During the year that Sischy and I have been meeting for interviews, she has been unsparingly frank about herself. She has confessed to me her feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy, she has told me stories of rejection and mortification, she has consistently judged herself severely. At the same time, she has not been altogether uncritical of me. I have not lived up to her expectations as an interlocutor. She fears that I do not understand her. As I ponder this tension between us, a story that she told me early in our acquaintance comes back to me with special weight. It was an account of a small humiliation—one of those social slights that few of us have not in our time endured—that she had suffered the previous day at a public lunch honoring a sculptor who had done a work for the city. Sischy had sat down at a table next to a stranger, a sleek, youngish man who, as soon as they had exchanged names, turned away from her and began talking to the person on his other side. The guests at the lunch were from both the art world and the city government, and this man was a city politician. “He was clearly disappointed that someone who looked like me should have sat down next to him,” Sischy told me. “I could see him thinking, What a waste of a lunch! I considered getting up and going to sit with some people I knew at another table, but then I thought, No, I’ll stay here. A little later, a woman who had sat down on my other side asked me my name, and when I told her, she figured out who I was, and she was very interested. And then two people across from me figured me out, and they started talking to me. And eventually this guy, taking it all in, said, ‘I’m terribly sorry—I didn’t get your name.’ So I told him again, and the woman beside me told him what I did, and his whole manner changed. He suddenly became very interested. But he’d lost me by then.” Sischy told me this story with no special emphasis—she offered it as an example of the sexism that women still regularly encounter—but I obscurely felt it to have another dimension besides its overt one. Now, a year later, the latent meaning of the story becomes clear to me: it is a covert commentary on Sischy and me. I had formed the idea of writing about her after seeing Artforum change from a journal of lifeless opacity into a magazine of such wild and assertive contemporaneity that one could only imagine its editor to be some sort of strikingly modern type, some astonishing new female sensibility loosed in the world. And into my house had walked a pleasant, intelligent, unassuming, responsible, ethical young woman who had not a trace of the theatrical qualities I had confidently expected and from whom, like the politician at the lunch, I had evidently turned away in disappointment.
In a charming and artful essay of 1908 entitled “A Piece of Chalk,” G. K. Chesterton writes about taking some brown paper and colored chalks to the Sussex downs on a fine summer day to do Chestertonian drawings of “devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.” But as he begins drawing, Chesterton realizes that he has left behind “a most exquisite and essential” chalk—his white chalk. He goes on:
One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is that . . . white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black . . . Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Since Chesterton wrote these buoyant words, the world has seen two world wars and a holocaust, and God seems to have switched to gray as the color of virtue—or decency, as we are now content to call it. The heroes and heroines of our time are the quiet, serious, obsessively hardworking people whose cumbersome abstentions from wrongdoing and sober avoidances of personal display have a seemliness that is like the wearing of drab colors to a funeral. In “Why I Write,” George Orwell said, “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is, I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” One feels about Sischy that at another time she, too, might have been less grave, less morally weighted down, and more vivid. She told me that as a child she had been extremely naughty and wild. What remains of this naughtiness and wildness finds expression in the astonishing covers, the assertive graphics, and the provocative special issues of Artforum. Just as Sischy’s personal mutedness is the by-product of an Orwellian sense of cultural crisis, so her vision of contemporary art is shaped first by societal concerns and only secondarily by aesthetic concerns. Her interest in the neo-Expressionist painting that is coming out of Germany today, for example, is bound up less with the painting’s aesthetic claims than with its reflection of the anguished attempt of young German artists and intellectuals to come to terms with the Nazi past. Sischy once said to me, “My greatest love is conceptual art. I may be even more interested in thinking than in art.” She added, “Rene and I used to have an argument. He’d say something like, ‘Well, that work is really beautiful,’ and I’d say, ‘So?’ and he’d say, ‘Well, you hate art if you say “So?” about something being beautiful,’ and I’d say—and I’ve come to realize that it’s more complicated than this—‘Well, maybe I just hate art when the only thing going for it is that it’s beautiful.’ ”
ADVANCED PLACEMENT
2008
As Lolita and Humbert drive past a horrible accident, which has left a shoe lying in the ditch beside a blood-spattered car, the nymphet remarks, “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store.” This is the exact type of black comedy that Cecily von Ziegesar, the author of the bestselling Gossip Girl novels* for teenage girls, excels in. Von Ziegesar writes in the language of contemporary youth—things are cool or hot or they so totally suck. But the language is a decoy. The heartlessness of youth is von Ziegesar’s double-edged theme, the object of her mockery—and sympathy. She understands that children are a pleasure-seeking species, and that adolescence is a delicious last gasp (the light is most golden just before the shadows fall) of rightful selfishness and cluelessness. She also knows—as the authors of the best children’s books have known—that children like to read what they don’t entirely understand. Von Ziegesar pulls off the tour de force of wickedly satirizing the young while amusing them. Her designated reader is an adolescent girl, but the reader she seems to have firmly in mind as she writes is a literate, even literary, adult.
As the first book opens, Blair Waldorf—who is almost seventeen and lives in a penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street with her divorcée mother, Eleanor, her younger brother, Tyler, and her cat, Kitty Minky—is sulking in her room. Blair, in the description of a classmate, is “the bitchiest, vainest girl in the entire senior class, or maybe the entire world” and an antiheroine of the first rank: bad-tempered, mean-spirited, bulimic, acquisitive, endlessly scheming, and, of course, dark-haired. The blond heroine, Serena van der Woodsen (who lives at an even better Fifth Avenue address, right across from the Metropolitan Museum), is incandescently beautiful, exceptionally kind, and, in the end, it has to be said, somewhat boring. The series belongs to awful Blair, who inspires von Ziegesar’s highest flights of comic fancy.
Blair is sulking because her mother’s new boyfriend, a Jewish real-estate developer named Cyrus Rose, “a completely annoying, fat loser,” and her mother are in the kitchen eating breakfast in matching red silk robes. When dressed, Rose “looked like someone who might help you pick out shoes at Saks—bald, except for a small, bushy mustache, his fat stomach barely hidden in a shiny blue double-breasted suit. He jingled the change in his pocket i
ncessantly . . . He had a loud laugh.” What? We’re only on page 6 and already reading about a fat, vulgar Jew! Doesn’t von Ziegesar know that anti-Semitic stereotypes are no longer tolerated in children’s literature? Of course she does. Cyrus Rose is only one among many tokens of her gleeful political incorrectness. An elderly guest speaker at Blair’s high school graduation is another:
“Auntie Lynn,” some old lady who’d basically founded the Girl Scouts or something, was supposed to talk. Auntie Lynn was already leaning on her metal walker in the front row, wearing a poo-brown pantsuit and hearing aids in both ears, looking sleepy and bored. After she spoke—or keeled over and died, whichever came first—Mrs. McLean would hand out the diplomas.
Only someone very hard-hearted wouldn’t laugh at this. The way von Ziegesar implicates us in her empathic examination of youth’s callousness is the Waughish achievement of these strange, complicated books. And in Blair she has found a powerful pivot for her feat.
She has equipped this girl with an excess of the most unattractive but also perhaps most necessary impulses of human nature—the impulses that give us such up and go as we have. Unlike her forerunners Becky Sharp and Lizzie Eustace, who ruthlessly elbowed their way into wealthy aristocratic society, Blair already has all the money and position anyone could want. She is pure naked striving, restlessly seeking an object, any object, and never knowing when enough is enough. However—and, again, unlike her prototypes—Blair never harms anyone but herself. She thinks malevolent thoughts about everyone, but she does not act on them. It is her own foot that she invariably shoots. Her goals of the moment—to lose her virginity to her boyfriend, Nate Archibald, and to get into Yale University—elude her. Something always gets in the way of her doing it with Nate, and her Yale interview is a catastrophe beyond imagination.
Nate is a kind of Vronsky manqué, with a grande dame mother, like Vronsky’s, and a navy-captain father who is “a master sailor and extremely handsome, but a little lacking in the hugs department.” (Too bad Tolstoy didn’t think of a father like that for V.) Nate “might look like a stud, but he was actually pretty weak.” This is because he is stoned most of the time. He lives in a town house in the East Eighties and is a senior at St. Jude’s, a private school that appears to be modeled on the Collegiate School, as Blair and Serena’s school, Constance Billard, is modeled on von Ziegesar’s old school, Nightingale-Bamford.
Unlike the actual private schools of New York, however, which give a fair number of scholarships to low-income minority students, von Ziegesar’s private schools are almost a hundred percent minority-free. (I say almost because of Carmen Fortier, a scholarship girl from the Bronx, who appears—chewing gum—on page 86 of the first book of the series and is never seen again.) Of course, this glaring absence is necessary to von Ziegesar’s program of provocation. She does not compromise it. There are no brussels sprouts hidden in her Rice Krispie marshmallow treats. She is writing a transgressive fairy tale, not a worthy book for a school reading list. “Welcome to New York’s Upper East Side, where my friends and I live and go to school and play and sleep—sometimes with each other” is von Ziegesar’s opening volley, delivered in the voice of an anonymous figure called Gossip Girl, who continues: “We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party.”
Von Ziegesar understands that the princes and princesses of fairy tales require the foil of beggars and commoners, and so, of her six main characters, only three—Blair, Serena, and Nate—belong to the world of the disgustingly rich. Of the others, two live on the wrong side of the Park, and one lives in Williamsburg. Dan and Jenny Humphrey share a decaying West End Avenue apartment with their father, Rufus, “the infamous retired editor of lesser-known beat poets,” whatever that means, who goes around the house in his underwear and a three-day-old gray beard and cooks inedible tagines from Paul Bowles recipes. But he lacks nothing in the hugs department and, indeed, turns out to be the only attentive parent in the series. (He is also a single parent—his wife ran off to the Czech Republic “with some balding, horny count” a few years earlier.) He “hated the Upper East Side and all its pretensions,” but he sends Jenny to Constance Billard and Dan to a private school called Riverside Prep because “the way he saw it, you had two choices in this city”:
Either you spent an arm and a leg to send your kids to private school, where they learned to shop for insanely expensive clothes and to be snobbish to their father, but also to converse in Latin, memorize Keats, and do algorithms in their heads; or, you sent them to public school, where they might not learn to read, might not graduate, and risked getting shot.
The question of where Rufus gets the money for the private school fees—and for the designer clothes that Dan and Jenny buy on his credit card as their lives intersect with those of the East Side kids—is left unanswered. Von Ziegesar has other concerns than writing books that make a lot of sense. Along with the pieties of political correctness, she has taken on the indecencies of consumer culture. Insanely expensive clothes are the engine of her send-up of our time of ceaseless shopping. There is scarcely a page on which the name of a fashion designer doesn’t appear. The kids don’t wear dresses and coats and pants and shoes; they wear Diane von Furstenberg dresses, Stephane Kélian shoes, Hugo Boss coats, Marc Jacobs shirts. If the book has any redeeming social value, it is as an education in label recognition. After reading the Gossip Girl books, you will never walk into a department store again without feeling a little surge of pride as you recognize Christian Louboutin and John Fluevog and Michael Kors—who are to their world what Marcel Proust and Henry James and Theodore Dreiser are to the bookish audience for whom von Ziegesar writes in the guise of writing for the pre-SAT young. The books are full of literary allusions: there are quotes from Wilde, Hemingway, Shakespeare, references to Goethe and Tolstoy, and chapters entitled “The Red or the Black” and “What We Talk About When We’re Not Talking About Love.”
Dan Humphrey is a caricature of the angst-ridden nerd who writes poetry. Dan’s friend Vanessa Abrams is so taken with a poem of his, called “Sluts,” that, behind his back, she sends it to The New Yorker, where it is immediately accepted by the magazine’s revered (if imaginary) submissions editor, Jani Price. After the poem is published, Dan, who previously spent his after-school time in his room “reading morbid, existentialist poetry about the bitter fate of being human,” becomes a star. He is courted by an agent. A rock band hires him to write lyrics. He starts shopping at Agnès B.
His sister, Jenny, is a shy ninth grader who “preferred to be invisible” and might have succeeded “if her boobs weren’t so incredibly huge.” She is a kind of stand-in for the eighth and ninth graders who read the Gossip Girl books, and who will identify with her innocent worship of the cool senior girls. But except for her boobs, she is not very interesting.
Vanessa is “an anomaly at Constance, the only girl in the school who had a nearly shaved head, wore black turtlenecks every day, read Tolstoy’s War and Peace over and over like it was the Bible [and] had no friends at all at Constance.” Her hippie parents, Arlo and Gabriela, who live in Vermont in a house made of recycled automobile tires, have allowed Vanessa to live in Williamsburg with her older sister Ruby, who plays bass in a rock band, on the condition that she get “a good, safe, high-school education.” Writing of a visit the hippie parents make to New York, von Ziegesar fulfills her pact with youth to lose no opportunity to express the disgust it feels for the old and unbeautiful and deviant. She dresses the “gaunt and alarmed” Arlo in a Peruvian poncho and ankle-length hemp skirt (“Yes, that’s right, a skirt”) and the gray-braided Gabriela in a garish African schmatte and sends them off to an exclusive New York benefit. When Vanessa asks where the benefit is being held, Gabriela replies, “Somewhere called
the Frick. It’s on Fifth Street, I think . . . I’ve got the address written down somewhere.” Weightless little in-jokes like this are scattered throughout the books, like the optional confectioner’s sugar on tea cake. Von Ziegesar’s hands are never idle.
Of course, the cake itself is of Hostess Twinkie immateriality—the Gossip Girl books are the lightest of light reading. They revolve around the twin desires of von Ziegesar’s high school seniors: to have a good time and to get into college. The conflict that might exist between these desires in the real world does not exist in the world of the Gossip Girls. No one ever cracks a book (they are too busy shopping at the three “B’s”—Bendel’s, Bergdorf ’s, and Barneys—or working in soup kitchens so that they can say they did on their college applications), and (with one exception, a vicious boy named Chuck Bass, who “could barely spell, had never read a book in its entirety, and thought Beowulf was a type of fur used for lining coats”) everyone gets into college. This is not much of a plot, admittedly, but von Ziegesar’s impudence invests the dopey activities of her characters with true page-turning interest.
Von Ziegesar uses the technique of narration through interior voice with all her major characters, but when she gets into the id-shaped mind of Blair Waldorf she crosses a kind of boundary. Blair is both a broader caricature and a more real person than the others. Her over-the-top selfishness and hatefulness has the ring of behind-our-masks-we’re-all-like-that truth. And among her malevolent internal mutterings lurk some of the series’s funniest lines. When her mother marries Cyrus Rose, for example, and proposes that Blair reconsider her refusal to take his name, Blair’s inner voice growls back, “Blair Rose? No thank you. It sounded like the name of a perfume made especially for Kmart.” Her refusal is a rare gesture of defiance. In almost every other respect she is an obedient, even rather docile, child. She is angered and embarrassed by her mother’s marriage to the oily Cyrus (and by her pregnancy at forty-seven), but she confines her fury to her thoughts. She is always perfectly civil to Cyrus, who is a perfectly amiable goof. Nor does she kick and scream when her pretty bedroom is requisitioned as a nursery for the baby and she has to move into her stepbrother Aaron’s ugly, ecologically correct room (it has a cruelty-free mahogany dresser), which smells so strongly of his dog, Mooky, that Kitty Minky urinates all over the bed in protest. She merely packs a bag and moves into a suite at the Plaza. Have the powerlessness of children and the power of money ever been so nicely fused? The gesture also gives rise to one of the series’ best set pieces.
Forty-One False Starts Page 31