It just now occurs to me to ask why, for all of my life, I have been interested in monarchical dynasties and aristocratic families — in those born to rule, in those not so born who did, nevertheless, come to rule when death cleared the way; in whom was related to whom. The allure of hereditary grandeur was a draw, but it never would have held me, because so few individuals ever do live up to it. What fascinates me, literally, is the conundrum of being born to lead a certain kind of life. This is a distinctly unAmerican prospect, but a very attractive one to me, for daydreams anyway, because I have never been able to dream up a life for myself. I have simply made the best of whatever came along. I do not admire “self-made men” — they’re usually not — and, as Grace Kelly complains in Rear Window, I do (secretly) believe that people ought to be born, live, and die on the same spot. (Easy for me to say; I was born in Manhattan.) I’m aware that I cherish these luxurious possibilities precisely because that’s all that they are, in today’s world; I should chafe as irritably as anyone if obliged to pursue an unchosen career or to live in a dismal climate. But today’s world, in which everyone is tossed out of the airplane one by one without regard for the reliability of the parachutes, is, in contrast, flatly inhumane.

Kathleen does not exactly disapprove of my reading books about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but she doesn’t want to hear about them. The duchess will always be that woman to my wife. Kathleen will never feel the need to specify just what it was that that woman did to earn her opprobrium, although the sin of marrying for comfort and security will always have something to do with it; and if it is pointed out that the Windsors’ comfort and convenience were arguable, then — so much the worse! Worse to marry for flashy comfort and illusory security. The duke may have been a nitwit, but the duchess was a wicked adventuress. Dixit uxor.

Although she enjoyed my reading aloud from Lady Caroline Blackwood’s The Last of the Duchess — a book in which the duchess never appears — Kathleen was not keen when I burst out, over the weekend, with snippets from Hugo Vickers’s account of the same story, the ghoulish entrapment of Wallis Windsor by her attorney, Suzanne Blum. And when I got to the second half of Behind Closed Doors, and found myself nodding sympathetically with Vickers’s assessment of the duchess as “something of a victim,” Kathleen snapped, “Exactly why?” I fumbled a reply that was perhaps foredoomed to be unpersuasive. By that time, however, my interest had shifted to the elephant in the room, which has never attained the focus that it deserves: the abdication itself.

At the time, in late 1936, the abdication was regarded by all right-thinking people as a horror, a monstrosity, and it seems more clear every time I read about it that nobody really believed that it would happen until the last minute — except the King himself. But it did happen, and the ex-king went away, and his replacement turned out to be not only acceptable but preferable. Thus began the era of having cake and eating it, too. With the accent on “Cake,” Deborah Devonshire’s nickname for the late Queen Mother. She and her husband and her daughters made up a dream royal family and were duly loved by the populace — but the abdication remained an abomination to which the only conceivable response was chercher la femme. That woman would never be received at court. Nor would the family take any interest in her plight after the duke’s death. Several friends of the duchess approached Buckingham Palace with their doubts about the care that the duchess was receiving behind the lawyer’s closed doors, but they were rebuffed. It was her own fault. Diana Mosley was indignant about the hypocrisy.

Well, if Cake hated her spell as Q I’ll eat my hat & coat, & then how about all the Christianity & what about widows, the dying & forgiveness of sins & loving one’s enemy etc.

What is clear to me is that nobody was thinking much about the abdication anymore, not as such. The abdication was a simply a large blank token crime that legitimated (in her own view) the Queen Mother’s hatred of the duchess. Asked about this, Elizabeth claimed that she didn’t hate Wallis, because to hate someone you have to know her. That’s something worse than hatred: cold contempt.

Nobody — getting back to the abdication — expected Edward VIII to forsake his throne for the woman who, it seemed clear to one and all, did not love him, and even the King didn’t know what it would mean if he did. Does this want of foresight remind you of anyone else, class? Did someone say “Lear”? I found myself wondering yesterday why nobody ever mentions Lear in connection with Edward, because I could see, especially in Vickers’s taut telling, how naive the King was about how he and his wife would be treated by his successor. The Duke of Windsor was shocked, shocked that his wife was not to be styled “Her Royal Highness.” You may think this a small matter, but you’d be wrong to do so, if for no other reason than the duke never let it go, and went on to his dying day bemoaning the insult. Seeing to it that the understandably expected title was withheld was Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon’s way of keeping the family feud alive. I am inclined to think that, had she died before the duke, her daughter would have put an end to it.

Pretty soon, Her Majesty will be ninety years old; she was ten when her uncle made her father King. Perspectives have shifted. It is clearer now that David Edward Christian &c not only didn’t want to be king but wasn’t thrilled to be Prince of Wales, either. There is evidence that he was looking for the right time to propose abdication in advance, but George V, who just might have countenanced such an outcome, was in poor health long before Wallis Simpson came on the scene, and the right time for such a discussion naturally never materialized. (The Prince might easily have taken himself out of the running by converting to Roman Catholicism, no matter how insincerely. It’s easy to see, however, that Mrs Simpson’s CV made this implausible.) Had the prince been a stronger, more decisive, more self-aware man, the abdication crisis might have been obviated altogether.

This, in any case, is where the the interest lies. Wallis, with her marriages and divorces and her uncanny hold over the uncrowned king, is a red herring. Did she dream of being queen (not much)? Might she have been queen (not without an exodus among the Dominions)? How about a morganatic marriage (a proposal made too late in the day)? These questions, having been chewed over with relish for the best part of a century, ought to be swallowed once and for all; they’re not, and never were, the issue.

***

In Archibald Colqhoun’s translation of The Leopard, the Prince’s “contadina,” Mariannina, in “a moment of particular pleasure,” exclaims “My Prince!” I wondered what Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa had her say, in Il Gattopardo. “Mio principe!“? “Principe mio!“? Neither. “Principone!“, which means “big prince.” Which the Prince in every way is, not least in that way. Some things simply can’t be translated, which is why you have to have two copies of all the classics.

As long as I’ve got the book open, I might as well copy out the most famous line, which, figuring in Albert Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction, put me in mind to re-read the novel.

Se vogliamo che tutto rimango come è, bisogna che tutto cambi.

In order for everything to stay the same, everything must change.

What with all the re-reading that I’ve been doing lately, it has been some time since I’ve experienced the vernacular suspense of not knowing what’s going to happen next, but that’s exactly the state to which An English Affair has reduced me. The Profumo scandal, and the ensuing trial of chatty osteopath Stephen Ward, comprised a lot of moving parts (among which Profumo himself was not terribly important), and it was all vastly more complicated than the story  that registered with me when I was a teenager, about an English call girl with two diplomatic clients from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Richard Davenport-Hines demonstrates that it is more a story of rapaciously opportunistic British journalism. And also a story about Anglophone homophobia. Everybody in the Profumo/Ward mess was straight, but prurient curiosity about other people’s sex lives seems to have sprung from a massive anxiety about distinguishing the real men from the fruits. (It was imagined at the time that such discrimination is not only desirable but possible.) This anxiety paralleled a related worry about apparent patriots who might really be Communists.

In any case, I’ve just gotten past the trial of Johnny Edgecombe, a West Indian who knifed a rival for the affections of Christine Keeler. What this has to do with Jack Profumo and Viscount Astor and the narrow Labour victory in 1964 might not be immediately evident, but it’s already plain to see that the impending brouhaha would not originate, as did the recent Marshall and Vassall spy cases, in criminal investigations but on Fleet Street.

The dust jacket of the Harper Press edition features a slim Foreign Office type, complete with bowler, striding away from an Underground station. He looks an awful lot like actor Mark Strong to me. (And nothing at all like Profumo.)

***

Well, I was one hundred percent wrong about what was so “plain to see.” The impending brouhaha did begin, specifically, with a criminal investigation, and a very corrupt one at that, instigated by the Home Office with a view to judicially lynching poor, louche Stephen Ward in a show trial. The witch hunt was ill-conceived, because the bullet aimed at Ward went right through him and struck the Macmillan Government, and he Conservative Party as well, right in the heart.

Davenport-Hines ends, as I feared he might, with an attempt to brand the Profumo/Ward “spree” as a turning point in British history.

Traditional notions of deference had been weakening for years, but after June 1963 they became mortally sick. Authority — however disinterested, well-qualified, and experienced — was increasingly met with suspicion rather than trust. Respect and deference, even when merited, were increasingly seen as a species of snobbery. Notoriety became a money-spinner: it became profitable to behave destructively. If Keeler had been born thirty-five years later, she would have starred on Celebrity Big Brother and consulted her publicist every time her footballer boyfriend knocked her about.

Surely the death of polite deference is, or was, as the intellectuals say, overdetermined. The ease with which Profumo and Ward slipped into catastrophe is an indication of how unstable the moral climate was, how rickety the traditional arguments had become. And how tired much of the world was with Establishment ways — especially the young and the youthful. If I were more a scholar than I am, I might take the trouble to apply the cycle worked out by Albert Hirschman in Shifting Involvements: after a decade of concentrating on private improvements (pursued all the more zealously in the wake of the war and and postwar austerity), the British sought refreshment in public affairs. They did not take up activism themselves, but they supported a newly-lurid  style of tabloid journalism that manned the barricades on their behalf. The stories of Profumo (whose dalliance with Christine Keeler began and ended in 1961) and Stephen Ward just happened to be the stories to hand in the summer of 1963. It might have been anything. On this side of the Atlantic, it was the length of the Beatles’s hair that got people going. (Activism at its simplest: stop going to the barber!)

I hope that I’ll be forgiven for not taking the trouble to summarize what the “spree” was all about; it’s still not entirely clear to me how the fates of the minister and the osteopath became entwined — they appear to have met only a few times. They were linked by a pretty but otherwise unprepossessing young woman who wasn’t a prostitute exactly but who was too impatient for a career in modeling, much less actual work. She was a protégée of Ward’s, through whom she met Profumo. Perhaps I’ve said enough right there: how prudent is it for a medical practitioner to have protégées, especially pretty ones in their teens? But then Ward was also involved with MI5, apparently in an attempt to persuade a Russian naval attaché to defect. Ward was, altogether, excessively linked — linked, but not “connected.” When he was on trial (for pimping, mostly), not one of his substantial patients would testify on his behalf — to do so would have been to risk running afoul of what was obviously a show trial. Lord Astor, who had given Ward the use of a Thames-side cottage on the Cliveden estate, was so broken by the adverse publicity that the link to Ward brought upon him that he died a few years later. (Ward himself died, several days later, of poison taken on the eve of the verdict; Profumo rehabilitated himself with volunteer work in London’s East End.)

Profumo was notorious because he lied about Keeler in the House of Commons (and not because he might have been feeding her state secrets), but what kept the case on the boil was Stephen Ward’s dodginess. He seems to have been a good-natured man who made a lot of poor decisions. He certainly didn’t know when to shut up. It’s odd that he never resettled to a jurisdiction that would recognize his medical training. (He would have done very well in Hollywood.) Ward was always bound to be detested by respectable Englishmen.

An English Affair has a cast of thousands, and Richard Davenport-Hines shines particularly well as a quick portraitist. The organization of the book is also very effective. The first part, “The Cast,” features eight chapters on the characters, their associates, and their backgrounds. The second part, “Drama,” consists of three longer chapters cleverly titled “Acting Up,” “Show Trials,” and “Safety Curtain.” Having brought the reader up to speed on the gossip, high and low, the author is free to activate a breathtaking cascade of dominoes. An English Affair is a brilliant (if partisan) tightrope walk between serious history and great fun. I hope that somebody brings it out over here.

What a difference a floor makes — especially outside.

I’ve already decided that one of the pieces in storage, a metal rocker, is not going to return to the balcony. It’s not in great shape, and not worth refurbishing because the balcony is not really big enough for a rocker, at least a rocker with me in it. But there are two nice chairs and a simple wooden bench, all of which will find places between the wicker chair in the foreground and the table in the background. It will be a while before everything is in place, but with the “bricks” reinstalled, the balcony is officially done. When the cushion for the bench arrives, we’ll have everything that’s really needed.

***

Days like yesterday reduce my brain to frothy pulp, and although there seemed much more to write about than I had energy to comprise last night, I can’t, today, imagine what I was thinking about. All I’m thinking about now is the juicy book that I’m reading, Richard Davenport-Hines’s An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo. Did you know that John Profumo was an Italian baron — or would have been, had the Kingdom of Italy survived the War? I remember wondering how any high-class Englishman could have an Italian name, and of course a lot of high-class Englishman at the time wondered the same thing. Did you know that Profumo’s wife was the actress Valerie Hobson, who plays Edith d’Ascoyne in Kind Hearts and Coronets? Nor did I know that the Profumos had a house in Chester Terrace, which I made a point of photographing when in London last year. I wanted pictures of its arches, one of which is the subject of a Pennell print that’s a jewel of our small collection of good things to look at, and there you have it: only connect. The reason why English society interests me so much more than anything American is that it’s small and relatively unicentric. There is no escaping it. The same names keeping popping up in different contexts — and in the wrong beds. A high water table of ressentiment feeds springs of sparklingly acerbic prose. Consider the following character assassination of Harrow in the Twenties (Cecil Norwood was headmaster at the time).

Norwood’s Harrow installed a smoothly-mannered duplicity. It taught boys to show outward to deference to people for whom they felt little respect. It rewarded them for giving a pleasant smile while conforming to rules that they inwardly scorned. It assured them that compliance to higher authority was the essence of English racial superiority.

That feels vaguely libelous, and also pregnant with ancient anti-Harrovian animus. I’d been thinking of reading the new biography of Nancy Astor, but after this I’m pretty sure that I won’t:

Nancy Astor, when young, was generous, bold, and funny, with quick-witted shrewdness and inexhaustible energy; but after turning fifty her sudden amusing parries turned to rash outbursts, and she became a domineering, obstinate and often hurtful spitfire.

(“If I were your husband, madam, I would drink that coffee,” Churchill is said to have replied to Nancy’s hypothetically poisoned cup.)

But it’s great fun to fill in the occasional blank.

[Bill Astor’s postwar] bride, Sarah Norton, was recovering from the recent death of a much-loved mother and from a broken engagement to Dorothy Macmillan’s nephew, Billy Hartington, who had married someone else and been killed in action in quick succession.

That “someone else” was Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, the eventual president’s sister. Harold Macmillan, we’re told, found the novels of Anthony Powell “witty but pointless.” He read them as “training for Proust.”

Every now and then, Davenport-Hines makes a sententious remark about the Profumo Affair as a key moment in the collapse of Establishment England. I am disinclined to take such statements seriously. English manners seem to be inclined toward brittleness; when they shatter, as they inevitably do, wails on the death of England resound. But the English classes — at least, as they’ve been configured since the Industrial Revolution created new fortunes — persist, without the appearance of fragility. As long as the public schools continue to operate, England will go on being England. The temper of the time may vary, now earnest, now fun, but until the climate becomes something other than green and pleasant (where “pleasant” means “wet”), the worlds of Jane Austen and Edward St Aubyn will be recognizably the same, united not least by a keenly felt language.

Yes, what a day. The nub of the tale is that the mover never showed up. There we sat, with all the “porch furniture” in the scene shown above, as the quarter hours ticked by with no news. The man with a van had to report that the crew that was supposed to take care of us had had an accident — a big accident — on the West Side Highway. But the real dereliction was that he (our man) dropped out of contact for a long time, leaving us sitting in an ever more chilly loading dock with a lot of stuff that couldn’t be transported by ordinary means, not knowing what to expect or do next.

In the end, Kathleen came through with two cars. The cars brought the boxes of plastic bricks (eight in all), plus Ray Soleil and me, back to Yorkville. The bench and the chairs had to be tucked back into the storage unit for another time. The bricks were the big deal, though, and Ray spent the entire afternoon, and then some, laying them out on the floor of the balcony. They transformed the balcony from small into cozy. When Ray took a bit of a break, I got down on my knees and added a pathetically small border to his work: my knees are not what they were when I laid down the bricks ten or so years ago. I was very glad that, when the balcony had to be cleared last fall so that the railings could be replaced, I’d held onto the flooring: even moreso after Ray — who couldn’t stop talking about the beauty of the bricks that were breaking his back and abrading his hands — told me that they’re no longer available. (Hence no link.) I’d saved the bricks because they cost about $700. Little did I know that they’d become priceless.

There is much else to report, but I haven’t the energy. One bright thing that happened was the arrival of a package of books from Amazon.co.uk (Amazuke). I’ll say at the outset that I believe that the problem is American customs, but the fact is that I haven’t received a package from Amazuke since last summer. A November order simply disappeared, and various amounts were credited to my charge card. Today’s package turned out not to be my latest order, but one that was supposed to have arrived in the middle of March. In frustration, I’d ordered one of the books — about the Profumo Affair — a second time. That package was supposed to get here a week ago Monday. When it finally does, as I begin to hope that it will, I shall give the second Profumo book to Fossil Darling. Fossil Darling and I actually remember the Profumo Affair. In any case, it’s fantastic to be back in simpatico with Amazuke.

A domani.

After days of reading and writing and more reading — with an interval devoted to Will — I’m taking up the active life for a moment. I have never been one for the active life, and now I find it exhausting, tedious, and painfully distracting. But it seems that the balcony is about to be put into some kind of finished state, with the durable plastic bricks on the floor and the other items that we held onto after clearing the balcony last fall. At the moment, a man with a van has been engaged for tomorrow morning, to transport the stuff from the new storage unit to the apartment. Ray Soleil and I will take a taxi uptown to meet him there. I deeply hope that this will be the last time that I’m engaged in one of these hustles.

Last night, I ordered a few more things to replace things that we didn’t save — after Kathleen found them all online and sent me links. A doormat, a reading lamp, a console, and a side table. The pillows for Kathleen’s Lutyens bench arrived yesterday, and they were all in the wrong color, so I had to make a call to change the color of the cushion to match. Happily, that could be arranged. I ought to have caught the mistake when the order confirmation arrived, but I didn’t review it closely. The wrong color is navy, which is quite smart but not very festive. We need to find cushions for the chairs coming down from new storage. I have to make a run over to Eli’s, because they sell fancy Italian seeds for flowers and herbs, and I like to have a pot or two of parsley on hand.

Within a month, I hope, the balcony will be restored as a real fourth room.

I’m also off to the old storage unit today. I’ll be taking the laptop, the MiFi card, and a barcode scanner, in hopes of creating a list of the books that I’m going to donate to HousingWorks. If I can scan the books in the storage unit, I won’t have to lug them home first, but will be able to box them up nicely for pickup. Whether or not the experiment is a success, I won’t be at the storage unit for very long, because I’ll want my lunch, which will be very late, as I’ll have been to the dentist, for a very quick appointment, at two.

Oh, to be done with it all.

***

On Sunday, I dug out Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments, a book that I’ve been meaning to read ever since it came out a dozen years ago. Rothschild’s book explores the metamorphosis of The Wealth of Nations from “a very violent attack…upon the entire commercial system of Great Britain” — that’s what Adam Smith himself called it — into the founding text of the cult of 24/7 markets in everything. In other words, from a book that was regarded as somewhat seditious in the 1790s, immediately after Smith’s death, into an establishment bible. (The largish question lurking behind Rothschild’s book is of course Smiths: will I actually read The Wealth of Nations, all of it, as I was supposed to do in college? I’ve still got the Modern Library Giant here somewhere.) While searching for Rothschild, I found two other books that I’d been thinking of. One was Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which I thought I might have lost, and the other was The Opposing Self, Lionel Trilling’s 1955 collection of essays. The last essay in The Opposing Self is “Mansfield Park,” and you’ve got to read it if you want to say anything sharp about Austen’s novel, because everybody else has.

I read the essay and must read it again; it’s dense, but it’s also dated. “[I]n our dreams of our right true selves we live in the country.” Is that still true? I don’t think so, nor do I feel the disgust with life that Trilling pins on the modern condition, although I certainly remember the vogue for it. One passage sailed right over the novel and struck me in the heart.

There is scarcely one of our modern pieties that [Mansfield Park] does not offend. … Most troubling of all is its preference for rest over motion. To deal with the world by condemning it, by withdrawing from it and shutting it out, by making oneself and one’s mode and principles of life the very center of existence and to live the round of one’s days in the stasis and peace thus contrived — this, in an earlier age, was one of the recognized strategies of life, but to us it seems not merely impracticable but almost wicked.

Indeed! I have never meant to shut out the world, but I certainly do believe in making the “mode and principles of life the very center of existence,” and I have often felt that this must be accounted for and excused. It is certainly “un-American.” For me, house and home are that very center, and their upkeep is the salient moral action, because it is aimed at contriving the stasis and peace in which the inevitable complexity of life is contemplated and understood. Housekeeping is only superficially a matter of cleanliness; quite literally it is the economy of possessions thought needful for life. There is always too much, and there is never enough. Because this order of housekeeping is so unfashionable, I have had to teach myself its elements. Unfashionable, as I say — but it is also new, since it is only within living memory that people who spend their days doing what I do have been obliged to see to themselves as servants did in earlier times. (Seeing to myself comprises seeing to Kathleen as well.) How to be your own servant without treating yourself as a slave is a skill that, in my experience, very few people possess.

***

Since I have been only once to the new storage unit uptown, and because the monthly rental is charged to my credit card and not, as the (much larger) downtown storage rental is, presented in a bill — and also because I visit the downtown storage unit not infrequently — the new unit assumed an air of unreality. I had to examine the credit card bill to make sure that the rent was actually being paid, and then I had to find the keys. The keys were, amazingly, exactly where they ought to have been.

Why two storage units? The idea is to empty the old one into the new one, getting rid of a good many things in the process. Books, for example. A few sticks of furniture that we needn’t hold onto. The uptown unit has, rather gloriously, a large window, so it will make a much better adjunct library than the dim downtown unit does. I hope to be fully installed uptown, and out of the downtown unit altogether, by the end of the year. That will be virtuous economy indeed.

Too soon, it is the middle of May.

In the current issue of the London Review of Books, James Meek writes about the banking crisis in Cyprus, and how it has damaged quite ordinary people, aside from the Russian jillionaires that you read about. His closing paragraph is enormously powerful and its very wide scope encompasses far more than a half-Greek, half-Turk island.

In the 2000s, in the conference rooms of New York, Frankfurt and Moscow, Cyprus seemed like a small island with many issues. The UN worried about reunification of the two communities. The European Central Bank looked at the quarter-by-quarter economic numbers. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia investigated money laundering. Big Russian companies liked the country’s tax regime. None of them saw the bigger picture. The ethnic-sectarian narrative, the Yugoslavian conflict narrative and the Cyprus economy narrative were never seen holistically for what they were – three facets of a single issue, that of a tightly knit Greek Orthodox community, bound together by a sense of mutual vulnerability and a weak fourth estate into grudging acceptance of rule by oligarchic political-business families, which became skilled at playing big foreign institutions, state and commercial, off against each other for short-term gain. The karmic aspect of Cyprus’s fate may please some outside the island, but nothing has really changed in terms of Europe’s institutional inability to see a problem in the round. The continent cannot afford to be run by so many moralists who are ignorant of finance, and so many financiers who are ignorant of morals.

Nor can the world. And yet that is our very predicament. Economists stoutly reject any role for morality in their dismal science. Humanitarians can’t be bothered with costs and benefits. Opportunists exploit the absence of comprehensive oversight. The “institutional inability to see a problem in the round” is not a specifically European problem; the United States is no less afflicted. Here, you might even argue, there are checks and balances designed to preclude access to the whole picture. Congressional Republicans are not alone in refusing to enter into discussions on terms other than their own. Now that we have all learned that control of the discourse determines the outcome, we have become choreographers of dances that few care to join.

Over the weekend, I finished one book by Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, and read another, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. The books are highly discrete case studies that, while they sound certain notes in common, bear no structural resemblance in their dealings with the history of ideas. That’s to say that they don’t form two parts of a larger whole. Shifting Involvements: Private Interests and Public Action, which I read earlier last week, is equally nonpareil. But I begin to have a sense of “what Hirschman is about.” In a nutshell, I believe, he wrote to encourage the reincorporation of economics within the humanities. His method was to undermine the “physics envy” that so many economists suffer by demonstrating that political economy, like everything else, changes over time. The world did not begin with John Stuart Mill’s 1836 definition of political economy as the science of man considered “solely as a being who desires to possess wealth,” but if it did, we’ve been living in the world for less than two centuries, and can hardly be said to understand it very well — especially when we bear in mind that for the better part of one of those centuries, from 1917 until 1989, the meaning of Mill’s claim was contested by world powers armed, ultimately, with weapons of mass destruction. Our experience of self-conscious economy is brief and inconclusive. We don’t know what we’re doing.

Much of Hirschman’s thought attacks the conservative (or reactionary) appropriation and inversion of that fact: since we don’t know what we’re doing, we’d better not do anything; this is the best of all possible worlds, and it’s going to the dogs. But he acknowledges that liberals can be equally pig-headed. At the end of Rhetoric of Reaction, in fact, he demonstrates the liberal habits of argument that correspond simplistically to those of the reactionaries.The Marxian insistence on the inevitability of social amelioration mirrors, for example, the reactionary conviction fundamental change is impossible: each party believes that the other’s policy is futile. What’s deadly about this configuration, however, is that neither will attend to the other.

There remains then a long and difficult road to be traveled from the traditional internecine, intransigent discourse to a more “democracy-friendly” kind of dialogue. For those wishing to undertake this expedition there should be value in knowing about a few danger signals, such as arguments that are in effect contraptions specifically designed to make dialogue and deliberation impossible. I have here attempted to supply a systematic and historically informed account of these arguments on one side of the traditional divide between “progressives” and “conservatives” — and have then added, much more briefly, a similar account for the other side. As compared to my original aim of exposing the simplicities of reactionary rhetoric alone, I end up with a more even-handed contribution — one that could ultimately serve a more ambitious purpose.

If he does say so himself. In fact, Hirschman’s writing is suffused with a gently ironic modesty that, together with the fractured nature of his output, explains the limits of his fame. In the books that I have read, he never states the belief that I have imputed to him, about folding economics back into the humanities. (He does rather roguishly insist upon calling himself a “social scientist,” a term that gnashes the teeth of economists.) He proposes no laws or theories that can be easily grasped out of context; his arguments must be read. (Unlike Adam Smith’s, they are brief.) The titles of his books, rendered unalterable by his death last year, betray the knottiness of his attention. To find out more about what he thought, we shall have to read Jeremy Adelman’s biography, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman. But what’s really necessary is for every educated citizen of every nation in which citizenship means anything ought to read The Rhetoric of Reaction. And every serious economist ought to learn the history behind Mill’s reductionism, which Hirschman lays out brilliantly in The Passions and the Interests. As James Meek says, we need moral bankers and numerate moralists.

Dizzy is what I am today. Dizzy and a bit stung. What I wrote here yesterday surprised me, to say the least, and when I woke up this morning it burned on my mind. Not only what I wrote, but also what occurred to me consequence, yesterday afternoon and last night. Further inventory, literally.

As if that weren’t enough, the Hirschman books arrived. These are the four titles by Albert O Hirschman that Cass Sunstein named at the start of his review of Jeremy Adelman’s new biography of Hirschman:

Hirschman is principally known for four remarkable books. The most influential, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), explores two ways to respond to unjust, exasperating, or inefficient organizations and relationships. You can leave (“exit”) or you can complain (“voice”). If you are loyal, you will not exit, and you may or may not speak out. The Passions and the Interests (1977) uncovers a long-lost argument for capitalism in general and commercial interactions in particular. The argument is that trade softens social passions and enmities, ensuring that people see one another not as members of competing tribes, but as potential trading partners. Shifting Involvements (1982) investigates the dramatically different attractions of political engagement and private life, and shows how the disappointments of one can lead to heightened interest in the other. For example, the protest movements of the 1960s were inspired, at least in part, by widespread disappointment with the experience of wealth-seeking and consumption, emphasized in the 1950s.

Finally, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. The objections are “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain). Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic, and often wrong.

I had a look at Exit, Voice and Loyalty, and found it a bit steep — plentiful references to the assumptions of neoclassical economics. The Rhetoric of Reaction proved to be vastly more congenial. Hirschman identifies three standard arguments, or theses, against progressive policies. The first, “perversity,” argues that the proposed policy will have not just unintended consequences but the very opposite consequences to those intended. The second argument, “futility” adds insult to injury, because according to this line of thinking the unintended consequence will be no consequence. (Hirschman traces “futility” back to Sicilian pessimism.) The third thesis, “jeopardy,” holds that the proposed policy will endanger some hard-won and precious benefit of the status quo. I sped through “perversity” and “futility” in no time, thrilled, really, to have so many thoughts of my own organized by Hirschman’s powerful overview. (Shifting Involvements had the same impact.) “Jeopardy” is somewhat more complicated; Hirschman’s discussion begins with Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1958 bifurcation of liberty (freedom from and freedom to) and the recognition that some conception of liberty will almost always be put at risk by any proposed reform. (Reading about the distaste for government regulation that flourishes in Texas even in the wake of the West Fertilizer disaster, I found distinguishing between the “futility” and “jeopardy” roots of the prejudice a very close call, and decided for “jeopardy” by a hair. Either way, the Times story captured the reasons for my discomfort at sharing a polity with Texans.)

As I’m reading The Rhetoric of Reaction, I’m testing a surmise that I glanced at yesterday, over Hirschman’s shoulder as it were. Perversity, futility, and jeopardy are all standard measures in the historian’s toolkit. Looking back, the historian invariably assesses the success of historical acts in one or more of these three terms. In his classic history of the French Revolution, for example, William Doyle fastens on the secularization of the Church as the Revolution’s singularly perverse policy, because it not only sparked counterrevolution in earnest but strengthened — revived, actually — the Church itself. Such judgments are what distinguish historians from annalists, the people who simply write down what happened without much thought for the consequences. I don’t mean to suggest that historians are reactionaries, but it might be said that reactionaries are fools for trying to be historians in advance.

Oh, and another thing about yesterday. I signed up at Feedly.

Dizzy.

The other night, as I was talking with Kathleen at bedtime (preventing her from finishing Armadale), I said that I really must write down the first line of my book, which had occurred to me earlier in the day, perhaps at the hospital during the infusion. “This is a story that has to begin at the end.” I knew that it was the opening line the moment it came to me, but I couldn’t have told you why. Well, I might have stammered something. And, if I manage to be artful, some of that stammering will be refined into coherent introductory material. I will try to take my time about getting to the opening close, which has in fact not yet quite crystallized. By then, I think that I’ll have done a good job of expressing what’s truly odd about me — and what has made it so difficult to get going on this project, which is not a memoir.

A memoir almost always entails a journey, in time and through character development. There are notable experiences and lessons learned. As I’ve sifted through the remains of my life, I’ve seen little evidence of journeys and epiphanies. I rather feel that I haven’t moved at all, not an inch, since my days in the playpen. I have remained immobile, in, admittedly, a generally rich environment, and simply ingested whatever in the passing stream seemed suitable, with the result of simply becoming more myself. At the same time, until rather late in life I was also covered in passing debris. But that was encrusted, not ingested, and, as I became more myself, less of it stuck. There was always only one possible result for me, and it wasn’t even a result, because I began as the result. All that changed was my understanding. That developed, yes. But the history of its development is not interesting; it’s a homework assignment that I’m happy to leave undone.

To a degree not only unmanly but somewhat subhuman, I sat still and waited for the right things to come along. And they did. Two very right things came along. Kathleen first, and then the Internet. Of course, once they came along, I knew at once what they meant to me and I held them tightly. I worked hard for both, stripping away much of the false crust — which was, of course, nothing but the remainder of my half-hearted attempts to fit in and be like everyone else. Through Kathleen and, in a way that is subordinate to Kathleen, the Internet I have found my place in society, as a human among humans — and it was where I was sitting all along.

I can well understand that some readers might find this to be a horror story, and that is why I am not going to write about myself directly. Instead, I am going to take inventory.

***

I had been meaning to re-read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland for several weeks, certainly since re-reading The Great Gatsby, and I got round to starting in on it yesterday, after putting in a long day of paperwork. There was the preliminary problem of how to re-read it. I used to have two copies of the first edition, one of them signed by the author,  but the unsigned copy seems to have disappeared in the general slimming of the library, and the signed copy is too precious to manhandle. So I bought the Kindle edition, and  I’ve been highlighting passages and making notes therein. The most remarkable thing about Netherland, aside from the lambent beauty of the writing, as strong and supple as a great cat (and as frightening), is the virtuosity with which the narrative is interrupted, and at time buried, by flashes backward and forward in time. By “the narrative” I mean the story of Hans van den Broek’s summer — it is longer than that, but the Gatsby parallel beckons — with Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian of South Asian background, in a New York City populated largely by immigrants. So far, I don’t think that there has been a twenty-page stretch of the narrative without interruption, and I’m nearly halfway through. These interruptions might be expected to challenge the fiction’s coherence, but they don’t; on the contrary, they enrich and intensify it. In this, Netherland could not be less like Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, which barrels along the timeline of Gatsby’s last months of life with only one or two modest asides in which Nick Carraway mentions his own affairs. Such asides flourish with tropical profusion in Netherland, which spends substantial time in the Netherlands, where the narrator grew up.

When I read Netherland the first time, I was sure that I didn’t get it, that there was something unspeakably cunning going on beneath its gleaming coat. Now I recognize this doubt as a kind of religious ecstasy. There are complexities in Netherland that I may never grasp, because I don’t really know much about cricket or Trinidad or, for the matter of that, Floyd Bennett Field that I didn’t learn here. I don’t bring enough to the novel. But I’m overwhelmed by it nevertheless.

A day of spring rain, not at all unwelcome after days and days of clear, cool skies. A day for huddling indoors with the windows open. A day for paperwork, with perhaps an opera in the background — Die Meistersinger?

The other day, I came across the DVD of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It had been languishing in a file drawer along with other series (Aliens, The Belles of St Trinian’s et al, Lord of the Rings) which, in setting up the jewel-box-free DVD library, I apparently decided to file with miniseries. In any case, I hadn’t seen Raiders in ages, and it seemed just right for making dinner. So I put it on in the kitchen and watched it over two days. I proved indeed to be a diversion, and no more — a surprisingly vulgar diversion that I wasn’t quite sure about still enjoying.

It’s vulgar in having been made with no thought whatsoever of the second viewing, or the third, or the fourth. Or the umpteenth, which I’d reached long ago. (I can be certain of having seen it more than twenty-five times.) The starchy dialogue is close to self-satirizing, and every character is conceived in comic-book, which is to say racist, terms. There are moments of fantastic inconsequence, such as the fall into that unlikely abyss taken by a jeep that Indy forces off the road to Cairo. Raiders is a stupid lug of a movie, dependent wholly upon its thrilling set pieces and upon John Williams’s score, which is vulgar, too, but in a patriotic way. (Like a piece of popcorn stuck between my teeth, the opening phrase of the main theme torments me with a resemblance to “The Star-Spangled Banner” that I can’t pin down.) As a fan of Harrison Ford’s mature dramatic performances, I have to say that he’s surprisingly unimpressive as Indiana Jones — not that anyone else would be better, or that being better would be an advantage. Raiders is generally regarded, I believe, as the best of the Indiana Jones movies, but that may be simply because it is the least ambitious. What saves the movie for me — what keeps its severe discount of audience intelligence from making it too irritating to watch — is Karen Allen’s laugh.

(I’ve heard Eddie Izzard’s “Death Star Canteen” routine; I wonder if he’s ever done a take-off of John Rhys-Davies baritonal pomposities as Sallah?)

***

As I was walking around yesterday, from one appointment to the next, my thoughts lodged on a remark made by Albert Hirschman in Shifting Involvements, something about the wave of chivalric grandiosity that inspired so many men to rush off to fight in World War I as bearing “some responsibility for the protracted and tragically murderous refusal of the generals on both sides to recognize the nonheroic realities of trench warfare.” (It took me a while to find this passage, because it appears early in the book, and I was slow to realize that I ought to be highlighting such unusually interesting statements.) I have always wondered about those generals, because they seem collectively to have suffered an inability to see the futility of their engagement. Hirschman, building on such diverse writers as Stefan Zweig and Paul Fussell, suggests a more than plausible explanation. Many Western Europeans were unhappy with the bourgeois peace into which their respective nations settled in the Nineteenth Century, and they were clearly bemused, if not troubled, by the apparent pointlessness of their armed might. Feudalism might be dead, but what of its highly romantic legacy of heroic allegiance? World War I made no sense, except that it’s what masses of ordinary people wanted in 1914. Every man could aspire to be Lohengrin.

In this reading, the war was brought on by forces that, although broadly popular, were not genuinely democratic. The war began more as an insurrection, but an insurrection aimed at toppling other sovereignties. The uprisings in any given country could mobilize state power because the populace had been given some sort of franchise to direct it (albeit a right to vote, not to surge into the streets). Governments were not, as in the past, regarded as oppositional — not at the outset. It was only at the end, when the war turned out to have accomplished nothing but massive death in disgusting trenches, that the people turned on their own leaders, and in kingdoms where the franchise was vague or limited. And then, at the Peace, Germany — pointedly not a party to the negotiations — was made out to be the villain of the piece, solely, it would seem, on the strength of its opening moves. The Peace was of a piece with the War, no less aimlessly chaotic in its maneuvers, and just as driven by “public opinion.”

I strongly believe that society — more exactly, the layers of social cohesion that mat the world — is subject to infectious diseases in the form of what it no longer seems quite the fashion to call “memes,” and I also believe that a working knowledge of previous epidemics — what professors call “history” — is our only defense against future outbreaks. As defenses go, history is far more comparable to rude quarantine than to engineered antibiotic; social medicine lags far behind the personal. But, as I say, it is all we have. We will solve the many problems that confront us, from climate change to unemployment, only as a society, ultimately as a society that includes everyone living. Far fetched? Yes. But it won’t happen otherwise.

Iain Sinclair in the LRB, catching glimpses of a recent state funeral whilst tootling about the mouth of the Thames:

Rarely can such an Alice in Wonderland charivari of local stereotypes have been assembled, some of them (like Dave and Samantha Cameron) quite obviously having a good time, with smiles and quips and cute photo-op hand-holding. The front rows were a woodpeckerish blizzard of Judas kisses, blood enemies forced to prod stiff lips towards cold cheeks. Toothless foxes sniffing at dead chickens. They were all there: from the well-rehearsed formaldehyde rigidity of senior royalty to the public faces of smug and comfortably suited former cabinet colleagues, along to be sure she was really in the box. To broken bullies blinking back tears under an unruly thatch of eyebrow. To the shameless court of right-opinionated entertainers still at large. To ennobled perjurers, medal-snaffling athletes, arms dealers, coup plotters, financial bagmen, wounded veterans, and such morally compromised foreign dignitaries as could be persuaded to take a mini-break to springtime London.

Too bad the lot of them weren’t in the box. It will be a long time before the embarrassment of Thatcher’s funeral will be entirely forgotten. I should have counted on British self-restraint to prevent such an orgy of unmerited respect, but then the Iron Lady emerged from the American Zone — the suburbs — and raised up others of her type. In the suburbs, everyone comes from anywhere, and the past is of no interest or account unless it is scandalous. Itching with suburban ambition (the most hypocritical form of discontent), anyone with enough push can become the leader of something that involves overseeing the unimportant people who do not live in the suburbs. Lead the right thing, and you may get to oversee a war effort, and nowadays, with leaders of all types ensconced in a grand bubble in which other leaders are the only company, war is as entrepreneurial as advertising. It offers the opportunity to succeed in an exciting venture — however ignoble. And a woman, properly coiffed and gowned, will trail the scent of virtue and rectitude in a triumph of cosmetics that no bemedaled field marshal could hope to equal.

To bury Thatcher as a military hero was to celebrate an undeniably pathetic disgrace. One can only hope that Britain’s fight to retain possession of the Falklands was the dying gasp of native jingoism. Perhaps the misbegotten honors of a state funteral were a necessary distraction from the much larger horror of Thatcher’s anti-political régime.

***

Further thoughts about democracy and voting — if democracy is the least-bad political system, then voting for the least-bad candidate ought to be the objective, good enough to motivate every voter — are blunted by the prospect of an afternoon of dentistry and doctoring. Such fun. What shall I read during the Remicade infusion? I wish the new book about the Profumo affair had arrived; it’s due any day. Watch: it will arrive this afternoon. Just as the new bench for the balcony arrived yesterday, and completely without fuss. I’d been told, by an email from the seller, that I would be taking delivery of the crate “curbside,” and I was not looking forward to loitering near the service entrance waiting for “an eighteen-wheeler” to squeeze down along 87th Street. When I called to make arrangements with the freight dispatcher, I was told, in a lilting brogue, that the bench had already been delivered, and, sure enough, there it was, in the package room. Now, thanks to Ray Soleil’s flying visit, it’s in place on the balcony, awaiting only cushions and warmer weather to couch Kathleen’s weekend naps.

Where to begin? How about this, from Ian Rankin’s new John Rebus mystery?

“I did a bit of digging on the internet,” Clarke said. “You couldn’t really send a picture from one phone to another until 2005 or 2006.”

“Really?” Page’s brow furrowed. “As recently as that?”

There was a time when new technologies took some getting used to, and people remembered the pain and fuss of it all. Now, new developments are introduced as if on cue, or slightly in retard of that, so that everybody is ready for them, and presently no one can remember being without them. Well, so it goes in the world of phones and tablets — so it goes at the moment.

In Cooking, Michael Pollan plumps for his subject matter as the thing that distinguishes mankind from other animals. We cook. He cites evidence that we are who we are because we cook, that one or two million years of fiddling over fires shrank our teeth, shortened our gut and expanded our brain. (Other animals spend a lot more time eating less-digestible raw food, which eats up a lot more calories.) Our brain amounts to about 2.5% of our total weight, but it consumes 20% of available energy when we are resting. For the past twenty years or so, getting used to Internet-related technology has consumed the lion’s share of discretionary neuronal firing, wouldn’t you say? “As recently as that.”

On Saturday, I piled my journal on the dining table and organized them. In a Word document, I listed the title of each notebook and the dates of the first and last entries. There are eight Sketch books, twenty-three Journals, a second series of five Journals, and a handful of differently-titled volumes, a few of which take up the series of entries in the journals. The ninth Journal appears to be missing. As a whole, the notebooks run from 1967 to 1979. If I didn’t believe that I’ve long grown out of that closed feedback loop, I’d be too ashamed of what I read there to draw another breath. But it’s embarrassing nonetheless to realize that I spent the decade of my twenties dogpaddling in this sea of twaddle. I seem to have grasped that the only way out of it was to stop writing in journals, to stop writing to myself about myself.

I didn’t read very much, on Saturday, but every now and then the odd paragraph would catch my eye. Once the notebooks were stacked and piled neatly out of the way, I was left with a pathetic image: the writer of these entries is like a plane that endlessly taxis around an airfield without ever taking off. Sometimes, the plane is on this side of the field (“I’ve happy lately”) and, sometimes, on the other (“I’m so miserable”). But nothing beyond this alternation of moods ever happens. The explanations for both happiness and misery are often puzzling, not to say weird, but both relate to the persistence of solitude/loneliness. (I was rather shocked, in an old-fashioned, stuffed-shirt way, to find myself moaning about loneliness on the eve of my first marriage.) It is sentimental stuff, the writing in these notebooks, ungrounded, as I’ve said, in the larger world, and intensely, deliberately solipsistic. The entries can be read as a kind of amateur therapy, in which I sought to get to the bottom of what was wrong with me. If little progress was made, that’s because I quite obviously didn’t know which way was up.

That something was wrong with me was never in doubt. I’d started seeing psychotherapists in sixth grade! I can’t say that I got much out of my hours on the couch, but as philosopher Albert O Hirschman would point out, that might have been because I failed to do my part of the work. The problem for me was this: where did my unusualness cross the line into pathology? When I began blogging, at the age of fifty-six, it occurred to me that whatever the pathology might be, I’d learned to live with it, and it probably wasn’t going to kill me or wreck my life. Not long afterward, I read a book about the mothers of adopted babies (The Girls Who Went Away), and my old interest in what was wrong with me shifted into a curiosity about how, as an adopted baby, I came to be someone who felt that there was something wrong with him.

I am absolutely convinced that, had that, had I been forty years younger in 2004, I’d have become who I am thirty years sooner. Ditto, had I been able to read that book and, coincidentally, to start blogging, in 1974. I’m not talking about a might-have-been here. The might-have-been has actually happened. (If it hadn’t, those journals would still be heaped up in storage.) But my timing, or the world’s, might have been better.

***

Albert O Hirschman: better late than never. Hirschman, long a member of the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, died late last year. in his nineties. A new biography of Hirschman, by Jeremy Adelman, was reviewed in the current issue of the New York Review of Books by Cass Sunstein. I read the review when I had read almost everything else; I’m not interested in philosophers or economists. A pox on both! But, too lazy to find something else to read, I drifted into Sunstein’s opening paragraph and was soon sitting up.

Albert Hirschman, who died late last year, was one of the most interesting and unusual thinkers of the last century. An anti-utopian reformer with a keen eye for detail, Hirschman insisted on the complexity of social life and human nature. He opposed intransigence in all its forms. He believed that political and economic possibilities could be found in the most surprising places.

It was soon clear that Hirschman had given clear voice to a number of my own half-baked thoughts, and that he was a thinker with whom I ought to be better acquainted. Sunstein claimed that Hirschman is a readable writer, but I decided to hedge my investment by purchasing the one book of his so available, Shifting Involvements, in a Kindle edition. That way, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have a book to get rid of. And of course I could begin to read it right away, which I did. Readable? I couldn’t put it down. I read it straight through, most of it yesterday.

The italics in the following excerpt are the author’s.

The trouble with such studies [of consumer happiness] is that they are still too close to the original assumption of the economist that the consumer carries within himself a universe of wants of known intensity that he matches against prices. Both the economist and the happiness-researching sociologist think in terms of individual pursuing an array of fixed goals or operating in terms of a set of values known to them. Now this seems to me a mistaken view of the way men and women behave. The world I am trying to understand in this essay is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want.

Something about Shifting Involvements made me take a kindlier (if not less critical) view of my attempt to understand existential solitude. What makes my notebooks boring to read is the entries’ dogged, implicit belief that sooner or later a “universe of wants” would be uncovered within me. I didn’t know that I was hewing to received wisdom! Not so unusual after all.

It may have been imprudent to spend yesterday afternoon on the balcony, reading. I wore a stout cardigan — but I was aware of needing one. I awoke this morning with a touch of sore throat. In view of the Remicade infusion that’s scheduled for Tuesday, I thought it best to stay home. Spending this afternoon on the balcony was not a temptation; although just as sparkling clear, it has been not nearly so balmy today. Instead of tootling down to the Angelika to see What Maisie Knew, which opened today, I finished re-reading the book instead, in the bedroom.

Kathleen saw the movie the other night and quite liked it. (She signed up for a course of previews, not one of which I’ve seen, having been no more willing to go to the movies than to do anything else out of the house.) I understand that the new adaptation, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose treatment of Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Deep End I admire greatly, takes at least one major liberty with Henry James’s text, aside from relocating it in today’s New York: the figure of the poor old governess, Mrs Wix, has been eliminated. This must simplify the story greatly. I gather, too, that the actress who plays Maisie, Onata Aprile, is a remarkable six years old throughout; the novel’s Maisie grows up a bit. I shall try to see the movie next week, while the novel is clear in my mind.

Not that What Maisie Knew is as clear to me as I should like. I’ve read it twice before, once so early in life that I could make no more of it than Maisie herself, and once, much more recently but without the patience that James’s novels of this period require. This time, I found the novel somewhat protracted. From the moment that Sir Claude whisked Maisie off to Folkestone, and then to Boulogne, James seemed to me to be lingering, almost loitering, over Sir Claude’s genial lack of moral backbone— as, of course, perceived by Maisie herself. It was asking too much of a Twenty-First Century reader to be disturbed by the “irregularity” of Sir Claude’s relationship with Mrs Beale, and I preferred to suppose that Maisie turns her back on her stepfather simply because he can’t make up his mind to what he acknowledges to be the right thing. It was difficult to decide whether Mrs Wix was hysterical or monomaniac, but the excessiveness of her outbursts went a long way toward suggesting the reasons for James’s failure as a playwright.

My sense that the book went on for too long owed a great deal to the power of the exit interviews, so to speak, that Maisie has with her parents. Both scenes are very grand, and dramatic without histrionics. The first scene takes place in a beautifully appointed room — the nicest that Maisie has ever seen — belonging to a “deplorable” American woman. This person takes a while to follow Beale and Maisie from the shocking encounter of too  many closely-related personages at the Earl’s Court, and while they wait for her in the dim opulence Beale makes an appeal to Maisie that she has the sense to interpret as the negative of everything that her father actually says: the irony is formidable, and Beale Farange stands before us as both dangerous and pathetic at the same time. The second scene occurs in the hotel garden at Folkestone. Ida wants to say goodbye, too, but she wants to present herself to her daughter, finally, as good and beautifully loving. In this she is thwarted by Maisie’s enthusiastic and unprecedented attempt to demonstrate her own reasons for coddling the same image, in tghe course of which she mentions a nice man whom Ida would have preferred to forget. The awful mother’s false self-portrait is smashed to bits by her own abraded vanity. Neither parent can satisfy Maisie’s longing to express sincere filial esteem, especially if she can do so at a distance, and the utter failure of each to grasp the child’s sympathetic acuity completes the excitement. These scenes make What Maisie Knew well worth reading.

But James’s writing at the time was crabbed by his cleverness; he was not yet capable of presenting a puzzle as fluently and straightforwardly as he would do in The Golden Bowl. The contrast between Maisie’s simple consciousness and the florid notation of everything that passes before her eyes is often confounding, so that there are moments when it is difficult to make sense of the text without imputing James’s deep understanding to his little heroine. There is also a certain dandy decadence of style, as if James were trying to “do” Oscar Wilde, but in his own terms. What seems intended to look carefree is, at time, simply confusing. I cannot for the life of me satisfactorily parse the antecedent of “such lucidities” in the final paragraph of James’s New York Preface to the novel, or comprehend the sentence that follows:

The only thing to say of such lucidities is that, however one may have “discounted” in advance, and as once for all, their general radiance, one is disappointed if the hour for them, in the particular connection, doesn’t strike — they keep before us elements with which even the most sedate philosopher must always reckon.

Do the “lucidities” have to do with Maisie’s familiarity with the corruption around her, or with those critics who find such familiarity too disgusting for artistic purposes? The cadence suggests the latter, but I’m pretty sure that James means, somehow, the former. But it is rather like working out hieroglyphics. The novel itself is rarely so obscure, and it is also devoid of the clammy self-congratulation that deforms the Prefaces generally.

***

Before spreading out my books and accoutrements on the balcony yesterday, I fetched the remaining journals from the storage unit. Now I must organize them. Happily, I am far too ill today for such hard and unpleasant work. The foreseeable bad reaction that set in after I glanced at one of the volumes last week has not abated; my opinion of myself and of my abilities is awfully low. It’s little wonder that I’ve diverted my attention to the close reading of literary masterpieces. I’ve been reading Austen and Fitzgerald and James with all the sharp attentiveness that I dread having to devote to the fossil record of an old but insufficiently extinct self.

As I was lying in bed, waiting to fall back asleep after a trip to the bathroom, the word “Alhambra” floated into my brain, and whatever current brought it there was broken by a sharp sense that I shall probably never see the Alhambra, nor, for that matter, set foot in Spain. The desire to do either has never been appreciable. It seems much harder that I might never make it to Italy, but, upon examination, the desire to visit Italy melts into an obligation, and quickly falls back further into a duty neglected in the past: I ought to have been to Italy by now. Now, with my stooped shoulders and rigid back, with my shortish stride and my disinclination for long walks, Italy would be rather wasted on me. In the night, the thought of never seeing the Alhambra was sentimentally sad, in a life-is-over sort of way that I had to snap myself out of. (Else I’d never have gone back to sleep.) This morning, I see the matter more clearly.

Physically, travel has become uncomfortable for me. But so has the very idea of “adventure.” I find myself wondering just how long ago it was that my willingness to play along with other people’s penchant for adventure became wholly inauthentic. Did I ever like adventures? Looking back, I see them as either frightening or disappointing. But then, I should never call walking around Paris or London or Amsterdam an “adventure.” I do not expect surprises in those cities any more than I expect them in New York. I rather dislike surprises, and will go out of my way to avoid the likelihood of being taken by them. I’m speaking of surprises in the street, as it were. I am ambushed by surprises in my mind every day. Some are more exciting than others, but collectively they satisfy my appetite for the unexpected.

There is, periodically, talk of another trip to Istanbul. Kathleen and I went there in 2005, and we were treated royally by our (business) hosts. Wasn’t that an adventure? How can I even think of saying that it wasn’t? I had such a good time that I was exhausted at the end of the week, or sick, actually; I came down with an allergic reaction to some medicine that I’d been taking — nothing to do with being in Istanbul, except that I was on the go every minute. (Up in the middle of the night, for example, blogging from the hotel’s business center; our wing had not yet been connected to the Internet.) Everything was extraordinarily interesting — everything! And it was all very comfortable, too. I learned a little Turkish, and daydreamed about living in a flat in BeyoÄŸlu, right around the corner, perhaps, from Orhan Pamuk, whose novel Snow I was reading.

I dream of living in flats in European cities all the time. That has nothing to do with travel.

***

Last week, I picked up a book that turned out to be a quick and pleasant read, Stephane  Kirland’s Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City. The transformation of Paris in the Second Empire is an abiding interest of mine, possibly because there has never been anything like it but probably because it really did make Paris the most beautiful city on earth. Not necessarily the city with the most interesting monuments and landmarks — but then, I’m not interested in monuments and landmarks. I don’t want to see the ruins of the Parthenon because that’s all they are, ruins; the Athens that the Parthenon crowned disappeared well over a thousand years ago. I will admit to a strange desire to see how small the Roman remains are, and how small the baroque churches built alongside them. But civically, a monument interests me only to the extent that it is well-sited, and almost everything in Paris is right where it ought to be, thanks to its web of boulevards. The original boulevards took the place of the old city walls during the reign of Louis XIV, but they were by their very nature peripheral. Until the Rue de Rivoli was undertaken by Napoleon I, there were no such thoroughfares in the center of town. New streets were developed throughout the early Nineteenth Century, but it was under Napoleon III that the city that we know began to appear. Thousands of families were displaced by slum clearance, and crony capitalism created thousands of dubious fortunes. Georges Eugène Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine for all but the last years of the “carnival empire,” was responsible for the heavy construction — the roads, aqueducts, sewers, and so forth. He had nothing to do with the design of the vernacular city buildings that still line the inner boulevards and give Paris its look of eternal serenity, which everyone attributes to him. There was nothing serene about Haussmann, a tyrannical workaholic. Haussmann was entirely Napoleon’s creature — that’s the point that Kirkland wants to make. The transformation of Paris was the Emperor’s doing. Kirkland is prevented from making his case with complete persuasiveness by a happy determination to avoid being tedious.

What I itched for, when I got to the end of Paris Reborn, was for a modern-day Plutarch to compare and contrast the careers of Georges Eugène Haussman and Robert Moses. Having said that, I see that I have something else in mind. Moses, even more dictatorial than Haussmann, and nobody’s creature, made large-scale urban renewal projects politically unthinkable, but we’re going to have to think again if New York is to continue to develop. It seems obvious to me — only to me, I’m afraid — that the future of New York lies in a reconception of Queens County as a more highly concentrated residential quarter, with buildings of “Haussmannian” proportions replacing single-family homes and larger apartment buildings lining the thoroughfares. Where is the vision to come from for this? Whence the political muscle? Whatever happens, the stories of Haussmann and Moses are replete with cautions.

The most pronounced symptom of spring fever this season is that I’m reading like a teenager. All I want to do is curl up with a good book. The difference is that I’ve read the books before. I’m not reading anything new. For the first time — and about time! — I’m going through the library in search of books that I’ve liked if not loved, and replacing a vague sense of my own taste with something clearer, something more like a reading list.

The same friend who warned me off the new Claire Messud (“too women’s studies”) has been reading Barbara Pym for the first time, so I thought I’d read something for the second. I chose the most unfamiliar title, The Sweet Dove Died. I couldn’t remember a thing about the book, and I had no feeling of having read it before. It is certainly not Pym’s strongest effort, partly because it spends too much time in the head of a James Boyce, a very good-looking but rather dim and confused young man. A bored young man, really. We spend even more time with Leonora Eyre, a fiftyish matron (maiden, more like) with beautiful taste, especially in clothes, and a cool elegance that comes across as frosty and repellent. She is given to mild bouts of scheming and self-deceit that bring Emmeline Lucas (“Lucia”) to mind, but nothing ridiculous befalls. James, whose sexual identity is palpably unclear to everyone, pays court to Leonora, which she likes very much, because he is very respectful and, with her, carnally inert. James meets a girl, Phoebe, and falls into bed with her a couple of times, but the principal yield of this liaison is Phoebe’s disappointment and Leonora’s jealousy. (In Leonora’s eyes, the youthfully shambolic Phoebe is undeserving of James.) Then, on holiday in Spain, James is picked up by an American grad student called Ned. Ned is a nasty piece of work, and it’s a pity that Pym doesn’t do more with him.

“Oh, Jimmie, that conscience again! So you’re still fond of her — what does ‘fond’ mean? So you hurt her — but that’s what loving is, hurting and being hurt. Believe me, I know.“

They had had this conversation before and it had occurred to James more than once to wonder whether Ned had ever been hurt himself or whether he had always been the one to do the hurting.

“I’ve had to hurt people so many times,” Ned went on. “Oh, Jimmie, it tears one apart!”

“It might tear the other person apart too,” James observed, with a cynicism unusual in him. “I’ll go an see here tomorrow.”

For a moment Ned looked almost anxious but the shadow soon passed from his face. James would be no exception to the rule that nobody tired of Ned before he tired of them.

It would have been great fun to read the story that showed Ned up.

Pym’s eye for detail carries her away, giving the novel the texture of a series of to-do lists. and second thoughts about same, that damps the sparks of humor.

Christmas was no almost upon them. It had come round again in its inexorable way, with its attendant embarrassments which this year seemed even more numerous than usual. Ned was going to have to spend it in Oxford with his friends, who were rather hurt by his neglect of them. The evening before he went James took him out to dinner to give him his Christmas present, a pair of expensive cuff link.s This had been comparatively easy to choose, for all Ned asked of a present was that it should cost the giver a lot of money. Leonora’s had been much more difficult. The Sunday paper colour supplements offered no advice on what to give an older woman towards whom one was conscious of having behaved badly. Anything like the Victorian ‘love tokens’ of the past seemed inappropriate, so James eventually chose a picture book of reproductions of Victorian paintings. He knew that Leonora would be disappointed; even if she did not show it in her face, her tone of voice when she thanked him would betray it, as Miss Caton’s had when he opened the book of poetry Phoebe had sent him for his holiday. Books of presents were somehow lacking in excitement and romance. He was relieved when he learned that Humphrey was giving her a pair of amethyst earrings and hoped that his uncle’s present would in some way make up for his inadequacy, though he really knew it would not. James himself was going to winter sports as usual with what Humphrey called “a pretty group of young people,” making them seem something very remote from himself and Leonora.

From this busy surface life of engagements and things, all deep feelings (if any) are bolted away. Every now and then, Leonora sheds a tear for the loneliness of her life, but she is always in bed when she does so; when she is up and dressed, she embraces her way of life with iron determination and plenty of contempt for weaker souls. She is something of a monster, still hale and hearty enough to keep up the bluff of being an attractive woman — but to what end? To Humphrey (James’s uncle), she is simply a tease, all dolled up but unresponsive to his amorous advances, as though they were in bad taste. As for James, Ned puts it well: “Jimmie was a sweet boy, but as time went on the innocence and naîvety which had first attracted Ned became tedious, even pitiful, and they seemed to have less and less in common. Jimmie was not very intelligent, had little sense of humour and was always ‘around’ in a way that began to be irritating.” The reader cannot feel much different.

When the book was over, I felt that Pym had not played her cards very well. The characters had not been dealt out properly. The plot depends too heavily on shifts in James’s living accommodations: his furniture is moved about a great deal. This occasions scheming, as I say, but not much interest. If James were to work at the center of the novel, he would have to be a mystery, closed and silent, his thoughts unknown to us. Phoebe and Ned — I should have liked to throw them in a box and see who came out alive. Leonora is mildly dented at the end, but still an half-hearted vamp, doomed to become ludicrous. Things might have worked out with Humphrey, but the timing was off; he comes to see her as ageing and tired, and he gives up on her as a prospective lover.

The writing, too, seemed flat, almost pedestrian. I was often reminded of Ruth Rendell’s less thrilling stories about odd people in London (Portobello, for example). The everyday psychopathology of Pym’s bored and boring characters left me dispirited. Needing a tonic, I remembered a story by Elizabeth Taylor that made a powerful impact when I read it last summer, “The Ambush,” so I went and found that.

It was like following a clavichord sonata by CPE Bach with one of his father’s great organ toccatas. Pym’s washed-out pastels gave way to gorgeous beauty, pregnant with constrained passion. “The Ambush” is set at an inviting old house on the banks of the Thames. Taylor sets many of her stories in this part of England, but none is so enchanted. A young woman returns to the home of her boyfriend, about a month after his death in an automobile accident, at the invitation of the young man’s mother. Catherine has been bottling up her grief, trying not to yield to scenes and sobs, and in general making everyone around her nervous; when she goes off to Mrs Ingram’s, her parents are relieved to “come down from their tightrope and relax.”

We care about Catherine because of the very uncertainty of her situation.

Uncertain, during those weeks, how much grief was suitable to her — for she and Noël had not been officially engaged and in the eyes of the world she saw her status as a mourner undecided — she had shown no sign of sorrow, for one tear might release the rest and one word commit her to too many others. Her fortitude was prodigious…

Noël’s mother, Mrs Ingram, is something of a sorceress. Catherine, we are told, “had wanted to be her daughter-in-law and part of the enchantment.” But the two women do not spend much time together, and Catherine wonders why she has been asked to the house. She spends most of the time, when she is not alone, with the brother, Esmé, whom she only met at Noël’s funeral. Esmé lives abroad and seems to have a life apart; he is visited by a Ned-like creature called Freddie. (Taylor’s biographer, Nicola Beauman, calls Esmé “the only obvious homosexual in Elizabeth’s work,” but I’m not so sure that anything is obvious.) Esmé and Catherine boat up and down the river, just as Catherine used to do with Noël. “Another thing about the river,” Esmé says, “we can quite safely bring our unhappiness here. No one can each it or be contaminated by it, as on dry land.” This is enchantment, too, and Catherine is within the spell.

Near the end of the story, Catherine accompanies Mrs Ingram to the graveyard, to freshen the flowers at Noël’s grave. In a long, beautifully written paragraph, Taylor deftly shifts between the summer afternoon on a shady lane and Catherine’s apprehensiveness about encountering “some overpowering monument,” resolving the two with the transcending image of “groves of Ingrams.”

Unlike most of the other riverside families, this had kept its bones in one place for at least two hundred years.

Noël’s grave, upon which the earth has not settled, is marked only by a wooden cross.

Catherine took a step back, as if she might otherwise sink with the earth. She felt obscenity, not peace, around her.

“Obscenity” comes as a bit of rude surprise, but then we realize that Catherine is, for once, not fretting but feeling.

“The Ambush” ends ambiguously — but powerfully, as powerfully as it has been throughout. Quite unable to go on reading, I was reminded of Wallace Stevens’s line: “This is the barrenness / of the fertile thing that can attain no more.”

But I must pick a better Pym next time.

I wish I had a list, a list of all the movies, most of them recent, that show a carful of characters making their way to Manhattan (for the first time!) by crossing the East River on the Queensborough Bridge. According to Hollywood, this is how one enters the Big Apple. In fact, it is how one enters Gotham from Long Island, if one is too cheap to take the Midtown Tunnel, and one enjoys the company of very large trucks. Some folks, it’s true, get taken for a ride by unscrupulous cab drivers, en route from Kennedy Airport. (The fare is fixed, so the driver pockets the toll money.) To enjoy the drive over the Queensborough as advertised in the movies, you really have to be sitting on the roof of the car.

The scenes are all the same. Right off the bat, I can think of one: In The Reader, Ralph Fiennes sits the back seat of a taxi on his way to visit a Holocaust victim on Park Avenue. (He’s playing someone from Germany who might well not know his way around the city’s “shortcuts.”) Before we see the actor, the camera plays with the bridge, panning through the beams and trusses to take in the Manhattan skyline. But why listen to me?

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city as seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

That’s from Chapter Four of The Great Gatsby. I ought to have made the connection a long time ago. What simpler way to pay cinematic homage to the big fish that got away, the great American novel that has eluded filmmakers for the better part of a century? Flickering light among the girders! The great city rising at the end of a magic bridge, waiting to be discovered, to yield up its riches and its secrets to optimistic newcomers!

I have to pin down a movie in which a party of three or four travel from New Jersey to Manhattan via the Queensborough Bridge. There’s got to be at least one case of a director who couldn’t resist flying on sentiment in the face of plausibility. How about Stop Loss?

***

The Gatsby Approach was first deployed, I’ll venture, in a film where it made sense. Reading Gatsby this time, I kept thinking admiringly of Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation. Every time Gatsby said “old sport,” I heard Robert Redford’s voice, and it sounded right. This is not the time to look into the colossal failure of the movie when it opened. It’s enough to say that it has aged very nicely. I’m not sure about Mia Farrow — not just Ms Farrow herself but also the film’s general adoration of the corrupt Daisy Buchanan. In the novel, it’s pretty clear that the adoration is limited to Gatsby himself, and that Daisy is in every way an earthier woman than the ethereal Mia Farrrow. There is also a slightly static quality to the film, as if it were a slideshow of illustrations of the text. Certainly it lacks the power of the novel, which is driven by a remarkable narrator. The movie can tell the story, which is almost as remarkable, but it can’t harness the narrator, no matter how many snips of voice-over transcription it indulges in. The Great Gatsby is a book to be read.

I was chilled by how close it seemed, the world of Gatsby. Many things have changed since 1922, but somehow the story does not seem “historical.” The ashpiles long ago gave way to the World’s Fairs, and Robert Moses’s system of parkways were about to obviate one of Fitzgerald’s key plot points. It is not, however, that the world today still looks and feels as it did then. It doesn’t. Our manners are more sophisticated at every level. But the myth that Fitzgerald spun out of American life in the wake of World War I still beats with a strong pulse. Stylish dishonesty and whitewashed vulgarity have not disappeared from city life. Men and women continue to trip up, big time, on the discontinuities of pretension and desire.

I suppose that it’s common to read The Great Gatsby as the story of an American dream gone wrong, with Jay Gatsby as the dreamer. This time, however, I focused more on what Gatsby was up against: the massive, brutish power of Tom Buchanan’s moneyed entitlement. This is a fairy tale told as things really are: boys from nowhere haven’t got a chance of beating entrenched family fortunes. Fitzgerald’s portrait of the philistine philanderer from whom Gatsby so naively intends to steal his wife is not a caricature; it conveys the full authority of a man deeply accustomed to having his own way. His dismissal of Gatsby the end of the “scene” in the Plaza suite is assured and unanswerable.

“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr Gatsby’s car.”

She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.

“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.”

And it is. The last that we see of Tom and Daisy shows us that Gatsby’s dream was always a fantasy, pitifully lacking in objective correlatives.

Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.

They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale — and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

The glamor has collapsed, only to reveal the homely reality of the Buchanans’ attachment. What wicked fun it was, to think it might have ended otherwise. But: “Her voice is full of money,” says Gatsby. So are Tom’s pockets.

***

We look forward to seeing Baz Luhrman’s attempt to capture the Gatsby magic. I’ll have a particular eye on Joel Edgerton, the versatile actor who’ll be playing Tom.

In his Introduction to the 1966 edition of Penguin Classics Mansfield Park, Tony Tanner says something very beautiful about why Mansfield is necessarily inhospitable to amateur theatricals.

For Mansfield Park is a place where you must be true to your best self: the theatre is a place where you can explore and experiment with other selves. A person cannot live in both.

Over the weekend, I read Richard Jenkyns long, admiring essay on Mansfield Park, in which he struggles manfully to rescue Fanny Price from the charge of priggishness. This is a battle that, once joined, can’t be won, because it assumes that comic fun is the ideal objective. If Mansfield Park is supposed to be a comedy, then Fanny Price is a prig, and that’s all there is to it. However, notwithstanding Austen’s sharply comic writing (almost stand-up at times), Mansfield Park is not a comedy. It is a transcendent meditation on English Christianity, on Milton and Bunyan and Johnson, to name only three of the pillars on which it stands. I am tempted to call it an allegory — but I resist. Fanny Price is not a prig; she is a pilgrim. She is on a journey, and her only defenses are modesty and integrity. Austen takes the nature of Fanny’s spiritual development for granted, as may we all, and pays it no more attention than she does Fanny’s feelings for Edmund, which we are allowed to see only where they are crimped by the behavior of others. What interests Austen as a novelist is the secular manifestation of the pilgrimage, which is presented entirely in terms of Fanny’s occupation of her uncle’s house.

At first, Fanny is in the background. We are encouraged to believe that we are paying much more attention to her than any of the characters in the book can be bothered to do. Fanny is a passive witness to the rush of developments that crowd the first half-dozen chapters, after which the remainder of Volume I is devoted to two highly-wrought adventures, both parables of a sort. The first is the visit to Sotherton, a locus of amazingly transparent symbolism. At Sotherton, with its walled garden, wilderness, locked gate and “free” open park land, the English religious tradition is realized in the physical landscape. Maria Bertram rehearses the fall from grace that, at the climax of the novel, will validate all of Fanny’s “priggish” concern for her well-being. The second adventure, the production of Lovers’ Vows that is aborted at the eleventh hour by Sir Thomas Bertram’s unexpected return from Antigua, pits Fanny somewhat more actively against various displays of worldly bad faith.

In the novel’s second and third volumes, Fanny is advanced, rather against her will, to the foreground. Maria marries Mr Rushworth, Julia joins the wedding trip (not an unusual thing at the time), and the Bertram sisters disappear forever into the novel’s background; we hear of them, but we never again see them. Suddenly, Fanny is the only young lady in the house, and, as Sir Thomas’s warm greeting to her upon his return indicates, she is discovered to be an appealing young lady. She has grown pretty and, for most purposes, self-assured. She is no longer the puny transplant from Portsmouth: Mansfield Park has nourished her, even without a fire in the East Room.

But there is a failure of harmony, because Fanny’s virtue is mistaken for mere good judgment, a more pliable quantity. The novel slows down to a series of conversations, in which people say things to Fanny that make her uncomfortable because she is not pliable. The novel registers her discomforts approvingly. She is right to be pained by Edmund’s talk of Mary Crawford, and right to be horrified by Henry Crawford’s proposal of marriage. By the middle of Volume III, she has shown what she is made of, but Sir Thomas and Edmund are still too enchanted by the spell of meretricious worldliness cast by the Crawfords, which Fanny alone resists, to like what they see. So Fanny is banished to Portsmouth.

Being Fanny, she does not perceive the painful aspect of this removal until she has spent some time under her father’s relatively wretched roof. Setting out from Mansfield with her brother, William, she looks forward to “going home,” and it is only when she gets there that she realizes that Mansfield Park is her home now. This is something that anyone not engaged on a spiritual journey would have foreseen, but Fanny’s piety requires the kind of material challenge that genuinely risks undermining her. An ever-apparently self-improving Henry Crawford pays a surprise visit, and Austen allows us to savor for a moment a future in which, Edmund’s having married Mary, Fanny finally capitulates to Henry, and perhaps does indeed “fix him,” as Mary sighs. But this scenario belongs to a different novel, one in which the Fall plays a slighter role, and no dissatisfied Maria Rushworth smoulders menacingly. When Maria duly erupts, Fanny, not without pangs of guilt at the good fortune that befalls her in the wake of the misery of others, triumphs. She returns to Mansfield Park, her best self intact, as a model guiding the others who remain there toward their best selves. Tellingly, Aunt Norris expels herself from the general transfiguration.

I read Mansfield Park as the record of a spiritual journey taken by someone besides Fanny: Jane Austen herself. This was the first book that Austen conceived in maturity. She had recently reworked, and finally published, her second and third attempts at fiction, but Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are rooted in Austen’s high-spirited girlhood, which explains their continuing popularity with young ladies. Mansfield Park, in contrast, seeks to come to terms with the full weight of Austen’s religious and intellectual heritage. In it, she brings her deep reading in the monuments of her native tongue to bear on the opportunities and vicissitudes of gentry life in a time of pervasive commotion.

Nobody would think to call Fanny Price a prig if, instead of “Jane Austen,” the title page bore the name of Marilynne Robinson.

Last year, Kathleen read a book called Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, by Joshua Wolf Shenk, and she liked it so much that I decided to read it, too, even though I find it very hard to focus on Abraham Lincoln. I prefer to admire Lincoln from a distance, and can only wish that the distance were greater — that, say, he were a great statesmen of a much earlier era and on a far-removed continent, rather than the man who presided over a regrettable war that, whatever the military outcome, could not conceivably have yielded political union, but only the mistrust of government and dearth of social vision that we Americans still have to live with. I read most of the book during the winter, but finally finished it in a long go yesterday, largely to clear it from the pile.

Shenk’s book is also admirable, and well worth reading, even if its parts do not fit smoothly. There is a want of harmony between the language of Lincoln himself, extensively quoted, and the language of contemporary therapy. Quite understandably, moreover, Shenk seems unsure of how well-informed his readers will be, about American history as well as about current thinking on mental health issues. Ideally, the book would knit into a seamless whole the image of the noble, tortured frontiersman and an unashamed acceptance of the realities of depression, but if Lincoln’s Melancholy fails of the ideal it nevertheless approaches it closely enough to present an occasionally mordant critique of the mindless optimism of our ghastly media culture.

Two paragraphs from the Epilogue stand out for snipping; they balance and resolve our conflicting views of afflictions such as depression, making good use of Lincoln as a case study.

For example, depressed people are often unable to get out of bed, feeling a kind of paralysis that seems physical and involuntary, even though on some level, it’s known to be mental and volitional. Truly, for those in thrall to mental agony, as Andrew Solomon has observed, merely going to brush one’s teeth can feel like a Herculean task. A common argument today has two people standing over the bed. One says, “He can’t help it. He has an illness and should be treated with deference.” The other disputes this, muttering, “He just needs a swift kick in the butt.”

Lincoln’s story allows us to see that both points may be true. First, when overcome by mental agony, he allowed himself to be overcome, and for no small time. He let himself sink to the bottom and feel the scrape. Those who say that we must always buck up should see how Lincoln’s time of illness proved also to be a time of gestation and growth. Those who say that we must always frame mental suffering in terms of illness must see how vital it was that Lincoln roused himself when the time came. How might Lincoln have endangered his future, and his potential, had he denied himself the reality of his suffering? How, too, might he have stagnated had he not realized that life waits for those who choose to live it?

This is very wise — as wise as Lincoln himself. At the back of it, I discern a suggestion of which Shenk himself may not be conscious: that, in certain cases of depression, it might be wiser to let the disorder run its course, without medication, for its natural term (about eighteen months). This would require organizing our affairs so that a person could suffer a bout of depression with the same guiltlessness as a cancer victim, and not be punished for absence from work or low spirits, and so on. Who knows how many lesser Lincolns’ potential “gestation and growth” we are sacrificing to our impatience with “volitional” disorders? Enduring depression would be appreciably less painful if it were generally accepted as an illness with a term. Shenk’s book demonstrates that it is impossible to hold Abraham Lincoln in high regard without ceasing to regard depression as shameful.

***

The other day, I watched Holy Motors, the French film made by Leos Carax (not his real name). Holy Motors was one of last year’s prestige films; when Oscar season rolled around, a few months ago, it was commonly sniffed that Holy Motors ought to have been nominated for something. I wasn’t tempted to see it in the theatre; I wasn’t even tempted to read much about it. But the title lingered, and eventually I yielded to Amazon’s suggestion that I might like it.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t enjoy watching it at all. A blurb on the jewel box promised “frenetic fun,” but I found the movie to be unrelievedly gloomy. The moment it was over, though, my feelings shifted. Holy Motors may turn out to be the strongest case I’ve yet encountered for getting the first viewing out of the way in order to see a film clearly. Insofar as Holy Motors is a lament for bygone ways of moviemaking (as suggested by Kenji Fujishima at The House Next Door), it’s probably not going to speak to me very powerfully, because I don’t let bygones be bygones. But as an object lesson in the illusions and actualities of acting, Holy Motors is very powerful, and Denis Lavant certainly deserved a Best Actor nomination. (Was I the only one who was reminded by his Monsieur Merde of Pan’s Labyrinth?)

Mansfield Park stands alone in Jane Austen’s small oeuvre for many reasons. Best-known reason: “Nobody likes Fanny Price.” Nothing funny (or ridiculous) happens in Mansfield Park. (Poor Mr Rushworth — who can really laugh at him?) My favorite reason, today: Depravity. Later English novels would be replete with villainy far less idle than Henry Crawford’s, but Crawford is a cad without equal in Austen. There are other cads, Wickham and Willoughby, who do worse things, but they do them offstage, to poor girls we don’t know. Henry Crawford sits right down in front of us and declares his intention “to make Fanny Price in love with me.”

His sister, Mary, is surprised.

“Fanny Price! Nonsense. No, no. You ought to be satisfied with her two cousins.”

“But I cannot be satisfied without Fanny Price, without making a small hole in Fanny Price’s heart. You do not seem to be aware of her claims to notice.”

Were Henry a genuine seducer — a Wickham or a Willoughby — we should not be hearing this conversation. But if there is nothing carnal about Crawford’s designs, that merely underlines their depravity. Operating without real desire, they feed on more than vanity. Crawford’s genuine admiration of Fanny drives him to engineer an affection for himself that can lead nowhere. Romantic longings that lead nowhere can be very beautiful (see Brief Encounter), but not when it is discovered, as here it is in advance, that those longings have been seeded.

We know that Fanny does not think very highly of Crawford, but Austen takes the trouble to warn us that, if her heart were not already given elsewhere (to her cousin Edmund — hopelessly), Fanny would be vulnerable to Crawford’s campaign.

… although there doubtless are such unconquerable young ladies of eighteen (or one should not read about them) as are never to be persuaded into love against their judgment by all that talent, manner, attention, and flattery can do, I have no inclination to believe Fanny one of them, or to think that with so much tenderness of disposition, and so much taste as belonged to her, she could have escaped heart-whole from the courtship (though the courtship only of a fortnight) of such a man as Crawford, in spite of there being some previous ill-opinion of him to be overcome…

But Crawford’s scheme will hurt Fanny otherwise than as intended, as we shall see. His behavior and his declarations end up covering her with shame, after all — in the somewhat astigmatic eyes of Sir Thomas Bertram, a paterfamilias unable to allow Fanny the liberty to reject the hand of so “fortunate” a suitor as Crawford.

***

We are all familiar with the cliché of the child who not only must be read the same stories at bedtime, night after night, and who interjects corrections when parents nod. Having familiar tales repeated, word for word, is understandably reassuring to budding imaginations. I am finding it no less reassuring in my dotage. But my taste cannot develop like a child’s — it is at any rate unlikely to have opportunities for doing so. Hitherto unknown but remarkably congenial authors cannot be expected to emerge from exotic recesses of literature. (As if to dispute that very remark, I think of Joseph O’Neill and Edward St Aubyn, two remarkably congenial writers of whom I was unaware only a few years ago. And let’s not forget Elizabeth Taylor.) Like a child, I want to hear certain kinds of stories, and not others. I have no use for what I call “men with issues” — put Ahab and Ishmael at the top of that list. I don’t much care for novels that center on the unsavory confusions of adultery. The list of things that I don’t want to read about it actually pretty long, and it gets longer as my life does.

What I want to read are stories of social gravity — accounts of characters influencing, sustaining, and thwarting one another by the sheer Newtonian effect of their own mass. In the end, Madame Bovary is an empty book for me because the story is about a narcissist’s failure to connect with anyone beyond her daydreams. Francis Steegmuller’s amazing Flaubert and Madame Bovary is immensely more interesting, not only for showing how Flaubert put his inner Emma to good use, but for setting the author in a context of friends and relations from whom, unlike his creation, he is not closed off.

Last year, I re-read Trollope’s Orley Farm, to see how it differed from a novel to which it was compared when it came out, Wilkie Collins’s No Name. (Hugely.) Orley Farm was a pleasant summer read, but I had to recognize that Trollope will never appeal to me now as he did when I was in my prime. Now, his resolutions seem both unimaginative, or unvarying, and medicinal. Trollope is too pious about the sacredness of landed property not to sacrifice his characters to its rules. And, with a few exceptions, his women are dim or wicked. Trollope used to make me laugh. Now, I sigh.

Overexposure is always a danger. Having discovered that you like something very much, you may, without caution, idolize and so kill it. (I find that I have to be very careful about Mozart — or should be if I did not have a battery playlists that dispenses Mozart with a plenteousness that falls well short of excess.) I don’t know what I’m going to read when I come to the end of Mansfield Park, but it will probably be about Jane Austen (about her work), not by her. One way in which I think of her novels collectively is as of an extraordinary fountain that becomes more extraordinary every time I visit it. I want to keep it that way. I want to resist the strong temptation to claim that it is the fountain of life. What could be more extraordinary than that?

Reading Persuasion earlier this month was such an intense, private, and comforting pleasure that I resolved to read Mansfield Park again soon, and when the Penguin/Bickford-Smith clothbound edition arrived by yesterday’s post, I sat down with it at once and began to read as carefully as I could. I copied out many fine lines, although it felt somewhat arbitrary to do so, as all the lines are fine, in one way or another. The lines that caught my interest yesterday and this morning tended to point out the worthlessness of the Bertram sisters’ apparently fine breeding. The sisters, Maria and Julia, it occurs to me, have the leading roles in the first part of the novel, first as an undifferentiated pair of privileged girls who, while never treating their poor cousin, Fanny Price, with cruelty or contempt, are simply too wrapped up in themselves to “secure her comfort”; and then (but soon enough), as rivals for the attentions of Henry Crawford, an ugly contest made positively foul by the fact that Maria has by this time engaged herself to marry the dull but rich Mr Rushworth.

It also occurs to me that, in her three later novels, Jane Austen takes on the role of witty heroine for herself. Neither Fanny Price, nor Emma Woodhouse, nor even quiet Anne Elliot is a sympathetic heroine in the manner of Elizabeth Bennett or Eleanor Dashwood. I need say nothing about Fanny Price; Emma is a fatuous dimwit, not so very unlike Maria Bertram as you might think in her want of real moral upbrining; as for poor Anne, she is buried alive at the start of a novel that, step by step, disinters her. The comedy is all in Austen’s narration, and it tends to be sharp and black. Take this whizzer about the Bertram girls:

Their vanity was in such good order that they seemed to be quite free from it.

That’s from the beginning of Chapter IV, by which time Sir Thomas Bertram has already taken himself off to his troubled plantations in Antigua. It is not to much to say that the rest of Mansfield Park is devoted to the gradual collapse of that “good order.”

I have read the first volume of the novel’s three, and it seems that everything that one remembers about Mansfield Park, aside from the thundering marital catastrophe at the end, has happened. On the last page of Chapter XVIII, the return of Sir Thomas is announced. During his absence, the questionable alliance with Mr Rushworth has been no sooner entered into than shown to be questionable, in the chapters depicting the visit to Sotherton Court. This episode is swiftly followed by the young people’s ill-advised theatrical project, which Sr Thomas’s arrival aborts. The pace is very brisk at the start, and the drama of event gives way to the drama of extended scenes only with the visit to Sotherton. One would never guess from Volume I just how suspended the action of Volume III will be.

It is undoubtedly a sign of old age to find solace in Mansfield Park, and to find it where one does. For example, “Julia’s penance,” at Sotherton: having thoroughly enjoyed sitting at Henry Crawford’s side on the box during the carriage ride from Mansfield Park to Mr Rushworth’s estate, Julia finds herself wholly neglected at Sotherton. Fanny wonders that Julia does not see Crawford for the trifler that he is. Jane Austen does not.

Poor Julia, the only one out of the nine not tolerably satisfied with their lot, was now in a state of complete penance, and as different from the Julia of the barouche box as could well be imagined. The politeness which she had been brought up to practise as a duty made it impossible for her to escape, while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.

This is nothing less than a flash of the Inferno.

***

After a not-unpleasant visit to the dentist yesterday, I walked a few blocks to the old storage unit and threw as many of my old journals into a tote bag as I thought I could carry. There seem to be about forty in all. When I got home, I learned that the table that I’d ordered for the balcony had arrived (in a flat box), but that it was too heavy for me to carry up from the package room. While waiting for it to be delivered, I had a look at a journal volume chosen at random. Although, as I’d expected, there was nothing interesting enough to merit mention here, the entries were not absolutely disgusting. They were more diary than journal, and as journal they were vacuous. I seem to have been not only ungrounded but determined to resist being grounded, as if there were something toxic about common sense. Perhaps I am reading this in. I ought not to generalize from a quarter-hour’s perusal of one book out of forty. It will take a good deal of study to decide whether I was feckless by nature, or whether something very important had formed no essential part of my education.

The drilling noises, coming from nowhere in particular, continue to spread a dreary atmosphere of general dentistry. Today, for my sins, I am actually going to the dentist — a new one. For several years, I’ve gone to a dentist in a nearby building, but, because of one thing and another, I haven’t gone. Let me gently hint that I don’t think that the technician who cleans teeth likes me. And when you suspect that someone with drills in your mouth doesn’t like you…

From the dentist I plan to go to the old storage unit, to retrieve some of the old notebooks that I’ve been talking about it. I have learned not to see them, so I’m not sure where they are, but I hope to find them without much ado. It is not a nice day, but cold and dark with rain in the forecast. I’d give anything to be able to stay home.

***

It has been a while since our New Yorkers arrived on Monday, so I haven’t yet seen the current issue, but I’ve read a snip of it at my friend Jean’s blog. David Remnick, writing about the Tsarnaev brothers (the Boston Marathon bombers), observes, “The digital era allows no asylum from extremism, let alone from the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men.” This “curdled disappointment” strikes me as a much bigger problem, right this very minute, than global warming. Global warming is almost certainly a problem that will require the consideration of several generations simply to assess in manageable terms. The consequences of curdled disappointment are all too likely to interfere with such long-term deliberations, depriving society of the kind of calm stability that has enabled the fruitful social and technological developments of the past seventy years.

It’s time to rephrase Freud’s question: What do young men want? Better still: what do young men need? And what do you do about young men whose needs have not been met, not remotely? I’m willing to accept, theoretically, the occasional emergence of “bad people,” but the Tsarnaev story is so characterized by disconnection that I can’t begin to place primary responsibility on the damaged boys.

And why do I keep thinking about Ayn Rand and her fans? Not so much their refusal to take responsibility for the Tsarnaevs of this world — although I despise them for that — as for their trumpeting noisy anthems about the Land of Opportunity, which make everything sound so simple. We need to be sending an alternative message to the rest of the world: America is a tricky country, where good luck takes strange forms and where falls can be very, very hard. Think twice before leaving a dense web of family support behind!

My barber told me yesterday that he is going to take his citizenship test today. He has been studying the hundred questions, and two other barbershop clients, both of them professors, have assured him that he now knows more about this country than their students. I have no doubt that Tito is going to thrive in the United States; he’s savvy and self-directed. But the well-documented ignorance of American high-school students, where basic American history is concerned, suggests that the Rand rot goes much deeper than Rand’s readership. There seems to be an implicit understanding that, if you’re an American, you don’t have to know anything!

What’s for two smart boys, born in a very different world, to admire in that?