Ray Soleil, laid up as he is with a broken arm, managed to send me the link to someone’s blogpost about Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, and their flat at Kensington Palace. I lacked the fortitude to read more about this newsy couple, he the most dashing of the royals and she much too pretty to be one, but I did learn that some of the smaller apartments in the palace are let to “suitable” tenants. There’s an Alan Bennett play in there somewhere! For some reason, the piece also put me in mind of the Duchess of Cambridge’s uncle Gary, not that I know anything about him except that his house in Ibiza is called the Maison de la Bang Bang. It doesn’t get less royal than that, innit?

Gary Goldsmith sounds like promising material for a JK Rowling novel, although I can only say that now that I’ve read the one, The Casual Vacancy. At lunch, a friend was telling me that she had been unable to get far into this book, which came out last year and did not do very well, not here in the United States, anyway. My friend thought that she might have let too much time elapse between readings, making it difficult to keep track of the characters, of whom there are about a dozen principal ones — characters to whose thoughts and feelings we’re made privy to. I could think of other reasons why the book might have been hard to get into. The setting is very English; it amounts to a cliché about antagonism between the conservative and comfortable inhabitants of an Olde English village and the sprawling impertinence of an adjacent municipality. But this picture begins to fall apart right away, with the death (by aneurysm) of a village councilor. It turns out that the council is divided (if unevenly) about a very important local issue, and the unexpected death, which creates the vacancy of the title (in which “casual” means something like “casualty”), knocks the blocks from under the status quo. What promises to be a darkish comedy of bad manners, though, gradually reveals itself to be something else, something more volatile and dangerous, as the antagonisms among the villagers induce them to act with a recklessness that we don’t associate with novels that open so picturesquely. You know that somebody is going to get hurt, and badly.

The pleasures of the English novel are all here — the sharply-drawn characters and the indefinite precision of their speech — but the moral of the story, which Rowling holds at bay with the spare elegance of her prose, is harsh: the people who get hurt are the ones without resources. Disaster might menace the prosperous (sometimes invited by irresponsible diet), but the prosperous have cushions to fall back upon. And they know how things work. They know what they’re doing, even when they’re being rash. (That’s what makes their foolishness feel dangerous.) The young and the disadvantaged are more at risk, just as in real life. Rowling is a great storyteller, capable of engineering a plot, with many moving, interactive parts, that comes to a dramatically satisfying conclusion. But this ending is very bleak. It encapsulates the proposition that only the dead have stories that end.

This is ironic, because most of Rowling’s characters are driven by the desire to restrain others. Village life, a competitive, zero-sum game, is replete with negative satisfactions: anyone’s loss is someone else’s gain. As the novel rolls along, you realize that the death at the beginning has gravely reduced the amount of generosity in circulation. The late councilor appears to have been the only person in town with a genuine interest in furthering the lives of others. It is not hard to see The Casual Vacancy as a scathing indictment, as they used to say, of provincial English life. It doesn’t read like one at all, but it closes like one. The affluent characters fumble their way onto less precarious ground. Beneath the others, the ground gives way.

It is no surprise that Rowling creates adolescent characters who are as vivid as her grown-up ones, but I can’t recall a novel in which teenagers’ problems have equal weight. But this is no young-adult novel. The machinery is far too brutal. Rowling animates her stock tropes with the sordid thrill of edging along the borders of wrongdoing, never overstepping them sufficiently to invoke the very different mechanics of the crime novel, but roaming far from the attractive hearths of social comedy. It is something like Ruth Rendell’s territory, but more crisply described, the writing less inflected by the self-justifying illusions of Rendell’s protagonists.

It rained on Barry Fairbrother’s grave. The ink blurred on the cards. Siobhan’s chunky sunflower head defied the pelting drops, but Mary’s lilies and freesias crumpled, then fell apart. The chrysanthemum oar darkened as it decayed. Rain swelled the river, made streams in the gutters and turned the steep roads into Pagford glossy and treacherous. The windows of the school bus were opaque with condensation; the hanging baskets in the Square became bedraggled, and Samantha Mollison, windscreen wipers on full tilt, suffered a minor collision in the car on the way home from work in the city.

The hopefulness of the young also serves to highlight the depravity of their elders. Adolescence is more likely to be outgrown than the failings of the mature. This contrast is keen in the relationship between Simon Price and his older son, Andrew. Simon is a vicious man whose weakness for shortcuts and cheating has reduced him to self-pitying monstrosity, and Andrew longs for the courage to stand up to his father’s verbal and physical abuse, but his revenge is similarly underhanded. The difference is that he seems to learn something from its fallout.

The Casual Vacancy is not a nostalgic novel; it will not please readers in search of appealing bygones. Instead of the amusingly quaint tale of bucolic foibles that she seems to promise at the start, Rowling gives us something much bigger. How much bigger, it is too soon to say. The great rural novels of the Nineteenth Century, by Brontë, Eliot, and Hardy, were rooted in the unthinking, heartless placidity of country life. Theirs was a world not yet engaged in the profusions and complications that followed the Industrial Revolution. It is hard to know whether their stolid grandeur might coexist with our post-industrial litter, but I daresay that even the Internet will eventually be found to rest on timeless, human-natural foundations. JK Rowling is well on track.

Taking care of those million things, and running a ring of errands that ended in the Museum bookstore, freezing and dripping at the same time, kept me away from the desk for most of the day; the rest was spent glued to The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling’s first post-Potter novel, and every page a book for grownups. It was midnight when I closed the book, and Kathleen walked in from a late night at the office.

Kathleen went straight to bed, but I stayed up for a while, starting Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors.

I should like nothing more than to devote the rest of this damp and rainy day to writing about all the good reading that I’ve been enjoying, but it cannot be. I’ve got to run to Fairway for the fixings for dinner, do a bit of prep, taxi down to Alphabet City to pick up Will and his Granma Fran — for the last haircut. This evening, Will’s parents will dine with us at the apartment for the last time in a long time. Kathleen won’t see them again until Thanksgiving. I’ve got to fetch some things that are coming back to us, on Friday, amidst the movers, but I won’t be hanging around to chat. By Saturday, they’ll all have left New York.

Megan and Ryan are off to what look to be great careers in San Francisco; Ryan is especially pleased with his new job, which is not wanting in the prestige department. Will is enrolled at a very attractive pre-school. Finding a house to rent in the chosen part of town is not expected to take very long, and temporary housing has been made available in the meantime. In their minds, Megan and Ryan are already out there, setting up their new life. It is impossible not to be very happy for them, and proud of them as well.

Will knows that something is afoot, but he’s game.

Kathleen and I aren’t quite sure what’s in store for us, but we’re very glad that we’ve got one another.

***

Fairway was about as empty as it ever gets, this morning. I pushed a shopping cart on the rounds, picking up very little that I shouldn’t be needing for this evening. When I was done, I stood in the shopping-cart line, just as I always do — because I always use a shopping cart, even if I’m going to buy only a few things. I don’t want to carry a basket, much less an armful of items. No matter how few things there are in my shopping cart, however, I know that I have to go through the shopping-cart line, because that’s the Fairway rule. I don’t mind, because the shopping-cart line is usually much shorter and sometimes even faster than the shopping-basket line.

It is also true that I avoid the store at rush hour. Running over to Fairway for a bunch of parsley last night at 6:30 was the sort of aberration that would occur only on the first day back from a trip. I was going to make spaghetti alla carbonara for myself while Kathleen worked late, and I had everything but the parsley. Simple, I thought. I ran into the very crowded store, grabbed a produce bag, and stuffed a bunch of flat-leaf parsley into it. Done! Then I went to stand at the end of the shopping-basket line. Only it wasn’t. Wasn’t the end. This was pointed out to be the lady who, I now saw, was next on line. standing where it stretched round a corner. So headed down to the end of the line and — wrong again. This time, I was politely alerted to my gaffe by a Fairway staffer. Sure enough, I had mistake a bend in the line for the end of the line. When I found the actual end, it was so far from the head that I thought I’d take my chances on the shopping-cart line. I had never seen anyone with a shopping-basket asked to leave the shopping-cart line, although suddenly, now that I was standing at the end of it, it seemed that this ought to be so, because I would probably be out of the store before the woman who rightly complained about my cutting in. (My inadvertent cutting in, I want to protest; but, let’s be honest: I wasn’t paying attention.) Already mortified by having risked assholery not once but twice, I felt that I was getting away with something anyway, and therefore being an asshole, by standing in the shopping-cart line, especially as it moved even faster than I expected it to do. Indeed, I was out of the store in minutes.

A lot of good it did me, because I felt ashamed of myself — I hate giving the impression of oafishness — and angry about having been put it (read: having put myself in) a mortifying position. At the time, I wondered if my sensitivity to the gaffe had been heightened by my complicity in the awful but mundane vanities that bloom in JK Rowling’s characters, in The Casual Vacancy, like acne on the teenagers’ cheeks. Just reading the book made me feel a low-grade, free-floating guilt. It took quite a while, home from the store, to settle into complacency — or at any rate the uneasy comfort of losing myself in Rowling’s novel.

This morning, I drew a different moral: if you have an everyday routine that works for you, stick to it. I ought to have used a shopping-cart to by the effing parsley.

It took three hours, door-to-door. Traffic was heavy on the Long Island parkways, and the driver opted for a route that was unfamiliar to me. We took the Cross Island Parkway to its nominal end, at the foot of the Whitestone Bridge, but swept right along onto an extender called the Whitestone Expressway. Soon we joined the Grand Central Parkway, which had backed up somewhere between the Cross Island and the Van  Wyck. There were ten minutes of drag along the lower reaches of Little Neck Bay. So this is Bayside, I figured to myself, but I did not get so far as to work out that it must be Douglaston across the water. I was vexed. I wanted to get home, and the brake-and-roll congestion seemed to threaten my getting there, ever. But then, as usual, our speed picked up, and most of the cars along side us peeled off for one of the two bridges, without any sign of the cause of the backup.

Everything in the apartment seemed to be as it ought to be. There were only two messages on the answering machine — two for a whole week! And one of those was rubbish.

It would have been nice to stay on at Fire Island, but when I awoke yesterday morning — to ice-blue skies that would cloud over with the passing day — knowing that we would be leaving that afternoon, I found myself ready to go home.

And now I’m home. There are a million things to do, but I already saw to the most important one: watering the plants on the balcony. Ray Soleil was going to stop by last Thursday to give them a drink, but before we even left for Fire Island he broke his left arm. (He’s doing well!) A few of the plants were a bit wilted, but they bounced back nicely overnight. Nothing else on my to-do list is at all urgent. But I’d like to get some of it taken care of before writing about what I’ve been reading, or rather whom — J K Rowling. For the moment, it suffices to say, damn, she’s good!

***

And of course I’m not talking about Harry Potter & Co.

Grey and damply cool, this is no day for the beach, but here we are, and here we shall gather with Megan, Ryan, and Will for a third Fire Island stay. Even though they’re off to San Francisco at the end of next week, we look forward to many happy returns.

It is lovely just to hear the wind soughing in the reeds.

***

For forty years or so, I’ve never let a certain compact yellow paperback get too far out of sight. It is one of my aspirational touchstones, promising swift self-improvement if given a minimum of attention. I have never managed to give it that minimum, at least until now, but, as I say, it has always, this little book, been near to hand. It is called 1200 Chinese Basic Characters, edited by W Simon, then of the University of London, and first published in 1944. My copy dates to 1975.

It happens also be an orphan of history, a remnant of violent upheaval. 1200 Characters is the adaptation, for English speakers, of a Chinese primer, People’s Ten-Thousand Character Lessons, published by China’s Commercial Press in pamphlet form and distributed in bulk as part of a literacy campaign. The original Chinese text, divided into four books of twenty-four lessons each, has been supplied with English translations, of both the lessons and the individual characters. The idea, according to the foreword, is that, by learning ten characters a day, one might become proficient in Chinese in three or four months. Rather, I should say, proficient in reading and writing Chinese. The lessons are explicitly aimed at people who have spoken Chinese from birth.

This is not the kind of book that you would expect to find in a contemporary modern-language course. It is on the contrary a vehicle of indoctrination for the Republic of China. Not the People’s Republic of China, but its predecessor, so to speak, and currently the government of Taiwan. Nevertheless, the lessons are sufficiently charged with collective spirit to sound Communist, at least to Western ears. What would be different about the PRC version of this book (and I’m sure that at least one exists) is that the characters would be “simplified.” Many of them would look quite different, and it would require a new orientation to be able to look them up in a dictionary. To this day, the two character systems thrive, the simplified within China and the traditional everywhere else — Singapore, Taiwan, and in Chinese-language publications in the United States.

Another odd thing about 1200 Characters is its devotion to an ill-fated romanization scheme. Older readers will recall the Wade-Giles way of representing Chinese sounds in English — Ch’ing Dynasty, Mao Tze-Tung — while younger readers will have bumped into pinyin, currently the standard romanization — Qing Dynasty, Mao Zedong. Only Chinese language specialists and a handful of elderly readers would have any call to remember Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the romanization scheme employed by Professor Simon. We need not say much about Gwoyeu Romatzyh, except that it looks very odd, replete as it is with extra-looking letters.

Back to the text, though. The first lesson teaches the student how write “My name is…” “I am N years old,” “I come from X.” There is no dialogue, no simulation of real-life exchanges. There would be no need for that, as the student is presumed to be a fluent speaker of Chinese. Rather, the student is facing the daunting challenge of learning how to write Chinese characters — and to write the Chinese characters that the rulers want to be sure that she knows, the better to read banners and proclamations.

The second lesson puts us firmly on the path to propaganda. Entitled “The Blind,” it consists of four lines: “People who cannot see are blind, And people who cannot read may also be considered to be blind. The blind suffer; Those who cannot read suffer also.” Jumping ahead to the seventeenth lesson, “Community,” we see that the order in which the characters are to be introduced to the student is not governed by considerations of everyday frequency. Two new characters in the lesson denote management or control, as does a third, introduced in an earlier lesson. In the following transcription, these words are italicized. “While as men we value independence [“self-reliance” would be more literal], We also value living in a community. Each private individual should look after his private affairs, While the community should handle communal affairs. The power of the community is unlimited, While the power of the individual is limited. If only there is the spirit of cooperation in the community, Anything can be achieved.” The beginning student may not know how to write about the weather or what he had for dinner, but he is already capable of grasping the public agenda.

My immediate goal is to master the 305 characters introduced in the first of the four books. So far, the indoctrination has made me feel very Chinese. My favorite line so far comes from the fifth lesson, “Working and Studying”: “Study and work: joy without end.” Yes, it sounds funny; how could anybody make such a statement with a straight face? Except that I pretty much can, these days.

***

1200 Characters omits a vital aspect of learning to write Chinese, which concerns the very fixed order in which the strokes of a character are to be written. It would be up to the teacher to impart that knowledge during the lessons.

I was drawn to the study of Chinese by an exhibition, mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring of 1972, of Chinese calligraphy. I spent the following summer buried in books from which I learned how to write characters and how to look them up in a dictionary. I did not learn anything very useful. I lacked even then the steady hand required for calligraphy of any kind, and I still can’t say anything intelligent in Chinese. The characters have remained the draw. And I really do know how to write them, even when I don’t know what they mean.

So it was extremely encouraging to read, the other day, something that I must have unwittingly suspected all along. Simon Leys, in a 1996 essay, “One More Art: Chinese Calligraphy,” writes of the “frenzied” cursive script that forms one of the principal calligraphic styles,

Only practitioners and specialists can decipher it — and yet, even for the common viewer, it is one of the most spectacular and appealing styles. Its illegibility poses no obstacle to the enjoyment of the ordinary public, since — as we have just said — this enjoyment does not reside in a literary appreciation of the contents but in an imaginative communion with the dynamics of the brushwork. What the viewer needs is not to read a text but to retrace in his mind the original dance of the brush and to relive its rhythmic progress.

Thus accredited with a skill that I already possess, I shall be making my way to the galleries surrounding the Astor Court at the Museum, to enjoy some imaginative communion with the brushwork — without feeling guilty about having no idea what the damn thing says!

I can’t remember being happier. In the middle of the night, I woke to the fall of rain upon leaves, inches from my pillow. Little gusts of clean air puffed every which way. I felt very safe and very young.

Later, however, we were disturbed by a low grinding sound, as of a whining, futile motor. I wondered if someone was very unnecessarily running an air conditioner. Kathleen actually got up to check the toilets. It was merely rain in the drain. It soon put me back to sleep.

This morning, it wasn’t a case of oversleeping. There was simply no better place in the world to be.

***

By 1909, Freud’s unassuming quest for a cure for nervous disorders…had improbably flowered into the vast system of thought about human nature — psychoanalysis — which has detonated throughout the intellectual social, artistic, and ordinary life of our century as no cultural force has (it may not be off the mark to say) since Christianity. … It was as if a lonely terrorist working in his cellar on a modest explosive device to blow up the local brewery had unaccountably found his way to the hydrogen bomb and blown up half the world.

So writes Janet Malcolm in Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, which I’m reading because I found it on my Paperwhite and was (am) still in the mood to read anything written by Malcolm. However, it has been a very long time since I gave serious thought to Freud’s ideas. For twenty years or more, they have struck me as extremely culture-bound, unlikely to have been produced anywhere but in the buttoned-up milieu of high-Victorian respectability. As a teenager, I’d wondered where, exactly, Freud’s three psychological agencies — id, ego, and superego — might be located in the brain. But in good time I understood that Freud and the neuroscientists were not dealing with the same material. There is no ego in the brain, I told myself, and that was that.

Perhaps simply because I haven’t thought about Freud in a long time, I had an open mind as I read Malcolm’s account of the development of his ideas. A mind open enough to be struck, and almost as shocked as one of Freud’s early readers, by the possibility that his famous tripartition, while it answers to no physiological arrangement, describes pretty well how we organize our minds as social creatures. The id is an inborn compound of anxiety and desire, the superego is our internalization of the cultural rules that we are taught as small children, and the ego is our character, the “decider,” around which we create our sense of self and with which we hope to excite our neighbors’ admiration. That the superego is a completely cultural construct I have no doubt, and it readily follows that the conscience of someone brought up in a tribal community (as almost all Americans are, outside the more affluent quarters of the great cities) will follow dictates quite different from those of someone raised in a cosmopolitan atmosphere. We may all agree that cold-blooded murder is wrong, but the further we get from that absolute, the more we will disagree, first over priorities and then over substance. This isn’t what Freud had in mind when he divided the mind into three parts, but it still seems to work.

I completely reject Freud’s “complexes,” especially as regards boys’ hypothetical fear of castration and the idea that anybody regards girls and women as castrated. Great thinker that he was, Freud was an unregenerate sexist, and his notion that the female superego is accordingly defective in rigor is ridiculously Martian. Sex is important in Freud because the denial of sex was such a prominent feature of the bourgeois life of his time. (He may also have underestimated the frequency of actual sexual molestation — a prominent theme of Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives.) When it comes to his theory of transference, essential for psychotherapeutic success, I would root it in the struggle to achieve autonomy in defiance of authority — the ego’s everyday job. The therapist embodies the superego’s social power, but at the same time he does not contemn the id’s passions. Thereby, his consulting room becomes the patient’s whole world. At least for fifty minutes.

It’s all right there in the second paragraph:

At forty-five, Jodi still sees herself as a young woman. She does not have her eye on the future but lives very much in the moment, keeping her focus on the everyday. She assumes, without having thought about it, that things will go on indefinitely in their imperfect yet entirely acceptable way. In other words, she is deeply unaware that her life is now peaking, that her youthful resilience — which her twenty-year marriage to Todd Gilbert has slowly been eroiding — is approaching a final stage of disintegration, that her notions about who she is and how she ought to conduct herself are far less stable than she supposes, given that a few short months are all it will take to make a killer out of her.

And as for that marriage…

Since I’m reading The Silent Wife on the Kindle Paperwhite, I can tell you that I’ve covered 66% of it. The suspense is almost unendurable. The late Susan Harrison writes like a student of Ruth Rendell who has figured out how to supercharge the formula. Several times already, I have cried out in shocked alarm.

More anon.

***

Well! That was a smashing read! But, beyond recommending it as heartily as I can, there is absolutely nothing for me to say. Not yet. Time will tell whether it’s a stunt, a magnificent entertainment, or a book of more literary haunting. Either way, it will be widely read. For young women, it will be seized on as a cautionary tale. Young men will fondle the moral conundrum that it poses. It may become a book that is read by everyone before leaving college, and rarely touched again afterward. I think that it tells one of those stories, composed of all the usual elements but to its own very peculiar ends, that everyone with some education will be expected to have read, whether or not there’s a movie.

The weather, somewhat cloudy late this morning, is sunny again, and still quite beautifully cool. Walking to dinner, we’ve carried sweaters that we’ve worn on the way back to the house. Tonight, we will stay home, just for a change; although I was determined not to cook, I couldn’t see the harm in poaching some chicken, boiling some orzo in the water, and grilling some large mushrooms, all for a salad with avocado and bottled Caesar dressing. I did bring a chunk of parmagiano reggiano. I’m throwing it together as I write, so that it can sit and steep while we take our walk on the beach — a walk that will be somewhat shorter than Monday’s and yesterday’s. (We’re sore!)

When we weren’t walking yesterday, I was bent over Confucius. Confucius say, “Vessel no vessel! Strange vessel! What a vessel!” Simon Leys pronounces this to be one of the most “terse” statements in the Analects. It is anything but incomprehensible, though, if you know that a ritual vessel characterized by squared corners was at some point replaced by one of a different shape, but called by the same name. Leys puts it thus: “A square vase that is not square — square vase indeed!” But there is no way to render the point in English. In Chinese, the name of the vessel, gu, was also its description — a single character that I can’t wait to hunt down in my modern dictionary at home. When the description no longer fits the object, the name ought to be changed, too. Confucius’s first act as a minister, he always said, would be to “rectify the names” — to call things what they really are. This is the opposite of what dictators usually attenpt, which is to rectify the named.

What makes “study” of this kind engaging is the classical language’s extradordinary pithiness: Confucius puts it all in seven characters, and only three different ones: gu not gu, gu wonder gu wonder. Hunting them down in Legge’s appended dictionary was wonderfully time-consuming

We slept in this morning. We both had crazy dreams. In my case, they were unusual and not unpleasant. (Has there ever been an opera called Amelia al ballo?) The air was uncommonly fragrant, more floral than woodsy; there is always a touch of the jungle about the backyards of Ocean Beach. It was also deliciously cool — too cool to get out of bed at first. We’ve been promised bad weather for most of the week, so every clear blue sky, such as the one above us now, is precious.

While waiting for the verve to get out of bed, I read the last couple of paragraphs of an old Ruth Rendell mystery, which I simply hadn’t been able to keep my eyes open for last night, called No More Dying Then. It’s in this novel that Mike Burden, Inspector Wexford’s number two and recently widowed, falls in love (or fancies he does) with the mother of a missing child. They are all wrong for each other but the sex (discreetly sketched) is quite passionate on both sides. Happily — very happily, when you think about it — the mother’s reunion with her child, who was kidnapped not murdered, puts an end to Mike’s by now merely honorable plans to marry her. His feet are already cold enough. I read the novel in dribs and drabs, half-asleep sometimes, and didn’t quite follow the action — something that has happened several times with mysteries read in ebook form. We’ll see what happens with the next title on the list: Susan Harrison’s The Silent Wife.

Color me happy at the news about the Washington Post. One thing that has becoming clear became even clearer last week, when the Times sold the Globe for a a very small fraction of what it paid for it twenty years ago. The people running newspapers today don’t know how to do it — for today, and much less for tomorrow. Jeff Bezos has demonstrated visionary abilities in the world of print, and, more important in a newspaper owner, he has demonstrated heroic patience. He’s not perfect or above criticism, but the alternative to men like him is men like Murdoch. With luck, Bezos will create a new business model for newspapers that inspires the Times to stay in print after all. To browse a newspaper and to browse a Web site — it’s misleading to use the same verb.

Yes, it’s true that I grew up reading newspapers, and that I’m an old man. But I’ve known a few fashions to come and go. The Seventies, after all — need I say more? And when I see people tapping on their smartphones while walking down the street, or, as we did last night at dinner, both members of a young couple fixing their attention on their screens instead of upon one another, I say to myself, they’ll grow out of it. Eventually, people will prefer not to be on the receiving end of such rudeness. At some point, a venerable app that’s wired into our roughly civilized brains will kick in.

***

A book that arrived in the mail as I was planning to pack for the week here on Fire Island was Simon Leys’s collection of essays, The Hall of Uselessness. Leys (a Belgian sinologist who settled in Australia and adopted this nom de plume) is a noted translator of Confucius, and he has always struck me as someone who understands what is the same and what is different about China, something few scholars and pundits do. Leys gets China right, to put it crassly. A book of essays by such a writer seemed just the thing to have by the sea, and, in case I fell into a serious mood, I brought along the Analects as well, which I’ve had since it came out in 1997. In case I got really serious, I added James Legge’s translation of the Analects, too. This hardy tome is more than a translation. The original text appears on facing pages, a scholarly apparatus crowds the back of the book, and there is even a dictionary of the characters.

Leys is a Catholic and, in the best sense, a conservative. It suits me now to read thoughtful, pious books that are nevertheless not dogmatic. When Leys is upset, as he is by Christopher Hitchens’s attacks on Mother Teresa, his indignation is personal, not propagandistic. As a born non-believer (as I have long understood myself to be), I naturally have no interest in spreading my lack of spiritual inclination; I wish only to be left alone. That granted, I’m happy to attend to religious meditations, so long as they’re not flamboyant. There are no actual meditations in The Hall of Uselessness, but Leys’s devoutness is palpable, and not at all disagreeable.

This interest in conservatism — which ought not to be taken as the sign of a political drift to the right; for the right would be my natural home, if it were possible to be an American conservative since Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Reagan’s Personal Responsibility (with its odious long tail of “deregulation” — has brought me to the point of wanting to learn more about Friedrich Hayek, who is such a (misunderstood?) totem of market fundamentalists. I’ve got two good books, in addition to The Road to Serfd0m, in my pile at home. One, which I’ve so far found very intriguing, is Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression.  (The other is Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek.) I’m wondering what Hayek would have made of the big Sunday Times story about the cartelization of orthopedic implants, by Elisabeth Rosenthal. As I’m on vacation, I’m not going to say more about that now than to toot my own horn: back when the Clinton’s were working everyone into a frenzy about health insurance, I wondered why they didn’t begin with an attempt to rationalize health costs, which are still, as Rosenthal’s story makes clear, capricious and quite contrary to the spirit of American law. Toot!

There used to be a police station where the grey structure to the right stands now. The station itself has been set up in the trailer at the rear, where the ferry terminal used to be. (What the closer building is used for, I’ve no idea.) Aside from the missing terminal, however, we have seen very little in the way of Superstorm Sandy damage here in Ocean Beach; everything seems much as it was. But we haven’t yet gone for a walk to the beach, where we understood that the damage was pretty severe.

***

We love our house. It’s on the bay — one in from the water, if you want to get technical, but the deck has an unimpeded view of, among other things, the Suffolk County Courthouse over in Islip. I’m looking forward to some spectacular sunsets.

The minute we stepped inside the house, we put the city completely behind us. It took the walk from the realtor’s to the house to do the job. The wagon was a bit rusty, and of course, being us, we’d overloaded it. I thought we’d never make it. And then we weren’t immediately sure which house it was. But the key fit in the lock — our first key, but also our first agency rental — and we have made ourselves at home. I’m about to go to the market, f/k/a Whitney’s, now called The Pantry. I’m buying only frivolous things; Kathleen and I agreed that, since we’d be out for seven days (and six nights), I wouldn’t lug my kitchen essentials. But I think I’ll boil a dozen eggs for snacks.

Nice to be online, too. We weren’t sure about that.

Last night, I watched Under Capricorn for the second time. The first time, decades ago, involved a cruddy VHS tape that did nothing to argue against the movie’s reputation as one of Hitchcock’s big flops. This time, I was watching a DVD that, while not claiming to be the product of serious restoration, was as agreeable, printwise, as any new movie. I enjoyed it. This enjoyment had a strong “meta” quality to it; I should not recommend Under Capricorn to anyone except, perhaps, fans of melodrama, because that’s what Under Capricorn is — and that’s why Hitchcock aficionados dislike it so much. To the true admirer of Hitchcock, his aficionados tend to reduce him to a genre filmmaker, and to scold him when he fails to produce a “Hitchcock” movie. They’re like the the fans who like Woody Allen’s “earlier, funnier” pictures. Hitchcock and Allen are, however, such consummate auteurs that even the movies that fail to thrill cannot be dismissed as failures, because each is an interesting experiment.

Under Capricorn was the second of two pictures inspired by some itch of Hitchcock’s to claim the power of stage performances for the movies. A master of montage, Hitchcock set this mastery aside for Rope and Under Capricorn, indulging instead in prolonged takes. Under Capricorn is the less rigorous experiment; in addition to its long scenes, there are plenty of conventional shots/countershots, the most basic grammar of filmed dialogue. But the camera covers much more ground in Under Capricorn, following characters through doorways and up climbing vines. To make this happen, sets had to be constructed to fly apart at the camera’s advance, and the mechanical noise of the production was such that almost all dialogue had to be re-recorded directly after filming. These technical challenges were Hitchcock’s principle interest in the making of Under Capricorn, and if the resulting film is short on appeal, it is nevertheless an indispensable rehearsal of techniques that would make Rear Window the astounding (and very dramatic) success that it is.

In any case, it is not the sophisticated camera work that makes Under Capricorn unpopular. It is the form of the story, which dates from the previous century, when “suspense” was a feature of “melodrama,” much like romantic scenery and bad weather. Hitchcock became famous for reversing this relationship: he expressed drama in terms of suspense. Suspense is a function of the asymmetry of information. The audience knows something that a character does not — but this is not to say that the audience knows everything. In Vertigo, for example, we learn that Judy Barton was impersonating Madeleine Elster long before Scottie Ferguson does, but this just changes the nature of our suspense, for now what we don’t know is how Scottie is going to respond when he finds out — not to mention the consequences of this response. No one has ever surpassed Hitchcock’s agility at shuffling the asymmetries while never allowing the tension dissipate. Nineteenth-century melodrama, however, used suspense to punctuate “dramatic” scenes, as in “drama” as it’s used by young people today. A better word would be “emotional.” When Devlin rescues Alicia from her bedridden imprisonment at the end of Notorious, the love scene in the foreground is quite conventionally melodramatic in structure (if cooled down to modern temperatures by Cary Grant), but it remains firmly encased in a format of suspense, because the resolution of the romantic confusion between the lovers simply releases us to worry all the more about how they’re going to get out of the house, and it’s that clever escape that we really remember. There are no such escapes in Under Capricorn.

Interestingly, Hitchcock forwent a signal opportunity for suspense in Under Capricorn by opting for its opposite, surprise, at the dénouement. Complete surprises are rare in Hitchcock. (Max de Winter’s confession that he hated Rebecca is the most successful.) He could not help himself from spoiling this one by heavily foreshadowing, in the most melodramatic ways, the evil designs of Milly, the housekeeper so wonderfully acted by Margaret Leighton. Leighton is great fun to watch; she does everything but wink at the audience while she pours honeyed lies into her employer’s ear. We know that she’s up to no good, but this is expectation, not suspense. We don’t know until the moment of surprise that she has been poisoning Lady Hattie and torturing her by placing shrunken heads under the bedclothes. And because of all that foreshadowing, we’re not really surprised. So it’s a double letdown. We didn’t know what the troubled Flusky couple was going to discover, and we aren’t all that shocked when we find out. The miscalculation is colossal, but it is colossally instructive.

Ingrid Bergman’s face is one of cinema’s icons, thanks largely to the photography in Casablanca, which inspired the saying that “the camera loved her.” As a generation of theatre actors had to find out during the early years of film, camera-love is the most understated kind of love in the world — the better to make room for the flood of audience-love. Every word that an actor speaks costs him an iota of his appeal, because it marks his distance from the viewer who seeks only to meld with him. This is why film killed talky melodramas. In a stage performance, it is very exciting to watch two characters go after each other with hammer and tongs; that’s why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is revived so often. On film, such excess is embarrassing, not powerful. (The Mike Nichols film of the play succeeds as a reality show: it’s understood that we’re witnessing scenes from the Taylor-Burton marriage, not a play.) Narration belongs to the camera, not to the character.

In Under Capricorn, Ingrid Bergman, at the center of the longest scene in the film, circles a long dining-room table and tells the story of Lady Hattie’s love affair with and marriage to a groom in her father’s stables, Sam Flusky (played by Joseph Cotten, who does not appear in this scene). At one point, she stands beyond her costar, Michael Wilding (playing Hattie’s childhood friend, Adare), and raises her hands in a gesticulation of looking into beautiful distances; the composition is as camp as Canova. Bergman is unsuited for the business, but it’s hard to think of anyone who might have carried it off. Again, however, the mistake is enlightening. And it doesn’t make us forget how radiant Bergman is at the Governor’s ball, in the immediately preceding scene. Aside from the arm-waving, she is always lovely and sympathetic.

What I found genuinely annoying about Under Capricorn was the soundtrack. I haven’t come across any other complaints about Richard Addinsell’s score, but it’s wrong in at least two ways. First, there probably oughtn’t to be background music at all — just as there isn’t in Rope. Stage plays don’t have background music — not during the action, anyway. If you want to know why, just watch Under Capricorn. All the dramatic encounters are underlined by background music. Worse, it is a very simpering kind of music, a blarney of Irish-sounding motifs that makes one wonder if someone thought that Under Capricorn could be saved by making it sound like Gone With the Wind. If the film is ever restored, I hope that the disc offers the option of blocking this music.

Patrick McGilligan writes that such humor as can be found in Under Capricorn owes to Michael Wilding’s performance, but, I say, let’s not overlook Cecil Parker, a great English character actor who probably wouldn’t have appeared in this film if it had been made in Hollywood and not at Elstree. Parker plays the Governor of Australia, newly appointed at the beginning of the film (Wilding’s Adare is his black-sheep cousin, brought along in family desperation), and he invests his role with an irresolute pomposity that suggests Margaret Rutherford and Marion Lorne. The leathers and the feathers of his imperial get-up make his fatuousness funny to watch.

There is a wonderful Sargent painting at the Museum that I like to take visitors to see, Alpine Pool. If you stand back, you see a pool of clear water and the rocks at its bottom. As you walk up to the painting very slowly, there comes a moment when the whole picture breaks down into an assemblage of abstract brush-strokes. Come closer, and you will see “how it is done” — how Sargent works the illusion. Watching Hitchcock’s movies offers a similarly bracing shock, although it works over time, not distance. As you watch them, he teaches you how to watch them, and he gradually empties your head of expectations as you learn to trust that, whatever he does, it will be interesting on the how-to level.

***

As long as we’re talking about melodrama, permit me to repeat my judgment of Gone With the Wind: it is a screwball comedy embalmed in a battlefield epic. I’ll take Mr and Mrs Smith any day.

In today’s Business Section, I came across one of those pieces that makes the Times look more like a publicity machine than a newspaper. The publicity is rarely focused on a single company’s new product — that would be transparent. Instead, it calls attention to new developments in a field. But there is a hopeful, prospective quality to these “developments” — which is to say that they haven’t actually developed yet.

“New Habits Transform Software,” by Quentin Hardy, prints the following statement, by Bret Taylor, “one of the best-regarded young software designers in Silicon Valley.”

“The way people use things is fundamentally changing,” said Bret Taylor, chief executive of Quip, a start-up offering document-writing software that focuses more on mobile than desktop work.

You can tell that the air is thin by the fact that this claim, both grandiose and obvious, has a paragraph to itself. The point of the story is that it is going to be easier to write documents collaboratively and on the fly, via mobile devices. I’m afraid that I don’t find any “transformation” in this news. What I was looking for, when I swallowed the bait in the title, was news about improved automation. For example: What I want is an app that will allow me to right-click on a photograph, make a selection between the two image sizes that I use at my sites, and — done. Something that would save me the trouble of “saving as” — assigning a new name to a copy of the original image. The app would know how to name it, because I follow a protocol about names that it could easily learn. A second right-click would ask me whether I wanted to PhotoShop the image. Eventually, it would insert the uploaded image’s file name into the draft of the pertinent Daily Blague entry. This wonderful app would cross many software borders to execute its commands, but in doing so it would finally realize the promise of desktop computing: true automation. Anything that I’m doing by rote, day after day, ought to be done by a machine.

I’m not expecting anyone to design this app. But surely someone could create an app for designing such apps.

***

So, no automation. I continued reading about making word-processing easier on small devices. Also, this:

“Writing and editing has always been somewhat collaborative, but things are moving much faster now,” said Mathias Crawford, a researcher in human-computer interactions at Stanford University. “We are moving from persuasion based on rhetoric to persuasion based on tables and videos inserted into narrative text.”

Well, that sounds pretty rhetorical to me. The shift to “tables and videos” is simply a move to another kind of rhetoric. A lesser kind, I believe.

It has been a bitter year in several ways — more bittersweet than bitter, perhaps; I’m not rending garments here — and one of the persistent sharp notes has been a reflective comprehension of what it means to be neither collaborative nor mobile. I don’t work with other people, and my favorite mode of communication, aside from the essay, is the exchange of letters. I do not consider such correspondence “collaborative.” Although correspondence can have some of the effects (on a third-party reader) of a collaborative effort, as two writers work to refine the expression of ideas in an exchange of comments, it completely lacks a key element of collaboration, cooperation. I am not an intellectually cooperative person. What I do well I do best by myself.

And I am not a mobile person, which is perhaps why I’ve never been able to find a use for Twitter. Six or seven years ago, when using a computer on the go, wherever one happened to be in the world, was just beginning to be imaginable, I was as eager as anybody to do it. But my age got in the way. Just as mobile devices came on line and became more reliable, I found myself at home most of the time. When I did go out, I went out to see or to do something, not to write about it. The things that I went out to see or to do did not entail news flashes that I might forget, and on those rare occasions when something startling crossed my attention, I wrote it down in a small notebook (and usually forgot about it). Conversely, when I did set to writing, I more often than not wanted to consult my library. I am very much in the position of Michel de Montaigne, who worked in his tower room. Montaigne was a man of affairs, and very mobile in his day job. But he wrote in retirement. I believe that everyone does. Reading and writing are different activities only to the extent that they are not bridged by thinking, and thinking, for most human beings, requires freedom from disturbance.

I don’t see anything on the technological horizon that is going to alter that.

As for “tables and videos,” I don’t know whether to laugh (at the blithe naiveté of the statement, as though there were anything new about the use of media in business presentations) or to cry (at the difficulty of putting media to use in ways that are intellectually clear to the uninitiated). Reading about Condorcet recently, I stumbled on what I take to be a truth that can be stated simply: the sole object of political activity is to shape laws and conventions that conform to a social consensus about everyday commerce. I am not convinced that “commerce” is the best term for this statement, but it was the most immediately handy. I mean it to cover the full range of human transactions, including of course the purchase and sales of goods but also comprising the many illiquid agreements of everyday life, such as our mutual engagement not to drive through red lights. (And certain human transactions, regarded as private, are not to be subjected to political attention. They are to be covered by exclusion.) But, to restate the truth: Politics is the business of making our laws agree ever more fully with our expectations about daily life.

A simple statement, but the complexity of realizing it is discouraging. It’s not that we need to think of a new system for making politics do what it ought to do. The system that we have will work well enough, if enough people agree to put it to that use. No, the complexity lies in closing the gap between the profusion of abstruse conditional statements that fill our lawbooks, on the one hand, and the comprehension of normally intelligent citizens, on the other. Few of our laws are written with everybody in mind. That’s what has to change, and changing it poses extraordinary challenges to the ability to express ourselves clearly. To state the challenge baldly: the economic underpinnings of our laws on taxation and incorporation must be plainly understandable to citizens without higher education. Otherwise, what we have is government by the elite, for the elite. (And I hasten to note that I belong to the elite!)

Visuals might be very helpful here, but learning how to create them won’t be taught visually. I remember something that the late media critic Neil Postman said about the act of thinking: it makes for dull television. Uncertainty is fatal to visual expression. In order to instruct, a video must be sure of itself, and to make a video that is both sure of itself and honest requires a great deal of thinking on the part of its makers. This is what ars est celare artem means: (according to the Random House) “true art conceals the means by which it is achieved.”

And there is no getting round the need to make clear thinking easier for more people. The plethora of less-than-honest visuals out there makes the problem twice as difficult.

“Carlos Danger.” That’s apparently what New Yorker editor David Remnick said to the magazine’s art director,  Françoise Mouly, by way of command. Remnick wanted a cover featuring Anthony Wiener in his superpower capacity. We presume that he is very pleased with John Cuneo’s drawing, which was released to the Times a few days ago. So much novelty! Seeing a New Yorker cover in the paper, before it hits the newstands! Editorial requests for topical covers! Well, those are perhaps no longer a novelty, but they still seem new to me, after decades of seasonally-adjusted timelessness. The cover of The New Yorker is now its most prominent cartoon (sorry, “drawing”), with the added joke that you have to look at the Table of Contents for the caption, which, this week, is “Carlos Danger.”

One thing I miss about the old days is knowing so much less about the sex lives of others. Close to nothing, really. Pregnancy used to be the only evidence of sexual activity, and even that was much less on view when I was a little boy. Information about the sex lives of others is not only unuseful but corrosive, because our social lives are carefully constructed atop sexual privacy. Sex happens, all the time, but if it’s not happening to you, how are you going to feel, sitting down to dinner with the teenager whose sexting has somehow come to your attention? Carlos Danger, even worse. An adult male who wants you to vote for him! I’ll bet that Bill Clinton, when he gets down on his knees for bedtime prayers, thanks the Lord especially for having gotten him in and out of the White House before the invention of Facebook.

One of the major pieces in this week’s issue is Ariel Levy’s account of the Steubenville ordeal, “Trial by Twitter.” Over the past months, I have been aware of “Steubenville” as a label pasted on a sordid episode, as effective as a skull-and-crossbones at warning me away. Or perhaps it was the infernal cliché of football-star rapists. I could assume that whatever it was that made “Steubenville” more exciting than other scandals would eventually run its course, and that if there were still anything worth talking about when it did, it would at least be considered talk, not “news.” Levy’s story is indeed considered, and the real issue has little to do with sexting teens. Rather it is the somewhat confounding alliance between critics of America’s “rape culture” and seekers after vigilante justice — the latter, in my book, no better than rapists.

I’m reminded of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. One of the best things in that novel is the account, ostensibly composed by the victim herself, of the heroine’s rape at the age of seventeen. Patty Emerson’s parents urge her not to press charges, because the boy involved is the scion of a wealthy family whom it would be politically embarrassing to disgrace. Patty’s mother in particular finds it difficult to believe that an athlete as robust as her daughter could be forced into nonconsensual sex. Disgusted, Patty turns her back on her affluent Westchester life and migrates to the Midwest, just like the pioneers of earlier centuries. Her adulthood begins in acrimonious rejection.

Franzen times Patty’s rape to occur at a transitional moment. Her parents take the traditional view: rape cannot occur when the man is known socially to the woman and the woman declines to make a fuss during the act. Rape is a violent crime, perpetrated in sudden, unexpected encounters by brutal, barbaric men. Patty’s coach, who notices some cuts and bruises, takes the new view, one of much wider scope. If sex is unwanted, it’s rape, and it cannot be mitigated by the woman’s desire to keep the assault a secret. Ariel Levy’s piece suggests that there is a quasi-legal presumption at work today, according to which a woman does not have the right to suppress a rape.

“Rape culture” is the banner of this new thinking, which is far from universally shared — certainly not by teenagers with no experience of sexual repercussion. Some of the tweets that Levy quotes have an almost Islamic sound to them: girls who get falling-down drunk at parties deserve to be screwed. Indeed, the Internet and its refinements have increased both the incidence of sexual risk-taking and the volume of social disapproval. At the center of everything is a terrible silence, where effective sex education ought to be. I’m not talking about biology classes. I’m not thinking of something that we ought necessarily to look to public schools to provide. But adults could clearly do more to help young people navigate the treacheries of adolescence than blow up every time a wild party leads to bad behavior.

In any case, “rape culture,” as I see it, is just a subset of “football culture.” The sooner football is perceived to be a vice that damages and brutalizes young men (and the young men who watch them), the sooner we can worry less about rape.

When I got [to Harvard], the first thing I did was to persuade them to make me a sophomore. I shouldn’t have even been a freshman! But for some reason they agreed to make me a sophomore. Then I decided that it was beneath me to live in the dorms, so I talked my way into a three-room apartment at a place called the Center for the Study of World Religions, where visiting professors and graduated students lived. I was unbearable. But Harvard was unbearable, too.

If you re-read In the Freud Archives in its new, NYRB edition, you’ll find an Afterward at the back, in which Janet Malcolm sets forth a brief account of the libel suits brought against her by Jeffrey Moussaief Masson, the fellow who spent his sophomore year at Harvard living with visiting professors and grad students, and who came to feel that In the Freud Archives defamed him. The Afterword ought to be a Foreword, because Malcolm reports the passages that offended Masson. Having noted them, you can then read her book, your mouth agape at all the things that Masson did not feel to be actionable, such as the marvel of fatuousness that I’ve copied out, and which therefore have his implied, or at least legal, blessing. (Masson appears to be making fun of himself, but the impression is too calculated to be sincere.)

There’s a word that recurs several times in Archives that seems to apply to much of what I’ve read by Janet Malcolm: Menschenkenner. A Menschenkenner is someone good at judging the character of others, and especially good at resisting the overestimation of talents and charms. Malcolm’s work is in large part a gallery of men and women who are not Menschenkenner. Jeffrey MacDonald and Joe McGuinness, in The Murderer and the Journalist, are well-matched in their lack of Menschenkennerheit. And poor Sheila McGough! All three succumb to positive first impressions, and if they come to rue the consequences, that doesn’t imply a change of heart about the source of disappointment.

In In the Freud Archives, people who are poor judges of character have the stage pretty much to themselves, beginning with Sigmund Freud himself. “Breuer, Fliess, and Jung were the most prominent of those who came within the orbit of Freud’s propensity for idealization followed by disillusionment,” writes Malcolm. Then there’s Kurt Eissler, the dean of Freudian analysts, gruff but ultimately lovable, and completely bedazzled by the precocious Masson. (Masson’s lack of skill as a Menschenkenner appears to stem from a want of interest in other people, making him more reckless than idealistic.) Malcolm’s principal story concerns the hiring and firing of Masson by Eissler, as his successor at the Freud Archives, which Eissler directed — a complicated operation about which it need be said only that access to it is very difficult, and therefore bathed with prestige by those seeking entry. Almost everyone whom Eissler knew advised him that Masson was not the right man for the job, and not just because Masson had no experience directing an archive. Whoever held the position, it was understood, would necessarily stand as a sort of ideological guardian of the Freudian heritage. Few people regarded Masson as any kind of guardian of anything.

Malcolm explores this heritage — an interesting one, not least for its controversies — in some detail. The crux of the story is Freud’s abandonment of the “seduction theory,” and his subsequent development of its replacement, which still strikes non-Freudians as remarkably far-fetched — the theory of the Oedipus Complex. Jeffrey Masson, for whatever reasons good or bad, came to believe that Freud abandoned seduction for “non-scientific” reasons, and that he subsequently realized that he had been mistaken to do so, but concealed his misgivings. Masson wanted access to the Freud Archives precisely in order to discover some written evidence of his theory about Freud, and thereby explode the foundations of Freudian orthodoxy. In short, he was a Trojan Horse. But it can’t be said that he was a particularly damaging one. Well within the year of his contract, he showed his cards — to a reporter for the Times, no less — and was unceremoniously kicked out, without having found anything. As McGuffins go, Freud’s ideas about the unconscious are as good as any. Malcolm manages to discuss them without sharing her own views about Freud, but her withholding is too ostentatious to be overlooked, and we’re indirectly reminded of her mordant thoughts about writerly objectivity.

But this is not just a tale of intramural feuds. In the middle section of the book, Malcolm turns her attention to a young man who has the paradoxical effect of making everyone else in the story look simultaneously normal and crazy. As he puts it himself, Peter Swales is a resident alien in the world of learning. A self-taught historian, without so much as a college degree, Swales latched onto Freud after working with a professor of psychopharmacology on a book about Freud’s interest in cocaine. “Working with” was not something that Swales tended to do for very long, however, and soon Swales was working on his own book about Freud and cocaine. He became an avid student of materials relating to the gestation of Freud’s psychoanalytic propositions. When his path crossed Eissler’s — Eissler, then director of the Freud Archives, controlled access to certain letters that Swales wanted to read — it was not as an analyst or even as a psychologist that Swales introduced himself. He was an intellectual historian, searching for the roots of ideas. This hardly made him ipso facto welcome to an institution that but closely trails the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Scientology in discouraging free exploration of its origins, but Eissler — never the Menschenkenner — was wowed by Swales’s work so far, and took the trouble to secure him a modest grant.

In the end, Swales turns out to have the usual defects of the autodidact. His doubts and his credulities alike are settled, and never subjected to the critical review with which Swales evaluates his evidence. His method is plodding and inexorable but also stubborn, with results therefore prone to what Malcolm calls “fantastical allegation.” But he has a voice that, as recorded by Malcolm’s tapes, shows a real gift for the English language, specifically for being dogged without being tedious. My favorite moment is Swales’s account of his role in the fracas that brought Masson down. Swales, having fallen out with Massoon, wrote a 45-page letter, addressed to Masson but circulated openly, in which he retailed the myriad ways in which Masson had disappointed him and, into the bargain, displayed shoddy habits of scholarship. (Malcolm insists that this tirade is “unfailingly interesting.”) The letter came to the attention of Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal. Blumenthal wanted to write up some of Swales’s findings, but Swales was involved in yet another Menschenkenner-less arrangement — an exclusives deal — with a London newspaper, and couldn’t expatiate on his saucy tales about Freud the adulterer and Freud the attempted murderer. Blumenthal naturally concluded that, if he couldn’t engage the writer of the long letter, he could at least talk to its recipient. “You do what you like,” replied Swales. He goes on to tell Malcolm:

And in that moment I saw what was going to happen. Blumenthal had had the idea that Klein was an authority on what was happening in psychoanalysis, and so had Klein steer him toward the seduction theory as the center of the article. I knew that Masson wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut. Ralph Blumenthal, being a newspaper reporter, is skilled at getting people to talk, and I knew Masson would succumb to Blumenthal’s flattery. So Masson, in turn, was steered by Blumenthal to blab about the seduction theory, and my story got lost and buried, and I was thankful. I had known that Masson would sooner or later put his foot in it. I didn’t know how, but I knew the guy’s got to blunder badly and get booted out, one way or another. When Blumenthal said, ‘I’ll talk to Masson,’ I more or less knew how the rest of the scenario would go. I knew that Masson would shoot his mouth off and that Eissler would finally have to face the truth about him.

Through all of Swales’ intelligent and careful diction, it is easy to see an ongoing carnival of resentful Schadenfreude.

***

But the funniest moment in In the Freud Archive came, for me, shortly after the passage that I quoted at the top. Masson again:

Erik Erikson was teaching at Harvard when I was there, and I went to him and asked if I could go into treatment with him. My main symptom was total promiscuity — sleeping with every woman I could meet. He said no, but he sent me to someone he said he had great respect for, and I was in therapy with this man for a few years. But eight years later, when I was teaching in Toronto, I still had the symptom, so I went into therapy again, and then into five-times-a-week analysis. The trouble never seemed to get any better, and I figured it must have something to do with my childhood.

There is no further talk about “the symptom”; we never learn if Masson discovered anything about his childhood that might account for “the symptom.” By the time we turn the page, Masson has traded in his professorship of Sanskrit for training as an analyst. A few pages later, we are not surprised, not in the least, to find out that being an analyst was not something that Jeffrey Masson was cut out to do.

I was left thinking of Mrs Grimmer (Ruth Draper’s most hilarious creation) and her three chocolate eclairs.

Michiko Kakutani calls David Gilbert’s new novel, & Sons, “smart, funny, observant and occasionally moving.” Although I can’t understand how any attentive reader might reach such a judgment, I’ve seen it happen often enough to wonder what leads professional book reviewers to respond with such stupefied impatience. Let’s begin with “funny.” & Sons is not funny. Its cleverness and its sharp perceptions will make you smile, certainly, but laugh? I don’t think so. That’s largely because the novel is not “occasionally moving” but constantly, achingly mortal. It begins with one funeral and ends with another. Watts’s great hymn is not sung at either, but never have I read a book that brought these lines so clearly to mind, and kept them there:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away.

The verse is doubly apt, because & Sons is indeed about sons. When I was talking about the book to Kathleen after I’d read it, she asked, “Why do men need rites of passage?” My first thought was to point out that women just have them, in menstruation and childbirth. The transition from boyhood to manhood is, in contrast, ambiguous and variable, and it frequently occurs only in retrospect. War, unfortunately, is the surest of the rites that we have come up with — war and training for war. The men in & Sons are spared, by the accident of timing, that particular ordeal. The older men (a little more than ten years older than I am) are too young even to have fought in Korea, while their sons miss Vietnam. Further complicating the business is the indiscussability of personal matters that characterizes masculinity in general but that achieves a stinging irony in the affluent, educated, and class-conscious world that Gilbert has chosen for his background. Almost anything can be talked about at length, so long as it is not important.

As if to highlight the uncertainties of achieving manhood, all of Gilbert’s men, with the exception of two boys, are products of the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and one of those boys is a student there. These men — the famous writer, Andrew Newbold Dyer, his “best friend,” the lately-deceased lawyer, Charles Henry Topping, and their sons, Richard and Jamie Dyer and Philip Topping — have all grown up in the smallest of small worlds. But familiarity does not breed understanding. To grow up in this world is to strain to grow out of it, into the autonomy of self-directed sex life and career. Straight boys do not spend their adolescence wondering what their best friends are going through inside. And  Gilbert’s men are all straight — or, at least, they seem to be.

A N Dyer, as he’s known to his fans, launched his career with Ampersand, a best-seller that, ever since, has rivaled The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace. We are given enough extracts to want to read the book (even if Kakutani doesn’t think much of them as literary material), especially after we learn of the reason for the disgust and shame that inspired it. It would be wrong to charge Dyer with homophobia, I think, when he is so clearly guilty of the much worse failing of exploiting weakness wherever he finds it. In one of his novels, he plants verbatim entries from his son Richard’s journal, proferred by the emulative son for his father’s judgment, not for his pilferage. Such plagiarism is unlikely to be felt as the implied compliment that it is. But Andrew is a user, ever on the make, and never so heedless of other people’s feelings as when he consents to participate in an occult experiment.

Seventeen years before the demise of Charlie Topping, whose funeral opens the book and whose eulogy reduces Andrew to a shambles, the famous writer brought home an eight-month-old baby boy, allegedly the fruit of a dalliance with a Swedish nanny who has since died. He is genuinely surprised when his wife of thirty-odd years declines to help him raise the boy and instead leaves him, but what’s even more interesting is his decision not to tell her the truth (as he sees it), which is that the baby is a clone — a clone of him! Gilbert handles this intersection with science fiction very well. He wraps up the episode in a somber murk that ever so slyly parodies the gothic excitements of Conan Doyle. When the story is told (by Andrew to his older sons), the novel proceeds in a way that allows the reader to decide whether Andrew is delusional. (And cloning isn’t science fiction anymore.) What remains is this: is it better or worse, more or less unfaithful, to have a clone than to have an affair? It doesn’t take Andrew’s estranged wife (a lovely figure) to finger the narcissism of cloning. I was reminded of Wotan’s vain attempts to nurture better versions of himself in his son and grandson, while at the same time standing in the way of both. The impulse to redeem, to make amends, is tragically displaced.

As it is here. Andy, as the love child or clone is called, is now seventeen, and not quite a man. From the moment that he meets his nephew, Richard’s son, Emmett, Andy’s passage to manhood is put into play.

Emmett might have been a year younger but he seemed older by four, safely on the other side of adolescence while Andy struggled through chin-high water.

Andrew is not quite as remote from Andy as he was from his older sons, but he is remarkably obsessed with Andy’s safety; ever since Charlie Topping’s death, he has needed to keep an eye on his youngest son, betraying an anxiety about the boy’s passage to manhood that far exceeds Andy’s. Andy is understandably annoyed, and we are put on notice. How will Andy die? I could not put this question out of my mind until it finally happened, and whether or not it was the most meaningful conceivable death it is too soon for me to tell. But that doesn’t matter, because Andy is simply too good to be true. Too good, that is, not to disappoint Andrew’s orgulous ambition. To his father, Andy is better than a best-seller; he promises a world in which best-sellers and even ordinary fictions won’t be needed, a world free of disgust and shame. Such a world is simply not in the cards. This is not to say that Andy’s character is thinly drawn, not at all. Clone or not, Andy Dyer is a fully present human being, and the most appealing of happy-go-lucky teenagers, longing only to lose his virginity — that curiously ineffective simulacrum of adolescent dénouement.

***

So much for the men — I can only mention in passing Richard’s resentful itch to bully, and Jamie’s slippery absurdity; and as for that interesting villainaster and sometime narrator of the novel, Philip Topping, I’m saving the penetration of his character for a second reading.

& Sons is also a book about Manhattan, as in Upper East Side of. Its points of reference were so familiar to me that I wondered if anyone not a denizen of this quartier would find the book intelligible, never mind interesting. Time will tell. Gilbert doesn’t bother to say much about St James’s, the church in which both funerals are held, beyond pointing out that Andrew Dyer attended Sunday school there — which is really all that needs to be said. But Gilbert waxes gorgeous about the society that inhabits these precincts. In fact he survives comparison with Proust in this regard. Like Proust, Gilbert can deconstruct the glamour of the wealthy and the professionally self-important without tarnishing their allure. Admirable perhaps they’re not, but desirable sadly they remain. At the center of the book, but diffused throughout several chapters — we arrive at it several times — is a big party, a glittering reception at the Frick. The hedge-fund father of an anthropologist-turned-novelist hosts a superlative book party, and Gilbert presents the various guests in a delightfully sustained astronomical conceit. At the climax, an addled Andrew, searching for Andy, runs into his own alter ego in Ampersand. It is a famous actor who, in preparing to star in the film adaptation that Andrew will never in his lifetime permit, has memorized great chunks for the book and then dressed up in prep-school duds.

It was Edgar Mead straight from chapter 18. Even in his muddled state, Andrew knew this was too fantastic to be true, that there must be a good explanation, perhaps within the mixture of pills and alcohol, the overexertion, the long nights rewriting, the possible guilt and the goddamn gout. The last week had been fraught and he was likely hallucinating. Would any other characters drop in? All in all, he was amazed by the magic of his imagination, however delirious, and with curiosity he watched Edgar Mead beaver his teeth at this stand of long-legged women. What would he do next? Possibly something from chapter 23? Instead he spotted someone in the crowd and he went and dragged him over.

Andrew’s gut reversed course.

It was Andy.

“Have you met my new best pal?” Edgar asked the swaying trees.

I suppose that there might be some who would laugh at this. I was richly entertained.

It was time to renew our membership at the Museum — the right time. I renew in person because I like to split the cost between two credit cards, and doing so on the 25th of the month ought to result in the charges appearing on successive month’s bills. One in August, one in September.

After a pleasant time at the membership desk — in twenty years, the volunteer told me, she had never split a membership fee between two cards, perhaps her very nice way of wondering if I really belonged at my membership level — I went down to the cafeteria for a burger, fries, and iced tea. (The ice tea is not sweetened.) Somehow, this was not the fun experience that it used to be. The burger was dry and the fries were too thick. Nothing new about any of this. But while I used to think that it was fun to drop into a very stylish high-school cafeteria largely devoid of loutish adolescents, it seems that I don’t anymore. Perhaps I ought to try the salads.

When I was finished with lunch, it occurred to me that I was unaware of the current exhibitions, and had no plans to see anything in particular. I took the elevator up to the second floor, where what I call the Old Master galleries have been completely rearranged. They have also been expanded, taking over what used to be the special-exhibition space at the south end. It will take a while to get used to the new scheme, even though it clearly makes more sense than the old one did. There are lots of unfamiliar pictures, too.

Ruisdael’s Wheat Fields can’t be one of them, but I’m not entirely sure. I’ve been giving Dutch landscapes a pass for years. In fact, I’ve rarely taken close looks at anything but the Vermeers, the ter Borchs, and the de Hoochs. But the rearrangement of the paintings has scattered my prejudices, which are no longer grounded in the floorboards. I even looked at a couple of Rembrandts yesterday. I dislike Rembrandt for the same reason that I love Vermeer: light. Vermeer uses light to make the ordinary extraordinary. Rembrandt uses light to showcase his sitters. Vermeer’s figures, who aren’t sitters, make much more intriguing pictures. Where others see psychological penetration in Rembrandt, I see only the penetration of the masculine ego.

Wheat Fields captivated me yesterday. The light and the clouds are wonderful, of course, but I found myself haunted by the settlement hidden in the trees. Is it a farm? A village? A country seat with a fine view of the sea off to the left? If it were a village, there would probably be a steeple, but you can’t be sure. It’s early summer, perhaps even late spring: the wheat is still short and green. But why doesn’t the tree on the right cast a shadow? A photograph of this scene would not be so engaging, but why?

This is a painting that I look forward to seeing again and again.

***

Never have I seen so many people holding unfolded plans of the Museum’s layout: everyone seemed to be visiting for the first time. When I was young, a year could go by without my setting foot in the Museum, and it was really only after we disencumbered ourselves of a house in the country that I made a point of going to the Museum regularly. It has become a form of exercise for me; I walk around until I’m tired. I try to look at something that I’m not drawn to — another form of exercise. I’m enjoying the changes that the new Campbell regime is making. I actually like most of them, but that’s not as important as the charge that I get from mere change itself, in the vast but familiar building. It makes me feel old in the best possible way: I’m still here! Pasts have died behind me, but I’m still here.

In the piazzas to either side of the main outdoor staircase, in front of the Museum, work is proceeding apace on the new design. The fountain basins have been installed on both sides, and the ground has been prepared for the grove of trees on the north piazza. On the south piazza, they’re still working on that: fitting the irrigation pipes and depositing what looks like gravel granola. The trees will probably be planted in the late fall, when they’re bare. It seems so wrongheaded to put growing things into the cold, dry ground, until you learn how trees work. The subway-station construction at our intersection has of coursed stripped all the trees away, and replaced them with hulking piles of trailers. I miss the trees terribly, and I look forward to the groves at the Museum. Even now, you can tell that the new design is going to be much more appealing than what preceded it, a pair of minimalist, hippodrome-shaped pools, fitted out with low waterspouts that always made me wonder how much they cost to operate (the sign of unsuccessful fountains). Will the new configuration alter the popularity of sitting on the steps?

When clouds like Ruisdael’s are plowing overhead, watching them from the balcony is one of my favorite things to do.

Reading Adam Gopnik on Edmund Burke in this week’s New Yorker, I had to pinch myself to remember that Gopnik trained as an art historian, not a political one. You’d never know from the piece, which explains, better than I’ve ever seen done, the difficulty of getting a fix on the monumental conservative. (There’s the American Burke — sympathetic to the rebels; the Indian Burke — an outspoken humanitarian and early critic of colonial misrule; and the French Burke — hysterical reactionary to the French Revolution, and the most familiar of the three.) The appearance of this excellent review of a new book about Burke by Drew Maciag was very convenient for me, as I’m in the middle of getting to know Condorcet, whose views Burke disparaged in a memorable passion about “endless discussions.” But it also reminded that, born before Adam Gopnik, I was deprived of the opportunity to tell my parents that I wanted to be him when I grew up.

I wish that Gopnik would translate Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments into “New Yorker.” Perhaps any staff writer could do the job. I don’t know what Rothschild’s target readership is, but it certainly isn’t the general one. Familiarity with the writings of Adam Smith and Nicolas de Condorcet seems to be presumed, as is a great deal else that might have been made less daunting by the liberal insertion of those brisk paragraphs that bring you up to speed in the typical New Yorker piece. This would not make the book longer, if the repetitions were cut from Rothschild’s book. The author seems anxious to make her points (which are very much worth making), and this always makes for anxious reading. Several passages went down the wrong pipe, as it were. I had to re-read the phrase “Necker’s administrative genius” three times to grasp that Rothschild was referring to the (imaginary) gifted administrator, posited by the autocratic financier, with a genius for knowing what would make everybody happy, and not the “genius” of Necker’s administrative schemes. (I’d edit Rothschild’s text to read “genius administrator,” and then try to find some less clunky, but no less clear, alternative.)

One consequence of the idea that politics exists only to determine the rules and conventions of everyday commerce — dare I call this “Condorcet’s Axiom”? — is that the language of politics as well as that of the actual rules and conventions (insofar as the latter are acknowledged in writing) must be clear and free of jargon. (It is possible that the concept of “terms of art” has outlived its usefulness, and that professionals ought to be discouraged from saying x when they mean y — particularly when x is not x.) It also follows that the language of social science — another sorry term — ought to be clear as well. Given that human beings are its subject, it ought to avoid the blandishments of systematic presentation; everyday life does not begin with first principles. I’m not calling for simplistic reductions, and I know that formulas are both necessary and boring to read. But the clarity of the New Yorker style is hardly unattainable. There would be a great deal of tough detail to work out in realizing Condorcet’s Axiom (the relationship between public discussion and legislative representation needs to be recreated, just for starters), but a stipulation on clear writing (and thinking) is the obviously and necessarily the first matter to settle.

Come to think of it, in schools today, why don’t they just throw out all the English and “social science” curricula and run seminars on each week’s issue of The New Yorker?

Thank goodness that’s over — I was checking the Telegraph site every two minutes. (“Baby Cambridge” was their idea.) I applaud the choice of George. With one exception (the Regent), the bearers of that name have been conscientious kings, even if they weren’t always appreciated at the time. It’s a bit unnerving, though, to realize that the new prince’s great-great-grandfather, George VI, was king when I was born.

Why have I been waiting to learn the baby’s name? I’ve been asking myself why it’s interesting, or trying to — since it just is, and has been for as long as I can remember. I memorized the royal succession from the Conquerer on down when I was in junior high school — a list that hasn’t changed since. In boarding school, I opened an account at Blackwell’s and purchased such worthy titles as GW Prothero’s Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (Oxford, 1894; Fourth Edition, 1913, reprinted 1964 and therefore hot off the press). (Don’t even think of asking how much of it I’ve read.) From the present perspective, it seems clear enough that I made this regal arcana (the mystery being: who cares?) into a sort of collector’s fantasy game that had the advantage of being played by nobody else that I knew. So I could be as good or as bad at it as I was, and keep things fun.

(I take little pleasure from congratulations for having done something necessary and difficult. I can only take pleasure if I enjoyed doing it, in which case necessity would be irrelevant and difficulty invisible. Balls of all kinds vex me, because unlike almost everything else in the world, they won’t stay put. I don’t think that I could explain my profound aversion to sports and unpleasant exertion more concisely.)

I collected facts about real people, mostly dead ones. The kings and queens of England began as baseball cards, but as I grew up, they became the principal nodes in ever-ramifying stories. I never regarded any of the crowned heads as heroes, or invested them with super powers. They just seemed to me to be extraordinarily privileged mortals, as prone to failure as the rest of us. But they had so much more to work with! At some point, this game of mine matured into an adult interest in the subject of English monarchy, which has certainly seen worse days as well as better. (Grander, anyway.) Over time, an interest in plain old regular history welled up around it. But the old expertise (such as it was) never faded much, and my ability to look back on the events of the past thousand years is kept limber by the armature of a thousand years of names and dates.

***

We have just heard news of rather more personal concern. Our son-in-law, Ryan, has been offered his dream job in San Francisco. Megan learned a few weeks ago that she would be welcome to transfer to her employer’s San Francisco branch, and that her package would include a moving allowance and temporary housing. Plans to move out there were cemented, however, long before either of them had jobs lined up, so we’ve had plenty of time to get over the shock of losing them, to the extent that their moving to the other side of the country is a loss. We have, as I mentioned the other day, our own plans, also cemented, to spend Thanksgiving with them there, and we look forward to annual Fire Island holidays. Wishing Megan and Ryan well makes it impossible to feel sorry for ourselves at any great length. But of course we do, momentarily, all the time.

Kathleen asked me what was wrong — I’d been sitting still in my chair, looking, I suppose, fairly bleak — but, very unusually, I begged off, saying only that it was “nothing personal.” I wanted to stew in it a bit here first, and to leave the feeling undisturbed until the time to do so.

One fine day in the spring, Kathleen and I took Will to Central Park. Our outing had its ups and its downs, mostly ups — and one or two scares. I was remembering the worse of these last night. Will wanted to clamber on some rocks and I could not catch up to him. He was running away from me, and would not come back when called. Being Will, he did not push this too far.  He surrendered just soon enough for me to gag on the bitter horror of imagining him disappearing behind a boulder. Really disappearing.

Last night, what this memory triggered was the imagination of something else: the novel that might begin with such a scene. This was really more memory than imagination also, for what would such a book be, at least in its opening premise, but a variation on Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time?

I thought of the work of putting the novel together. The procedural encounters with police officers, to start with. The dreadful announcement to the child’s parents. How could anyone voluntarily imagine such scenes clearly enough to realize them on the page? How could anyone get up in the morning knowing that the day’s work comprised the writing of an episode involving the flutter of false hopes? Which would be more onerous, the unpleasantness of the story or the labor of composition?

I sat in my chair and experienced my massive lack of vocation as a novelist. It was nothing personal.

***

What’s worse is that what I do want to write about is beyond me, not that that stops me. I want to write about political economy, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t know what that term even means. Reading AO Hirschman, I clambered up a rock of my own, and now I’m running off into a wilderness, while common sense calls me back, in vain. I am possessed of the intoxicating illusion that something stupendous awaits discovery, just up ahead.

Why not “economic politics”? Why should one term modify the other, assuming thereby a supplementary role? Is there no way to balance two nouns?

The Russians, for all their talk of the means of production and their disdain of parliamentary procedures, saw the running of the country as a purely political matter. Theorists vied for political endorsement, and then their policies were imposed on industries. Or it might be that thugs did the imposing. There was no genuine economy.

The Americans did just the opposite. They saw the running of the country as a purely economic matter. Capitalists large and small were given free rein to invest at will. Regulators were captured, legislators bought off.

Both the Russians and the Americans wound up in the same becalmed boat: not enough — not nearly enough — real jobs.

Have we learned the lesson yet? Politics and economics cannot be sold separately.

The Chinese seem to be aware of this, but China is undergoing a transition so extraordinary — experiencing, in little more than a tenth of the time, the economic upheavals that played out in the West over two centuries — that nothing can be learned from their example until they either settle down into something stable (and less arbitrary) or blow up.

What is the “right mix” of politics and economics? How do you keep politicians from muddling the economy, and capitalists from rigging the politics? Is it a good idea for businessmen to run for political office? What distinguishes the deals that politicians make from the ones made by commercial traders?

It seems clear to me that the healthy functioning of any society depends on an arm’s-length alliance between politics and commerce in which neither predominates. In the past, such alliances have emerged fortuitously, only to disintegrate under pressure. What we need, and haven’t seen yet, is an alliance firm enough to control disruptive pressures.

Just for the record, I’m in the middle of two related books, Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty — I saved the best-known title (though not, in my view, the best book) for last — and Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment. I’ll leave you with a thought for the day that’s drawn from the latter: Emma Rothschild argues that Adam Smith intended “the invisible hand” not to stand for an actual economic force but as an ironic joke. Ha ha.

It’s like going back to school.

After an early dinner on Friday night, Kathleen and I watched two movies. The second feature was Hyde Park on Hudson, which I’d seen in the theatres but which was new to Kathleen. It’s a great picture, deftly combining two stories — the long-running affair that FDR had with his genteel but poor fifth cousin, Daisy Suckley, and the visit of George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the American president’s country house in 1939 (the first-ever royal visit to the United States) — with an extraordinary cast headed by Bill Murray and Laura Linney. (Mr Murray seems to have been born to play the trickster patroon.) It’s Olivia Williams, however, as Eleanor Roosevelt who catches my eye. With her relentless smile, touched up with condescension and impatience as if these were a new kind of face-powder, Williams brings home the way in which Eleanor was not only liberated by the collapse of her marriage but  emboldened to transform it into a political partnership that gave her the broadest imaginable platform for heavy-duty consciousness-raising. They used to tell a marvelous story about Eleanor giving an address at the United Nations, back in the day when the visitor’s gallery was also a peanut gallery. Her subject was to sing the praises of Adlai Stevenson. “Adlai Stevenson headed the Democratic Party slate in Ninteen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Two, and he headed it again in Nineteen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Six…” At this point, some wiseacre called out, “Adlai Stevenson’s an ass!” To which Eleanor replied, ineffably, “Nevertheless…”

The first feature was The Swan, Charles Vidor’s adaptation of Molnár’s 1914 play. The Swan might well be considered Hollywood’s wedding present to Grace Kelly. Not only was it released on the day of her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco, but it recanted fifty years of American story-telling by sticking to the tenets of European aristocracy, according to which, at least in those days, princesses do not run off with tutors. The conceit of the story, that princesses are like swans, beautifully majestic on the water (set off and apart) but waddlingly awkward on dry land (mixing with hoi polloi), is not quite borne out by the leading lady, who was never ungainly anywhere, but her Alexandra does conclude that she has been “a goose” before asking her intended, the crown prince played by Alex Guinness with his patented, barely-suppressed lunacy, to take her hand. The velvet gloves of MGM are ever at the throat of this light romantic comedy, itching to suffocate it with spectacle, but the actors — Louis Jourdain, Jessie Royce Landis, Estelle Winwood, Brian Aherne, Agnes Moorehead, Robert Coote (and even Leo G Carroll as the major-domo) — keep the air sparkling and electric.

This would be Kelly’s penultimate movie. (Her last would be, just as aptly, High Society.) She would waltz off to Monaco and break Alfred Hitchcock’s heart. Watching her in The Swan, I truly understood Vertigo for the first time, seeing it completely as the story of a film director who loses his favorite star to a stellar marriage; in the movie that he makes about this disaster, she is replaced by a common woman who falls to her death twice. Kelly and Hitch remained the best of friends, but Vertigo tells us how he really felt.

The other movie that I couldn’t help thinking about was The Prince and the Showgirl, a misbegotten project with Molnárian overtones that wouldn’t be worth watching (except as a train wreck) if it weren’t for Simon Curtis’s wonderful My Week With Marilyn. After seeing the latter a couple of times, I had to see the movie that it was all about. Set at roughly the same time as The Swan, The Prince and the Showgirl features the same aristocrats but a different kind of commoner; instead of earnest and brooding Louis Jourdain, we get the bodice-popping Marilyn Monroe. As Grace Kelly whirled around the dance floor in Jourdain’s arms, I couldn’t help seeing her as the self-possessed beauty that Monroe never managed to be. Monroe, saturated in sexiness, was a tremendous comedian, but she could never be serious for more than two seconds. Hitchcock himself told François Truffaut why.

Sex on the screen should be suspenseful, I feel. If sex is too blatant or obvious, there’s no suspense. You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We’re after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom. Poor Marilyn Monroe had sex written all over her face, and Brigitte Bardot isn’t very subtle either.

Hitchcock goes on to say that he is more excited by Nordic ice goddesses: “Sex should not be advertised.” Truffaut begs to insist that this is a minority position. Hitchcock concedes the point without conceding anything.

That may well be true, but you yourself admit that those actresses generally make bad films. Do you know why? Because without the element of surprise the scenes become meaningless. There’s no possibility to discover sex. Look at the opening of To Catch a Thief. I deliberately photographed Grace Kelly ice-cold and I kept cutting to her profile, looking classical, beautiful, and very distant. And then, when Cary Grant accompanies her to the door of her hotel room, what does she do? She thrusts her lips right up to his mouth.

There is no thrusting in The Swan; it wouldn’t be much of a wedding present if there were. But I ask you: how did Hithcock, given his fascination with monuments and celebrity addresses, fail to make use of Biltmore, the Vanderbilt faux-chateau in North Carolina? Vidor certainly puts it to wonderful use in The Swan.

A week or so ago, Janet Maslin gave The Unknowns, a debut novel by Gabriel Roth, an indulgent review, suggesting that the book was good in spite of itself. The snips that she excerpted seemed literate enough, and as I was still in the mood for holiday reading, I thought I’d give it a try. I found a copy at Barnes & Noble, which I haven’t visited in quite some time, preferring to do my in-person book-buying at Crawford Doyle. I made the exception in order to buy a better Chinese dictionary (which indeed I found). As long as I was there… That was on Wednesday, and by late afternoon yesterday I had read the novel. It’s scrumptuous: engaging, smart, winsome, and funny. It’s also startlingly candid about human opportunism, or at least unusually frank about amatory calculation. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to like Eric Muller — I don’t think I’d like him in person — but I did. And The Unknowns is no mere holiday read. Even though we don’t have the rentrée littéraire, publication ought to have been reserved for the fall.

Roth tells two stories in The Unknowns, separated by a stretch of time. We first meet Eric in San Francisco, after he has made his Internet fortune. He and a high-school classmate have put together a data-mining program and then sold it to an established firm for millions and millions. This has left Eric with nothing to do but tackle his long-time problem with love. It is a problem that many men seem to have, but Eric is bright enough to describe it cogently. Brief: How do you achieve intimacy with a creature so alien as a woman? Do you really want to? Eric is tantalized by the second question, because, no, in fact, he doesn’t want to — but he’s afraid of missing out on something. At a party, he meets a girl whom he thinks might make a suitable intimate, and, although it takes a little while, he establishes a romantic relationship with her. There is an unforeseen problem, however. I’ll come back to that.

The other story is about Eric’s high-school career. This takes place in suburban Denver. To say that there are no undiscovered adolescent humiliations is like saying that every piano has eighty-eight keys; Roth plays the horror of high school with an uncommon virtuosity all his own. Like Jennifer Egan, he can charge his scenes with enough unstated meaning to make it very easy for the reader to proceed from one to the next with a minimum of explanatory fuss. You might, like Janet Maslin, dismiss Eric as a geek or a nerd, or whatever — someone hopelessly clueless about social interaction. But all teenagers are hopelessly clueless; the lucky ones are merely cynical. You bring what you have to the problem, and what Eric has is a fine mind. In pursuit of a girlfriend, he constructs a database. Unfortunately, the database is contained in a notebook, and the notebook falls into the hands of others. A romantic pariah, Eric devotes himself to writing computer code in compensation. But, not to pity: Roth manages the tonal registers so beautifully that the genial narration carries us happily along: disaster recollected in tranquility.

Back to grown-up Eric. (Well, he’s in his twenties.) There are always unforeseen problems in romance, but the one that Eric has to face seems designed to put him at a disadvantage. It turns out that the girl he has chosen, Maya, was sexually abused by her father, beginning at the age of nine. At least, that is what she thinks must have happened. With the stupefying grace of an Olympic skater, Roth addresses the issue of repressed-memory, and he makes you forget that it’s an “issue.” There are two nightmares: the former child’s, of course, but also that of the parent who is blindsided by the sudden destruction, possibly for no good reason, of his or her relationship with the child. It is the uncertainty of these nightmares — it seems that both cannot be legitimate — that gives Eric a nightmare of his own, one that he experiences when he has sex with Maya. He cannot forget what she claims to remember, and yet he cannot be sure that what she claims to remember really happened. Being Eric, he has to try to find out. Next stop: intricately satisfying dénouement.

***

I myself am inclined to be skeptical about repressed memories of sexual abuse, but I also suspect that boys and girls deal with the trauma of abuse in different ways. What stuck in my mind as The Unknowns wound down was a question about the meaning of “sex,” which I take in a direction opposite to that of the last impeached president. To me, sex comprises all physical intimacy, at least potentially, and it is not for one party to determine whether sex is involved in any given contact. It’s for both. Once again, I see a fundamental difference in the way men and women define sex. For men, sex must involve at least one of a number of specific acts, and the acts must engage erogenous zones other than the mouth. For women, sex is not so limited. Where the sexual contact might be unwanted, men and women seem to disagree about the contact that precedes what men mean by sex: for women in such cases, this contact might be an assault. As a man, I’m included to the menu view: at least one item must be checked. As a human being, however, I understand that women can feel very differently. So, unlike Eric, I would dispose of the either/or conundrum posed by Maya’s repressed memories (more precisely, her formerly repressed memories) by resolving it into “and.” It’s possible that Maya and her father are both right. This seems to be Eric’s position near the end, when he asks Maya for permission to touch her like this and like that. His requests are vaguely ironic, but her welcoming responses are unambiguously robust.

I’ve got a memory, too.

I remember the bedroom, so it must have happened when I was between seven and twelve. Eight or nine, I’d say. The other thing that I remember is my mother, perched on the side of my bed in her nightgown, clearly intoxicated (after a dinner party or somesuch that ended long after our bedtimes), telling me how much she loved me. I remember her embraces, but not very clearly, because I was so confused and frightened. It goes without saying that a carnal assault never occurred to me. I did not know how to respond — how to make this unwanted attention stop — without making her angry. I dreaded her anger, not because it was violent but because it could be so existential: I myself was its object, not my bad behavior.

I don’t recall how the scene came to an end; I don’t remember any further embarrassment. I am certain as I can be that it never happened again. If you asked me to speculate on my mother’s motivation, I would say — speaking as someone familiar with morning-after remorse — that she got wound up at the party and wanted it to continue. My father, I suppose, didn’t want to play anymore, so she hatched one of those plots that seem so plausible and unobjectionable and indeed revelatory when you’re really loaded: she decided to be the doting mother. Or maybe it was one of those spells, not quite rare, when she was dissatisfied with her husband. In any case, what she was doing, perched on the bed, was trying something out as a way of keeping the night going. It was very inappropriate and also very harmless. The situation might have been unprecedented, but my discomfort was not: there were years and years of not knowing quite what to say or do, and being made to feel wicked and worthless. (Later, almost as smart as Eric, I had my revenge, and got very good at saying the cruelest, most painful things. I ought to be ashamed, but I’m glad I got it out of my system. I’ve met too many unhappy adults who didn’t.) This lurid experience was a unique moment. I recount it merely to suggest that, had our genders been reversed, I might have grown up to be Maya.

Yesterday, writing about Anthony Pagden’s new book, I focused on the worldly side of the Enlightenment. No less important is the philosophical side. But if the dream of a cosmopolitan federation of states was fairly well sketched by the end of the Eighteenth Century, the Enlightenment’s intellectual objectives were, in retrospect, not entirely conscious, much less fully developed. Kant, as I mentioned, is the climactic Enlightenment thinker for Pagden on the subject of the cosmopolis. In my view, however — Pagden does not explore this as fully as he might have done — Kant is at odds with the French writers who preceded him. Although he was inspired by Hume to critique all previous philosophy, he composed his thoughts into three ponderous tomes that, if they were not quite the foundation of a systematic philosophy, inspired Hegel to sink that foundation, and to build a mighty metaphysical theory about history that would rival the complications of Ptolemy’s epicycles, giving us Marx into the bargain.

Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot detested systematic philosophy. The project of describing the universe in terms of a handful of axioms and working out the implications in those terms and in those terms only struck them as closed-ended and pointless. Systematic philosophy is beguiling because it appears to shut the door on ignorance: all will be explained! But this is to deny the possibility that its axioms might be faulty. The philosophes were writing in the aftermath of the fatal blow that the discovery of the New World, together with greater familiarity with the peoples of the East Indies, dealt to certain axioms of Christian theology.

There was little or nothing essentially Christian about these axioms, but they had worked their way into the central fabric of Catholic dogma, following a development that Pagden briskly summarizes.

Theology had begun … as an attempt to grasp the nature of the Christian God, through the scattered writing his adherents had left behind them. But since these writings offered little beyond a rudimentary ethics, Christian theologians had been forced to go elsewhere to find answers to the larger questions about the nature of the universe. Inevitably they had gone to Greek sources, the only ones they had, and in the process they transformed Christianity from what had been, in essence, a world-rejecting late Roman mystery cult into — to use a recent term — “Hellenized Judaism.”

This Hellenization married the sometimes contradictory ethics of Scripture to the systematic philosophy of Aristotle, the Mr Answer Man of classical antiquity. By the time Christian theology entered its final, “scholastic” phase, in the High Middle Ages, philosophers were no longer looking at or thinking about the world in which they lived. They were thinking only about their books.

The method employed by the scholastics was essentially what is called “hermeneutical.” That is, their science consisted in the painstaking reading and rereading of a canon of supposedly authoritative texts, which by the sixteenth century had been expanded from the Bible to include the writings of the early Greek and Latin theologians, known as the “Church Fathers,” and those of a select number of saints called “Doctors of the church” (there are thirty-three of them to date), together with a canon of classical Greek, and some Roman, authors. By far the most important of these was Aristotle, whose authority throughout most of the Middle Ages was such that he was commonly referred to simply as “the Philosopher.”

The Hellenization of Christianity, in other words, tied Catholic dogma to the constellation of Aristotelian axioms about the nature of the world, a union that remains to this day. Although the Church has developed a very sophisticated way of talking around the problem, its theology remains, essentially, that of the most illustrious scholastic philosopher (and perhaps the most fervent admirer of Aristotle), Thomas Aquinas. In effect, Christian theology was as worldly as the clerical interference in political affairs, because it professed an expertise about how the universe actually works. This expertise was challenged most famously by Galileo, whose sentence of house arrest, following his recantation of the heliocentric theory that, by the early Seventeenth Century, was already accepted by many leading minds, shocked intellectual Europe with the realization that the Church would henceforth stand in the way of learning and punish those who challenged its now discredited cosmology.

At this very moment — as what we now call the Scientific Revolution was gathering unstoppable momentum — the political system of Europe, fragmented by the Protestant breakaways, deteriorated into a continental war (fought mostly in Germany) that lasted for almost the Thirty Years for which it is named. (The last few years, largely peaceful, were occupied by negotiations that would produce the Peace of Westphalia.) The doctrine that emerged at the end of the war, cujus regio ejus religio (the religion of the prince determines the religion of his subjects) did not, obviously, stand for religious toleration within states, but only among them. Of the European powers, only one, France, prescribed internal toleration. Ironically, just as other states were testing the possibility of religious toleration, France turned her back on it. Revoking the Edict of Nantes, Louis XIV restored the Roman Catholic Church (albeit a church that he intended to control himself) as the official religion of France. This instantly made French universities hostile to the new thinking that was simmering throughout Europe. And it meant that genuine intellectual life would have to take place elsewhere. Hence the non-academic quality the Lumières, perhaps the aspect of the Enlightenment that appeals to me most. Elsewhere — in Prussia and Great Britain — academics were free to take up the Enlightenment, and, not coincidentally, the works of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant were of academic length and amplitude. The philosophes in France were more like journalists, following stories instead of working out theories.

***

The intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment was, in my view, a matter of seeds, not fruit. When the season of open inquiry came to an end with the upheavals of the end of the Eighteenth Century, and European minds turned to the increasingly technological objectives of the new Industrial Revolution (entertaining themselves in the meantime with romantic rhapsodies that the philosophes would have found rather mushy), it does not seem that the Enlightenment had gotten much further than proclaiming a universal curiosity. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert — a gathering of all that was known about the world — revealed itself to be a project that could never be completed without being massively obsolete; so far as what we call hard science goes, the Scientific Revolution launched in the Seventeenth Century would not find its current foundations until the early Nineteenth, making most of what was “known” to the Encyclopédistes incomplete if not wrong. The utter transformation of chemistry effected by Lavoisier and Priestley in the 1780s was the singular achievement of eighteenth-century science; nothing else on that scale happened in the century of the Enlightenment.

The philosophes endure as critics, but it cannot be denied that they were as eager to ignore their own ignorance as any systematic philosopher. Voltaire in particular wished to be seen as something of a Mr Answer Man. It remains for us to work out the constructive role of critical ignorance.

We are right to expect experts — professionals — to command the knowledge of their specialties. The man or woman who takes up physics, or patent law, or neurosurgery, or aeronautics, is free to explore new possibilities, but is not free to ignore any established branch of the profession. In a professional, such ignorance is not just a bad thing but an impermissible one.

It is with respect to every other kind of knowledge that we are free, whatever our professions, to be critically ignorant. We may acknowledge that there is much that we don’t know, and we may speculate about it — critically. Critical speculation imposes a certain rigor and discipline on ignorance; very roughly, it binds us to follow lines of thought that comport with what we’re pretty sure about knowing. When reading history, for example — and history is a vast ocean of lost knowledge of which we are doomed to remain ignorant, dotted with archipelagos of facts upon which we construct our pictures of the past — we work hardest (as lay readers) at drawing inferences, from what is known (what was written down, generally), about what was felt and thought and intended by long-gone men and women. Our ignorance persists; all we can have are speculations. But when these speculations begin to conform to a broader picture — when a sermon in England helps us to understand a ministerial action in Vienna — then speculation begins to firm into something like knowledge.

But it is not knowledge, knowledge in the sense of professional knowledge (even for professional historians), and there is no need for it to be, for what we are trying to do, after all, is to understand the world, and that is emphatically not a profession. That is what the Enlightenment stands for in its opposition to the stranglehold of Catholic theology. “Throughout the Middle Ages,” Pagden writes at the top of the first paragraph quoted above, “and in some places as late as the eighteenth century, what today we would call moral philosophy, jurisprudence, epistemology, and psychology were studied as ancillary to theology.” He might have thrown in physics, astronomy and law as well. These “ancillaries” are all professions now. But the “science” of theology has been replaced by the Enlightenment of inquiry. We begin, not with the unmoved mover, but with our own ignorance. Slowly, we learn — even if, sometimes, it seems that we’re learning very quickly. But we learn only to the extent that we acknowledge our ignorance.