Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  “That is ridiculous,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “Surely he had better things to do with his time.”

  The passage is a tour de force of double-edged irony. McCall Smith’s gentle mockery falls equally on African innocence and Western knowingness. Mma Potokwane’s “I do not think so” is worthy of Twain.

  In the new book, Arcadia is showing signs of decline. In the opening scene, Mma Ramotswe sits in an outdoor café in the capital city of Gaborone and witnesses, in rapid succession, three instances of flagrant antisocial behavior. First she sees a woman who is parking her car scrape another car and drive away. Next she sees a woman steal a bangle from an outdoor peddler while his back is turned. And finally she herself is ripped off: as she runs out of the café to try to stop the jewelry thief, she is stopped by a waitress, who accuses her of trying to leave without paying her check and demands money as a bribe for not calling the police. Gaborone as Gomorrah.

  After the incident of the scraped car, Mma Ramotswe reflects that “it was not true that such a thing could not have happened in the old Botswana—it could—but it was undoubtedly true that this was much more likely to happen today.” Her reverie continues: “This was what happened when towns became bigger and people became strangers to one another; she knew, too, that this was a consequence of increasing prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring out greed and selfishness.” A few pages later, in a scene in a church, we are recalled to another threat to the African paradise. The minister speaks of “this cruel sickness that stalks Africa”—that, in fact, stalks Botswana more cruelly than almost any other country: Botswana has one of the highest H.I.V. infection rates in the world, roughly 40 percent of the adult population.

  I get this statistic not from McCall Smith’s series but from an article by Helen Epstein in the February 2004 issue of Discover magazine. The “cruel sickness” is not an overt theme of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books. McCall Smith does not even give the scourge its name. On some subterranean level, however, his sexual comedy and the tragedy of AIDS intersect. The sexual activity by which the H.I.V. infection is spread is the activity by which the books themselves are driven. Sex is everywhere in them.

  A large percentage of the clients of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency are women who want to know if their husbands are cheating on them. (They invariably are.) When Mma Ramotswe interviews one such client, “there flowed between them a brief current of understanding. All women in Botswana were the victims of the fecklessness of men. There were virtually no men these days who would marry a woman and settle down to look after her children; men like that seemed to be a thing of the past.” The case takes a characteristically comic turn. After Mma Ramotswe personally entraps the husband and presents the client with the conclusive evidence of a photograph in which he is kissing the detective on her sofa, the client is beside herself. “You fat tart! You think you’re a detective! You’re just man hungry, like all those bar girls!” But the comedy only underscores the unfunniness of the priapism by which McCall Smith’s Botswana is gripped.

  McCall Smith does not connect the dots. He never talks explicitly about how “the cruel sickness” is transmitted. But one has only to look at the real Botswana (where McCall Smith has lived) to see what he must be gesturing toward. In a second article on the subject in The New York Times Magazine, Epstein writes chillingly about the promiscuity that is the agent of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. She attributes Botswana’s especially high H.I.V. rate to a special sort of promiscuity: the concurrent long-term sexual relationships with more than one partner, largely male-orchestrated, that are a fixture of the country’s life. She notes that a program of “partner reduction” or “increased faithfulness” in Uganda, where such relationships had also been commonplace, brought about a marked change in the H.I.V. infection rate; so far Botswana has not established such a program.

  McCall Smith’s major characters—Mma Ramotswe, Obed Ramotswe, J.L.B. Matekoni, Mma Makutsi, Mma Potokwane—are hardly in need of partner reduction. McCall Smith writes so compellingly of their goodness that we don’t immediately notice their sexlessness. But there is a sort of chastity enveloping them that is in conspicuous contrast to the hypersexuality of the society at large. In the first book of the series, Mma Ramotswe articulates what is to become implicit. She has refused the first proposal of J.L.B. Matekoni, and worries about losing him as a good friend. “Why did love—and sex—complicate life so much? It would be far simpler for us not to have to worry about them. Sex played no part in her life now and she found that a great relief.… How terrible to be a man, and to have sex on one’s mind all the time, as men are supposed to do. She had read in one of her magazines that the average man thought about sex over sixty times a day!” Mma Ramotswe later accepts the transcendently kind mechanic, and eventually marries him, but we don’t get the feeling that sex has much to do with it. The sexual magnetism of the sociopathic trumpeter brought her nothing but suffering. Matekoni, clearly not a man who thinks about sex sixty times a day, if at all, brings her fatherly companionship. She is satisfied with it.

  In a reprise of the cake scene, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Potokwane give the allegory of transgression yet another comedic tweak. As they sit in Mma Potokwane’s office eating the magical confection, Mma Ramotswe asks her friend if she eats too much cake, and Mma Potokwane responds:

  “No, I do not. I do not eat too much cake.” She paused and looked wistfully at her now emptying plate. “Sometimes I would like to eat too much cake. That is certainly true. Sometimes I am tempted.”

  Mma Ramotswe sighed. “We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.”

  “That is true,” said Mma Potokwane sadly. “There are many temptations in this life, but cake is probably one of the biggest of them.”

  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is a literary confection of such gossamer deliciousness that one feels it can only be good for one. Fortunately, since texts aren’t cakes, there is no end to the pleasure that may be extracted from these six books.

  The New York Times Book Review, 2005

  _________________

  In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I SHOULD HAVE MADE HIM FOR A DENTIST”

  Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It was almost universally disliked when it came out in 1967. It struck a chord of hostility in the mid-twentieth-century literary world that was out of all proportion to the literary sins it may or may not have committed. The reviews were not just negative, but mean. In what may have been the meanest review of all, Wilfred Sheed, a prominent critic and novelist of the time, wrote:

  In this mixture of complacency and agitation, he has written a book of no literary distinction whatever, pockmarked by clichés and little mock modesties and a woefully pedestrian tone.… Mediocrities from coast to coast will no doubt take Making It to their hearts and will use it for their own justification.… In the present condition of our society and the world, I cannot imagine a more feckless, silly book.

  Even before the book was published it was an object of derision. Podhoretz’s friends urged him not to publish it, and his publisher shrank from it after reading the manuscript. Another publisher gamely took the book, but his gamble did not pay off. Word had spread throughout literary Manhattan about the god-awfulness of what Podhoretz had wrought. This and the reviews sealed the book’s fate. It was a total humiliating failure.

  Making It was reissued last year by New York Review Books as one of its Classics, and the literary world—perhaps because it no longer exists—remained calm. Bookish people didn’t call each other up to exclaim about the scandal. Not many reviews appeared. And yet among those that did were some that in their nastiness might have been written in 1967. James Wolcott’s review in the London Review of Books was the longest and nastiest. It began with a quote from an entry in Alfred Kazin’s journal of 1963, in which Kazin wrote of a party he attended at the offices of Commentary magazine, of which Podhoretz was
editor:

  Struck by the oafishness of Norman Pod, drunkenly clowning in the entrance to the elevator. That lovely, blond girl (wife of the publisher of the NY Review?) looked really offended, and I couldn’t blame her.

  Wolcott’s decision to begin his put-down of Making It with an image of its author as a boorish jerk, taken from a text written years before the book’s publication, may help answer the question of its original outlandish unpopularity. It illustrates a glaring problem of the autobiographical genre, namely its susceptibility to influences outside the text. At the time of the memoir’s first publication Podhoretz was a well known if not universally well thought of figure in the New York literary establishment. He had been writing for Commentary, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker since the 1950s, when he was still in his twenties, and had become editor of Commentary in 1960 at the age of thirty. He was a kind of magnet for malice. A famous mischievous story going around was what Lauren Bacall was supposed to have said when he introduced himself to her at a cocktail party: “Fuck off, boy.”

  * * *

  What was Edwin Frank, the editor of New York Review Books, thinking when he decided to reprint Making It? Had he seen virtues in the book that the fog of schadenfreude had obscured in 1967? Would a new audience see them, too? In his chapter on serving in the army, Podhoretz recalls that he got along extremely well with uneducated boys from the South. “I was puzzled as to what they saw in me, and my curiosity drove me once to ask one of them why he liked me. ‘Because,’ he answered in a thick Mississippi drawl, ‘you talk so good.’”

  Today’s reader of Making It will immediately see that Podhoretz writes no less good than he talks. The 1967 reviewers were simply wrong when they added bad writing to their list of offenses. Writing as lucid and vital as Podhoretz’s is not often encountered and should have been acknowledged. But the original critics were evidently too irked with the boy wonder to give him an inch. Perhaps more to the point, they could not distinguish between the book’s narrator and its author. When we read a novel narrated in the first person we do not make that mistake. We know that Humbert Humbert and Vladimir Nabokov are not the same person. In the case of autobiography, because author and narrator share a name, we are only too prone to forget that the latter is a literary construct.

  The “I” of Making It is a character we have never exactly met before. The outlines of his story are familiar: a precocious, poetry-writing boy, the son of poor, Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Brownsville, Brooklyn, rises above his origins and becomes a person to be reckoned with in the larger culture. But the particulars are unusual, a little mysterious. Norman—as I will call him to distinguish him from his creator, Podhoretz—is not the conventional changeling who doesn’t belong with the Muggles he has been set down among. He is content with his lot. He is bookish and precocious, yes, but being the smartest boy in the class doesn’t ruin his life. “By the age of thirteen I had made it into the neighborhood big time, otherwise known as the Cherokees, S.A.C. [social athletic club],” he says with modest pride, and adds:

  It had by no means been easy for me, as a mediocre athlete and a notoriously good student, to win acceptance from a gang which prided itself mainly on its masculinity and its contempt for authority, but once this had been accomplished, down the drain went any reason I might earlier have had for thinking that life could be better in any other place.

  Once this had been accomplished. Norman doesn’t explain how he negotiated this improbable feat, before which getting published in Partisan Review or becoming editor of Commentary pales. He simply tells us that the gang’s uniform, a red satin jacket with white lettering stitched across the back saying “Cherokee,” was his proudest possession, and that he wore it to school every day.

  * * *

  He was hardly waiting for a Princess Casamassima; but one came to him anyway in the form of a snobbish teacher at his high school named Mrs. K., who made him her pet and proposed to rid him of “the disgusting ways they had taught me at home and on the streets” and thus turn him into a plausible candidate for a Harvard scholarship. Norman’s resistance to her three-year-long attempt to make him over comes to a dramatic head in a scene in which she takes him to de Pinna, a classy clothing store on Fifth Avenue, and tries to buy him a suit to wear to the Harvard interview. “Even at fifteen I understood what a fantastic act of aggression she was planning to commit against my parents and asking me to participate in,” Norman recalls.

  Oh no, I said in a panic (suddenly realizing that I wanted her to buy me that suit), I can’t, my mother wouldn’t like it. “You can tell her it’s a birthday present. Or else I will tell her. If I tell her, I’m sure she won’t object.” The idea of Mrs. K. meeting my mother was more than I could bear: my mother, who spoke with a Yiddish accent and of whom, until that sickening moment, I had never known I was ashamed and so ready to betray.

  Norman somehow slides away from the betrayal; the suit is not bought. He later reflects:

  Looking back now at the story of my relationship with Mrs. K.… what strikes me most sharply is the astonishing rudeness of this woman to whom “manners” were of such overriding concern.… Were her “good” manners derived from or conducive to a greater moral sensitivity than the “bad” manners I had learned at home and on the streets of Brownsville? I rather doubt it. The “crude” behavior of my own parents, for example, was then and is still marked by a tactfulness and a delicacy that K. simply could not have approached.

  That is very handsomely said. But the seeds of class-consciousness that Mrs. K. had planted were well sprouted by the time Norman arrived at college. What she couldn’t achieve with her obnoxious corrections, higher education achieved with its subtler admonishments. (He had received the Harvard scholarship—at the interview he wore a suit handed down from an uncle—but went to Columbia instead because it offered a more generous scholarship; the family could not afford the extra expenses of the Harvard offer.) While at Columbia Norman lived at home, traveling more than two hours by subway daily, and “I was, to all appearances, the same kid I had been before entering Columbia.” Yet

  we all knew that things were not the same.… I knew that the neighborhood voices were beginning to sound coarse and raucous; I knew that our apartment was beginning to look tasteless and tawdry; I knew that the girls in quest of whom my friends and I hornily roamed the streets were beginning to strike me as too elaborately made up, too shrill in their laughter, too crude in their dress.… It was the lower-classness of Brownsville to which I was responding with irritation.… What did it matter that I genuinely loved my family and my friends, when not even love had the power to protect them from the ruthless judgments of my newly delicate, oh-so-delicate, sensibilities? What did it matter that I was still naïve enough and cowardly enough and even decent enough to pretend that my conversion to “culture” had nothing to do with class when I had already traveled so far along the road Mrs. K. had predicted I would.

  “I should have made him for a dentist,” Norman’s mother murmurs to herself at a moment of special incomprehension of her boy’s new ways.

  * * *

  It was at Columbia that Norman was bitten by the crazy ambitiousness that was to become a sort of signature. For the first time he was not automatically the smartest boy in the class. In his freshman year he had to struggle just to keep up, and then he had to claw his way to being first. He attributes the excesses of his competitiveness to a realization:

  My hunger for success as a student, which was great enough in itself but might yet have yielded to discipline, became absolutely uncontrollable when I began to realize that I would never make the grade as a poet.… The truth was that I could not bear the idea of not being great.

  Norman won his way to the academic top by being weirdly energized by exams and by an equally uncanny ability to write papers in the styles of the professors for whom they were written. Not only A’s but A+’s poured in as a result of these aptitudes. He was not liked by a lot of his fellow students, but he did
n’t care. He cared only that the professors liked him. In his final year he took a course with Lionel Trilling, who was determined not to be taken in by this famous know-it-all. But Trilling was won over by the exceptional quality of Norman’s academic performance. He, too, gave him an A+.

  Trilling and his wife, Diana, became friends of Norman’s after his graduation, and Trilling was to provide an important link to the literary world outside the academy by introducing him to Elliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary. But Norman’s entrance into that world was delayed by another academic triumph. After graduation from Columbia he went to England, as the recipient of the Kellett Fellowship to Clare College at Cambridge University. Getting the coveted Kellett did not further endear Norman to his classmates, as he unrepentantly notes.

  He recalls the pleasures of a room of his own, with early morning tea brought by a servant. He notes that this was the first time in his life he had the leisure to read for the sake of the work rather than to show someone how clever he was. In the English system the tutor for whom he wrote a weekly paper had no influence on the outcome of the exam he would take at the end of two years. Sucking up to him served no purpose.

  [He] was the best possible antidote I could have found to the frenetic pursuit of “brilliance” to which I had become habituated at Columbia and whose imperatives constituted a more fearful tyranny, being largely internal, than any that could conceivably have been imposed upon me from the outside.

  However:

  There was, as usual, another side to the story. Worlds apart from the Cambridge of Clare was the Cambridge of Downing College, and if the fires within me were banked at Clare, to Downing I came, burning, burning, even more hotly than before: burning to learn, burning to impress, burning to succeed.… Downing was the college of F.R. Leavis, the greatest critic in England … the editor of the country’s most formidable critical review, the terrifying Scrutiny.