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.

 

The Appeal
by Janice Hallett

Last week, I came across a piece by Sarah Lyall in the Times about an English mystery-writer, Janice Hallett — I hadn’t heard of her — who has much of spent of her life as a writer-for-hire, with a specialty in beauty-aid copy. When Hallett  tried her hand at screenplays, she was urged to write a novel. The result was a bit success in Britain. Intrigued, I ordered The Appeal, which came out in 2021. While I can’t imagine how it could be adapted for film, I am fascinated by Hallett’s successful overhaul of the classic Agatha Christie model.

As is the case with those great entertainments, not much can be said about The Appeal without spilling clues, so this will be brief. The first thing to note is that the omniscient observer, dribbling out details about the weather and the library wallpaper, has been dismissed, leaving us with a mass of first-person email and text. The unreliability of this evidence is palpable, as the smiling ironies of unwitting self-disclosure cavort like cherubs over the surface of suspicious testimony composed by people whose eyes have not really read what their hands have written:

Marianne: Stay safe, Joyce. Don’t get involved.
Joyce: I won’t. I’m on my way there now (128)

When another woman, the hyper-organized Sarah-Jane MacDonald, is obliged at one point to dictate a text while driving, the resulting garble is such fun to read — her son, Harley, is referred to as “Harlem” — that I hoped that Hallett would repeat the stunt. Later, Sarah-Jane replies to an importuning text by writing, “You were standing right here only moments ago. Why not just speak to me?” (218)

This stream of communications is produced by the members of an amateur theatrical company in the West of England, plus assorted friends and relations. Currently in production is Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Hallett’s choice of play here is not insignificant, but it could really be anything, since it is gossip about casting and rehearsals that elicits the email, a topic that is presently joined by an awful crisis, the need to provide very expensive treatment for a cancer victim that inspires a crowdfunding campaign. Gossip’s virtuosity at converting unpremeditated “whoppers” into established truths will provide the attentive reader with more than enough amusement to forestall the tedium suspected by one of the more copious email writers, who says at the end that it must have been “boring to read so many words.”

When I wasn’t thinking of Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell, I had Wilkie Collins in mind. In The Moonstone, Collins gave the world the unforgettable creature, unforgettably named as well, of Drusilla Clack, whose misapprehensions about the welcome of her proselytizing almost make her bearable. More than a few of the contributors to The Appeal would die of congestive blushing if they could read the novel through our eyes. Better yet, they might die of shame at having quite literally walked onstage naked.

To corral the morass of inputs, Hallett has framed them in a series of chats between two young lawyers, or “clerks,” who have been assigned by their boss to read it all with fresh eyes. The boss (a QC) has come to have second thoughts about the conviction in a case that he prosecuted a while back, and he has chosen to test his hypothesis by distributing the evidence in select tranches. There is a good deal of information that he withholds from his juniors at the start, but in the end their agreement with his hunch shows that the evidence supports a more compelling conclusion than the easy, obvious one. Nothing is more satisfying — this hasn’t changed since Christie’s day — than having figured out who done it before the final pages. The cover of my paperback edition urges you to try. So do I.

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Hitler’s People:
The Faces of the Third Reich
by Richard J Evans

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans, is a useful book. Reading it, I thought of it as a sort of Plutarch’s Lives of the Nazis. In the ordinary course of reading history, we are obliged to compose, in our own mind, the full story of each leading player’s career (in this case, from 1918 to 1945), as it unspools alongside all the others’ lives. Here, conveniently, we are given a set of detached, complete biographies that does the job for us. There are 22 chapters, covering 24 lives. The chapters are grouped in four sections: The Leader, The Paladins, The Enforcers, and The Instruments. (Two of the chapters in the final section are split between two subjects.) The seasoned reader will be familiar with all or most of the names in the first three sections. The characters singled out as Instruments are meant to be representative: thus Karl Brandt stands in for medical doctors who rationalized atrocious experiments by claiming that their victims were not human, and Leni Riefenstahl sees herself as an artist who intended no one any harm, notwithstanding intense collusion in the creation of the Reich’s image — the mistress of the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth, the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred, could have served the same purpose.

The Leader, Adolf Hitler, gets about a fifth of Evans’s attention; while most biographies here range between fifteen and  twenty-five pages, Hitler’s goes on for a hundred. It functions as a pocket history of the rise and fall of the Reich at its core. Unappeasable resentment and uninhibited violence were its perpetual engines, always churning behind appearances, such as the hearty revival of the Fatherland and the pretended normalization of diplomatic engagements; and activities, such as the bold (or rash or reckless) conduct of the war and the methodical extermination of undesirable people. Given Hitler’s complete lack of capacity for painstaking planning, the core was bound to explode sooner or later; Evans is very clear: after 1941, Germany was at war with enemies that, owing to their vastly superior resources, it could never hope to defeat.

It is interesting that almost everyone in Hitler’s People comes from what in English is called the lower middle-class but is more appropriately thought of as the petite (or petty) bourgeoisie, educated but neither professional nor academic. This class was particularly bedeviled by the hyperinflation of the early Twenties and the loss of respectability (or caste) that it threatened. In any case, education did nothing to inspire Nazi sympathizers to transcend the sentimental nationalism that was humiliated by the peculiar outcome of World War I. There were a few semi-plausible aristocrats among the Paladins and the Enforcers, such as Ribbentrop and Papen, but no workers. Workers, drawn on the whole to the Left, could not compete with the Nazis’ pretenses to cultural vitality; it has not been forgotten that Hitler and his entourage drew great strength from their prim distaste for the experimental and the outré. Theirs was a regime of insufferable Babbitry.

I have two quibbles with Hitler’s People. The minor one is with the book’s lack of an independent time-line, a handy list of the the inflection points to which Evans refers again and again, such as the Kristallnacht of 1938, This would save the reader a fair amount of repetition and a good deal of authorial heavy-breathing. It serves no purpose to be reminded that these events, which range from the Reichstag Fire to the Wannsee Conference were horrific and/or had horrific consequences.

My major quibble is not unrelated to the minor one. There is a lot of scolding in this book. This is tedious of course, but also questionable. Human-rights violations may be unconscionable, but in the context of war, who is to say that their perpetrators are punishable? Several conflicts in the world today suggest that such violations may be tools to victory, or at least to quiescence. Ever since the dawn of Western imperialism, European minds have been addicted to imposing their provincial mores on the rest of the world, as if channeling a “greatness” of ancient Greek and Roman thought that often turns out to be spurious. I find that it behooves the historian who would influence intelligent minds to curb the impulse to sermonize.

As I say, though, Hitler’s People is a useful book, and genuinely useful books are as rare as great ones.

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