She rarely laughed, we are told. So somber an outlook on the human affairs of our time seems entirely appropriate to me. But I am puzzled by one small biographical detail: Why did she choose Asbury Park in which to spend her one outing? Had she once an affection for the seashore? Did she know it had an amusement park, that it was, even then, noisy, crowded, and full of the tinny sounds of the merry-go-round and the high, panicked shouts from the Ferris wheel? I do not know why she went, but I can guess why she never went back.
The New York Times reports this morning that George Rapee, ‘one of the world’s great veteran bridge players,’ is playing (at the age of seventy-six) in Indianapolis at a national competition. I learn that he held three world titles in the fifties. I remember him clearly, seated cross-legged on a table in the editorial office of the Washington Square Review, of which I was editor in my senior year (1939) in college. He had very black hair combed straight back; he never said very much. Someone told me he was the son of Ernie Rapee, the orchestral conductor, ‘one of those sons of famous people who never come to anything,’ I remember someone saying.
A wonderful letter from a man in Texas who wishes to augment my stories in End Zone about absurd military discipline and behavior during the war. He served in the Medical Corps at a base hospital in the Pacific which cared for severely burned sailors. An order came through that a very important member of ‘the brass’ was arriving to inspect the installation. All patients who were able were to stand at attention beside their beds as the general passed through. All others, too severely wounded to rise, were to lie at attention, and salute, during the inspection.
Jane calls daily, or I call her. The time of her ordeal is close. Yesterday, Christmas Day, was her forty-fifth birthday. She celebrated with her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law in New York City, where they all live. It must have been a less than festive day, like the prospect of New Year’s Eve when more of the family will be together. I cannot believe that the level of hilarity will be very high.
Sybil and I are packing to go to Washington, closing the house slowly, talking to Mr. Snow about turning off the water, checking to make sure that everything we hope to see turn green and bloom again is covered, the bushes secured under blankets of boughs or hemp, the whole living organism that is a house put into hibernation, cold storage, for the long winter.
I call Abigail McCarthy, an old friend from New Republic days, to ask her to introduce me at the Woman’s National Democratic Club next February. She says she will try to change her Florida plans to visit her sister and move them a few days ahead. I think this is remarkably good of her. She says, when I tell her about the sad decline of my Catholic faith, ‘I don’t know that I have much of the old faith left, but I still behave as though I did.’
The club asks for a title for my speech. I have no idea what I will say, so far from the day, so I use Red Smith’s mot: ‘There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.’ I decide to call the speech ‘Opening a Vein,’ and hope it fits whatever I think up to say two months from now.
Winter thought: You grow old, and the older you grow the less you are known as a person who has done this or that, and the more your name is prefixed with the fact of your advanced age. Or, if you have a small accomplishment, it is enlarged in the eyes of the reporter, it never stands alone, your age is always attached to it: ‘At the age of seventy-five she won a senior marathon,’ or ‘At seventy-three, he taught himself Greek.’ Josh Billings knew that living a long time was its own single virtue: ‘I’ve never known a person to live to 100 or more, and then die, to be remarkable for anything else.’
January
‘My children,’ said an old man to his sons who were frightened by a figure in a dark entry. ‘You will never see anything worse than yourselves.’
—quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Spiritual Laws
Last month, on the 11th of December, Berenice Abbott, the distinguished American photographer, died. She was in her mid-nineties, I believe. I knew Susan Blatchford, her companion, slightly (she had twice visited Wayward Books). We made indefinite plans for me to visit them in a town only about an hour from Sargentville, but nothing ever came of it. I kept thinking there was still time, put off calling again, next summer, I thought.… So I never got to tell her how much her photographs of New York City in the thirties shaped my memories of the city of my birth.
I remember one thing Susan told me about her friend. She said that Miss Abbott never complained about old age. Every day was an enjoyment to her; she woke each morning with a sense of delight that she was still alive. I found this amazing, in the light of my feelings each morning that nothing good can come of the day ahead. I told Susan I would like to acquire some of Berenice Abbott’s joie de vivre, but I never traveled to Munson, to catch from her the enviable contentment with which she lived her life. Once more, as if I were not already aware of it, I learned that there is never ‘still time.’
In Washington, preparing to go to New York to see Jane, who is enduring the first hard days after her operation, and waiting to hear if her vision has survived it, I discover how bleak is my interior landscape, how much like the view from the apartment I have now, of an alley, of the windowed wall of a public school, of another, new building with all the charmless features of modern architecture. It is some consolation, or perhaps reassurance, when what you see matches so well the way you feel.
On the last morning in Maine, we were treated to a vision of sea smoke, as it is called (or steam fog, some say). It is a lovely white haze clinging to the edges of the Cove, caused by cold air flowing over a body of relatively warm water. The resulting vapor condenses in small columns near the surface of the water. It resembles steam, and takes on very delicate tinges of color as the sun rises over what looked like grey mountains, but of course there are no mountains, only a stationary bank of fog, or cloud, which then turned white and melded with the sea smoke. The Quakers have a useful expression for what I felt as I watched this phenomenon: it ‘spoke to my condition.’
From the business section of the newspaper this morning I learn that in merchandising there are persons known as ‘factors.’ They guarantee payments for ‘receivables,’ especially when those accepting the goods may not be able to pay for them immediately. Macy’s department store and Burdine’s are in such unfortunate positions, and the factors (who sound to me more like entities in a mathematical equation), I gather, stand between them and the manufacturers, the middlemen between debtors and creditors for large transactions. Such curious and almost anonymous occupations must be necessary in the complex business of capitalistic enterprise. But I would have trouble owning up to such employment:
‘What do you do?’
‘I am a factor.’
The anonymity of that word makes me think of the time I first encountered, in some mystery story or other, the description: ‘He is a fence.’
From our balcony I see a cloud of pigeons light on the roof of the garage. They seem to have been rendered almost colorless by the dirt and smog of the city.… I am put in mind of the family of small, black-backed white ducks that moved into the Cove just before we left. I had not been aware of their presence since the spring. It was fine to have them back. I felt honored, as though they had explored all the other possible habitats during the long summer, decided Billings Cove was superior to them all, and returned.
National Public Radio holds a contest to find the best collective nouns that listeners could invent. The winner, and my preference:
A staph of doctors.
We go to New York, take a taxi to a hospital at the top of Manhattan Island, about twenty blocks north of where I was born, and find Jane’s private room, into which she has just been moved, this day, from the intensive care unit. She is badly bruised, one eye swollen shut, her forehead, nose, lips, and parts of her face and head blue and swollen. Her fever indicates that some slight meningitis is present, so a tube connects her to antibiotics. She is in much
pain and asks for Demerol long before she is due to receive it. Her hair is shaved around her face; a brutal-looking scar crosses her head from ear to ear.
To my maternal eye she is a sorry sight. Yet I am filled with gratitude that she is alive, that she has not lost her sight during the operation that removed a fortunately benign tumor that had wrapped itself around the optic nerve and intruded into the sinus cavity.
The prediction is that she will be entirely well in a short time.
The family takes turns staying with her during the day, especially her sister Elizabeth, who is there almost the entire time, feeding her, cheering her, holding her hand during the unpleasantnesses that follow such a massive invasion of the head: spinal taps, hypodermics in the forehead to remove excess fluid, tests and shots of every variety. Her husband, Bob, comes early in the morning and then again as soon as he closes his bookstore. He is a cheerful and encouraging chap who is, even more than the rest of us, sensitive and sympathetic to her pain. Isaac Wheeler, her nephew, comes down from Yale on the weekend and reads Molly Ivins to her. She smiles weakly at the lovely wit, but tells him her mouth is swollen on the inside so the humor hurts. Sam Wheeler is there every day after his school closes, full of his customary good humor and priestly calm, and Barbara Wheeler, her older sister, brings in well-cooked dinners that Jane makes an effort to eat. Only Kate is absent, the family’s doctor, who telephones every day but cannot come because she lives a good distance away, has a young child, and is pregnant with another. Her father calls nightly from Albany.
Often at odds, a pride of highly individual women and supportive men, sometimes turned away from each other by a word or an act, nonetheless, a family like ours is at its best in adversity. It becomes a single defensive unit against whatever threatens to diminish it, cemented by a kind of disparate love that is as fierce as its occasional animosities.
One virtue of coming away from Maine earlier than I had planned (besides the relief of being close to Jane) is that I will get to see small Maya, my granddaughter, who will celebrate her second birthday this month. She arrived twenty years after my sole grandson, Isaac. I would have settled for the pleasure of watching (at some distance) him grow from a humorous, curly-haired, loving, intelligent, and thoughtful whelp (a besotted relative’s adjectives, and I am probably misusing the noun), interested in everything, into a very tall, intelligent, socially aware, short-haired lad whose love for his family, his friends, and the rest of the human race is his most endearing characteristic.
But then his cousin Maya arrived, a smaller-than-average infant born, to the obstetrician’s surprise, with her eyes wide open. In the two years I have been acquainted with her, seeing her only occasionally, I have recovered some of my affection for being alive. Before Maya, I had many unaccountable, often very disturbing flashbacks to the decades of my childhood, youth, adulthood, maturity. Now I am more inclined to sudden hopeful, forward flashes, fantasies about what might be:
A small, blue-eyed, blond child demonstrates to me her ability to read.
I show her a saltwater tidal pool and watch her delight at the sight of scurrying sand crabs, mussels, barnacles.
I see her splashing in Billings Cove or (if the Cove proves too cold for her until she grows up and acquires some body fat) in the low waves of Moody Beach, or some beach, or the warmer waters of the pond on Deer Isle. Like her grandmother, I fantasize, she will love water more than land, and feel the same rush of extraordinary freedom in it. There are already signs of this: At a year and a half she could stay afloat, put her face in the water, even jump in from the side of the pool. I hope I am still around to induct her into the Gertrude Ederle Society, my girlhood invention for high-school swimmers who aspired to that great Channel swimmer’s achievements.
I see her, almost grown, her solemn, round blue eyes wide open to the possibilities of artistic or intellectual pursuits and still unaware of society’s pervasive corruption, of atmospheric and water pollution, of the failures of government and church, in a depraved world I and my contemporaries have left to her.
In this Sunday’s New York Times, the argument rages over Kurt Masur’s plan to conduct the Israel Philharmonic in a program of Wagner’s music. It concerns not just the use by the Nazis of Richard Wagner’s martial-sounding music, but the newly uncovered strain of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s prose. Defenders of Masur excuse him by claiming that ‘Wagner’s prejudice was shared by many other artists and intellectuals of his time.’
This time-sharing alibi is very common. Writers like Edith Wharton, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather are exonerated from the charge because, in their time, anti-Semitism was in the very air they breathed. To some people, this seems to be enough to excuse their unpleasant portraits of Jews in their novels.
In this year, an aspirant to the Presidency of the United States, Patrick Buchanan, was accused by conservative William Buckley of having made some blatantly anti-Semitic remarks. An editor of the liberal journal The New Republic offered an ingenious defense of Buchanan: ‘Pat is the kind of guy who likes to overstate his case. And in his own heart Pat believes he is not anti-Semitic and that counts for something.’
These unconvincing absolutions from the charge bring me back to the time, a few years ago, when the book critic for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley, and I engaged in a nasty verbal interchange in the pages of that newspaper. He had reviewed the recently opened Diary of H. L. Mencken and disagreed with its editor, who had declared flatly that ‘Mencken was an anti-Semite.’ Not at all, wrote Yardley. ‘We do well to bear in mind that his prejudices were those of his time and class. We do no man of an earlier time justice if we judge him by the standards of our own more “enlightened” age.’
In a response to this, I wrote a piece for the editorial page of the paper, listing twenty-four very nasty examples from the Diary of Mencken’s bigotry. I noted that ‘his time’ was not a century ago, but the years (of the diaries) 1930—1948, when the worst acts against humanity in centuries were being perpetrated against Jews and when a responsible journalist committed an unforgivable crime by contributing to the atmosphere of prejudice.
In the last paragraph of the piece, I moved in a direction that Yardley, who had been a literary friend of mine for many years (I introduced him to his present wife, published him often in The New Republic, and recommended him for his present job), could not forgive. I speculated about persons who defend obvious anti-Semites, and concluded that only someone insensitive to the evidence, indeed, someone possessed of ‘an anti-Semitic sensibility,’ could overlook it and defend the writer.
In a few days Yardley devoted his long column to calumny of me, my ‘self-righteousness,’ my McCarthyism, my lack of reasoning (I ‘would earn an F in Logic 101’), my ‘private spitting match’ against him, proving that only among little ‘insignificant’ literary people like me was such an attack interesting or important. Out of our sense of our own insignificance we (the insignificant literary people) engage in attacks on each other because ‘the world out there doesn’t give a farthing.’
Now, a few years later, I look back on the yellowed clippings and think: I would now put it somewhat differently. I would assert that many people, Yardley among them, are unconscious of anti-Semitic slurs and statements, do not, in fact, even hear them, and therefore are able to assert, with assurance, the absence of them entirely. Perhaps it is too strong to say such people possess ‘an anti-Semitic sensibility.’ Too strong, yes, I suppose, but time and much further thought have not fully convinced me it is not true.
And, let us face it, the world out there does give a farthing when the issue is not literary gossip but the great concerns of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.
Thinking today of my love for Isaac and Maya, I embarked on a fanciful dissertation. Those grandchildren are bound to me not by proximity or frequent contact, but by ineffable psychic connection. In my long life, I’ve learned there are pluralities to love, not one LOVE, varieties of the emotio
n called by that name and composed of diverse elements.
For example, I loved my mother, I thought. But, with the lofty scorn of the young for a parent, I treated her badly. I was indifferent to her needs, her sorrows, her disappointment with her narrow life. She yearned, I now believe, to learn something from the classes I took at college and the reading I was given to do. She had to settle for late-morning lectures at Town Hall, given by popular pundits with three names like William Lyon Phelps, Raymond Gram Swing, John Mason Brown, and A. A. Brill, who, with great self-assurance, told their all-female audiences what to read, to see, to think about.
My college-student contempt for these fashionable servings of pap was profound, I who was reading Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Andre Gidé, and Marcel Proust while my mother went regularly to Womrath’s lending library to borrow the latest novel by Warwick Deeping or Hervey Allen. But when I needed her, for encouragement, comfort, affection, she overlooked my superior pretensions and provided me with them. She asked nothing of me but my imperfect, puerile ‘love.’ I had the mistaken notion that this was enough.
Another example: first love, sometimes phrased as ‘first true love.’ This is perhaps the most passionate we are ever to know, and the most unforgettable. Catullus tells us: ‘It is difficult to lay aside an old passion.’ For some, first love may be akin to childhood parental love. For others, like me, it was the first time the whole self responded to another, like the action of a catherine wheel, an emotional sweep so intense that one is powerless to describe it to anyone else.
Extra Innings Page 12