Dear Tim,
There now: feel better? I’m so glad you had a chance to share your Raskin gripe with the multitudes. It’s the kind of peeve that one’s spouse is, shall we say, privileged to hear on a repeated basis. I loved your disquisition about the Jetsons movie (or “Jecksons,” as our kids are wont to say). What keeps throwing me about it is the suspicion that you and I are now living the future imagined by “The Jetsons,” which seemed so impossibly far away when we were ten. Where are our Jet-paks? Where is our friendly family of helper robots?
Let’s keep this a no-news day, shall we? I want to write about two things–one shallow, one dark. My favorite piffle of the day is David Streitfeld’s story in the Washington Post about John Berendt and the mysterious success of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I couldn’t really care less about John Berendt, but Streitfeld (who is the best reporter writing about publishing today, in a walk) gives amusing play to the question of what on earth someone does for an encore, after scoring a fluke success like Midnight. The best words in the piece are from Berendt’s friend Gay Talese, who says he told Berendt “Never write again. The success of this book is so inexplicable, so illogical, so mystifying, that it does not provide a basis on which to build anything.” (It’s amazing how illogical writers always find the success of their friends.) Instead, Talese says, he should “devote himself to managing a boy’s basketball team… or being a charitable leader of wayward taxi drivers assailed by the Giuliani administration, or running a religious order outside of Bosnia somewhere with Richard Holbrooke, or just lying on his couch and fantasizing about Hillary Clinton.”
Here’s the dark thing. Please read, in this week’s New Yorker, John Bayley’s “Elegy for Iris,” his account of wife Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s. It’s agonizing, gorgeous, full of the cold-blooded detail that a born writer can’t leave out, down to the “grubby white label” on the back of her trousers that tells him which way to put them on her in the morning. I’m madly torn about this piece. On the one hand it’s very accepting, madly admiring of the woman she was, full of the comforts of an old marriage. Yet I had to beat back, constantly, the feeling that it was faithless for him to publish such an intimate thing while she’s alive.
In general, I’m of the firm opinion that any writer’s story belongs only to him or her, and that moral judgments about the propriety of airing one’s own life are beside the point. (The anti-memoir backlash, which peaked with Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, seems only crabbed and tedious to me. So don’t read it if you don’t like it!) But in this case, I found it creepy that Murdoch is neither dead, on the one hand, and past all claim to privacy, nor really alive in the sense of being able to know what has been written about her. (Usually, the living at least have the privilege of reacting to a writer’s decision to expose them.) Murdoch doesn’t even know, as Bayley points out “that she has written twenty-six remarkable novels.” And although this isn’t his only tone, at times he writes about her with a kind of terrifying dispassion: about how she “sometimes twitters away incomprehensibly,” about the way his ritual jokes will bring on “a sudden beaming smile that must resemble those moments in the past between explorers and savages, when some sort of clowning pantomime on the part of the former seems to have evoked instant comprehension and amusement on the part of the latter.”
I need to know what you think. I suspect that what sent my needle into the red zone was the Avedon photo that leads the piece, in which Murdoch stares into the camera while Bayley scrutinizes her from the right side of the frame. Her expression is unreadable, but after you’ve made your way through the piece, the one thing you’re sure of is that she didn’t know she was being captured in her old snowflake sweater by Richard Avedon for the consumption of hundreds of thousands of Americans. She seems, well, like a thing that is being used. Never do this to me, okay?
Confusedly,
Marjorie
