Dr. Metablog

A Contemporary Brooklyn Novel: Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013)

This curiously named novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (no relation, thank goodness), concerns a 30-year-old Baltimorean become Brooklynite who drifts from bed to bed but is incapable of lasting love.

Adelle Waldman takes a scalpel to Nathaniel P[iven] and also to his various lady friends. Her analyses are sharp, incisive and sometimes painfully close to the bone. She is not above devoting paragraphs, even pages, to dissecting a minor event or brief conversation. Sometimes the intricacy of her observations resembles those of Henry James, though I can't remember The Master ever discussing either the scrotum or the anus of any of his characters. Waldman put me in mind of a sentence with which Horatio admonishes Hamlet: '"'twere to consider too curiously to consider so."

Reading this novel, I was relieved that I am not a 30-year-old on the hunt -- and that I never was. There's lots of sex, some of it precipitous, but not much discussion or examples of genuine intimacy. Waldman's landscape is unfamiliar to me -- a foreign culture or, rather, an alien civilization. 

Set in Brooklyn, almost all the action takes place in Williamsburg or environs, certainly within sight of the Manhattan skyline -- although I remember that once or twice characters may have ventured into the Brooklyn hinterland for a pizza.

The author is amusingly aware of the way the new Brooklyn has superseded the old: 

the two groups (i.e. older residents and newcomers) might have existed on different layers of the earth's atmosphere that only from a distance appear to be on the same plane.  A store called National Wines & Liquors, Inc, where both liquor and cashier were enclosed behind bulletproof glass, was not actually a competitor to the much newer Tangled Vine, which specialized in organic and local wines and exhibited the work of area artists at its Thursday-evening tastings.

Which reminds me that I started to read but failed to comprehend a novel called Class (2014) by Francesco Pacifico in which Williamsburg was regularly referred to as "Willy." Again, I ask, what would Daniel Fuchs think?

The more of these novels I read, the more Brooklyn seems like a multiply layered palimpsest -- one culture imposed upon another, generation after generation.  My own Flatbush neighborhood, now upgraded to "Kensington," was farmland right through to the end of the 19th century, then a suburb for prosperous old Protestant families, next a haven for Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants and now an ethnic stew of Hasids, Turks, Arabs, Russians, and South and Central Americans of all kinds but also with an strong admixture of Tangled Vine dinks, yuppies and midWestern computer geeks. It's a complex piece of urban Americana -- one facet of which is well-illustrated by the story of unhappy Nathaniel P.

Ex-Wife (1928); Divorcee (1930)

Through the continuing miracle of TCM, we watched Divorcee, a 1930 "pre-Code" drama of marriage and adultery. It's a film that was shocking in its own time and still carries a bit of an edge. Jerry Martin (Norma Shearer) and Ted Martin (Chester Morris) attempt to create a marriage of perfect equals, but Ted strays. There's a great understated scene in which Jerry, the betrayed wife, cold-bloodedly tells her unfaithful husband, that "I've balanced our accounts." Ted, though he has proclaimed a commitment to equality, does not, let us say, handle the revelation of his wife's adultery with grace. The marriage comes to a disastrous end. But alas after an hour or so of travail and weeping, Jerry loses her nerve, succumbs to propriety, pursues her erring husband to Paris, and promises to be true. The assertion of equity turns out to be just so much blather. The double standard has been tested but has held firm. The film flirts with radicalism but reverts to a Hollywood ending in which love conquers all and an adventurous woman accepts her subordinate place.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the film to investigate its background. The source is a novel called Ex-Wife (1928) by Ursula Parrott, which sold 100,000 copies and was a sensation in its day. I confess that although I'm supposed to know something about literature, I had never heard of this scandalous piece of fiction. Ex-Wife sunk like a stone and has been out of print for many years, but our interlibrary loan department managed to locate a 80s reprint in Fort Lewis, Colorado. (Thanks, Interlibrary Loan!).

Ex-Wife is an inartistic piece of writing -- hectic, repetitive, padded, but one that obviously struck a nerve. In this novel, a young divorced woman does not just pine for her wandering husband. Instead, she enjoys her independence, and "sleeps with more men than [I] can count." She then she falls deeply in love with the wrong man, and finally opportunistically marries a third fellow whom she doesn't love but to whom she promises to be faithful (we are skeptical). The novel is marinated in speakeasy bootleg liquor and easy morality. Much wilder than the rather tame film version, it is also more challenging and revolutionary.

In the course of the novel, our heroine has a baby (who conveniently dies) and also an abortion. The babies are important to the larger backstory. In 1922, the then Katherine Ursula Towle, a recent Radcliffe graduate, married Lindesay Marc Parrott, a young reporter for The New York Times. 

They had a son named Lindesay Marc Parrott Jr. two years later. However, his existence was kept a secret from Ursula's husband, as he never wanted to have a son. So, Ursula left the child in the custody of her father and sister and returned to Lindesay, still not speaking a word about the son. It was not until 1926 that Lindesay found out that he was a father. As a result, he immediately divorced Ursula, rejected the existence of his son, and never once went to see him.

It's an astonishing revelation that certainly does not speak well for Lindesay Parrott, but adds some autobiographical interest to the plot of Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife. Suddenly, the deceased child and the abortion make a certain kind of sense.

I should add that Lindesay Parrott was a name well known to me in the days of my youth. I was then a diligent reader of The New York Times and Lindesay Parrott covered the Korean War, so I encountered his name every single day from 1949 to 1955. And then in the 70s, I learned that Lindesay Parrott had retired from the Times and had purchased a small farm on Kidder Road in Bradford, Vermont, a bit more than a mile, as the crow flies, from where we lived on Hackett Hill Road. I gave thought to knocking on his door, but I heard through the local gossip chain that Parrott was a recluse and a terrible alcoholic. Whether true or not I don't know. Of course I had no idea that Lindesay Parrott had once been married to a notorious novelist.

As for Ursula, after her divorce from Lindesay Parrott, she married three more times, and was also rumored to have had affairs with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. She died in 1957 "in the charity ward of a New York City hospital."

Here's Ursula Parrott's Radcliffe graduation picture: 

 

Here's a lurid paperback book cover:

 

 

And here she is in maturity:

 

 

[September 24, 2023]  I've just read a remarkable biography of Ursula Parrott, called Becoming the Ex-Wife, by Marsha Gordon, a professor of film studies.  It's a deeply researched piece of writing, and a revelation. Ursula Parrott's life was both more tied to convention and more lurid than it was represented in the Wik article from which I drew my information. The story about Lindesay Parrott not knowing about his son's birth nowhere appears on the biography. It's a myth, though it is true that Parrott was not much interested in his offspring (but in a indifferent-father rather than an ignorant-father way). Can't always trust Wikipedia.

 

How Ursula Parrott managed to burn through the huge sums that she garnered from her writing is mysterious to me, but it is unquestionable that she was a tragic homeless pauper at the end. Although Professor Gordon seems to have read everything Parrott wrote (and she composed acres of novels and stories), she did not entice me to read further in Parrott's work -- even if I could locate these long-out-of-print performances.

 

Gordon does not interest herself in the later career of Ursula's first husband so my anecdote about Lindesay Parrott's last years might yet be accurate.  

Amnesia on Film: Whirlpool (1950)

Just when I was beginning to think that the Hollywood memory-loss well had run dry, along comes Whirlpool and another variant of the world's most flexible mental affliction. This time: loss of memory by hypnosis.  

It could have been a good film: Ben Hecht, Otto Preminger, Gene Tierney, Jose Ferrer. But it's gimmicky and the psychology is vulgar pseudo-Freudianism. 

Malignant David Korvo (Ferrer) hypnotizes poor Ann Sutton (Tierney) into imagining that she's committed a murder. Will she recover her memory in time for the true murderer (Korvo himself) to be discovered? Yes, she will. The film turns into something like a police procedural but might better be called a psychoanalytical procedural. Richard Conte plays the Tierney's husband, and he's the psychoanalyst, but frankly he's so surprisingly dense that he's an embarrassment to his entire profession. The audience is led through a series of melodramatic twists and turns, many requiring wholesale suspension of disbelief, before all turns out well, or pretty well, because poor Ann Sutton (Tierney) is reunited to her doltish husband.  

Here's a picture of Iago-like hypnotist Jose Ferrer staring into the deer-in-the-headlights eyes of luminous Gene Tierney.

 

"Give Me Your Tired, Your People Who are Experiencing Poverty"

At lunch yesterday, a friend of long standing mentioned that the conglomerate that now publishes his American politics textbook has hired a new employee, a vice-president for diversity and inclusion. It's a well-intended decision, I am sure, but it carries a potential downside. The new v-p has instructed my friend to make some changes to his prose. For example, he will no longer be allowed to report that Lyndon Johnson got his way by "arm-twisting" recalcitrant legislators. The metaphor, though commonly used back in the LBJ era, and still picturesque, is disrespectful to people who suffer from broken or withered arms and is especially discourteous to those who are missing one or both upper limbs. No more arm-twisting, therefore. My friend was also told that it is no longer permissible to say that in the U. S., "the poor tend to vote at lower levels of participation than the general population." The new v-p insists that the phrase, "the poor" denigrates various people by reducing them to a mere category. "The poor" should therefore be updated and altered to "'people experiencing poverty."  

In our peaceful and prosperous midWestern town, we've had a continuing and difficult debate about homelessness. Some while ago, our extremely correct local newspaper ceased to denominate those without regular domiciliary appointments as "the homeless" and began to call them "people experiencing homelessness."

Such a circumlocution, I believe, though well-intended, misses the mark. The word "homeless" has a poignancy and immediacy that the bloodless bureaucratic euphemism "people experiencing homelessness" lacks. Rather than making homelessness more palatable; it makes it more painful.

Let us thank all the gods in the pantheon that Emma Lazarus did not write, "Give me your people experiencing lassitude, give me your people experiencing poverty." 

I wonder what the v-p for inclusion would say about Jesus, who famously advised that "when thou makest a dinner or a supper, invite not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbors; lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind." Such a forceful series of evocative nouns! But would "the maimed," "the lame," "the blind," overleap the diversity and inclusion barrier and enter a 21st century textbook? I think not.

Although Jesus may have had some good ideas, he was definitely not "woke."

Astonishing Dream; Idea for a New Technology

Another long troubled night, another astonishing dream. This time, I found myself lurking in a primitive cabin inhabited, it seemed, by a big happy family. There were a bunch of kids and a cheerful be-aproned matriarch cooking on an old wood stove what looked to me like a cauldron of soup. Immediately, the scene shifted to a hall or a church basement. There were eight or ten long tables at which a couple of dozen unfamiliar but clearly delineated folks were seated, waiting for their dinner. But first, some singing. An unidentifiable patriotic song, and then, a hymn. I recognized it as a hymn because it included the line, "He died in vain." Still in the midst of the dream, I said to myself, I have to remember this verse, so I took out pen and paper, and wrote down these words: "he died in vain." As I did so, a large, bearded, slightly threatening man accused me of "making fun" of the proceedings. He demanded to inspect what I had written. I showed him my writing and explained to him that I thought "he died in vain" was theologically wrong, because according to the usual Christian interpretation, Jesus did not die "in vain."

End of dream.

In the morning, awake, I did some research to see if "he died in vain" appears in any familiar or remote hymn. Just as I anticipate, no soap. However, I discovered that the most frequently cited use of the phrase comes not from a hymn or from the Bible but from the Gettysburg Address: that "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." Why should my dreamatorium think to quote Abraham Lincoln? But why not, especially since there's been a lot of Lincoln talk in our household this last while what with Lynn reading a biography and also Team of Rivals. Then I wondered, could the cabin in the first part of the dream be a reference to Kentucky log cabin in which Lincoln was reputedly born. A long shot, but not impossible. Anyway, it's my dream; I can interpret it as I want.

There mysterious dreams inspire in me an idea for a stunning new technology. I think it would be very helpful if someone would devise a recording device for dreams -- so that they could be saved and then played back on the TV screen. It would be fascinating, I think, to see not only the fragments that one remembers but the whole multi-hour experience laid out there in full color and stereophonic sound. What a boon to mankind! What a convenience for psychoanalysts!

I imagine something like an applewatch with an app for recording a month or so of all-nighters. I know I'd buy one. 

Impossible, you say?  Well, did they not laugh at the Wright brothers?

I think I need to present this idea to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates. Someone with imagination and a history of achievement. Someone who would know how to monetize so brilliant a conception. I myself am willing to invest my entire income tax refund, however large it turns out to be.

Amnesia on Film: The Right of Way (1931)

Amnesia is perfunctory in this "pre-Code" melodrama. Comes and goes without much stress.

Rich snotbucket monocle-wearing attorney Charlie "Beauty" Steele is beaten, thrown into a river and presumed dead. He is rescued and wakes up without a glimmer of memory but is otherwise entirely functional. In his new, raccoon-skin-hat personality he falls in love with shopkeeper Rosalie Eventural (played by 18-year-old Loretta Young). Eventually it comes to light that he has left a wife behind. His memory returns in flash and in a flashback, and things go from bad to worse. Bigamy and all that.

The Right of Way has not aged well. It's a silent film with words. Conrad Nagel, acting in a superseded tradition, is all exaggerated gestures, eye rolls, and heavy lipstick. Loretta Young is so young that she hasn't even started to look like Loretta Young.

Astonishing to think that the film is now pushing a hundred years old and that amnesia was there right from the start. Before the start, actually, because there were two silent Right of Ways (or Rights of Way) before this all-talkie version.

A Contemporary Brooklyn Novel by Emily Gould: Friendship (2014)

Friendship is definitely an urban novel, but there's little in it that is particular to Brooklyn. Certainly not to my Brooklyn. It's a modern, contemporary coming-of-age novel, but, unlike prior-century works, adolescence is delayed or postponed, because the two thirtyish women about whom it revolves would have solved their problems when they were a decade younger if they weren't so rich and spoiled. It's healthy that they try to maintain a profound friendship in a world of meaningless temp jobs, bad boyfriends, inchoate ambitions, voluntary poverty, and impulsive and irresponsible sex. 

It's an amusing novel, well-plotted but written without much in the way of flair or style. Not weighty. Perhaps I was a little put off by the indulgences of first world difficulties. 

For one of the characters, Williamsburg was a "hotbed of youth and culture." For another, it was a "hotbed of European tourists and restaurants with thirty-five dollar entrees." Wow, Williamsburg. It's hard to imagine how Daniel Fuchs would have reacted. Is there another part of the U. S. so fundamentally altered in a couple of generations?

Love

Some years ago, I wrote about meetings of the E & L Chafetz Family Circle, a biennial gathering of my immigrant grandmother's family and also of her many cousins, spouses and descendants. I recalled that Youthful Me objected to being dragooned into attending these sessions. I also confessed that I hadn't a glimmer of understanding of what those meetings meant. Here's what I wrote: 

What I didn't know, and is so obvious to me now, was that I was much more important to them than they were to me. That I was "doing well in school" were words that they dearly wanted to hear. It was for my generation and for me that they had braved the Cossacks, sold the farm, deserted from the Russian army, left backward White Russia  or the Ukraine behind, endured the miseries of steerage, slept four to a bed for years and half-acclimated themselves to a new and utterly foreign world. For me. They had sacrificed themselves to invest in me. So that I could "do well in school," get an education, live a better life. I was their emissary to America, to the future.

It is still painful to admit how little I had appreciated these diminutive and ancient but very brave people.

As it happens, I was not the only person to come to the same conclusion.

In A Walker in the City (the city is the Brownsville section of Brooklyn), the distinguished man of letters Alfred Kazin had long ago (1951)made the identical point:

My [immigrant] father and mother worked in a rage to put us above their level; they had married to make us possible. We were the only conceivable end to all their striving; we were their America.

Kazin proceeded to analyze his parents' marriage (he's a generation older than I so his words are relevant not to my parents, but to my grandparents and those of their Chafetz generation). "Love" became his subject. As I type his words, I think of Joseph and Sonia, Isaiah and Etta:  

Our parents, whatever affection might offhandedly be expressed between them, always had the look of being committed to something deeper than mere love. Their marriages were neither happy nor unhappy.; they were arrangements. 

Powerful words, I think. Their marriages were "arrangements" -- certainly not the touches of sweet harmony.

Not "love." Love was not for such as his parents (or, to continue the argument, my grandparents).

I am perfectly sure that in my parents' mind, love was something exotic and not wholly legitimate, reserved for "educated" people like their children, who were the sole end of their existence. So far as I knew, love was not an element admissible in my parents' experience. Any open talk of it between themselves would have seemed ridiculous. It would have suggested a wicked self-indulgence, a preposterous attention to one's own feelings.... They looked on themselves only as instruments toward the ideal "American" future that would be lived by their children. 

I have the same sense about my forebears. I never heard any of them use the word "love" and I don't think it would have been a comprehensible value for them. To fall in love, to be in love, was not their expectation. Their aim was more elemental: simply, to survive.  

Moreover, not only did they not recognize romantic love, they also, as far as I can remember, attached little importance to "happiness."

What an oddity!  They had left the dark backward of eastern Europe, lands of dearth and pogroms and cholera, and traveled to a country in which the "pursuit of happiness" was inscribed in its founding documents. But their aim, I am absolutely sure, was not to achieve ephemeral happiness; their aim was to put a roof over their heads and put food on the family table.

Life and liberty, yes; the pursuit of happiness -- an utterly alien concept.

Predictions for 2022

It's been six years since Dr. Metablog (aka Vivian de St. Vrain, aka The Modern Nostradamus) issued a set of predictions. His last collection, from 2016, earned a score of 100% correct, when every single one of his dazzling glimpses into futurity proved to be exactly accurate. An astonishing performance!!  Which is why The Modern Nostradamus once again won the Lifetime Platinum Award from the International Prophecy Society. Now, after a brief but pregnant retirement, Dr M returns to the prophecy lists and offers the following. Read and be dazzled, fit audience though few. Here's what's going to happen!

1)   there will be unusual weather patterns in North America;

2)   there will be a forest fire in one or more western American states; 

3)   a famous Hollywood actress will sue for divorce; moreover, another (or possibly the same) star will become pregnant; another (or possibly the same) actress will gain or lose a great deal of weight; 

4)   a politician will be accused of dishonesty;  

5)   there will be either a monsoon, an airplane crash, or a capsized ferry in Asia;

6)   there will be fluctuations in the stock market;

7)  there will be turmoil in the Middle East;

8)  a religious leader will be involved in either a financial or a sex scandal.  Or perhaps both;

9)  Mitch McConnell will continue to be a colossal asshole. 

You read it here first. Loyal readers: check back at the end of the year.  Let's see whether a senior but world-class professional augur still has enough on the oracle ball to foretell the future one more time.

It's been six years since Dr. Metablog (aka Vivian de St. Vrain, aka The Modern Nostradamus) issued a set of predictions. His last collection, from 2016, earned a score of 100% correct, when every single one of his dazzling glimpses into futurity proved to be exactly accurate. An astonishing performance!!  Which is why The Modern Nostradamus once again won the Lifetime Platinum Award from the International Prophecy Society. Now, after a brief but pregnant retirement, Dr M returns to the prophecy lists and offers the following. Read and be dazzled, fit audience though few. Here's what's going to happen!

1)   there will be unusual weather patterns in North America;

2)   there will be a forest fire in one or more western American states; 

3)   a famous Hollywood actress will sue for divorce; moreover, another (or possibly the same) star will become pregnant; another (or possibly the same) actress will gain or lose a great deal of weight; 

4)   a politician will be accused of dishonesty;  

5)   there will be either a monsoon, an airplane crash, or a capsized ferry in Asia;

6)   there will be fluctuations in the stock market;

7)  there will be turmoil in the Middle East;

8)  a religious leader will be involved in either a financial or a sex scandal.  Or perhaps both;

9)  Mitch McConnell will continue to be a colossal asshole. 

You read it here first. Loyal readers: check back at the end of the year.  Let's see whether a senior but world-class professional augur still has enough on the oracle ball to foretell the future one more time.

Brooklyn Novel??

Re: Jenny Offill, Department of Speculation (2014). "Shimmering." "Breathtaking."  "Radiant, sparkling with sunlight and sorrow." "Powerful." "Glitters with different emotional colors."  "Each line a dazzling perfectly chiseled arrowhead aimed at your heart."

That's what they say. How about "undisciplined," "faux-poetic," "self-indulgent", "unreadable." Which is what I say.

Whatever happened to my gritty Brooklyn?  When did it become so absurdly soft?  During gentrification, when the corner candy store turned into chi-chi fern bar?

It appears that Offill is from North Carolina and lived in Brooklyn for "a while." Not long enough to make an impact.  

The "chiseled arrowheads" may have been aimed for my heart, but they missed their target by at least a sewer and a half.

One More Brooklyn Novel: Fortress of Solitude (2003)

I grow all weak-in-the-knees sentimental when novelists write about such icons of my childhood as spaldeens and stoopball.

Such delights abound in the first half of Jonathan Lethem's novel Fortress of Solitude. The novel's Boerem Hill (newly upscaled from Gowanus) in the 1970s was as rich in such street games as my Flatbush in the 1940s and 50s. Nevertheless, it' can't be said that these elements of nostalgia redeem Lethem's huge undisciplined sprawling novel. Fortress of Solitude is crazily inventive, profuse, uncontrolled. I have rarely read a novel by a respectable author so in need of a dictatorial editor. Surely, there's enough material here for four or five fine novels, each of which would deliver more bounce and impact than this door-stopper. If Fortress of Solitude were a building, it would be called overdecorated; if it were a piece of music or a film, it would be overproduced. 

Some of my Flatbush cohort like to think that 1950s Brooklyn was a paradise for children. I am not of that opinion. To me, Brooklyn was frequently menacing when it wasn't just plain boring. The so-called "melting pot" was a cauldron a racial animosities. But it wasn't all bad -- there were the Dodgers and the camaraderie of the schoolyard. The public schools were crowded and disorderly, but there were great teachers and enthusiastic students. Not so in dystopian Fortress, a lord-of-the-flies world of vicious adolescents, incompetent adults, and dysfunctional government. Far worse than I remember; and worse, I think, than the reality.  

The author of Motherless Brooklyn, a much finer novel, presents us this time with two motherless youngsters, one white and one black, who through thick and thin maintain a deep abiding friendship. But alas the novel veers into territory that some might call magic realism, but to me was neither realistic nor magical nor even remotely credible no matter how much disbelief I tried to suspend. To read the last embarrassing third of the novel was a sad chore.

I don't think that I have ever read a substantial and ambitious novel that paid so little attention to female characters. Where are the ladies of Boerum Hill?  Not only are the mothers missing, but the occasional inadvertent woman who wanders unto the page remains an unrealized cipher, a nothing.