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Margo Howard and Martin Peretz

the breakfast table
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from: Martin Peretz

Does W. Pose a Threat to White House Interns?

Posted Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2001, at 5:53 PM ET

Very dear Margo,

You told me once that the Web site Siliconsalley.com promotes a "Take Your Son to Work Day." Years ago, when my son Jesse was about 6, I did take him to work, which then meant my office at Harvard. Frankly, I was a bit nervous because I hadn't been able to explain to him what my work actually entailed. He was oh-so-excited. Anyway, he came with crayons and paper and busied himself while I did what I did. When we came home, Anne asked him, "Well, Jesse, what does dad do at work?" And he answered, without any guile, "Oh, mom, the same thing he does at home, talk on the telephone."

It is frightening to imagine what young children make of their parents' habits. During the late '60s and early '70s, our family would sing when we were driving anywhere. There was the usual "Old MacDonald had a farm ..." and, of course, the insufferably high-minded folksongs that were then so intrinsic to our lives. Among those songs, the one that now brings me hives is "The Times, They Are A'Changin"--so self-righteous and didactic. A song I really liked that was also in our family repertory: "We Shall Overcome." I was at the l963 civil rights march on Washington, and I remember the lusty voices of the quarter-million marchers belting out those stirring words. Which, of course, we wanted to pass on to our kids, not only as words but as values. One of the verses, attesting to the early link between the civil rights and antiwar movements, was the lyric that pledged that, "We shall live in peace." Many years later, we discussed our singing habits with our two older kids who endured this long moment in our culture. Lisa said she had a question that she and David used to ponder, and ponder in a way that suggested they thought their folks were quite mad. "Why, why would you ever want to live in peas?"

Apropos work, we have friends, a couple, the husband of which is a cellist. When their two children were young, the wife would drive the husband to the airport to embark on his concert tours, and the kids would come along. And the kids would come along to the pick up dad from the airport as well. For years, these two youngsters thought that their father worked at the airport, perhaps playing for travelers in the food emporia that were then proliferating at Logan. God knows what your children will imagine!

If only you were young enough to work at the White House. Since you are a Democrat, this means that you were dreaming of working for Bill Clinton. This is something that, if I were you, I would not confess to your children ... or your friends. But, alas, you did already confess to the public. And many readers are having salacious thoughts. I wonder if there is any danger to young ladies working for Dubya. Probably not.

You write that you went to a Boston Symphony concert last night. Isn't it interesting that so many orchestras are now hunting for principal conductors, including the BSO, where Seiji Ozawa's reign is finally coming to an end. It was a signature Ozawa program designed so that the audience suffer acutely through at least one piece. Stravinsky, Mozart, Britten, and Berio--Luciano Berio, to be exact. I bet his composition was placed in the middle of the program instead of at the beginning or at the end, so that a listener couldn't choose to come late or to leave early. It is a mission of the contemporary conductor to make you both learn and endure, and maybe it's a justified mission. You seem to have found Benjamin Britten trying. I don't. In any case, shame on you. Britten was daring and difficult three or four decades ago. He is now a classic, almost like the pieces assembled on those "Adagio" CDs, Von Karajan's favorites, everybody's favorites. This difference between us shows you how much more modern music I've been forced to endure than you. But Berio! Oh, no! You should hear his dinner conversation.

Did you read in the Times that Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the widow of the publishing magnate, is building (or, to be precise is having built) for $17 million an edifice to show the couple's art collection, which I don't think is owned by the foundation whose building it is. Nothing new about that. In Los Angeles, there are already two contemporary self-endowed tributes to dead men's tastes, and the city is waiting for others to follow. One of these is a good friend, may he live till 120, as we Jews say to ward off the evil eye. So they'll have to wait 60 years for his collection. But it is interesting to speculate why the truly great collectors in the past were content to put what they had assembled alongside what their friends and enemies had also assembled. In New York, at the Met, the collections of Stephen C. Clark, Andre Meyer, Arthur Lehman, and the Havemeyer family (I almost wrote "fortune") are integrated into the wider ambit of their peers. In St. Louis, which boasts not insignificant treasures, Mrs. Pulitzer is going it alone. (She is a member of the local museum, with a contribution for the first time in many years of $2,500. The rancor must run pretty deep.) In any case, it isn't the going it alone that is now strange. It is the rules for the proposed mausoleum. They'll allow in 50 (yes, 50) people per week. Now, I don't like those big blockbuster shows either, the suffocating crush, the sheer din of heels and boots on marble floors, the inability to stand back and look, the literal physical pressure to move on, the all too audible and sometimes inane chatter. (I overheard this at a Vuillard show: "Doesn't that dining room look like Aunt Mabel's?") But still. Yes, it would be a special experience, and God only knows what arrangements will be made to admit some and deny admittance to others.

The great art historian of Impressionism and Postimpressionism and many other sensibilities before and after, John Rewald, who came to America as a Jewish refugee before the war, once told me that when he first tried to use the library of New York's Frick Museum on 70th and Fifth, he was denied admission on the grounds that the museum would not allow German nationals to use its facilities. Of course, there were very few German nationals in the United States in those days, and certainly not ones who wanted use an art library. It was a strange kind of patriotism, Rewald had observed at the time. And then he realized that this interdict was not aimed at a tiny handful of German nationals in the city. It was aimed to exclude refugee Jews from Germany, students and scholars of art, of which there were many whom the unfolding catastrophe was landing on our shores, many but not nearly enough. The irony, of course, was that these refugee Jews, to whom the Frick denied use of its facilities ostensibly because they were Germans, had ceased being Germans since the Nazi regime had suspended their citizenship.

As for Mrs. Pulitzer, her peculiarities are not that grave. But they sure are peculiar.

Yours,
Marty

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Martin Peretz

Does W. Pose a Threat to White House Interns?

Posted Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2001, at 5:53 PM ET
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Margo Howard writes Slate's "Dear Prudence" column. Martin Peretz is a lecturer in social studies at Harvard and editor in chief and chairman of the New Republic.
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