I'm Going To Take A Break

The brain has gone dead, and I have to spend my waking hours weeding the garden anyway.  And maybe I will really and truly start the write this novel I have in my head.  I told the plot to a friend who is not given to soft words of encouragement, and she liked it, so maybe in fact it is appealing, or at least to her and to me.  I am tired of reading and writing, perhaps not the best thing to admit whilst also announcing that a novel might be in the works.  Oh, well, let's hope for the best.  Have a Glorious Fourth of July.  We've got rain and mosquitoes, that's for sure.

Time Marches On

“To every thing there is a season,” saith the Preacher, known to most people by the Greek version of the word, to wit, Ecclesiastes.  I was reminded of it again when a dear friend from California who used to be very close to me and my family in our Brookline years remarked on the telephone a few days ago how extraordinary were the dinner parties I gave in our house in the waning days of the sixties and into the early seventies.  Sometimes twice a week sit-down dinners for twenty or more, children, children’s friends, my friends, strangers, a crowd given over to riotous laughter, lots of wine, hilarious singing, hours of merriment, psychic abandon verging on total madness.  I can never stop smiling when I think back to those long ago evenings.  When I was divorced the party moved, often to the seashore where I had bought a large and exceedingly ramshackle summer house (“resembles nothing so much as a third class pensione in Sicily,”  my two Italian friends would laughingly exclaim whenever they visited.) “It was the dirtiest house I was ever in,” a Newton friend confessed years later when after selling it I used to wax nostalgic for its, I guess I would have to say, dubious charms.  Funny how all the wine, laughter, dope, sex, and general hilarity from morning til night covered over a multitude of imperfections. After I sold it, the new owners tore it down before it fell down, thus sparing me an ever present memorial to younger and happier days.  Fate and the financial markets brought me and my husband to another house in the same little town, in much much better condition, a kind of permanent home, with Florida as the winter getaway, the northern abode replete with an exceedingly large and elegant garden, terrace, and manicured miniature lawn.  Life here, forty years on, is all very sedate, charming lunches out in the shade under the wisteria, quiet evenings watching Netflix, a hint of the gracious life.  And, yet, there are the neighbors.  The house in the old days was in an area despised and neglected, somewhat deserted.  Absolute quiet reigned, broken only by the water’s action.  As Arnold so famously described it:
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Our new house is set in the midst of houses, as a typical low income summer beach town generally looks.  What more than anything else characterizes the place for me in this the second decade of the twenty first century is that everyone on all sides seems to have got themselves a small shrill barking dog.  We might as well be in a kennel.  From morning til night it is not the grating roar but the high pitched shriek, over and over again, from thousands of furry throats.  If they do not have a dog, then they have at least two cats, an animal which, considering its small size, can generate an amount of fecal matter that I would have ascribed to an elephant.  In the spirit of the town, feckless, unlettered, rude and untaught, the cats roam freely, most often to their preferred toilet area which is our spacious yard.  I sometimes think that this is god’s punishment for caring so about the garden and for being so proud of it.  Whatever, it makes for a certain sense of being beleagured, which reminds me often enough that these are certainly not “the good old days.”

Margaret Thatcher

I have been reading Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, or at least the first volume which will take us up to the Falklands War.  I am not much of a political person, enough to get through The New York Times every day, and read Truthout often but not always, as well as articles that deal with politics in such publications as The New Yorker Magazine.  I somehow feel that whatever happens is way beyond me.  I am also not very good at understanding economics, having never studied the subject formally at university.  Since public life is nothing but theories of economics clashing with one another I am very sorry for this, although on another level, I can’t bear to think about the subject even as vague as it is for me.  Moore’s biography requires a great deal of understanding of economics, macroeconomics, monetarism, supply side, finance, and on and on. The exciting feature of this biography is its detailed exposition of the day to day confrontation with the issues of governing that make up the life of a Prime Minister.  Fascinating!  I marvel that Mrs. Thatcher, trained as a scientist, mastered economics sufficiently to hold her own in discussion with the experts and her ministers.  Perhaps I am misled, but I am struck with how even handed Moore seems to be in presenting the Prime Minister.  His range of quotation from those who observed her and worked with her is extraordinary and one is left with a very detailed picture of the situation in which she found herself, her challenges, her ideas, her blunders, her successes.  On one level she comes across most definitely as a shopkeeper’s daughter with a strong sense of propriety, an unwillingness to move outside and beyond the culture in which she was raised.  She is always the outsider among the Tory party’s aristocrats, she has an instinctive empathy with lower middle class people and their aspirations.  She was raised as a Methodist; she was not an intellectual, so she did not stray far from the strictures and structures of her religion and her childhood home.  Her strength and her failing was that she thought that there was an answer and that she had it, coupled with a housewife’s concern to make things neat and tidy. Economists say there has to be a trade-off between equality and efficiency; she clearly voted for the latter, and enraged the public who cared first and foremost about the quality of citizens‘ lives.  She was tough and strong, but then again vacillating, and sometimes wildly emotional.  She drove her associates crazy, but there were legions of them who admired her immensely.  One doesn’t get the sense of a lot of love, but there is no question about her devotion, her sense of duty.  She took refuge in her ideologies, but could be argued out of a position.  She loved to dance, she loved clothes.  The story of this particular Prime Minister that Moore has to tell is fascinating, this lower middle class small town girl landing,  good looking woman that she was, landing into the midst of a group of males whose education at single sex English boarding schools made her a monstre sacré whether she had that in mind or no.

Writing A Novel

I want to write a novel.  This is not the first time the urge has gripped me.  In fact, I have written four novels, I believe, none of which have been published, although I cannot claim that I am like some unsung Milton or whatever the expression is, unknown in a country hamlet, since from the moment I published my first non-fiction book on ancient epic poetry with Doubleday I have been introduced to numerous people in the publishing industry, have dined with publishers, editors, agents, all of them of great renown.  Of the books that I have published the first "went over the transom" as they say, i.e., not solicited by Doubleday, the second commissioned by that outfit, the third suggested to me by La Terza in Italy, the fourth solicited by the author/editor John Gardner for a series he was contemplating, the fifth born from an idea in the head of senior editorial staff of Hyperion, and this sixth and last picked up as a second thought after a twenty year hiatus by a publisher and editor who had been shown it and rejected it in the first instance.  But no one wants to publish my novels, although almost all of the welcoming and helpful people engaged in those other publications were kind enough to read my manuscripts.  I am sure they read them in the first instance because they recognized that I knew how to write and were thus trolling for new fiction.  But, since such a large variety of people in the business politely declined, I have to believe that I don't have the chops for fiction, although one more sympathetic than the others once said to me that if I were to come by his office, he would be happy to sit down with me and go over the list of agents and select those who might like my stuff, and so after months, maybe years of submissions and rejections I might strike pay dirt.  I have known persons who submitted a manuscript for inspection to agents and had it rejected twenty odd times before finding one who would take it on.  It is not that I would hate the repeated rejections, although I am not good with that.  I have a friend who is an actress who for the past fifty years has faced that over and over again in audition, who despite it, gamely goes out again and again and indeed finds work, but oh, the first polite moment of rejection.  I find that hard.  "This is a great story, but I don't think we have a niche for it."  "You characters come alive in the very first page, but somehow, the implications of their story is lost on me." "This is more like Junior Adult fiction, not for us, and, no, I really can't recommend anyone who does that sort of thing." I don't send my stuff around, I don't self publish.  Why?  I am lazy for one.  I want to write and send the stuff away and have someone else deal with it.  Then, I am a serious ecologist, well, of sorts, and I am not sure the world needs these works of mine, cluttering up the environment of the mental/aesthetic life of the community.  But, there's another story brewing in my head, a shameless rearrangement of the facts of my life which I covered in last year's memoir.  I am getting to the point that I want to write it.  I may have to stop these blogs for a few months.  My career calls!

Less Is More

My happy days on the Cape began and ended with a wait on the dock at either end for the ferry. It was in such shocking contrast with the the rest of the experience that I cannot erase it from my mind.  It has been several years since I was in Boston’s harbor area, where the old overhead highway has been replaced by a grand pedestrian boulevard covering over the traffic tunnel below ground.  Quite splendid and many blocks long.  Any sense of majesty, calm, or grandeur, befitting a great and historic city like Boston, is immediately destroyed by the absolute hordes of tourists milling about waiting to board tour buses or filling the shops and cafes of a more or less designated tourist area, that is, the famous Quincy Market, designed for them to get a sense of “history” “old” “historic” and all the other things that come to mind when you think Boston.  Of course, tourism is a major source of revenue for Boston and New England and we cannot fault it; I guess one must just stay away.  It happens the world over.  I think of the crush of humanity being marched mindlessly through the Vatican Museum who came not for the treasures on display therein but because Dan Brown’s novel talks of it.  Well, it helps pay for the cost of the architectural treasures, so be it.  I left  Provincetown on the very same ferry on which I arrived four days later, but this time proceeded by a long lunch and stroll about the town. Driving to the dock parking facility required driving through the throngs filling the streets of a density and indifference to the car that reminded one of any major Indian city.  Then we joined them as we walked to our restaurant.  The crowds of visitors were overwhelming, back and forth, to and fro, densely packed, looking at nothing really, registering the look of “Oh, here we are in famous Provincetown.”  Indeed, the shops and houses along the way were dressed up to be so quaint or so camp that it more or less defied rational looking.  Provincetown is one of the gay meccas of the United States, and the jubilant crowd was rejoicing in the decisions handed down the day before from the Supreme Court.  It was good to see so many gay men and women walking hand in hand with the ones they loved, or embracing them publicly. It was also amusing to contrast the Boston tourist crowd, usually groups of four, mother and father bulging with fat, and two tubby tots with hands full of candy working on the avoirdupois and the Provincetown male couples, dressed so neatly, such trim bodies, such elegance, perhaps a little bit over done, but working to preserve a look of youth and beauty, but overall, we shuddered. It was just the crowds, the milling.  Less is more, said Mies

Holier Than Thou

My childhood home was peculiar as all must be, and one of its marked idiosyncracies was that no one ever mentioned salaries or pay.  This was immediately the result of the fact that once my father died when I was six years old, there was no member of the household who held a job and took in a salary.  So the one adult, my mother, had no one to whom she would naturally speak of earning a living.  More to the point, my mother never talked about money, not just earning but paying out.  We never discussed the price of things then or as I grew older.  It was “ill-bred.” She never suggested that the paper route which I took on at the age of 12 or 13 would be a good source of income for me, I don’t remember her even remarking on the money I made from  it.  Having a paper route, she told me, would be character building.  When I ran up a huge bill at the music shop while I was at Andover, she was properly irate, and required me to work the two summer vacations thereafter on the buildings and grounds crew of the public school system to pay her back.  From this I discovered the notion of a paycheck, reinforced when at the age of 18 I went off to New York City and worked as an office boy to support myself, so that when I returned home to attend the local university I took a job as an admissions clerk at the state university hospital’s orthopedics/pediatrics departments twenty hours a week afternoons Monday through Friday.  And when later Harvard University withdrew my scholarship, I went off to work as a nightwatchman for six months until they reinstated it. I don’t remember, however, shopping around for a job that paid the best.  I accepted my first teaching job without knowing the annual salary; it was never brought up nor did I inquire at the interview. So it’s clear that I did not go into teaching for the salary, never related what I did to what I earned, really, and that was my attitude for the next forty years, never tok a job for the money, nor while teaching at University A did I lust after the salary offered at University B. I found all my satisfaction and esteem from performing a service to others.  That may sound soupy, do goody, smug, but it is true.  I have never in my life thought of how I might profit from what I did in any real dollars and sense way.  I cannot imagine what it must be as a doctor in a practice that has fee for service where prescribing more tests is a way of boosting the income, ditto the lawyer who introduces another complicated wrinkle that will double the billable hours.  In sum I cannot imagine having done what I did for the money in it.  Of course, one expects this of Wall Street traders, bankers, and the like; money is all they  know, although I am probably discounting the adrenaline high of such work which makes it so sexy. And I seem to ignore that my pension is funded by forty odd years of their cutthroat derring do so that I can say ever so smugly: “Whatever else it is nice to have spent one’s life at doing a service for other people without thought of your own advantage.”

Happy Days On The Cape

I am enjoying happy days in Wellfleet staying with a friend who is doing a gig at some summer psychology institute.  During the morning hours when she has been teaching I have been tootling around town by car with another old friend with whom I used to visit to get a reminder of the place I last saw twenty or thirty years ago.  The outstanding piece of history was still there where I had seen it all those many years ago in Truro’s old cemetery, the gravestone, small, slate, curious, easy to miss, from the eighteenth century of my direct ancestor Jedidiah Lombard.  He is descended of Thomas Lombard who settled in Dorchester in 1630, and then moved the family on to Barnstable, and then on to Truro. Friends in England have sent me photos of his ancestors’ graves in Tenterton in Kent, England.  As the expression goes, we go way back.  The weather has been unseasonably hot and muggy, so we sought out a largish pond whose water at first seemed might give me hypothermia, but then by the time I had swum out to the diving raft was refreshingly cool, clear enough to see the bottom.  Upon my return to our towels on the shore I was happy to see that two slim waisted, incredibly beautiful Italian boys, probably college students, had arrived in their chic, form fitting, swim trunks, with which they showed off to their advantage bums and baskets in that unselfconscious way of Italian males who know that they are exceedingly beautiful and desirable, and that God had made them that way from the start.  Last evening the psychology institute gave a drinks party to which I was also invited.  It took me back to the days of my academic career when such get-togethers were a commonplace for me.  I’ve lost the ability to circulate, I discover, really can’t think up any small talk, and thus grab people into a conversation about a book or political act that goes on to long.  I quickly lost my taste for it all, and noticed that though I had stood up well, I was getting definitely shaky after an hour and wished I had a cane, or could lean against a table.  Pretending that I had an important cellphone call to make I slipped out on to the spacious porch where a cool breeze made the place an alternative to the air conditioned interior.  I suddenly realized that there is a great virtue in being in your eighties; no one expects you to stand your ground at parties, slipping out to abject anonymity is okay.  The odd thing was a whole bunch came out one after another and we had a rump party at which we all got into an act of demonstrating athletic prowess, me standing up without holding on, some young charming woman, turning herself into a pretzel and then unfolding and bounding to her feet.  A good time was had by all.