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.

Try and…

I’m going to try and….

I’m going to try to explain my dislike of this construction. Whether or not it’s grammatically incorrect to write such sentences as “I’m going to try and go to the store to buy a few things” means very little to me. What means a great deal is giving the impression that I know what I’m saying when I write — that I am aware of how the words that I use not only fit together but also register my knowledge of what they mean. I believe that this requires me to forego the use of some lazily informal but very well-established patterns of speech, of which “try and” is possibly the one that I find most annoying in print.

There is nothing new about the locution in print. An example from a book on my nightstand: In her estimable study, A Life of One’s Own (1932), the British psychologist Marion Milner uses it often to explain her efforts to understand herself. Sometimes she switches, for no reason that I can see, to the usage that I prefer. I am sure that I could find earlier examples, but point here is to stress that I am not merely lambasting some recent depravity, as well as to suggest that time does not heal all solecisms.

Perversely, replacing the preposition (to) with the conjunction (and) works to disconnect the verb (try) not only from the infinitive (eg, go) but from the point of the sentence. Try bobs meaninglessly on the page. Try what?

To write about trying to do something is to express a certain possibly insincere humility. It often means that something is going to be attempted despite the blizzard of incompetence and stupidity that life obliges us to withstand. That, I think, explains the dangling, unmodified misuse of “going to try and…” “I am going to go to the store even though I may never get there, the world being what it is.”

A caveat the applies to the try… construction whether it is written properly or not: don’t use it in cases where subject of the sentence, generally you, speaking as “I,” are solely responsible for the results. It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to try to complete my degree program in four years.” No matter how hard you try, no matter how great your academic achievement, it’s not going to be up to you to present yourself with a diploma. It’s another, and rather silly, thing to say, “I’m going to try to do my best.” Whatever you do will be your best.

While I believe that writing ought to follow the rhythm of speech, and even sometimes surpass it (as Shakespeare does as a matter of course), I also believe that it mustn’t capitulate to the laxities of unthinking chit-chat.

“The Pension Beaurepas”

From the early days of the Republic, Americans toured Europe for a variety of reasons, and some went to live there for the additional reason of economy. Not only were services cheaper, but they were also superior to their American equivalents. If we consider that very few Americans thought of service as desirable career path, and that America itself was not seen as a tourist destination, the affordability of Europe makes a kind of sense that has little to do with favorable exchange rates, although those were certainly an attraction.

The writer Henry James and his siblings were raised in Europe partly for economy in this extended sense: not only did it stretch the purchasing power of his peripatetic father’s inherited dollars, but it allowed Henry James Sr to provide the family with genteel, well-kept accommodation in a variety of European cities. Coming from a similar background, the painter John Singer Sargent, James’s junior by twenty-odd years, was born in Florence to an American couple that had abandoned the United States ostensibly for the wife’s health. Sargent did not set foot in the United States until he was a young man.

By that time, Henry James had settled in Europe. Aside from economy (no small consideration for him), there was the attraction of the life of the mind, which was difficult to cultivate in the United States, certainly outside of what was then a rather circumscribed academic world. James was no systematic thinker, but his writing evinces a keen moral philosophy that is centered largely on the conflict between experience and innocence. This is often simplified by his readers as a campaign of evil against good, as exemplified by corrupt Europeans and their naïve American victims. In some of James’s keenest fiction, however, it is transplanted Americans who are corrupt, most notably Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, in The Portrait of a Lady.

In “The Pension Beaurepas,” a long short story first published in 1879, not only do Americans occupy all of the active roles (with Mme Beaurepas and M Pigeonneau supplying commentary), but there is no corruption — in this story, everyone’s hands are clean. Aside from the narrator, who is clearly a stand-in for the author (and who can be quite unnecessarily taken as an example of the writer’s personal unwillingness to commit to romantic attachments), we have two American families, the Rusks and the Churches, all staying at the eponymous boarding house in Geneva. The Rusks recall “Daisy Miller,” published only the year before (and a work that is far better known than “The Pension Beaurepas”). They are unpolished Americans of fortune, touring Europe without quite knowing why. The Churches, in contrast, foreshadow a situation from The Awkward Age, a much later novel in which James repeatedly alludes to a cynical mother’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to preserve her daughter’s innocence by keeping the girl ignorant of the world.

The member of the Rusk family whom we get to know best is the father. (It will be recalled that Daisy Miller’s father is named but does not appear in her tale.) Mr Rusk presents himself as a businessman, but it emerges that he would more accurately be called an investor or even a speculator. An unhappy man, he is apparently a victim of the depression that followed the Panic of 1873. James does not spell this out, but it explains why Mr Rusk has been advised by his doctors to take a break, in the form of an extended trip to Europe. He complains that there is nothing for him to do about his “lumber” interests at home, which suggests to me that he is a promoter without prospects for real-estate developments in a flat market (there really is nothing to do.) Almost worse than the after-effects of the Panic, however, are the depredations of his wife and daughter, whose only interest appears to be shopping for and buying extravagant clothes and jewels. Like Undine Spragg’s father (in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country), Mr Rusk seems powerless to halt the fatal fiscal drain.

If Mr Rusk and his ladies are tragicomic caricatures of the American abroad, Mrs Church brings to mind quite different figures from James’s fiction, namely Mme Merle, Mme de Bellegarde (the materfamilias in The American), and Charlotte Stant. These ladies, usually Anglophone by birth, pursue their oblique, even gothic objectives with a suave ruthlessness that earns the grudging respect of narrators and readers. Although there does not appear to be anything sinister about the schemes of Mrs Church, she is almost as redoubtable as those anti-heroines. She hopes to find a suitable husband for her daughter, Aurora, whom she has been conducting on an occult tour of European cities since the latter’s childhood, and she intends to preserve Aurora in a state of innocence unblemished by unsuitable male attentions. The plan is perhaps grandiose, given that Aurora will not have much of a dowry — an obstacle of which Aurora herself is well-aware. Although relatively poor, Mrs Church makes demands on Mme Beaurepas’s establishment with the assurance of a wealthy woman. Aurora’s awareness of her mother’s arguably deluded determination, expressed on two somewhat surreptitious occasions to the narrator, are to my mind the heart of the story, affording an early look into one of James’s central preoccupations, namely, what do those who are supposed to be innocent (and ignorant) actually know? These vulnerable creatures are usually girls, but Morgan Moreen (“The Pupil”) and little Miles (“The Turn of the Screw”) are important members of the group. Morgan, almost comically precocious, often sounds like a fiftyish man of the world.

It seems to me that these English and American characters, and not the glamorously impecunious figures of “old” Europe, best exemplified by Prince Amerigo, that provided James with his best artistic reasons for settling in Europe. Little Miles aside, their having left home behind for the new world of old Europe has, by depriving them of the of the advantages of protective coloration, exposed them to the scrutiny of an articulate expatriate. Back in Manhattan, shuttling between Wall Street and Murray Hill, Mr Rusk would be unpromising material for a writer, no more visible perhaps than the less distinguishable of Catherine Sloper’s cousins. On the shores of Lake Geneva, however, he is a fish out of water, a fully mortal creature, no more “interesting,” perhaps, but vastly more vivid, in his tilting top hat, than a shuffling New Yorker. However personal and economic Henry James’s decision to settle in Europe might have been, it brought him incalculable riches from home.

Significance

Clearly — !

I’m talking about a dust jacket. It features the celebrity-author photograph by Annie Liebowitz and graces the newly-published edition of Notes to John, Joan Didion’s memoranda of meetings with a psychiatrist in 2000-1, when she, her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, about whose alcoholism and other problems Didion was consulting the psychiatrist, were all still alive.

If you slip the dust jacket off the book and flatten it out — no, if you glance at the front of the dust jacket for a moment and then do as I said, you’ll notice a contrast right away. There is light and color on the left half of the photograph. On the right, there is Joan Didion, sitting in what is presumably her home office, and you might be forgiven for thinking that the image is in black-and-white. On the part of the picture that appears on the rear of the dust jacket, there is a lighted lamp, whose ecru shade glows yellow, as does its empty-column glass base. This causes the blue-greens of the image on the computer screen to stand out, at least as color. Now that the whole of the desk in the window is visible, it is clearly littered with mildly colorful items, especially a porcelain bowl, painted with fish or dragons (or something), that I should like to know more about. These things, in the lamplight and alongside the computer, bring out the color in the author’s face and arms.

That’s it: the whole photograph — and it takes the whole photograph to do this — brings Didion, who died at the end of 2021, to life.

Or maybe not. Maybe celebrity photographer Annie Liebowitz just knows how to take pictures that look meaningful. Certainly it must be assumed that she did a little more than walk into Didion’s home office and snap her shutters. In the rear of the populated half of the photograph stands a starkly modern floor lamp that the photographer may have decided to turn off. Without its light, the room seems not so much bathed as rinsed in a chaste northern daylight arguably inadequate to the needs of elderly eyes.  Interestingly, the empty but lighted half of the photograph shows two crumpled tissues, one next to the mouse pad and one at the base of the lamp. These details suggest that Liebowitz is not an interior-décor photographer.

The impulse to catalogue what’s visible is almost irresistible to someone like me, who grew up on the 1963 Cloisters catalogue description (cribbed, I think, from the work of Erwin Panofsky) of what is now known as the Mérode Altarpiece, packed with such decodings as this: “The rays of the sun passing through the window give visual form to the popular medieval allegory of the perpetual virginity of Mary, which St Bernard explained thus…” Beauty takes a back seat to cleverness: catnip. But I resist.

The telephone behind Didion’s head does remind me of a poignant story. Shortly after my late wife and I moved into the last apartment that we would share (next door and up two flights from the one I’m writing in), a technician’s error cut the entire building’s landline cable; neither the building management nor Verizon would pay for the repair, and it was never fixed. That’s the story. Kathleen, very unhappy about this, went to the AT&T shop down the street and came home victorious. She produced a line that could be attached to the phone at her bedside. I tried to explain to her that it was not a landline; but simply a cable attached at its other end to a locked-in mobile phone. But it looked like a landline to her, and what’s more, it restored service to the chunky appliance that took up so much of her nightstand. The look and feel of a landline trumped the reality.

What is that curious box-like thing lying on the desk blotter? I think we can rule out a pack of cigarettes or a deck of cards. And what about that porcelain dish next to it? What is it doing in an office, in such proximity to a hanging-file cart? It is hard for me to imagine Didion writing about it; she did not take a professional interest in “things,” especially things of typically feminine interest. Why is the dish empty? Was it empty when the photographer arrived? Would Claude be able to recognize the pattern, so that I could shop for one like it at Replacements?

Who was in charge of this book? Who wrote the foreword and the afterword, both very brief, that bookend Didion’s notes? Who decided where footnotes were needed and then wrote them? Who chose Liebowitz’s photograph, which was not, we must remember, taken for the purpose. Joan Didion would not, I think, disapprove of these mystifications. I never met her, but I can imagine her impassive smile.

I don’t have a home office. I have never had one, to listen to me, although in two of our apartments in this building there was a room that some people, and even Kathleen at times, would refer to as such. I resisted with my preferred nomenclature: first (and for thirty years), called the Blue Room (upper case) after the color of the walls, and then, for much the same reasons, the rather smaller book room (lower case). That hanging file in the dust-jacket photograph: is it full of writerly drafts? Or do the folders contain contracts and other professional-business papers? I would find its presence, out in the open, very distracting. But let’s not go into how I keep my files. The important thing is that I have a better view from my desk, especially now that the leaves are out. Even in winter, the red brick but multiply-windowed wall of the building across 87th Street is screened by the branches’ nervily organic twists and turns.

As for my desk, what does it say about me? It says the same thing that every writer’s desk says, but with unusual explicitness. It says, almost geometrically, that I am not a person who does not notice or care what his desk looks like. But unlike most desks of any kind, it does little to remind me who I am. There are only two overt mementoes, and both are reminders of Kathleen: a photograph taken not long before I met her, and an important if unimpressive award of which she was the first recipient. Oh, and an eensy plastic spider.

Filed under New

A New Pope

We have a new pope, and he is an American of mixed-race background. If we throw in the fact that he holds dual citizenship (US and Peru), and that he is the first pope to be a member of the Augustinian Order — to which Martin Luther also belonged — we have an impressive number of novelties. On top of that, he is seventy and said to be in good health; his reign may be a relatively long one.

It occurs to me, however, that Robert Prevost’s choice of the name Leo XIV suggests that these incidentals may be the limit of the “change” with which history associates him. The last Leo, Leo XIII (1878-1903), is known for his encyclical letter, De rerum novarum, 1891, which called upon governments and capitalists to do more to protect workers from immiseration, while at the same time rejecting socialism as an interference with Catholic teaching on the family. As an exhortation, De rerum Novarum may be very fine, but it is no kind of call to action. It is, rather, a call to conscience, and as such a ratification of well-established ideas of Christian charity.

We can infer from this, I think, that Leo XIV will not significantly alter the Church’s positions on ordination, matrimony (divorce), or the run of non-procreative sexual acts. It is not clear that, outside the liberal West, anybody wants him to.

Perhaps more important than these doctrinal issues, however, is the structural one of papal authority. To be sure, the head of a church that professes universality and catholicism must speak with the same voice to all members. The question might be this: need he speak so often and so much? Must his be the only voice?

The history of the Church over the past millennium shows us a religious body that until recently rested on territorial power and the taxation that goes with it. Until 1870, the pope was the temporal head of a medium-sized sovereignty, known to us as the Papal States, extending through the center of the Italian peninsula. As such the pope’s territorial domain was one of the dozen or so significant states of Europe, and by the year 1100, it was ahead of all the others in centralized organization that enabled it to make the most of its resources. The effectiveness, or efficiency of church government with respect to land readily lent itself to the prosecution of doctrinal matters: it is not an accident that Europe’s first law school was established at about this time at the papal sub-capital of Bologna. Procedurally, the law of land ownership provided a template for the law of professed belief. They might be complicated, but they were stable, even routine. The pope was a dual autocrat, requiring no one else’s blessing to proceed temporally or spiritually.

The pope’s spiritual autocracy did not go unchallenged, most notably by the Conciliar Movement of the early Fifteenth Century, which, however, failed so signally that the one event most generally remembered about its climactic event, the Council of Constance, is the burning of Jan Hus, despite Imperial safe-conducts. In the middle of the next century, the Council of Trent was intended to bring together at least the more respectable voices calling for Church Reform, but Protestants declined to appear, lest they suffer the fate of Hus.

Against the background of the collapse in 1789 of the ancien régime ethos, which however persisted in Rome into our own time, the truly global extent of today’s Church has renewed the call for councils, to organize the debates of leaders from throughout the world without obliging the pope to pronounce on their every claim. There is certainly reason to suspect that the election of Jose Mario Bergoglio as the last pope, was inspired by the desirability of detaching the church’s operations from the remnant of Italian secular power that lurks in the Vatican bureaucracy. There is all the stronger reason to suspect similar intentions behind the election of Robert Prevost as the new one. It is expected that Leo XIV will continue the work of Francis’s Synod of Synodality.

The overarching obligation of the worldly Church — “from the bishops to the last of the faithful” — is to articulate the sensum fidelium, “a universal consent in matters of faith and morals.” It may be that this comprehensive clarity will be better attained by a polyphonic choir than by the unison of plain chant.

During a time of transformation such as ours, it is usually helpful to say as little as possible at any one move — and so to keep commitments to the future to a minimum. We cannot learn from what we our doing if our plans are so worked out that they can teach us nothing that we don’t know.

Book into Film: Mrs Harris Goes to Paris

Although I made the decision just last week, I can no longer recall why I ordered both the 1958 novella, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, by Paul Gallico and Anthony Fabian’s 2022 film adaptation thereof. I know that I bought the DVD because Lesley Manville appears in the title role, and I’m crazy about her. But there was another, now forgotten reason for my sudden interest in the novella — which, by the way, I was happy to discover, at Alibris, the market for used books,  really was called Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris when it first appeared in the United States, just as I recalled. I remember being very confused when I was ten: How do you pronounce ‘Arris? Shortly after struggling with this typographical conundrum, I saw My Fair Lady on Broadway and hinferred the hanswer: As in ‘urricanes ‘ardly ‘appen.

Like Eliza Doolittle, Ada Harris is a striving cockney. In the armoire of Lady Dant, one of her employers, Mrs Harris encounters a Dior gown. The experience is transformative, and the underfed cleaning lady immediately embarks on a program of stinting and saving until she accrues the staggering sum of £450. The book skates over the self-sacrificing stage of Mrs Harris’s adventure, because, in spite of universal protestations that a charlady will never have occasion to wear a couture “creation” (I got rather tired of this word in the text), she really does need the Dior gown in a narrative hurry, in order attain her destiny as a fairy godmother.

The package arrived on Sunday, and it did not take long to read the novella. I’m not sure that I got through it in 1958. It takes an awful lot of good old savoir faire for granted; worse, there is a a lot of the kind of sentiment(ality) that is unappealing to all but the most weathered hearts. I did think it rather rude to apply the stubby word “char” to another human being, but the author could not be blamed for that. I did sense that a cleaning lady with the spirit and candor of Ada Harris wouldn’t last a day with my mother (or vice versa, seeing that Mrs H dismisses her employers, not the other way round), but, just like Mrs Harris, I couldn’t really imagine how things worked in a dress shop far too fancy for clothes racks.

But even if much of the story went right over my head, I was aware that it was considered “lite,” and, as Gallico himself put it, describing himself, “not even literary.” Mrs ‘A (as I shall refer to the book) is a fairy tale, but not one for children. Nor, as Mrs H (Fabian’s film) makes clear, was it, in 1958, a tale for today. The adaptation is one of the more interesting pieces of bowdlerization that I’ve come across in a long time.

I must say that I read Mrs ‘A for the first or the second time, whichever it was on Sunday, with a suspect innocence. I laughed and I cried as if nothing had changed since Britons were forbidden to carry more than £10 with them when leaving the country. I watched with delight as Gallico set up his plot elements like a footman setting the dinner table in Gosford Park, and I was not disappointed when they were all tied up with savory bows. I sighed like a pillowed box of chocolates as the young people, an accountant and a fashion model, struggled to overcome their proper French reserve and fall in love. I all but stood up to sing “God Save the King” when it was pointed out that plucky Mrs Harris not only “knew her place”  but insisted on keeping to it, as if she were personally responsible for  straightening up the Great Chain of Being. As The New Yorker‘s news flashes used to reassure readers, There’ll Always Be an England.

You might imagine that Mrs H, the movie, woke me up from this Arcadian reverie of an Albion that, as a younger child, I imagined to be populated exclusively by dukes and their butlers. It didn’t take long to see that Fabian and his collaborators had thrown Gallico’s carefully labeled tabs and slots out the window in service of their rather different tale. Mrs H has plenty of charm, but at least three of the major supporting characters are shown not to be so charming as in the book. But what shook me from Gallico’s feudal fantasy was not the film but the book’s last chapter. It might seem foolish to worry about spoilers in connection with a novella that is nearly as old as I am, and a film that, in movie years, is at least half as old, but I find that I must resist explaining why, despite the mess made of Gallico’s expert carpentry, I found the movie more satisfying in the end. In fact, I was prepared to be very disappointed with the film if it did not deliver this one important alteration. I will only hint that what the original delivered was the promise of its original title, Flowers for Mrs Harris. Fashions don’t last long, but flowers die even faster, and to leave Mrs ‘A with vases full of smelly water and a halo of insight was truly unsatisfying. Also, disproportionately, wrong.

Instead, Fabian gives us a gown, a staircase, and an Entrance fully worthy of the actress entrusted to bring them to life. As an unexpected bonus. Lady Dant, who can somehow afford haute couture without managing to pay Mrs Harris what she owes her, is presented, contrary to the virtues of “pluck” and “place,” with No Uncertain Terms — and a key through her letter drop.