsolved at the end. Or so it seemed to when I was young. Last night, I understood that the problem itself is what changes: it is shown to be unsolvable. Laura Wingfield is never going to attract a husband. It has also been demonstrated that the alternative solution to her predicament — being cared for by her brother — has been withdrawn. Tom Wingfield just might take Laura under his wing, but in order to do so he would have to push his insupportable mother out of the nest. That’s what The Glass Menagerie comes down to: the dramatic proof of a thesis that, as of the opening scene, has not yet been put to the test.

***

The shouting between Amanda and Tom is what’s usually easiest to recall about productions of The Glass Menagerie, but there’s more to the play than their hoarse frustration. Much of the second act is devoted to a scene of extended conversation that can be extremely dull. But not in this production. Here, the scene for Laura and Jim, the “gentleman caller,” is a genuine duet, finely choreographed for two strong actors. The playbill features a “Movement” credit, to Steven Hoggett, and the performance is dotted with many moments of stylized gesture. The gestures are somewhat reminiscent of Grant Wood’s paintings, and their effect is sustained by Nico Muhly’s haunting, lyrical music. These elements establish a tenderness at the heart of the nightmare. As Jim, the gifted Brian Smith is the very type of an American fine young man, graceful about acknowledging that he was spoiled by easy high-school triumphs. He establishes an instant rapport with Laura — who loved him from afar in his glory days — but with time we realize that it is the rapport of a brother, not a lover. Jim would almost certainly make a better brother than Tom does. Unlike Tom, Jim wants to achieve success in the world as it is. As the poor girl, in one of the classic stage’s most thankless roles, Celia Keenan-Bolger brings an unquestionable integrity to Laura that amounts, toward the end, to grandeur. She and Mr Smith make this a genuine, if eccentric, love scene.

Zachary Quinto, who plays Tom, is making his Broadway debut, which would be starting at the top if it weren’t for a sheaf of Off-Broadway credits and a sterling performance in Margin Call. He looks nothing like Cherry Jones and is somewhat difficult to imagine as her son, but by the same token he evokes the absentee father who “fell in love with long distance”: as evidence of a mésalliance, he is eloquent. But he pulls off the even neater trick of presenting all of Tom’s petulance and impatience and cynicism, his resentment and his oceanic ambition — perhaps that is the sea into which he falls at the end — without making the character unpleasant. At no point did I share his mother’s exasperation with him. Mr Quinto doesn’t so much impersonate Tom as hold him carefully close, like a lantern that the draft must not be allowed to snuff out. Never has the portrait of the artist as a young man been displayed with such urgent good faith.

It is undoubtedly the vitality of Cherry Jones, the sheer aliveness of her, that enables her embodiment of an Amanda who, while frequently tiresome and thoughtless, is neither a monster nor a pathetic wreck. Amanda is limited, as we all are, and she is getting on as best she can, which is the most that can be asked of anyone. It is easy to remember Williams’s Amanda as a close relative of the deluded Blanche DuBois, but Ms Jones will have none of it. There is nothing toxic in her Amanda’s determination to remember the bright side of things — as she must, for she sees precious little enough of it. When I was young, I probably missed the absence of an Atridean secret in The Glass Menagerie, the germ of a doom that would explain the rotten downfall of the Wingfields’ fortunes. Cherry Jones makes me wonder if anything can ever be altogether rotten. It is impossible not to remember her Amanda as a woman coquettishly capering across the carpet, full of life. And so I left the theatre with a decided spring in my step.

As I’m running around today, and even going out this evening, my brain is something of a snow-globe. I thought that, in lieu of striving after lucid originality, I would pick up Henry Hitchings’s Sorry!: The English and Their Manners and revisit some earmarked pages.

I’ll begin with a comment about the subtitle. Now that the book’s contents have steeped in me for a few days, I find the subtitle incredibly misleading and, indeed, the source of much of my original puzzlement. While Hitchings does indeed write about manners, and while his sights are indeed focused on the English, his subject is not the bundle of shibboleths by which people gauge each others’ socioeconomic backgrounds but, far more largely, the psychological distance that has been extended, in Europe and North America, between bodily functions and effects deemed noisome on the one hand and social space on the other. Of course there is a physical distance as well — that’s why most bathrooms accommodate one person at a time. But the psychological distance is what allows us to forget about bathrooms altogether when we are not actually using them, or in need. That’s the kind of manners that interests Hitchings, not the table settings or the forms of address. Nancy Mitford’s mischievous essay, “Noblesse Oblige,” is disposed of in one paragraph — in the chapter on Victorian manners, if you please. The book’s second chapter is entirely devoted to the seriously undermannered period known as the Middle Ages.

The third chapter begins with the motto that William of Wykeham had chiseled over the doors of both of his foundations, Winchester College and New College, Oxford: “Manners maketh man.” William’s sentiment “may strike us as archaic,” writes Hitchings, but that is only because centuries of refinement (and “refainment”) separate us from his earthier era. In the Fourteenth Century, it was all too easy, at least in the benighted economic system that we call feudalism, to slip toward the bestial. Young people depended on their elders for their manners — there were no magazines or visual media to help them out — and most elders knew only what they had learned living out their lives in one spot. It was not a world that greeted strangers cordially and treated them well. The exhibition of a certain attentive flourish, combined with disciplined impulse control, was the only known passport. The display of what William meant by manners entitled its bearer to a room in the house, rather than a stall in the barn.

One particularly noisome bodily function is violence, and indeed this was tackled before all the others. Failure to wipe your mouth after eating might cost you the good opinion of others, but the uncertain handling of your knife could cost you your life. Today, we can hardly imagine the dangers of a medieval banqueting table. (When we sit down to eat, we don’t even fear intentional poisoning anymore.) Hitchings wants to remind us of them, if only to show us the ground of our own behavior, which we quite naturally take completely for granted.  That’s Hitching’s other point: the manners that we take for granted. He is not really interested in those that we don’t, or that we associate with social classes other than our own.

Class (page 36):

It was in the nineteenth century that the word class began to be used to signify a system. Since the seventeenth century people had spoken of classes — ‘lower,’ ‘higher,’ ‘governing.’ Middle class was established as a noun by around 1750; as an adjective it did not take off until about a hundred years later. We might interpret this as a sign that what we would call class distinctions were coming into sharper focus. But in its new sense the word class, rather than marking social differences precisely, did the reverse. It suggested the existence of a pattern of social divisions, yet created sketchiness where previously there had been the crisper demarcations of rank, order, station and degree. The old terms connoted heredity, along with duties and ethical expectations. Class was not so bound up with the past, having no air of the feudal or the medieval, and was therefore easier to change. The business of changing it was spelled out in the Victorian period’s innumerable etiquette books, which were aids to ambition. As social distinctions became less static, so defensiveness and rivalry increased, as did a fondness for playing detective, spotting differences that had been submerged.

The difference between “manners” and “etiquette” is important; children pick up manners readily enough, but not etiquette.

Plus ça change (page 133):

But English euphemisms seem to be everywhere, and many of the words we feel the need to avoid were euphemisms in their time — vagina and excrement, for instance.

Ageing well (page 170):

Nevertheless, we can see the practical bent of Savile’s counsel: he tells his daughter that ‘one careless glance giveth more advantage [to predatory men] than a hundred words not enough considered,’ and that she must ‘every seven years make some alteration … toward the graver side,’ so that she does not become like one of those ‘girls of fifty, who resolve to be always young, whatever Time with his iron teeth hath determined to the contrary.’

Baloney (page 193): Hitchings follows up a brief mention of a dicey situation in Fanny Burney’s Evalina with some salty language of his own (relatively speaking).

That basic attitude survives among many men, who defend their priapic blitzkrieg with baloney along the lines of ‘She was asking for it.’

The sentence stands out in Hitchings’s generally pastoral prose — priapically, as it were.

Punctuality (page 251): This is also from the chapter entitled “What Were Victorian Values?”

Among the consequences of closer timekeeping was a greater arbitrariness about what were the right and wrong times for certain kinds of activity. Prescriptions about timing replaced an intuitive understanding of it. Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit, constantly fussing about the time, is a true Victorian.

Tipping (page 260): Tips were also known as “vails.”

Voltaire, having dined once with Lord Chesterfield, turned down a second invitation because the servants expected such great vails.

Location, location, location (page 276): This is a chapter heading. Manners are everywhere, and everywhere a little different. This frees us all, ultimately, to get on with more interesting things.

Ah, youth (page 315):

First of all, the young are likely to behave in a depraved way because they have yet to experience the consequences of such behavior, or because they know what the consequences are and don’t consider them significant, or because the consequences are much smaller for them, or because there is a masochistic thrill to be had from inviting the consequences. The ‘forgetting’ of manners referred to by my friend is in part a wilful abandonment of manners, an expression of independence. It is also a test of the structures that manners appear to hold in place.

This warrants a separate meditation.

Having set it aside for a few weeks, I’ve picked up Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy again, and I’m nearing the end of the second volume, They Were Found Wanting. The novel has become slightly more puzzling — not as a read (nothing could be more straightforward) but as a phenomenon. Set in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, the Trilogy was written in the wake of World War I, and published in a troubled country with little interest in an epic that was centered in a territory (Transylvania) that no longer belonged to it. This initial impediment to the novel’s success was dwarfed by the two crushing blows that followed, the Nazi invasion of Hungary and the Communist takeover after World War II. Bánffy, born to one of the great Protestant but aristocratic families of Transylvania, died a poor man in 1950, stateless in every way that counted. His novel was stateless, too. Out of print when he died, it would not reappear in Hungary until 1983. Translations into other languages followed, with the author’s daughter co-producing the English translation that appeared in 2001. The Transylvanian Trilogy is therefore the Sleeping Beauty of great novels, unknown for the better part of a century. It is astonishing to think of all the literary critics and other pundits whose understanding of modern literature necessarily failed to take it into account.

It’s easy to make impressive claims for Bánffy’s work. It is obviously heir to the large-format canvases of Trollope and Tolstoy, setting a great love story against a detailed panorama of political crisis. The profusion of fully-realized characters brings Proust to mind, although Bánffy’s impatience with the easily-distracted élite is softened by an insider’s affection. But I don’t know where to turn for precedents for the copious amount of extravagantly appealing nature writing. I have heard that Transylvania is a beautiful part of the world, but now I know it, sight unseen, from Bánffy’s pages. This is not “nature writing,” nor is it cinematic. The fields and forests are vividly experienced by the characters; the beauty of this world gets under their skin.

Miklós Absolon sat at his ease between two columns on the veranda of Borbathjo, his elegant baroque manor house in the largely Szekler district of north-eastern Maros-Torda. His bald head was covered by a tiny velvet skullcap covered with pearls that he had brought from Bokhara and the collar of his soft silk shirt was open round his thick bull-like neck.

It was May and the sun was shining. Absolon had nothing whatever to do and he was just sitting there, barely even allowing himself to think. His attitude was that of an inscrutable oriental sage, content merely to contemplate.  After all, it was warm and the sun was bright. The view from where he sat was not particularly interesting but stretched into the far distance, right across the Kukullo River, which here was only a meandering stream, surrounded by water-meadows bright with the yellow of buttercups and the lime-green of young grass, up to the valley where the hillsides were covered with forests of beech, pine and hornbeam, all now in bud, and, still further to the south, to the peaks of the eastern Carpathians.

The view was so familiar to him that now he barely noticed it. He had known it from his childhood before the days when his restless urge to travel had carried him to the farthest and most unknown parts of Asia. Or course he had come home from time to time, until that day when he returned with a crippled lag and could roam no more.

If Absolon was thinking of anything at all it was to reflect that, after all, everything, everywhere, was much the same. What essential difference was there between squatting on a rock at Kuen-Lun disguised as a pilgrim and apparently watching the goats outside a Tibetan monastery, or lying at ease in the shade of a Kirgiz tent in the Taklamakan desert, and sitting here at Borbathjo, in the heart of the Szekler country, on the veranda of the house in which he was born?

Life could be beautiful, thought the old traveller, where you were — provided that, if there was no reason to travel, one was content to sit and enjoy it, unlike those city folk who always seemed so fretful and nervous. This was his philosophy, though he rarely thought about it in such simple terms and never discussed such things with other people.

This the opening of Chapter Five of Part Five of They Were Found Wanting. In the very next paragraph, the scene is disturbed by the appearance of a carriage in the distance. The approach and arrival of the carriage covers more than twice the length of what I’ve just copied out. It is a virtuoso performance, following both the vehicle across the landscape (and then out of sight but still audible) and Absolon’s inability to imagine who his visitor might be. That she is a woman, he can tell from the parasol peeking out from behind the coachman, but he can tell no more. I had no more idea than Absolon of her identity, but I had a feeling, guided, I am sure, by the suave undercurrents of this expansive fiction, that it would turn out to be Adrienne Miloth, the wife of Absolon’s nephew and the great love of the book’s hero, Balint Abady. And indeed it was. I am sure that I was not the only reader to feel a Wagnerian portentousness in this brilliant scene-setting. But what I want to call attention to is the fine braiding of psychological and physical detail. There is really only one sentence of specific landscape painting, but its vista is extensive, stretching from buttercups to mountaintops, and Bánffy’s language artfully contradicts the claim that the view “was not particularly interesting.” There is the conjuring of distant places, but not as exotic scenery; Absolon is “disguised” in Tibet and “lying at ease” in the Taklamakan. (I must say that I found the latter remark almost boastful, as being somewhat improbable in a trackless waste whose name means something like, “you may find your way, but not your way out.”) Above all, however, there is the fact of Absolon’s being as planted in this view as any tree. The “old traveller,” now lame, surveys his birthplace, and is no less inscrutable than it is.

I quote the passage also because it presents some of the difficulties that many readers will have with The Transylvanian Trilogy, once they realize, if they were so mistaken, that Transylvania is not an imaginary region invented as the backdrop for vampire stories. (Two-thirds of the way through the Trilogy, I can report that there is no hint, not the remotest, of the antics of the undead.) When Bánffy was writing, Transylvania had been ceded to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon. In time, the Romanians would re-name everything, so that it is difficult now to get a map of the province with the old Hungarian names. (The map provided in the two-volume Everyman Library edition is shockingly inapt.) But the grasp of a rich and complex history is also presumed. The Transylvanian aristocracy, unlike that of the Danube plain that constitutes modern Hungary, went Protestant in the Reformation, and it stayed Protestant. This only intensified the “Wild West” (or east, in this case) reputation of Transylvanian grandees, a friction which in turn mirrored that underlying the “Dual Monarchy,” a confection of 1867 that attempted to distinguish the identities of the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary, even though they embodied in the same man, Franz Josef von Hapsburg. Throughout the novel, the “men of 1867” are pitted against those of “1848,” partisans of Hungarian independence. As for the Szeklers, they were Hungarian, Protestant smallholders, and they were also emigrants leaving the country.

This political background is not at all decorative. Indeed, I have never read a more chilling account of the run-up to World War I, which is tacitly presented here as an inevitability. The Transylvanian Trilogy has the sweep and power of the best historical fiction, but it is written by a witness and participant — Bánffy was a career diplomat — and not by someone born long afterward. One big surprise is the antagonistic character of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whom I had never thought of as anything but the jolly old victim of an assassination. In Bánffy’s treatment, Franz Ferdinand is a malignant opponent of Hungarian autonomy and a reactionary intent upon emasculating diets and parliaments. When Balint Abady is not engrossed by his longing for Adrienne (whose marriage is complicated by the possible madness of her husband), he is almost as horrified by international developments as he is by his countrymen’s refusal to pay attention to them. The reader who can grapple with these foreign details will be rewarded, however cheerlessly, by the picture of a dysfunctional legislature that stinks with familiarity. The vulnerability of liberal democratic political systems to personal opportunism and rent-seeking is endlessly palpated, like a loose front tooth.

***

The carriage drew up, and Adrienne got out.

That’s how the chapter opening closes, and, as it did, I was acutely aware of having been reading. The scenery, perhaps, could be captured in a movie, but not Absolon’s impassive expectation. What you can see is only part of the story. Reading, alone among media, allows the momentary to be placed alongside, or perhaps atop, the historical. It is not just a beautiful woman who gets out of the carriage, but Adrienne Miloth, and all that we know about her. She alights upon a carpet of well-chosen words.