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Daphne Merkin and Christopher Caldwell

the breakfast table
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from: Christopher Caldwell

The Blobs

Posted Tuesday, July 13, 1999, at 10:38 AM ET

Dear Daphne,

There was a news item in the Financial Times this morning about Large Two Forms, the Henry Moore sculpture that sits in the gardens of the German chancellery in Bonn. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder hates it, and wants to make sure that when his stuff is loaded onto trucks and moved to the new chancellery in Berlin this year, the Moore sculpture is not along. The underlying worry--a legitimate one--is that Schröder dislikes not just Bonn but the diffident Germany it represents, and wants nothing to remind him of it. Helmut Schmidt used to say the two blobs curved into each other represented the two Germanys. (That can't be right--the Henry Moores on every campus in America look exactly the same.) Kingsley Amis, I think, used to say that the two-blob format of most Moore sculptures always represents two people humping. (But that can't be right, either--Schröder would have brought the sculpture along.)

David Mamet used to be high on my list of overrateds, too. My freshman year in college, I went with some friends to the rundown theater district in Boston to see the hot play of the moment, which was Mamet's American Buffalo. It's about, if I recall correctly, a bunch of guys trying to steal a valuable coin. The dialogue was what used to be called "realistic":

--Yo, yous guys, I got da fuckin' buffa-low.
--Fuck you.
--Fuck you!
--Fuck you. Ya got da fuckin' buffa-low, ya fuckin' fuck?

It was so bad it was almost funny. I had written off Mamet five minutes into the show, and he stayed written off for the next 15 years. But then someone insisted I see the movie of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I found it just rivetingly, horrifyingly tragic. The more so because of the paltry advantages that these door-to-door salesmen are fighting over.

You and Mamet are right about New York being--despite all appearances--a place for people who have made it rather than for those who are going to make it. But that's exactly what makes it a good place for a literary artist like yourself. New York imports a great variety of provincialities: the Alabama golf champ, the Minnesota trucking magnate, and the Sicilian capo would all want to live in that apartment you just sold. If you moved to another city, you'd be stuck with only the homegrown provincialism, which it would take you all of two weeks to master, and from then on it would drive you up the wall. So don't do anything crazy.

Washington's worse. There is not a single great novel written by a Washingtonian or about Washington. (The ludicrously inflated reputation of Henry Adams' Democracy is testimony to how desperately we wish there were.) I think it was Henry Kissinger who dismissed D.C. as a place where you have to arrive with a lot of intellectual capital--because there is nothing to do here except spend it down. Whoever said it, he has a point. So when we next correspond this p.m., you may find me a shadow of my former self.

Yours,
Chris

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Christopher Caldwell

The Blobs

Posted Tuesday, July 13, 1999, at 10:38 AM ET
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Daphne Merkin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes "Reckonings," a column on personal and cultural life. She is the author of Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays (click hereto buy the book). Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.
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