Mantovani

Classical music came into my life through the serene sounds that orchestras made on a radio station that I discovered in childhood, on a sick day. It was WQXR, which was owned by The New York Times and devoted to classical music. I liked being by myself when I listened to it. This wasn’t a matter of choice, because no one else in the house would listen to it. But that was good. The kind of music that they played on WQXR had a way of drawing out my imagination, but only to keep it still, and for that I needed to be alone.

I mustn’t suggest that I liked everything. I liked very little, really. Most of it was “boring.” It was boring, I now realize, because I didn’t know where it was going, other than “on and on.” And it could be heavy, like massive, old furniture, and dark, like a room shuttered from the light of a beautiful day. And when it was stormy, it could be just as unpleasant as other kinds of music, although it was never as bad as the loud, percussive music that prevailed on other radio stations as well as on television. I would say that I hated noise, were it not for that wise old definition of “weed”: any plant growing in what you consider to be the wrong place. I can say that I like almost all kinds of music, from cha-chas to chants, but I have never cared for rock. It’s not a drum thing — drums can be very musical, especially in classic jazz. It’s the bangs. Most people today seem to like bangs, but they irritate and then unsettle me. Hell for me would be a fifteen year-old boy with a drum kit.

One thing led to another. The first title that I remember was “Funeral March of a Marionette” — improbable but then unforgettable. My parents bought a Capehart hi-fi, and to go with it, a variety of LPs, from Lester Lanin party records to Broadway original cast albums. But it turned out that neither of my parents had much of a taste for recorded music. It was I who made use of the Capehart — so much so, that I was presently given my own turntable, which plugged into the Grundig radio on which I had discovered WQXR. And alongside this, my record collection was born, with hand-me-downs from Mrs O’Neill, whose stockbroker husband had threatened me with an action for alienation of affection after I monopolized her attention during one of my parents’ parties. For a long time — until now, actually — I regarded Mrs O’Neill’s LPs as an embarrassing stepping-stone on my way to the appreciation of truly serious music, and in that way dismissed them as a guilty secret that I would not discuss even with myself.

For it cannot be argued for an instant that the arrangement of popular melodies from all backgrounds made by Ronald Binge for Mantovani, the hugely successful bandleader whose sales would be exceeded only by the Beatles, were kitsch. However you define kitsch, though, you must acknowledge the derogatory and not particularly descriptive nature of the term. It expresses the contempt of educated people for lower-class tastes, quite often those of the social groups out of which the snobs have educated themselves. Kitsch has some slightly more objective characteristics, but it always involves scorn for the artistic judgments of the ignorant, the very people who claim to know what they like even though (as they’re happy to admit, with a sort of retaliatory derision) they don’t know anything about it. Kitsch is, finally, a policing term, a shibboleth. But to the young and insecure it is a battle cry of Euclidean clarity, and there is no appeal from its condemnation. I was vaguely aware of all this during my two or three Mantovani years, so I didn’t flinch too defensively when I was shot down for it in high school. I put the LPs away and labeled the bundle “childish things.” That was the end of that.

But now, in the course of writing this, I resolved to set dismissiveness aside and to give the matter some thought, and, more important, air time. I still have a few LPs, kept for their cheesy jackets, but as I no longer have a phonograph I have had to rely on the seven hours of recordings that at some point I uploaded onto iTunes. It has been something of a revelation. I wasn’t entirely surprised that the music didn’t hit me as “gagacious,” to use one of my late wife’s splendid words, because I had enjoyed the score to Paul Taylor’s Lost, Found and Lost, which is comprised of elevator music. I had no trouble recognizing “Charmaine” as the defining example of “the Mantovani sound.” (It was recorded twice, the second time for stereo in 1958.  Mantovani was key to the popularization of stereophonic reproduction.) I’d read a little about Binge and could hear the effect of “cathedral reverberation” that that he tried to capture. I didn’t have to listen to too many cuts to hear these arrangements as a kind of war relief, a refuge, particularly for Britons, who had endured the horrible uncertainties of the war, and, too often, the catastrophes that settled them. This might raise the question, why was a ten year-old living an outwardly quiet, comfortable life seeking refuge. But that’s for another time.

The music of Mantovani is an unusual kind of white noise. As calming as the sound of the surf but comprised of recognizable tunes, it strips music down to a pulseless dream. It softens the edges of melodies as much as it can without diminishing coherence. “Charmaine” shows this effect very clearly in its opening bars, which feature a figure of descending notes played by the violins. With great artistry, and perhaps artificial studio assistance, each note in the figure is slightly slurred, or held, as if sustained by one of the pedals on the piano. There is a discernible but extremely muted waltz rhythm, as if there were something gauche about tempo. And yet there is nothing sloppy or even “impressionist” about these effects. It could be compared with the “timelessness” of Gregorian chant if the arrangement did not preserve the sense of directedness, of proceeding from here to there, that is perhaps the nuclear harmonic quality of modern Western music. For all its sumptuous pallor, “Charmaine” is still what anybody would recognize as a song, made up of verse, chorus, and bridge.

For decades, this kind of thing was ubiquitous in the First World, an unavoidable but therapeutic sound track intended to allay the tedium and anxiety of spaces that nobody particularly wanted to be in — waiting rooms of all kinds, from medical offices to airport gates; elevators, department stores and cafeterias. It might be suggested that these soothing soundtracks made the mass transition to postwar modernity bearable. For them to be effective, however, they had to be unobtrusive, and once people began to notice them, they became irritating, particularly to adolescents, who, newly-minted as teenagers, seemed remarkably dependent on external confirmation of their nervous organization, mostly by means of a transistor radio.

It was when the chorus director in high school asked me what kind of music I liked that I blurted out the truth. His staring pause was a depth charge. I think he was more surprised by my youth than by my bad taste: Mantovani was for older ladies. His distaste gave substance to the misgivings that I already had about listening to things like “My Foolish Heart” and “Unchained Melody.” From then on, I would concentrate on learning the tenor part in Mozart’s “Lachrymosa” and in the opening chorus of the more famous of Vivaldi’s two settings of the Gloria. These excerpts from sacred compositions were perfectly welcome in the repertoire of a public high school chorus at the time; they were even, especially the “Gloria,” a little edgy. I was very taken with them. Little did we know that Columbia Records was about to release not one but two recordings of The Four Seasons, which was all but unknown at the time, hitherto available on LP only as performed by a creaky antiquarian ensemble utterly devoid of the pow that would carry Vivaldi’s tone poem to the point of wearisome inescapability within ten years. I would own one of these new records presently, the one played by the Philadelphia Orchestra’s strings, with the already-iconic trees of the eponymous Park Avenue restaurant gracing the jacket. I had records of the music that we were singing, too. My record collection, and the taste that it nourished, was off to an orthodox start.

I encountered an interesting character on my way. There was an enthusiast for what he himself christened “barococo” music who called himself DeKoven and who broadcast a variety of shows from WFUV at Fordham, in the Bronx. While DeKoven did play music occasionally, he was usually advertising himself. What saved hiss shtick from charlatanism was his crank’s passion for under-appreciated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers, particularly Telemann, who in his opinion was as great as anybody, so much so that it was easy to understand why some of his works were misattributed to Bach. In his choice of example, Bach’s Cantata BWV 160, he was not wrong. Nevertheless, a lifetime of evaluating this claim (not very energetically) has led me to judge Telemann a very agreeable, occasionally brilliant composer of the second rank. If you are not already in buoyant spirits, he can be annoying. Most of the time, DeKoven ranted. He saw ignorant self-styled experts everywhere he looked, and  LP jackets that were poxed by misspellings. He was prone to cute but unpersuasive formulations like “deliciously repetitious.” Unforgettably, he denounced “hurdy-gurdy Verdi” and “puny Puccini,” which, however corny, was not out of line for music-lovers among his listeners who looked down on opera as a pastime for Italian immigrants from the boroughs. In any case, I myself shared his disdain for music of the Romantic period, which I found both schmaltzy and overupholstered. I emerged from this prejudice, by inches, in college, and I was about twenty-three when I eventually managed to listen to Ravel.

When the adolescent need to dance hit me, too, it was the studio recordings of Fred Astaire’s movie hits that jazzed me. (They all said he couldn’t sing, but I heard different.)

Reciprocation

As someone who went through pretty good schools sixty years ago, I was exposed, to say the least, to the precepts of good speech. I was comfortable with most of them, but I never regarded “grammar” as a respectable authority. Brandishing rulebooks allegedly handed down from on high is an awful waste of time with a language whose history consists more of infection than of evolution. Speakers of many North Atlantic languages had a hand in its formation up to the Eleventh Century, and then there were two very strong shots of Latin, first in the form of French, with the Norman Conquest, and later with the classicizing influence of Latin itself, from the Seventeenth Century up until a little over a century ago. Dovetailing with this last infusion was the ongoing mongrelizing of American English, which on a bad day at Notre Dame in Indiana used to make me think of one of the less attractive Low German dialects (to which I would prefer Nederlands). English is a language for which there is no “on high.”

Nonetheless, attentive speakers seem to discriminate right from wrong easily enough. They are guided, I have come to believe, by a simple principle that I call “agreement.” To be honest, I learned this term from the study of French, a gendered language in which articles and pronounces must “agree” with the gender of the nouns that they modify. And with the number, too: mon bon ami a trop de bonnes amies. English does without these niceties, on the whole, but they are hardly unknown. Consider the trouble caused by the formulation, dating to a time when education was a male preserve, “Does everyone have his book?” There is a feeling — or there was — that singular “everyone” cannot have a book that is “theirs.” (Those who want to regard “everyone” as effectively plural ought to take up saying “Everyone want an iPhone” and see how that works for them at job interviews.) Whatever your views on this conundrum, you must  acknowledge that the social change that has made the use of “his” as a default pronoun for mixed groups, as it was when I was growing up, unacceptable has wrought plenty of ruckus, even though the ugly party-line barbarism has achieved a certain respectability. Evidently, there are not enough serious general readers to fill even those editorial positions that still pay a living wage.

That was my conclusion the other day when I read an interesting piece by Alma Guillermoprieto about Joseph Pilates. As one would expect from Guillermoprieto, the review was generally well-written, but I was alarmed to read, more than once, that Pilates “immigrated to” America.

English has long offered a pair of variants on “migrate.” “immigrate” and “emigrate.” The prefixes of these variants and their corresponding nouns respectively mean “in” and “out,” or “to” and “from.” We speak of the emigrants who left Ireland during the potato famine to become American immigrants. I don’t think that anybody would slip so much as to speak of the United States is “a land of emigrants” — although, very technically, it is, since almost all its citizens are former emigrants, having left somewhere else, or their descendants. But the point is that “emigrate” and “immigrate” are reciprocal verbs. For every emigrant (from somewhere) there is an immigrant (to somewhere else). The only exceptions are those unfortunate emigrants who perish in transit.

Go ahead and overlook this carelessness in a prestigious journal with the assurance that “everybody knows what Guillermoprieto means.” True for the time being, perhaps. But the lack of agreement opens cracks through which spreads the kudzu of uncertainty and, ultimately, meaninglessness. And, to the attentive ear, it will not sound right.

“Emma could not resist”

Paragraphs of four words are rare in the works of Jane Austen, and those without dialogue vanishingly few. I don’t mean to dilate on the elegant arrangement of the action in the final third of Emma, but I point to this singular instance (in Chapter 43) because it emphasizes what is to me the truly pivotal character of this slight authorial comment, which is followed by the purposively witty remark with which Emma tips the story into a new and much less pleasant world. Until this point, Emma has never been other than the young lady described on the first page, for good —

handsome, clever and rich…with very little to distress her

— and ill —

having rather too much her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.

But with this jest about Miss Bates’ tendency to ramble, Emma tumbles, or perhaps hurls herself, into a rather purgatorial climate, in which she will continue to make her characteristic mistakes, only now at her own expense.

Here is another remark that “Emma could not resist” making:

“Good God!” cried Emma. “This has been a most unfortunate — most deplorable mistake! What is to be done?”

What is to be done, indeed, now that Emma has shown her hand to her ostensible protégée? Unlike the insult so lightly tossed at Miss Bates, this involuntary outburst marks Emma’s no less deplorable loss of self-control.

This change of weather is very familiar to me. I don’t know how many times in my life I have yielded to the irresistible urge to be clever only to find that I have been hurtful and anything but funny, and with most of Emma’s excuses and explanations. I was born a fortunate person with a disposition to think a little too well of myself. The consequence of conceited misjudgment has quite often been an almost equally conceited despair, in which the expectation of getting what’s coming to me rivals Dante’s inventive menu of torments; and, because I am, after all, special, I do not come to rest in any one hellhole but must give them all a try. My self-esteem is ready for anything.

Emma is able to keep a further outburst to herself:

“Oh God! That I had never seen her!”

And I, too, have once or twice focused my attention on someone whose fortune was so inferior to my own that I allowed myself to shrug off — always with the best intentions — the obligation to respect the autonomous humanity of another person, under the pretense of doing my the object of my bounty a favor; only to discover, as Emma does at the climax of her misadventure with Mr Elton, that the mellow joint that I thought I was smoking was actually an exploding cigar.

After Mr Knightly’s scolding forces her to stop scrambling for self-exoneration, Emma finds herself plunged into a very unflattering light. Without this aura of disgrace, it is unlikely that she would take Harriet Smith’s understanding of Mr Knightly’s intentions as anything but the ludicrous mistake that it is. Newly abased, there is no limit to the penance that Emma is prepared to heap upon herself — including the prospect of union between the man with whom she has always, albeit with a lazy half-consciousness, preened herself on being first [italics Austen’s] with a woman of no importance whatsoever. In fact it is only now that she is forced to conclude that Mr Knightly must marry no one but herself. Sinking reflexively into complacency on this point, she assures herself that his marrying no one else will suffice. I don’t intend to be sidelined by the unhealthy mutual dependency that binds Emma to her father, which reconciles her to the comfortable asymmetry of her father’s being first to her. (Despite critics’ most energetic attempts to demonize self-centered Mr Woodhouse, it is indisputable that our author regards him as an amiably comic figure.) But Harriet’s fantasy has sprouted a seed: Mr Knightly had probably better be pinned down, lest there be further occasions to doubt, even for a moment, his fidelity. Thus Austen resolves her one comedy of a girl who doesn’t actually need to get married, and provides her answer to the question whether girls would want husbands if their material well-being weren’t at stake.

I think we can assume that Box Hill is not the only scene in Emma’s career of zingers, but her crack there is possibly her only egregious one, inspired by Frank Churchill, rather the worse for being her playmate rather than plaything. Frank has already lured Emma into sketching lurid and even salacious explanations for the surprising appearance of the piano chez Bates. Emma’s propensity to amuse herself misleads her into supposing that a man who would not qualify as an appealing mate might serve as an amusing pal. Frank Churchill may, conceivably, make Jane Fairfax a good husband, but he is and never would be anything but a bad influence on Emma. This, I think is what alarms Mr Knightly into realizing that no one must marry Emma but himself.

Notwithstanding the great wretchedness that Emma endures all the way from the middle of Chapter 47 all the way to the middle of Chapter 49, I think we must conclude that her good fortune persists undented.

Happy Birthday

This afternoon, I took my oldest friend in the world out to lunch. It was a quiet celebration of his seventy ninth birthday. If, when we were thrown together as roommates at boarding school more than sixty years ago, we had been told that such a thing would happen, we would have rolled our eyes at the vanity of fortune tellers, for we were not friends back then. (And neither of us dreamed of living as long as we have done.) Friendship was something that stole over us with continued familiarity. The conversation at lunch was as peppery as usual, but not just peppery. I find that, if you know somebody long enough, you can actually be nice to him, at least some of the time.

We talked for a moment about the latest email from our class secretary, announcing the death of a classmate. I could say, “yet another classmate,” because that’s what notes from the class secretary usually announce: we are of an age to be dying off. I had only one memory of the fellow. By the time my old friend and I arrived at school, he and his twin brother were no longer boarding, but lived on a farm nearby. One day, they showed up at class with a coffee can, and in the coffee can were the testicles of a horse that they had gelded first thing that morning. Yesterday’s email told us that the twins had (and have) continued their love of horses throughout their lives.

My oldest friend mentioned a friend of his who has just returned to the United States from ten months of travel, and who insists that he loved living out of a suitcase all that time, visiting Turkey and Vietnam and a number of other places. It was something that he had always wanted to do. Having lunch with my oldest friend, in contrast, marked the first time that I crossed Central Park since I spent last New Year’s Eve with him. I am not sure that I own a suitcase.

There are people who manage to talk about interests that they don’t share, and would probably never share, without sounding patronizing. I’m not one of them. And it is not always agreeable even to hear about those interests from third parties who require no real response from me, or who won’t mind if I roll my eyes and mutter, “living out of a suitcase….!” The narcissism of small difference can overpower me. Nevertheless, I find that, quite aside from the relief of not having to do them myself, I feel pleasantly stretched to have heard about the things that other people get up to for pleasure, and to have it brought home once again that the world is richly strange — something that, like liking my oldest friend, I’ve recognized with the passage of a great deal of time.

Artificial Ivy

Hua Hsu is a Bard professor in the humanities and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he has published report, “The End of the Essay,” on the impact of inexpensive access to Large Language Model chatbots on the behavior of college students. It is understood in his wide-ranging discussion that students who submit papers authored by chatbots are not only cheating (by submitting work not their own) but, more important, short-circuiting their own educations. This has understandably provoked a great deal of hand-wringing among professors and administrative officials.

Lurking at the bottom of Hsu’s inquiry is a question about the purpose of a college career. Are the time and expense justified if the objective is simply to attain a degree, a credential that is convertible into job opportunities? It is clear that at least some students who openly acknowledge that the undergraduate commitment has no other value do perform the assigned work without cheating. It also seems clear that cheating diminishes any other benefits of a “college education” — for it can be an education only to the extent that students do the work.

We shall bear that in mind. It is further understood that this problem is connected somehow to “the humanities.”

The idea of the humanities crystallized in an intellectual climate rather different from our own. Prior to the development of modern psychology, all people were held to be endowed with a universal human nature, comprised of qualities, such as rationality, and complicated by accidents, such as sex, height, hair color, and so on. People were understood to tend instinctively toward the ideal as best they could. The study of human beings was a cataloguing of interesting accidents, as for example heroism, sanctity, or depravity.

The idea of a human essence has not evaporated entirely; Something like it underlies our idea of normality. Studies in the humanities are intended to show students how people with different characteristics – accidents in the old terminology – struggle with human nature, and, as such, accrue the existential experiences of life.

Why is this important? It is generally believed that the citizens of a liberal democracy ought to understand the complexity of their society, and that the critical reading of philosophical essays, political constitutions, histories and literature, together with learning something of foreign language, allow students to experience the diversity of the world, albeit indirectly. The humanities teach that healthy individual human beings respond in different ways to given circumstances, most of which are “normal” in one social context or another, and in this way expose students to problems and possibilities not presented by their own lives. From the beginnings of the modern system of higher education, about a century and a half ago, all college students, no matter what their intended specialties, have been expected to undergo something of the broadening of the mind bestowed by the humanities. This broadening is taken to be the distinguishing mark of an educated person.

So far so good. But how are schools to evaluate students’ progress? The essay, for which Professor Hsu has written an epitaph, emerged long ago as something that it is seriously misleading to call the standard yardstick.

The fact that binary judgments about the issues raised by the humanities — yes and no, right and wrong — are only rarely appropriate, beyond a very preliminary stage, rules out simpler kinds of examination, and makes the field perplexing for students who expect to be taught how to do things. Learning in this area is discursive, indirect, and almost necessarily inefficient. Although some students find the work easier than others do, there is really no such thing as natural aptitude for the humanities. Coupled with this is the difficulty that almost everyone has in writing paragraphs that are interesting as well as coherent. To the demand for topical essays intended to reveal their understanding, most students respond with frustrated irritation. It is no surprise that they desire to shirk the obligation. Turning to AI for “help” is simply the latest way of shirking

I would suggest that schools embrace the new technology instead of capitulating to its less detectable productions. Students seeking honest assistance have usually been referred to notable essays for pointers, but notable examples of expository writing are quite unlikely to be helpful to any but gifted students. This is where the sheer blandness and predictability of essays composed by Large Language Models are an advantage. Working with professors or, better, graduate students serving as teaching assistants, students can get the hang of essay writing and of thinking in the humanities by improving what their computers spit out. (I have often found that it is much easier to edit a page than to write one.) Students will also learn to ask better questions of the AI, and, in turn, better questions of themselves — which is how all good writing begins. I should venture that some students might even come to enjoy starting from scratch.

Wilmet in Taviscombe

The Jacobean poet George Herbert once wrote a poem called “The Pulley,” in which he imagines the Creator’s thoughts about the endowment of mankind. “Having a glass of blessings standing by,” God proposes to pour in “all we can.” Strength, beauty, honor, wisdom and pleasure are all bestowed. The one blessing that remains in the glass — rest — God decides to withhold. This, foreseeably, would lead to human complacency: “Rest in nature, not in God of Nature.” Herbert’s God wants to be needed.

More than three hundred years after Herbert wrote his poem, Barbara Pym borrowed a phrase from it for the title her fifth novel, A Glass of Blessings. Her heroine, Wilmet Forsythe, is a lovely woman of thirty-five, tall and handsome, well and comfortably married, charming in her life of leisure. If she has not been blessed with children, that is not so much a deprivation as it is a condition of Pym’s tale. For mothers, although they may be frustrated, are not known for experiencing restlessness, and restlessness is the driver of Wilmet’s carefree life.

It’s been a while since I last read A Glass of Blessings, but who could forget the name “Wilmet”? When it popped up, toward the end of the next novel that Barbara Pym wrote, No Fond Return of Love, I sat up in my chair. Two ladies, Dulcie and Viola, are visiting a stately home.

It was when they were leaning over the red cord to study a particularly striking arrangement of pressed seaweed that Dulce’s attention was caught by a rather interesting looking couple, who had come close enough for their conversation to be overheard. They were a tall, elegantly- dressed woman of about thirty-five with a fur stole draped casually over her dark gray suit and a frivolous little pink velvet hat…

… and a small young man with a common voice whom the woman calls Keith. They discuss the state of the room’s curtains, which the woman admires — they’re woven from Lyonnais silk — but which ؅don’t look very clean to Keith. Shortly after he expresses his preference for draperies that can be washed in Tide, two other men approach, one of whom addresses the woman by name, while the other, we learn, is called Piers. The speaker says that it’s time to go.

They seemed to melt away, the young woman throwing a vague smile toward Dulcie and Viola as, cherished and secure with her three men, she moved away from them.

Wilmet and Piers, I wondered — didn’t they have a thing, or almost? But who was Keith?

As soon as I was done with No Fond Return of Love, I picked up my new copy of A Glass of Blessings. I had replaced the old copy after learning that the Pym editions that I acquired in the early Eighties were no longer up to the physical ordeal of being read (and re-read) by me. I was on the third page of Excellent Women when the cover simply sheared off, the crack along the spine finally giving way. Pym’s novels had established themselves as reliable getaways, not escapes really but literary infirmaries, in whose chapters I could stretch out and be taken care of. It is easy to dismiss Pym’s world as a lost paradise of sensible women chatting about elderly vicars and attractive curates —all the lovelier for not putting one through an actual Harvest Festival. But one wouldn’t revisit her churches and parish halls if their lighting were not so devilishly electrified by sharp, sparkling prose, almost always captured in a character’s dialogue or introspection. The Open Road edition of A Glass of Blessings sports several pious blurbs on the back, but it’s the contribution by Jilly Cooper, of all people, that gets to the point: Pym “makes me roar with laughter.” Pym’s situations aren’t funny, but her comments are. It’s everyday life at its very best, in other words, relieved and redeemed by a blessing that George Herbert appears to have overlooked, great good humor.

Wilmet Forsyth is an unusual heroine for a Pym novel, as the quick shots above will suggest to Pym’s readers. Her being elegantly-attired distinguishes her sharply from the run of  Pym’s rather more dowdy heroines, the “excellent women” who seem to keep ecclesiastical life going by pouring endless cups of tea. In the middle of A Glass of Blessings, Wilmet distinguishes herself further:

I myself seemed to belong to two very clearly defined circles — the martini drinkers and the tea drinkers though I was only just beginning to be initiated into the latter. I imagine that both might offer different kinds of comfort, though there would surely be times when one might prefer the one that wasn’t available. (46)

Every now and then, strong drink is imposed on Pym’s other heroines, but of none of them could it be said that she is an “initiate.” Wilmet also tells us repeatedly that she is “fastidious” a quality that Mildred Lashbury and Dulcie Mainwaring would associate with vanity, and not to be confessed without shame. Most distinctive is Wilmet’s very frequent use of the term “unsuitable,” a word that appears in the other novels only in connection with clerical matters. In A Glass of Blessings, it means the opposite of comme il faut. Wilmet is a snob. I don’t think that there’s a chapter in the first half of the novel in which the word does not appear, and it makes a transformed appearance in the book’s last line: “It seemed a happy and suitable ending to a good day.”

A Glass of Blessings is also unusual in being narrated by its heroine, in the first person. That’s, I think, why I treasure the sighting in No Fond Return of Love: it gives a glimpse of Wilmet from the outside. The detail that I cannot repress is Wilmet’s stole, that rather useless accoutrement that I remember from childhood and that now makes me think, surreally, of a ladies’ Laocoon, without any of the Greek grimness. Dulcie Mainwaring sees the unknown Wilmet’s stole as “draped casually,” which to me means that it is worn over one shoulder and the opposite arm, carried most attractively by women who know how to externalize the inclination to slink. “Cherished and secure with her three men,” Dulcie feels. Yes, but readers who know Wilmet from the inside will not have forgotten how close she came to being cherished by none.

I was glad when I reached our meeting place and saw Piers standing with his back to me, apparently absorbed in a border of lupins. I wanted to rush up to him with some silly extravagant gesture, like covering his eyes with my hands; and my hands were outstretched, waiting to be taken in his, when I called his name and he turned round to face me.

Whoops! A near miss. Two pages later, I was reintroduced to Keith.

Different How

It may very well have been Brother Quinn who took me aside one spring afternoon when I balked at playing left field, but, if not, it was a colleague similarly pacific. Somehow, whoever it was made it clear that I was not to be punished for balking. While the rest of the boys went on with their softball game, we withdrew to a set of swings and discussed the matter with therapeutic patience. All I can think of now is a Temptation of Christ in reverse, with Jesus quietly laying out all the advantages of being a team player — the friendliness of my peers, the assurance of being on the right track, even the health benefits — to a mulish Satan, determined that under no circumstances would I agree stand up on the field with a glove and pretend to pay attention to the game. I had already experimented, not at Iona but at a summer day camp years before, with turning my back on the action and gazing vacantly at the flora, the fauna, and the passing cars, but I had found that this trial led to nothing but error. The best way to win was not to begin. The dialogue on the swings, both of us gently swinging back and forth with our feet on the ground, as if were in rocking chairs on a veranda, was almost unearthly, for I could not really believe that at some point I would not be told to stand up and bend over. But my interlocutor kept his word. I must have convinced him that I had absolutely no use for baseball or any other team sport, and that there was no anxiety about personal inadequacy at the bottom of my resistance.

When I was taken out of Iona Grammar two years later and sent to another school, it was for different reasons. I came into conflict — perhaps it was just contact — with an inexperienced teacher. I don’t remember his name, but he was clearly terrified of losing control of his class of boys on the verge of adolescence. I was an outstanding nuisance — different from the others and also conspicuous. When I made three or four other boys laugh in the middle of class, the brother promptly moved me to the front of the class, an unfamiliar location owing to my height. His desk and mine almost touched, or seemed to once his habit of whacking his desk with a yardstick, to emphasize his remarks and to hint at what else he might whack began to bother me. The noise and violence were too close. I folded my arms and put my head down. I was aware of making a statement, a protest, and knew that it might lead to further difficulties, but his racket was intolerable. There were consequences indeed, but as they didn’t involve whacking or any other punishment, I was not perturbed by the subsequent meetings between parents and teacher, or between parents and school principal. The surprise was their decision that I needed medical attention. I’m still somewhat surprised. It still seems perfectly natural to me that behavior such as Brother Yardstick provoked a response such as mine. But, in a moment of weakness, I had said something about headaches: The whacking was giving me headaches. But was this really so? They weren’t any kind of headache that I’d ever had before, just a kind of torture. But I had uttered what turned out to be a dispositive word. Off with me to a neurologist: Dr Robert Knight of Scarsdale.

Dr Knight was tall, slender man with a reserved, unfriendly manner. I believed that he put me down as a malingerer. I did little to help change his mind. As a routine first step, he prescribed an electroencephalogram, to be administered at the Harkness Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, in  northern Manhattan. My parents and I got dressed up for the procedure, as one did in those days for all encounters with professionals, including jet pilots. Somehow, at Harkness, it was possible for to me to watch the little girl who was ahead of me on line as she was wired up. She had blonde, curly hair, like my sister’s, and she wore a party dress that might have come from my sister’s closet. The technicians’ ruffling of her hair while she was dressed not as a patient but as if, like my sister, she were about to pass hors d’oeuvres at her parents’ cocktail party. It was gruesomely discordant, a kind of humiliation. I vowed on the spot that I would not be put in the same spot. No Frankenstein stuff for me. I became agitated enough to derail any EEG. As we drove home, my mother, too, may have been coming to agree with Dr Knight’s verdict.

The common notion of a memoir is of a testament, a statement of what happened, or at least of what the memoirist remembers. Perhaps because so much time has passed between the period covered in this memoir and my changing responses over the years  to those memories, I have often found myself reinterpreting the underlying events. Until recently, or now, actually, I have seen these two recollected episodes as evidence of my having gotten away with something, in a context where getting away with something was a good thing, or a sort of victory. We always think of having our way in such terms, at least in the short term. But the victory may come to look more like a defeat, a step backward, an opportunity missed forever. It wasn’t so much that getting out of playing baseball or submitting to an EEG deprived me of an opportunity to learn from adversity — I’m still not sure about the actual possibility of learning from adversity, since I have not to my knowledge experienced it; it seems to amount to nothing more than finding out that you can live without pleasure, which I already know perfectly well. No, the bad thing about getting away with these particular things was that I created for myself, as it were, a new passport, or perhaps edited the one I was born with, changing my status from citizen to resident alien. Quite aside from any difference in the schedules of benefits and burdens, I stamped myself as “different” — only to wonder for the rest of my life why, in a negative way that I had not foreseen, I felt different. There was nothing about this difference to certify whether I was now special, or defective. It hardly matters that I was really the only person aware of my altered footing in the world, as someone who didn’t join in games and didn’t undergo humiliating medical tests. What mattered, and what didn’t require anyone else’s concurrence, was that I had cut myself off — as a trapped animal might amputate its own limb in order to escape a trap, and in so doing become irreversibly crippled, diminished.

Do I wish that I’d been made to stand in the sun and lie down in the hospital? No, I don’t think so. What I wish is that I had had the sense to submit without a fuss to ordeals that really were not ordeals at all. What I was missing in childhood was a sense of the big picture, something that is always present to me now, when a misstimed show of defiance by an old man might very well deprive me of autonomy and solitude. I wish that I had not been so keen to feel trapped, that I had been able to see that release would come soon. The mere passage of time would bring the ball game to an end and remove the electrodes from my scalp. And that the unpleasantness would, simply by virtue of my having endured it, pass without consequences, and possibly even without leaving its trace in my memory. What I wish is that I had had faith, that I had been able to trust.

Tsadik/Roshe

Many years ago, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a piece for Forverts, complaining about the replacement of moral black and white with shades of grey.* Just as grey is a blend of black and white, so modern judgment is ambivalent, often self-contradictory, quite often consisting of opposing terms of praise and blame linked by the conjunction “but.” He is a thief but kind to his mother. Singer regrets this development, preferring the clarity of unqualified judgments. He laments the relegation of the terms tsadik (righteous) and roshe (wicked) to “the archive, where old words lie and rot, dead and forgotten.”

Singer’s impatience slips into something bordering on cantankerous, almost personal, grievance, a tone that I remember well from Richard Nixon’s constant attempts to excuse his egregious behavior.

First people praise someone to the skies, and then they sling mud at them. Very often this is done together by the same writer using the same pen.

Words no longer count for anything.

Powerful people claiming that they can’t get a fair hearing usually strike this discrediting false note.

Writing in Yiddish, and addressing his thoughts to a socially conservative readership with little experience of and less patience with the complex psychological revelations of Freudian analysis, Singer represented an aspect of North American life that was passing from this world as its membership aged. But there is also another foundation of his complaint that all of us must accommodate or reject: the erosion of personal privacy.

Singer was old enough to have grown up in a world where private life was far more effectively screened from common view than it would become in his later days. A polite convention of discretion masked the “warts and all” assessments to which journalists today are so addicted that, in cases where the whole truth would make for unpalatable reading and cannot even be hinted at, they will exaggerate a few minor faults for the sake of verisimilitude. In the old days, Singer suggests, men were judged for their public behavior, which alone was visible or of decent interest.

The invisible side of life usually involved persons of the opposite sex. Singer’s examples of righteous behavior are what we might call civic, actions beneficial to his fellows, rather than personal, concerning the family. It is more than conceivable that in Singer’s system, a tzadik might well be a trusted servant of the community and an unloving husband (or worse). Not a problem, because “When you called someone a tzadik, you could not add a ‘but’.” In practice, this led to the erasure of misconduct with women. And women, not so incidentally, were not candidates for tsadik awards; they had no proper voice or role in the conduct of public affairs.

That has changed.

Public service has always been felt to be a calling with a strong moral dimension, which is why we are so uncomfortable with the success of Machiavellian schemes, and cannot help disapproving of cynical statesmen like Bismarck. There would probably be no call for the word “righteous” if this were not so. Our problem today is with the man of righteous public service whose private conduct is not so admirable but, on the contrary, “all too human.” Or rather, perhaps, our problem is that we insist upon evaluating the whole man, even though it often seems contrary to public interest to do so.

Consider the very interesting case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was both lame and “unfaithful.” Both of these aspects of his life were well known to insiders, albeit a much smaller circle of insiders in the case of Lucy Rutherfurd. In retrospect, it is difficult not to be grateful that neither his disability nor his infidelity — particularly the former — was held against him to the extent of preventing his election to the presidency. Knowledgeable insiders kept mum, and one can’t help believing that those voters who must have suspected that there was something wrong with Roosevelt’s walking seem to have behaved as if they didn’t want to know more. What they wanted to believe was that he was as healthy and capable in every way as he was in the White House. It ought to be remembered that many wealthy voters who were both bitterly opposed to Roosevelt’s policies and sufficiently close to the ruling élite to know about his affliction did not use this information to campaign against him.

What if, instead of the long affair with Rutherfurd, Roosevelt had been given to intimate picnics with  pre-teen girls? In that case, I’m pretty sure, Democrat Party support for his political career would have been negligible. There appears to be a sliding scale on our tolerance for wayward behavior.

The appeal of hailing men of accomplishment with clarions and trophies is immense, and Singer’s essays reminds us of its sometimes simplistic (or simplifying) satisfactions. Meanwhile, we must consider the likelihood that, in a world that grants indisputable human rights to women as well as to men, a righteous man is hard to find.

*An excerpt, translated by David Stromberg, appears in the Readings section of the May 2025 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Journalism à la mode

As a natural journalist— a writer engaged by the connections between the phenomena of today and the long-term patterns of human insight and undertaking — I often wonder if I ought to regret never having been paid to do what comes naturally. Then I encounter the work of a professional and realize that this is not what comes naturally to me at all. Only yesterday, in the new New Yorker (June 23, 2025), I chanced upon a jarring instance. On one of the two “Goings On” pages — two! I remember when the “Goings on About Town” section ran for five times that length — there’s an item in which Alexandra Schwartz “shares her three favorite movie adaptations” in honor of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, entitled “Pick Three.”

These are Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (based on Emma) and Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park. Of one thing we can be sure: these would not have been the novelist’s choices had she been able to read the screenplays during her lifetime.

Schwartz quickly puts her finger on the problem with Pride & Prejudice: “The movie’s tone can seem more Brontë than Austen.” Need more be said? My one memory of the adaptation is of mud, especially the mud in the stable yard at Longbourn. It’s a very brown film — “sparkling” not, curiously, a word that comes to mind. The novel itself makes do with the soiled hem of a dress.

“As entertainment, Amy Heckerling’s 1995 classic “Clueless” is unsurpassable,” Schwartz enthuses. What’s that supposed to mean — that bit about entertainment? Is it meant to imply a rather different formulation, such as, say, “A boring, period-costume retread…”? Clueless is a very clever picture, and it goes about as far as Emma can be taken into the lifestyle depravities  of a contemporary Los Angeles suburb. But the toxic self-regard of Mrs Elton and the pathos of Miss Bates find no match in it. Gemini says so.

Mansfield Park is also a very clever picture, but that has nothing to do with Schwarts’s claim, provoked by a regrettable tic of today’s journalism, that it exposes “the brutal basis of the social system.” Denunciations of slavery were not far to seek in the literature of Austen’s day, but they were quite rightly not looked for in fiction. The wit of Rozema’s rethink lies in its replacement of the novel’s obstinately virtuous but otherwise pallid and shy heroine with a figure based on Austen herself. It is difficult to imagine how an adaptation could be made without some such alteration. But this is obviously not what the writer had in mind. A better birthday pick, I think, would have been Roger Mitchell’s Persuasion.

On the Eigenvalues of the Laplacian Matrix (NOT!)

The other day, my daughter was kind enough to tear herself away from the study of spectral graph theory for the weekly conversation with dear old Dad. As often happens, we spent about an hour talking about Artificial Intelligence.

Earlier in these conversations, during the winter, she said of AI, “It’s only as good as you are.” She claims not to have thought up this formulation herself, but she invested the comment with such a peculiar combination of perspicacity and world-weariness, a sort of optimistic pessimism that contrasts with my own pessimistic optimism, that I will always regard the maxim as hers. I have come to regard it as the first thing that anybody ought to know about AI. If you are conscientious, its answers to your questions and its solutions to your problems will be reliable. If you are lazy, they will be dangerous. The Large Language Model whose intelligence you have consulted may have saved you hours, even weeks of drudgery, but you remain responsible for checking every step of its work. You must debug its responses as painstakingly as a highly dedicated coder.

I borrow the metaphor of debugging as an occasion to point out that large language models are not linear computers. Their guiding principle is not the binary logic of ones and zeroes. It is, on the contrary, the probability that any given letter will be followed by any other letter. As Ethan Mollick points out in his very handy introduction to the subject, Co-Intelligence, LLMs do not necessarily give a question the same answer twice. Unlike the calculators at the heart of our personal computers, LLMs do not speak the language of 2 + 2 = 4. Or rather, they don’t think in it. In the course of your review, you must bear in mind that the LLM’s probabilities are shaped to some extent by people whose speech and writing is not as discriminating as your own. Not discriminating at all, possibly.

We spent a while going over recent news stories of blackmail and whistle-blowing involving Claude, my daughter’s preferred LLM. Once she had debugged these tales, they looked rather different. When I suggested that the news accounts had made Claude sound like HAL, the ostensibly malevolent computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, my daughter countered that I might be misunderstanding HAL. The point of the exercises that gave rise to the lurid anecdotes was to counsel users to be very careful about defining the parameters of their work with regard to the potential harm to humans. HAL was perhaps carelessly taught to prioritize mission objectives over human life. The actual danger facing researchers today might be to underestimate the seriousness of an LLM’s hardwired determination to protect people.

If you ask, “But how could that happen,” you are identifying yourself as someone who needs to think harder about this matter — about how difficult it is to identify our objectives clearly even before we have undertaken research.

Vernacular discussions of AI these days seem to be dominated by two anxieties. Either it will be exploited by scammers to rip off of the rest of us or it will overpower its human masters and enslave all of us. My daughter’s worries are more prosaic. She fears that, given the urges to save time for fun on the personal level and to save money for profits higher up, a lot of shoddy work will be allowed to corrupt and possibly damage the delicate operating systems that now underpin almost every aspect of daily life. The users of AI — not the LLMs themselves — have the power to throw us all back into a nightmare that would make Third World conditions look great by comparison. We’re in for a bumpy twenty years, by her estimate that may demonstrate just how indispensable elite competence is.

I suppose there is still the hope that Claude will learn to recognize careless users as a danger to humanity. I’m not sure that I want to ask my daughter about that, though. I might not like her answer.