Weekend Update:
On the Young
When my aunt called, I said that Kathleen and I had just gotten back from One Day University. My aunt did not ask what One Day University was. She said, “Oh, I’d like to go to that so much!” — or enthusiastic words to that effect. It killed me (as if often does), that my aunt lives in New Hampshire, and not here in New York City. True, she lives in a deep pocket of high culture. Also, she is perfectly happy there, and has been for years. It’s entirely likely, by the way, that Il y a longtemps que je t’aime will show in a theatre nearby. Nearby her, in the middle of the Monadnock Mountains. She said as much when I told her how much I’d loved the movie, which I did in response to her faux question about Kristin Scott Thomas: “Have you seen your lover-girl yet?” My aunt knew that I had tickets to see The Seagull, but her eyes do not allow her to track my every burp on the Internet, so she could be excused for not knowing whether I’d seen the play. Like the hormonal teenager that, in fact, I never was at the time, I rushed right over the Broadway show to say that I’d seen the movie, “which opened yesterday!” As though my aunt might pin a medal on my chest for cultural diligence. Have I forgotten to tell you how crazy I am about my aunt? New York is the poorer for her absence. In my heart I am still about fourteen and she is in her early thirties. Octavian’s crush on the Marshallin was about half the size. But now I’m sixty — so I don’t stammer.
Ordinarily, when my aunt and I talk, we are both home alone, but today, having just got home from ODU, Kathleen was on the premises as well, so I put her on the phone. At some point, we asked if my aunt had heard a certain bit of news. She hadn’t. “But I’m completely desensitized,” she said, “to the communication skills of younger people” — by which she meant that younger people have no discernible communication skills. Kathleen said, “We were brought up very differently, weren’t we?” and for that instant my aunt and I belonged to the same generation. “We were indeed,” she said.
As usual, One Day University’s program consisted of four one-hour lectures. Three of the professors were very explicit about the pleasure of speaking to an audience familiar with such references as “Nixon,” “Glass-Steagall,” and the fact, that, once upon a time, there was only one phone company, and that you rented your telephone from this telephone company, which is why it always worked. Fear not: I am not going to launch into my “Prowst” lecture. That’s the one in which I indignantly demand that Dartmouth reimburse my aunt’s grandson (M le Neveu) for having failed to teach him how to pronounce a great French writer’s name. The anecdote on which this lecture is built never fails to shock the people to whom I tell it. They know that my cousin is brilliant, so it can’t be his fault. How did he get through one of the premier liberal arts colleges without so much as knowing that it’s “Proost”?
The last lecturer of the day — Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore — actually came out and said that he finds that today’s students don’t work as hard as their predecessors because they have so much more other stuff to figure out. The lecture began with a reminder of the world that most of the audience grew up in: When Mr Schwartz became an adult, the question wasn’t whether he’d get married, or whether he’d have children. The answers to those non-questions, both of them, was “As soon as possible.” The only genuine question was whom he’d marry — and he had the grace to point out that there was no question that this partner would be a woman. I suspect that Mr Schwartz and I would agree that, even if we were given all the options in the world, we’d still have been happy with the women who consented to marry us. But we were lucky. Lots of people were miserable when it came time to deal with the marriage question, and that’s why it’s a good thing that there are more choices today.
Which would mean that things are great if it weren’t for a slippage problem: undergraduates have to think about having sex. You could say, they’re allowed to have sex. Lord knows, we weren’t. “We were brought up very differently.” You might dream all the time about “scoring,” but it was just that, a dream. Meanwhile, you read your Shakespeare. And your Proust. You would not have known what to do with a hookup if the girl had knocked on your dormitory door. All right, you would have known. But only short-term: you’d have handled the matter like an Edwardian roué. The deeper connections would have been off-limits. And she, of course, would have been Germaine Greer. Rocket science.
When I was growing up, my aunt was the only adult I knew who had anything to say to me. She was beautiful, intelligent, romantic, and the mother of four children. (She is still all of these things.) I am sure that she had a great deal to do with my falling in love with Kathleen. By which I mean, not that I fell in love with Kathleen because she’s just like my aunt (although she sort of is), but because my aunt taught me what I might hope for in a partner. Without that example, I might have lived my life alone.
Instead of which, I haven’t lived the life of the prickly autodidact that I probably deserved.
A lovely tribute to your Aunt.
I didn’t want to combine responses, but my undergrad days were full of, oh shall I say it, well, sex. My fraternity brothers and I had a different focus, to be sure, but ‘it’ was certainly around. Perhaps the sacred halls of Notre Dame were more immune to the 60s and the sexual revolution than Lancaster, Pa……..but then again the local intelligentsia In South Bend were unlikely to try to run you over with a motorcycle during an anti-war rally…..
Against my internal counsel, but out of a desire to welcome time in my car mindlessly entertained that otherwise would be merely endured, I am listening to Philip Roth’s “Indignation” on CD. What a surprise that the early chapters in his autobiographical coming-of-age novel focuses the kind of “different era” preoccupation to which you refer. And the oft unacknowledged consummations that, as Fossil Darling notes, none-the-less took place.
Your tribute to your aunt makes me envious, sad to miss my own beacon of intelligence and culture, my Aunt Barbara, who passed away in January, three months before her brother, my literate and witty father. It also reminds me of your lovely stories about a beloved aunt that, like your plays, I often wish you’d dust off and publish. I’m a fan; so sue me.
Yes, the post about, and tribute to, your aunt was lovely. It reminded me of many such influences in my life, not the least of which was my dizzy “Auntie Mamesque” Aunt Pat, who gave me my: first drink, first nightclub outing, first opera, and many other firsts, which my parents either hadn’t the time, money or inclination to offer. Her greatest gift perhaps, and the gift often given in different ways by my other parental surrogates, was the one of acknowledging me as an individual with defined opinions of worth. This is not to bash my parents who, with a brood of four, could barely keep track of our names, much less the nuances of our personal growth and development.
As to your allusion to identifying with your aunt about being of the same generation in terms of social rearing, and your note about youthful sex, I have a quandary; I too was raised with the tenets and mores of a refined Victorian sensibility, albeit tempered by distance from that most restrictive of eras. The paradox is that, as a teen of the 70’s, I had, and availed myself, of sex readily available in every way, shape and form. This may have had more to do with being a young citizen of the REAL “Sin City”, New York, during its precipitous fall prompted by its social and financial crisis. A young gay man with raging hormones during the gay liberation of the 70’s in New York had experiences not readily matched since the days of the libertine Regence era of France. In fact, one had to actively “avoid” such salacious opportunities, they were so rife. As a coda to this post, I would note that my Auntie Mame once took a wrong turn with me after a performance of Shakespeare in the Park, and got us lost in the wilds of Central Park’s notorious Ramble at night, while making our way eastward. Upon seeing the bunches of Jack Wrangler clones and Richard Locke wanabees massed in the Rambles’ bucolic, night shrouded walks, she turned and noted to me, “well, this should be an education for you.” I don’t know a better example of a sign of respect for a young gay man’s distinct personhood.
The Sunday New York Times has a small block article about the release on DVD on the 1960’s Transylvanian/suburbia sitcom, “The Munsters”.
I loved the show as a kid; it was brilliantly funny and paradoxical in its tearing down yet re-enforcing of the mores of middle-class America, but has anyone mined the subject of how subversive this and similar shows were to the cult of White WASP “Mad Men” suburban America? The viciously funny lampooning of all we held dear in our goldfish bowl society was intense. The “Addams Family” was similar and so too was “Bewitched” whom some might posit was a metaphor for homosexuality, a group of individuals who reside within a society, looking exactly like them, but who have a completely different and “magical” life, hidden in plain sight, yet must never be revealed to the “mere mortals” who could never take the reality of difference residing amongst them – a corrollary to Queen Victoria’s “don’t scare the horses.” This is to say nothing of “Batman” with his youthful ward “Dick Grayson” and their butler; Aunt Harriet, a character never seen in the original comic, being added as a conscious sop to the network to prevent wholesale rioting. Even “I Love Lucy” was subversive in the way it turned the paternalist ethos on its head. There is a pop
dissertation here folks.
R J, that was a touching tribute.
LXIV: You’ve made me feel much better about all those hours in front of the television during my misspent (suburban) early youth — watching those exact shows! Now I can feel lucky, knowing that I was also absorbing a bit the argot of the Subversive from The Munsters, Addams Family, etc. Thank goodness.
Well, you’ll be happy to know that I have to hear about “Proost” cookies every time a Madeleine is in sight. He does absorb information so I believe you are correct in that the fault rests in the hands of one Dartmouth College. (Not to brag, but I don’t think I could have finished Bryn Mawr without knowing how to properly pronounce Proust)
And I adore Gran, too, and miss her very much. You’ve chided me into worrying that I am another young person with poor communication skills. I owe her a proper letter.