Withholding yourself

15 years later,
still instructive

By Moristotle

[Originally published on December 16, 2006, without an image and in the default font of the time.]

In Colm Tóibín’s novel, The Master, Henry James is visiting his old friend, the wealthy Paul Bourget, an “unpleasantly rigid and authoritarian” anti-Semite:

Henry did everything he could, in the early days of his stay, not to discuss Zola or the Dreyfus case with Paul or Minnie Bourget or their guest, feeling that his own views on the matter would diverge from those of his hosts. His support for Zola and, indeed, for Dreyfus was sufficiently strong not to wish to hear the Bourgets’ prejudices on the matter.

14 Years Ago Today: Holiday frivolity

By Moristotle

[Originally published, without an image, on December 14, 2006.]

My wife and I went to a party last weekend. The neighbors in a house behind ours [on Ironwood Place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina] (visible only during the defoliated time of the year) were throwing their annual “Holiday Party.” The dining room table was groaning with plates piled high with food. Every wall and mantle on the first floor of their huge house (the house’s floor space probably approaching 4,000 square feet) were decorated with ornaments of the season, whether the pagan Yuletide or Christmas, or even of Eid or Hanukka or Kwanzaa. I couldn’t help but wonder where all of this stuff got stored the rest of the year.

Book Review: Philip Roth Unbound

The Nobel Prize and various and sundry matters

By Jonathan Price

Philip Roth died a month ago. And it is a great loss though little surprise since he was 85 and had intentionally retired from writing six years ago and not given a farewell tour. His prominence is perhaps indicated by several articles the next day in the main section of the New York Times¹ marking his death, and a two-day retrospective of his interviews with Terry Gross on Fresh Air² (culled from seven interviews over the past, say, 25 years).

Seven Years Ago Today: Taking myself too seriously?

By Moristotle

[Originally published on January 6, 2011, with an additional reflection at the bottom.]

The episode of my new blog pic and its attendant quotations (from an old friend and from Henry James – another old friend of a sort) led to my realizing that I seem to have been taking myself a bit too seriously lately (and for who knows how long before that).

Reserve

In Colm Tóibín's 2004 novel, The Master, Henry James is visiting his old friend, the wealthy Paul Bourget, an "unpleasantly rigid and authoritarian" anti-Semite:

Henry did everything he could, in the early days of his stay, not to discuss Zola or the Dreyfus case with Paul or Minnie Bourget or their guest, feeling that his own views on the matter would diverge from those of his hosts. His support for Zola and, indeed, for Dreyfus was sufficiently strong not to wish to hear the Bourgets' prejudices on the matter.

    Note that Henry is confident that his "sufficiently strong" views are more or less the true ones, for the contrary views of the Bourgets he regards as "prejudices." Aren't we all like that? We think we know what's true about religion, or politics, or marriage, and the people whose views we don't "wish to hear" are bigots.
    But Henry, his judgment of Bourget aside, seems to like the man well enough.

[Henry] knew Bourget, he felt, as though he had made him. He knew his nature and his culture, his race and his type, his vanity and his snobbery, his interest in ideas and his ambition. But these were small matters compared to the overall effect of the man, and the core of selfhood which he so easily revealed. This was richer and more likable and more complicated than anyone supposed.

I recognize that there's a lesson for me here. Over the past decade and a half of partisan politics in this country (I'm going all the way back to the 1994 mid-term election), I've observed my tendency to write bigots off and grant them no hope of reprieve in my estimation. Fortunately, I have a few counterexamples of bigots with whom I have, for various reasons, nevertheless maintained friendships. The fact that I have been able to do that gives me hope to believe that I may grow past this shortsighted intolerance.
    Tóibín continues:

In return for all Henry's attention, he knew, Bourget noticed nothing [emphasis mine]. His list of Henry's attributes, were he to make one, would be simple and clear and innacurate. He did not observe the concealed self, nor, Henry imagined, did the idea interest him. And this, as his stay with the Bourgets came to an end, pleased him. Remaining invisible, becoming skilled in the art of self-effacement, even to someone whom he had known so long, gave him satisfaction. It was not a deliberate strategy, but it was central to his very presence in a room or at a table. Those in his company could enjoy what he said, but most of the time they found a polite and polished blankness. He was ready to listen, always ready to do that, but not prepared to reveal the mind at work, the imagination, or the depth of feeling.

    I much admire Henry's reserve, his ability to hang back in the shadows and observe without revealing himself.
______________
The original version of this article was published on December 16, 2006 (as "Withholding yourself").

Taking myself too seriously?

The episode of my new blog pic and its attendant quotations (from an old friend and from Henry James—another old friend of a sort) led to my realizing that I seem to have been taking myself a bit too seriously lately (and for who knows how long before that).
    Horace Fletcher (1849-1919) was known as "The Great Masticator," and according to something I read somewhere, Henry James followed his prescription to swallow thirty-times before swallowing. Seems to me that you should follow the same advice when reading my blog (or maybe any blog).

And, in the process, I may have hit on a third new year's resolution, if resolving to take oneself less seriously isn't a self-contradiction. (I'm not sure that it isn't.)

Formidable

Having quoted an old friend¹ in my profile on the subject of my new blog pic (craquelured in Photoshop to resemble an old painting), I thought it would be well to display Merriam-Webster's definition of formidable:

1. causing fear, dread, or apprehension
2. having qualities that discourage approach or attack
3. tending to inspire awe or wonder

A niece who commented on this and related self-portraits on my Facebook account seemed to be in with sense #1. She commented on the photos by quoting from the movie The Sixth Sense: "Be scared, be very scared...."

I don't know in what sense my friend intended the term. Senses #1 and #2 seem to me to derive from sense #3. (And, if the order of senses weren't descriptive rather than logical, Merriam-Webster might do well to renumber the list 2, 3, 1.)
    In French, the word is often used in a highly laudatory sense, and it is synonymous with

extraordinary, formidable, gigantic, huge, enormous, immense, colossal, horrible, tremendous, fantastic, wonderful, sensational, terrific, splendid, marvelous, super, mighty, smashing (fig.).

    But as About.com on the French language says on the subject of "Formidable (F) vs Formidable (E)," they're "almost opposite":

Formidable (F) is an interesting word, because it means great or terrific; almost the opposite of the English. Ce film est formidable! - This is a great movie!
Formidable (E) means dreadful or fearsome: The opposition is formidable - L'opposition est redoutable/effrayante.

Anyway, since, as I think, I bear a remarkable resemblance to Henry James² (except that I'm less bald and fat), I don't mind the controversy.
_______________

1. "Your new blog pic shows a formidable if not defiant person...."
2. Who wrote [in the precise source I have not discovered]: "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue."

Bicycling and the art of fiction

N'est-pas un interlude

In the 1890's, rotund Henry James engaged an instructor and took up bicycling. In another scene in David Lodge's novel Author, Author!, a letter has just arrived from the instructor

apologetically cancelling the afternoon's lesson. He was downcast for a moment, then reflected: why should he not take a spin on his own along the sea-road? He had managed well enough on his last outing. Accordingly he changed into plus-fours and Norfolk jacket, put on a soft cap, and fetched his bike from the stables at the back of the hotel where it was kept. Rather than entertain other guests by attempting to mount the machine on the carriage drive in full view of their windows and balconies, he wheeled it out of the hotel grounds and on to the Meadfoot Road. After one false start and a few alarming wobbles, he got the bike under way and pedalled stoutly.

It was a pleasant, sunny afternoon, with a light breeze from the south that, augmented by his movement through the air, stirred his beard and cooled his cheeks agreeably. As always he felt exhilarated by the surge of speed compared with mere walking. In a few minutes he had travelled half a mile. What a wonderful invention it was! So simple, and so ingenious. Why had it taken mankind so long to realise that, given a certain momentum, a human being could balance indefinitely on two wheels? The combination of Momentum and Balance was the secret—and one might draw an analogy here with the art of fiction: momentum was the onward drive of narrative, the raising of questions to which the audience desired to know the answers, and balance was the symmetry of structure, the elimination of the irrelevant, the repetition of motifs and symbols, the elegant variation of—

At this point in is reverie a very small perambulator suddenly rolled out of a side alley in front of him, pursued by a young woman and a little girl. He braked hard, his front wheel locked and skidded in some loose gravel on the road, the bicycle overturned and he tumbled to the ground....[pp. 302-303]

For some bicycle history.

"If God is so wonderful..."

N'est-pas un interlude

In another scene in David Lodge's novel about Henry James (Author, Author!), George Du Maurier talks about his religious beliefs:

Du Maurier...had hardly any beliefs at all. "I think I was born a sceptic," he told Henry when they were seated one day on the Bench of Confidences. He had been brought up a Protestant, since his father was of Huguenot ancestry, and his mother's family Anglican, but their attitude to religion was more pragmatic than dogmatic. "My brother Eugene was baptised in a Catholic church to please an aristocratic friend of the family he was named for. I think they would have made him a Hindoo if it would have improved his prospects." Du Maurier laughed a little shamefacedly at his own joke. "No, that's not fair—they were Christians of a kind, but not devout. My father had a loathing for priests and pastors—'les corbeaux' he used to call them because of their black cassocks. He and Maman seldom went to church. They taught me to say my prayers—but even as a young boy I couldn't see the point of praying. If God was so wonderful, why did he need me to tell him so? And what was the point of asking him for favours, since if he existed he knew what I wanted already?" [p. 89]

Have things changed much?

Encore un autre interlude

In September 1893, the fictional Henry James portrayed in David Lodge's hugely entertaining novel Author, Author! stopped for dinner with his friend George Du Maurier at the Cod and Lobster Inn in Staithes on the east coast of England.

Perhaps the ale was unusually strong, for Du Maurier was particularly loquacious over the meal. He reverted to the subject of his dealings with Harper. It seemed that [his second novel] Trilby contained a passage of authorial polemic in favor of nudity, which the publishers wanted to cut out.

"I have a theory, you see, Henry, that if only our climate allowed it, we should be much happier going around without clothes. There is nothing inherently shameful or indecent about the human body."

"The weather in North Yorkshire certainly precludes the experiment," said Henry, as he cracked open a lobster claw. "But even in Samoa—where I understand from Louis Stevenson the natives make do with very little raiment—even there I don't think I would care to meet my friends in a state of nature. Most of us are simply not beautiful enough."

"Ah, but that's because we neglect our bodies. And we neglect them because we cover them up with layers of cloth—and in the case of women, distort their natural shapes with whalebone and bustles and lacing and suchlike. Now if we saw each other habitually in a state of nature, as you call it, as a matter of course, we should take pains to exercise and diet to make our bodies strong and healthy and attractive."

"What about those who are irredeemably ugly or misshapen?" Henry objected.

"They wouldn't reproduce, because nobody would marry them," said Du Maurier triumphantly, evidently seeing this as a knockdown argument. "By Darwin's law of natural selection we would—in the course of a few generations—eliminate ugliness from the human race. We would also get rid of all the sniggering smut and furtive lust that surrounds the mere mention of the human body in polite society, and corrupts relations between men and women." [pp. 190-191]

Ladies and gentlemen

N'est pas un interlude

In David Lodge's novel about Henry James (Author, Author!), the author recounts an anecdote told by James's friend George Du Maurier:

It was a fine but very cold Sunday just before Christmas, and Henry had made the effort to walk up to Hampstead and take Du Maurier for his constitutional on the Heath, according to custom. They were alone, apart from the terrier Don, who nosed about on the frost-hardened ground looking frustrated at the scarcity of interesting smells. It was too cold to sit on their favorite bench—cold enough for people to be skating on the ponds. Watching them, Du Maurier recalled an occasion long ago when a dog fell through the ice on the Whitestone Pond and got into difficulties, and he had plunged into the icy water to rescue the creature. "The grateful owner tried to tip me half-a-crown, upon which I'm afraid I was rather short with him. 'I beg your pardon,' he said, 'I didn't realize you were a gentleman.'" [pp. 143-144]

Men and women—gentlemen and ladies in their God-blessed freedom—should not require the promise of heaven (or the hope of avoiding hell) to do what is right.

Those French writers!

Un autre interlude

In David Lodge's novel about Henry James (Author, Author!), the author describes James's lunch with another author:

...A few days earlier, Henry had lunched with [Guy de] Maupassant at a fashionable London restaurant, and the Frenchman had embarrassed him by trying to enlist his help in picking up a woman seated alone at a table on the opposite side of the dining room.

"Go and ask her if she would like to join us, Henry," Maupassant said. (Mercifully they were both speaking French.)

"I couldn't possibly, Guy," said Henry. "I don't know who she is."

"Well, send her a note by the waiter. Tell her we would like to make her acquaintance."

"Certainly not."

"I would do it myself, but my English is not good enough."

"You simply cannot do such things here, Guy," Henry protested. "It's impossible."

"Why not?" Maupassant demanded, helping himself to more wine, to the distress of the hovering waiter who considered this operation to be his duty. "She is available, without doubt. Why else is she dining alone in a public restaurant?"

"There is a new species of respectable but emancipated ladies in this country who are laying claim to some of the traditional prerogatives of men. I daresay she is one such."

Maupassant snorted derisively. "I want a woman," he grumbled. "Not an emancipated one, just an ordinary woman, as long as she has a pretty face and a nice arse. I haven't had one since I got to London."

Henry was relieved to get him out of the restaurant without creating a scene. It confirmed all his prejudices about the morals of French writers. How right he had been to flee Paris! [p. 81]

The apparent benefit of embracing

Un interlude

George Du Maurier, the Punch illustrator (1865-1896), was a Frenchman who, like his younger friend Henry James, settled in England. As Henry James became a fictional character in Colm Tóibín's novel The Master, so he becomes again in David Lodge's novel Author, Author! Lodge describes James's friendship with Du Maurier, including James's frequent visits with Du Maurier's family:

[Du Maurier's children] were a good-looking and high-spirited brood. Beatrix, the eldest, was a real beauty, who had only just "come out" when Henry met her, and being squeezed into a broom cupboard with her during some boisterous game of Hide and Seek, pressed up against her sweet-smelling, gently yeilding form in the dark, had been one of the more remarkable sensations in his experience, and one which helped him to understand the ecstasy that lovers apparently derived from embracing. He watched with fascination as she opened like a flower to the warmth of a developing social life.

Du Maurier himself was brazenly prejudiced in favour of beautiful women. He kept two plaster models of the Venus de Milo in the house—one on the mantlepiece of the studio-living-room, and another on a pedestal at the angle of the staircase—as icons of his devotion to the ideal female form....

"Sanguine [religious] healthy-mindedness..."

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banguet.

Psychologist and philosopher William James wrote that, in his masterpiece in the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

James (1842-1910) identified two religious mentalities: "the religion of healthy-mindedness" and the religion of "the sick soul." Both mentalities seemed to be present in James himself, for I doubt that he could have had the insight quoted above in any way other than by introspection.

In my own way, I've had the same experience. I've had numerous moments in my life of feeling so fulfilled and joyous that I've actually voiced the opinion that "I could die this moment and in perfect happiness have no regrets whatsoever." But I've also faced the "skull grinning in at the banquet." This life is (or may be) all there is, and may not be enough. It hasn't been enough, anyway, for me to have read all of William James's brother Henry's novels yet!

Witholding yourself

In Colm Tóibín's novel, The Master, Henry James is visiting his old friend, the wealthy Paul Bourget, an "unpleasantly rigid and authoritarian" anti-Semite:

Henry did everything he could, in the early days of his stay, not to discuss Zola or the Dreyfus case with Paul or Minnie Bourget or their guest, feeling that his own views on the matter would diverge from those of his hosts. His support for Zola and, indeed, for Dreyfus was sufficiently strong not to wish to hear the Bourgets' prejudices on the matter.

Note that Henry is confident that his "sufficiently strong" views are more or less the true ones, for the contrary views of the Bourgets he regards as "prejudices." Aren't we all like that? We think we know what's true about religion, or politics, or marriage, and the people whose views we don't "wish to hear" are bigots.

But Henry, his judgment of Bourget aside, seems to like the man well enough.

[Henry] knew Bourget, he felt, as though he had made him. He knew his nature and his culture, his race and his type, his vanity and his snobbery, his interest in ideas and his ambition. But these were small matters compared to the overall effect of the man, and the core of selfhood which he so easily revealed. This was richer and more likable and more complicated than anyone supposed.

I recognize that there's a lesson for me here. Over the past dozen years of partisan politics in this country (I'm going all the way back to the 1994 mid-term election), I've observed my tendency to write bigots off and grant them no hope of reprieve in my estimation. Fortunately, I have a few counterexamples of bigots with whom I have, for various reasons, nevertheless maintained friendships. The fact that I have been able to do that gives me hope to believe that I may grow past this shortsighted intolerance.

Tóibín continues:

In return for all Henry's attention, he knew, Bourget noticed nothing [emphasis mine]. His list of Henry's attributes, were he to make one, would be simple and clear and innacurate. He did not observe the concealed self, nor, Henry imagined, did the idea interest him. And this, as his stay with the Bourgets came to an end, pleased him. Remaining invisible, becoming skilled in the art of self-effacement, even to someone whom he had known so long, gave him satisfaction. It was not a deliberate strategy, but it was central to his very presence in a room or at a table. Those in his company could enjoy what he said, but most of the time they found a polite and polished blankness. He was ready to listen, always ready to do that, but not prepared to reveal the mind at work, the imagination, or the depth of feeling.

I much admire Henry's reserve, his ability to hang back in the shadows and observe without revealing himself.

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I went to the first of the remaining two holiday parties I mentioned in a comment on my post on "holiday frivolity." While I did get into the "holiday spirit" at this one (and even had a quantity of the delicious food served there—too much for my gastro-intestinal comfort in the early hours this morning), I intentionally held back from expressing myself in a few instances. It wasn't that hard when I actually entertained the possibility of holding back, but for the most part I simply let myself go and be my usual spontaneous self. (Over the years I've tended to be a "life of the party" type.)

As for withholding myself in other things, no doubt it would be prudent, as well as respectful, if I didn't respond to even the most "evangelical" of Christmas greetings by saying something like:

I haven't celebrated Christmas or enjoyed the season for some years and have decided to quit pretending that I do. But to you who do truly celebrate it, I hope that you have a good one.

However, I've already responded this way to one person who came on strong with the "Jesus is our Savior" approach. Maybe I'll learn something from it.

Holiday frivolity

My wife and I went to a party last weekend. The neighbors in a house behind ours (visible only during the defoliated time of the year) were throwing their annual "Holiday Party." The dining room table was groaning with plates piled high with food. Every wall and mantle on the first floor of their huge house (the house's floor space probably approaching 4,000 square feet) were decorated with ornaments of the season, whether the pagan Yuletide or Christmas, or even of Eid or Hanukka or Kwanzaa. I couldn't help but wonder where all of this stuff got stored the rest of the year.

Because we were among the first of scores of people eventually to arrive, we were able to hear and be heard by our hosts when they greeted us upon our arrival. But as the house filled up, conversation became less and less possible. Not that it mattered that much, in my opinion, so little of consequence that I could actually hear was uttered by anybody. We'd already had dinner and I avoid alcohol in the evening because it aggravates my acid reflux, so I didn't eat or drink anything. However, to keep it simple when we were leaving and our hostess asked me whether I'd had some food, I said, "Oh, yes, thanks!"

My sense of a wasted evening came back to me when I read the following passage in Colm Tóibín's novel, The Master. It's New Year's Day 1900. Henry James has as guests at Lamb House his brother William, William's wife Alice, and their daughter Peggy. Edmund Gosse, the English poet, author, and critic, comes to lunch.

Gosse arrived with small presents from London, and immediately declared that he was the happiest man in England now that he had quit the city, that it was a hateful place during the festive season, with far too frivolous a social life and an unspeakable fog, some of which had entered into the crania of the very best minds of his generation. [emphases mine]

Gosse's criticism of London is significant, for as Henry has already told Peggy, preparatory to the man's visit,

the main fact about Gosse is that he loves London more than he loves life. So when your father mentions the quiet intellectual life in Boston, he will not understand. The man who is tired of London is tired of life, that is his motto. So you, my dear girl, had better find a subject on which your father and our guest can agree.

I trust that my failure to appreciate the party in my neighborhood doesn't indicate that I'm "tired of life," but rather simply that I'm averse to a certain kind of mentally foggy frivolity. I guess it wouldn't be too unfair to refer to my attitude as, "Bah, humbug!"

Hmm, I wrote all that a couple of hours ago. Since then I've thought about it and just had a conversation with a colleague (in connection with another holiday party, next week) about how neither of us can remember people's names (or faces) as well anymore. "It's embarrassing." I'm wondering whether my growing disinclination to attend parties is a function of aging as much as of anything. I mean, maybe I used to be able to hear a conversation conducted in the middle of a frivolous party.

I'm sure that has something to do with it. Maybe aging even influences my tolerance for chit-chat (including chit-chat that I can hear perfectly well). Time speeds up as we get older (it really does seem to), so maybe we feel the need to use our time more wisely or productively than we would if were standing around listening to things we've already heard a million times...and saying things we've already said a few times too....

Each, Our Private World

Sometimes, when I look at another person—usually a stranger I've never seen before but whose substantiality at that moment for some reason strikes me—I think about the fact that he too has a vast past, a whole other world from mine that has shaped him, educated him, hurt him, pleasured him, sometimes rewarded, but maybe mostly disappointed him, and that has deposited and formed the substantial weight and depth I'm struck by now, even though I am not acquainted with its mysterious otherness. And not only is it unknown to me, but much of that stranger's private world is hidden even from his intimates, just as much of mine is hidden from the people who think they know me.

I was prompted to reflect on this again yesterday, when I read the following passage from Colm Tóibín's novel, The Master:

It struck [Henry James] all these years later that he had been thinking something which he could not tell [John] Gray or [Oliver Wendell] Holmes or even Minny [Temple], that his mind during these few minutes had wandered over a scene whose meaning would have to remain secret to him...He thought about the result if he spoke his mind out, told his companions as truthfully as he could what the name Gus Barker had provoked in his memory. He wondered at how, every day, as they moved around each other, each of them had stored away an entirely private world to which they could return at the sound of a name, or for no reason at all [emphasis mine]. For a second as he thought about this, he caught Holmes's eye, and he found that he had not been able to disguise himself fully, that Holmes had seen through his social mask to the mind which had strayed into realms which could not be shared. Both of them shared something now, tacitly, momentarily, which the others did not even notice. [pp. 99-100, Scribner edition, 2004]

And I am prompted to share it here because of a comment I made on another blog the other day, about how I dislike polite banter but dearly love significant disclosure. Unless we are as observant as Henry James, we need to disclose ourselves significantly to others in order to disclose ourselves significantly to ourselves.

Alice James on meeting family members after death

Alice James was the invalid sister of the American philosopher William James and the "Anglo-American" writer Henry James. Apropos my post on the belief that we might be reunited with our relatives in the sweet by and by, Alice is represented in Colm Tóibín's novel about Henry, The Master, as having reservations about such a reunion:

[Henry] remembered a scene when Alice must have been sixteen. It was one of those long dinners with one or two guests, he remembered, and someone was talking about life after death, and meeting members of their family after death, or hoping to, or believing they might. Then one of the guests, or Aunt Kate, had suggested praying to meet the loved ones in the next life, when suddenly Alice's voice rose above all the others and everyone stopped and looked at her.

"One need pray for nothing," she said. "Reference to those whom we should meet again makes me shiver. It is an invasion of their sanctity. it is the sort of personal claim to which I am deeply opposed." [p. 49, Scribner edition, 2004]