Them And Us

I have been reading my sister Holly's journal she kept in the late forties when she lived in Greenwich Village with her husband in a one room basement apartment.  They were the proverbial starving artists, she trying to write and sell her stuff, he painting and printmaking, not very successful at all.  A bitter, desperate existence a lot of the time, punctuated by jolly drinking parties at the White Horse Tavern nearby, not yet made famous by Dylan Thomas' drunken nights there.  Things were cheaper then by far, everyone pooled their funds also.  She writes endlessly of the Irish immigrant dockworkers, their drunken behaviors, the husbands beating their wives, the wives beating their children, how it shocked her coming from an supper middle class WASP family of the Midwest.  Coincidentally my husband and I just went to a local production of Arthur Miller's "A View From The Bridge" where the same desperation and cruelties are played out in a family of Italian immigrant dockworkers, almost contemporaneous also in time.  It made me think of my own grandfather, a teenage immigrant from northern Germany, who came alone with his cousin, got themselves across half the continent by walking and working for lodging and food, separated in Chicago, the cousin went on to Iowa started farming in a German community and when his family entered again in our narrative a century later they were prosperous farmers.  Meanwhile my grandfather at nineteen enlisted in the Union Army in the contingent from Illinois, learned fluent English, came back to Chicago, hitched his wagon to a local businessman, married the daughter's friend visiting from Boston, and fathered eight or so children, becoming a successful businessman in his own right.  The family took on the coloration of the mother's Boston manner--to hear my mother, her daughter in law tell it, something out of Edith Wharton's milieu.  I only remember her high falutin' Boston accent, and I have a photo of her at the silver tea urn, serving to a bunch of ladies--tres genteel!  No, longshoreman from the New York harbor in this image!  But don't forget the German immigrant whose father back in the old country was a farmer--just don't mention it.  There were plenty of people of Irish descent in Iowa, and I met them when I switched to the public high school, and at the same time discovered my mother's prejudice against them, when I mentioned the Celtic names of some of my new friends.  "Oh, she's Irish."  "Isn't that an Irish name?" People of Italian origin were not so common.  I was first introduced to the notion of "Italian' when as fourteen I started on a paper route not too far from my home, delivering the eighty-five papers from a bag slung over my shoulders on foot or by bicycle, depending on the weather, and when my mother scanning the list of my customers spotted what she claimed was an Italian name, she determined that on Friday when it came time for me to collect from house to house the thirty five cents price of the weekly delivery, she would come and stand down at the foot of their sidewalk near the street so that they could see "who you were."  Otherwise, she claimed, "those people don't always pay."  How awful to infect a child with a prejudice, but oddly enough my burgeoning erotic interest in males and the inclination of so many of these--in mother's eyes--questionable ethnics to satisfy their own emerging lusts with me meant that I never really developed any prejudice until I was in graduate school at Harvard which in those days sat like a castle with the moat drawn up as protection from "le peuple" of Boston.

Degas, Manet, and Homer

I am lost in the world of art right now what with reading Sebastian Smee's book about some celebrated rivalries between major artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most recently that between Manet and Degas.  It is extraordinary to see bourgeois males dressed in their city clothes, frock coats and top hats, in situations which I should find so uncomfortable, too hot, stuffy, liable to be mussed, spilled on.  Here in Sarasota it is a burden for me to put on long pants; I have gone completely native.  Thus the paintings of Degas and Manet depicting Parisians living their daily lives reflect a world as foreign as that of ancient Rome, and it is always a shock to reflect that these austere and elegant males so handsomely portrayed were forever pulling down or off some or all of these items of clothing for the incessant pursuit of their manly lusts with the many women of the demimonde who were available to them.  What a difference the zipper and y-front underwear have made for men of action!  This is really an aside, for, truth to tell, I am ennobled by the constant perusal of so much beauty as revealed and shaped by these two supreme painters.  I am so happy that I saved the catalogues of so many great exhibitions over the past forty years.  But now indeed I must set the nineteenth century aside and proceed with my lectures notes for my Odyssey course which begins in two weeks, install myself once more into ancient Homeric Greece which is as much or even more my fantasy as historical fact.

A Charmed Life As A Writer

A friend emailed me to ask if it were true that my novelist cousin used the famous and powerful Binky Urban as her literary agent, and I had to say yes, and what is more she once represented me on a book deal.  Wow! was the reply.  It made me think my career over, and I have to say, I've led a charmed life.  Nowadays writers outside of the academic market, i.e., university presses, struggle to find an agent to represent them, mailing their manuscripts  over and over again endlessly, facing a million rejections until they, if lucky, get a fit.  Way back when I thought to write a commercial book about the Homeric epics. I had taught the poems several times in humanities courses to college versions of the great unwashed, as I contemptuously like to refer to "le peuple," those who are not tuned into the literary and cultural currents of our day, and who look at me stupidly when I make what I think is a sparkling remark on what I have just noticed in the TLS, the LRB, the NYReview--the list is endless.  So I wrote up a specimen chapter based on my lecture notes and innocently mailed it off to Doubleday.  Innocently or mindlessly?  I knew that the publishing house had started a new series called Anchor Books, paperbacks for the literati and intelligentsia, and had the presumption to believe that someone in the office would open the package with my manuscript and read it.  Unsolicited.  Stupid of me perhaps, but this was 1964 and that's exactly what happened, and in time I received a reply from a young editor who took me.  I wrote the book, they published it; it stayed in print through several printings.  Then I wrote another book at their request on ancient Greek literature in general which was contracted to a friend of mine who died in a motorcycle accident.  It did well, eventually, even translated into Italian where I established some connections while there on sabbatical, and then it was  reprinted after some serious editing by a university press here.  Then John Gardener the novelist and critic wanted a book on Apollonius Rhodius for his literary series, and someone mentioned me, and he read my stuff or some of it, and I got the contract.  No sooner did I finish that than my student and friend who had become the publisher of a very large new commercial press asked me to write an ironic pseudo biography of Odysseus which was lots of fun.  For this high powered enterprise my friend insisted that I find an agent to negotiate the contract and I, thinking of my cousin, suggested Binky Urban. I was that naive; it was like a novitiate suggesting the Pope officiate at his ordination.  But she accepted, and I am sure got me much more money than the publishing anticipated for this item.  There were various other books along the way all of them at the suggestion of the press involved, all culminating in the publication of a memoir which was picked up by the supremely elegant Farrar, Straus, and  Giroux because its editor and publisher had it brought to his attention twice in a decade at a cocktail party and at a dinner party.  The decade interval at which he first rejected it and then had second thoughts gave me the chance to rethink it and add another chapter of later events.  Everything turned out just hunky dory.  Amazing.

The Monk In His Cell

My bedroom here on the third floor of our U-shaped complex is on the inner side facing the courtyard, and since we are on the north end out beyond through the trees to what is in fact a parking lot for a mall but comes through as an indiscriminate mass of open space broken by massing branches and leaves of live oak trees.  A nature scene, really, punctuated in the farther distance by the occasional palm standing very tall and solitary.  Down close, of course, it transforms itself in the squalor of mall parking lot and makes the residence less than desirable I should imagine.  We love it.  When we sold the big place in Cambridge I got a bookseller to take my library for a very good price.  Here I have only kept my art books and a few Greek and Latin texts.  Richard is now collecting DVDs as though he were going to open a store.  That's his compulsion; we do not discuss it.  Back to my subject, if it could be said that I have one.  Off my bedroom is a lanai reached through sliding glasss doors; this is a small screened in porch where I had two canvas chairs and lots of relatively ugly Florida flowering plants which look to be made of papier maché and rubber, take little water, and stay in full bloom for months.  It is a joy, however, to sit out there in the early morning and at sunset, and indeed later in the night when the moon shines down; the breezes off the Gulf are always splendid, the changing colors of the changing cloud formations are endlessly fascinating and beautiful.  I do not go out to walk, except for pacing back and forth on the galleria outside the front door.  Surprising how richer my monk's cell is what with the Sarasota public library, the New College Library, richer, I say, than I would have thought, but of course lacking the resources of Harvard's Widener Library in proximity to which I spent fifty or sixty years.  I have brought a considerable portion of the art I collected over a lifetime, spread on the walls of our two units, crowded together salon style from ceiling to the level of furniture.  I can sit for hours looking at a painting, with the same concentrated gaze i give the moon and the stars and the clouds.  I am at rest, I guess, although the anxiety and incipient terror which is the curse of my personality means that I shall never be satisfied or happy.  The Carthusian monks in their cells in the Grand Chartreuse high in the mountains in that documentary "Into The Grand Silence" or whatever it was,  my ambition to be like them.

Looking Through Art Books

My daughter gave me Sebastian Smee's fascinating book about rivalries between artists, Lucien Freud, for instance, and Francis Bacon, or Manet and Degas, for which Smee set the situation up by referencing the work of Ingres, perhaps the most celebrated and accomplished draftsman since the lead pencil was invented.  Luckily I have gathered over the years the catalogues of all the major exhibitions from the Hermitage to the Prado to the Louvre to the Met, oh, I could pretentiously go on for some time.  Shelf upon shelf groan in my living room with these great tomes which even hard bound I can scarcely lift, especially not now in my extreme dotage.  Luckily Richard is here to lift a great weight of them down at once.  I well remember an old bibulous dowager in Cambridge who fell on the stairs and broke her neck carrying, God bless her!, a case of good burgundy up from her cellar.  Way to go, dear!  I have been spending the last few days leafing through a gigantic catalogue of a Ingres portraits put on about twenty years ago at the Met.  There is a lot of Ingres in the States so that the Met was able to borrow freely, and the show of the drawings is unprecedentedly large.  Apart from the breathtaking skill and control exhibited in every drawing there is nothing more fun for someone who grew up gossiping in a small Iowa town than to read the capacious entries on each entry detailing in what can be considered a small town's gossiper every detail of their legitimate relationships, the illicit ones, the children, the maiden aunts, the friends, who was helping whom get ahead at court, all the background detail that then come to life so brilliantly in the eyes, the smiles, the creases around the mouth, the gesture of the hands.  It is soap opera of a very exalted kind avant la lettre

Going To The Pictures

My small hometown had three movie theaters, and because it was a university town with a large component of European refugee faculty one of the three showed foreign films almost exclusively.  Like every teenager I went to the movies a lot, all the new releases and lots of foreign films too because of my older sister's encouragement in that direction. There was no television on those days.  Every Sunday afternoon we gathered in my late father's study, kept just as he left it when he died in an accident in the mid thirties, and listened to the radio programs designed for children it seems to me.  I don't remember them now.  Today is Christmas and my husband and I decided to break the tedium of a holiday not observed by going to the "art" cinema here which offers a meagre menu of serious films.  Today we were going to see "Manchester By The Sea" I must admit with some trepidation as we had been warned again and again how depressing it was, what a downer it would be for us.  And in the end we did not go but instead stayed inside to watch more of our favorite television series.  The Lonergan film is coming on television in a couple of months and we shall wait for that.  I find it shocking to confess to this, but the fact of the matter is, we don't much like going to movie theaters anymore.  There's the talking, the rustling of papers, oh, all kinds o distraction.  Am I just growing dreadfully neurasthenic?  Are we, I should say, since my husband is far more disturbed by distraction.  I cannot bear to surrender to depression and sadness and to have the mood broken by whispering, or even worse outright talking from old people who have no notion they are doing so?  I remember when first I encountered this.  It was the chamber music concerts on Sunday afternoon, done by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and all these dear old people had toddled down from the Upper West Side, and as they sat and listened, they would loudly comment upon the instruments, the technique, completely oblivious to the fact that they were not at home on their sofa in front of the telly.  No, better to stay home, keep silence.  As it is I have some art books I have dragged down from the shelf, Ingres, Manet, Degas, to keep with reading Sebastian Smee's fascinating study of rivalry in the art world.  Right now it's the latter two I just mentioned who feature in his second chapter.  Then we can eat something, I'll have a little vodka and triple sec, and then a little of our favorite "Vera."  And so the day goes by.

Chosts of Christmas Past

The elementary school I attended was attached to the high school, the entire building housing this enterprise was built against the side of a hill overlooking the Iowa River.  The last day before the beginning of the Christmas school vacation.  We all stood attentively in our class home room, and at a given signal began to sing a Christmas carol for which we had rehearsed.  While singing we followed our teacher out the door and proceeded to climb the stairs toward the higher grades whom we could hear distantly singing out hymn as well.  Then we moved onto another hymn, ever climbing higher and joining more and more classrooms pouring out into the hall and the volume of singing swelled until we reached the high school level where the students because of their maturity provided extra volume and body to the singing.  It was a dramatic actualization of any number of ideas associated with the Christian story and I know that we little ones were mightily impressed by the powerful qualities being brought to bear on Christmas.  This ritual left me dazzled.  Next was the Night Before Christmas when we were allowed to stay up to hang our stockings along the mantelpiece in the living room plus enjoy a late night supper set at the dining room table before the older members of the family went off to celebrate Midnight Mass at the Episcopal Church.  Oyster stew was a centerpiece of this supper, and it is hard at this remove to imagine that this child eagerly slurped it up but such was the case.  In the morning we raced downstairs in our pajamas and tore at our stockings filled magically during the night with all kinds of goodies.  Then we paused, dressed, at a proper breakfast, and then lined up, marched up to the nursery where lo and behold was a large tree decorated with the most lavish decorations, intricately carved pieces from the famed workshops of Czechoslovakia and Germany, lights twinkling on and off, and the tree almost buried in the piles of gaily wrapped packages for a family of eight.  There were also included wrapped presents for the house servants who stood to the side smiling, who knows with what feelings?, and received theirs before returning to the kitchen and dining room to prepare for the midday Christmas dinner.  Which indeed began on time at one o'clock when we had all returned from church, and sat dutifully in the living room while the grown ups had cocktails before the maid summoned us all to the table.  There were guests, bachelor professors, the dean of nursing, the head professor of nutrition in the medical school, not meant to entertain children, but instead meant to endure sitting next to us, if that were their fate, and making conversation.  After the main course we children were excused and left to our own devices "to work off all the food," whilst the oldsters stayed at table and managed a civilized conversation over liqueurs and coffee.  And it came to pass that we were all happy and satisfied.