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I
was waiting during the Academy Awards to hear our new president’s name
mentioned. Watching the show mindlessly (always a mindless ritual,
knowing nothing I like will ever win, and having seen almost nothing up
for Oscars anyway), I may have missed it, but at the end Sean Penn
slipped it into his acceptance speech for best male performance in
“Milk,” saying it almost as an aside, giving it no special inflection:
“I’m proud to be part of a country that elected an elegant president.”
There was no applause, from what must have been practically a 100%
pro-Obama crowd—reflecting a sentiment at large or inability to respond
quickly or reluctance to acknowledge Penn as claimant. The country must
be holding its breath right now over our new president. No one wants to
say anything, certainly not those of us who rabidly supported him. “For
Chrissake,” a fellow enthusiast said to me, “he’s been in office only a
month.” I had been ranting somewhat over Afghanistan.
But if elegance is all it takes, we’re in good shape. And other things
are happening. Liz Smith, who is only 86, lost her gossip job at the
Post after 33 years. Luckily I lost my newspaper job at merely 51,
leaving me free to get into lots more trouble over books. I wasn’t
canned by the paper. There was simply a tacit agreement to call it
quits. The paper had long gone stupid, and all I had left to write
about were things like how I had my hair cut. During my tenure at the
paper, which began in the ancient time of 1959, I heard from people of
the likes of Liz. Between 1971 and ’72 I had four letters from her. I
wonder what she said. Given those dates, I can actually imagine. The
letters are buried in my archives with thousands of other invaluable
papers. Ingrid can locate the dates from a big fat archive book she
created. Everybody I know or hear from, excepting my family, and a
couple of health care providers, who by now number in triple digits, is
the result of my writing. Ingrid has long been family, but she found me
on an Amsterdam
newsstand in 1968. The power of paper is extraordinary and scary. Like
baseball players and their bats, the trees I’ve used and thrown away or
saved in my hall of fame must be a forest. My walls of course are lined
with trees. From off their shelves, Ingrid has been reading my Virginia
Woolf journals. You can’t read mine because I won’t give them away
before I die, and I am never going to die. They have simply tons of
paper and ink (where does ink come from?) dating from 1974. There are
about two hundred and fifty of them. Each one is a bound and
lined Boorum & Pease account book, 144 pages, 7 1/8 inches by 5 1/4
inches. In 1974 I lost five years worth of them when I feared leaving
them alone in my house in Massachusetts to drive to New York. Packing them in boxes in the trunk of my 2002 bmw, staying overnight in Manhattan,
in the morning I found the car with its precious cargo missing. My
insurance covered the loss of the car. Over the journals I lost my
head. These journals are rarely Woolf-like. They function as memory
banks, a research tool complete with indexes. I say wise things
sometimes, as immortals can. I enter conversations verbatim, and quotes
by friends or other immortals, like this by Woolf dated May 14 1925
which Ingrid showed me: “The truth is that writing is the profound
pleasure and being read the superficial”—here not because I agree
necessarily but because it can make me think about whether I agree or
not. And in this case I identify with the first part of Woolf’s
thought, not the second. Whatever you do that absorbs you utterly, I
call “profound.” I have a couple of Buddhist friends, the kind who
actually meditate. They live out west, one in New Mexico, the other in California,
and I talk to them on the phone. They offer measures for improving my
existence. Neither thinks of writing as “profound” particularly, unless
the writer is unknown to them, like immortal, or the writing is
fictional. One tells me what to do; the other can bring up the Buddha,
implying I would benefit from meditation. The last time His Greatness
came up, I said impulsively, with hubris aforethought, realizing my
sacrilege, “Whenever I practice my craft, I am the Buddha.” These good
friends are not my best readers, though they came to me in different
ways through my writing. Readers are very important to me, unlike Virginia
(and I don’t really believe her). Often, having written something, I
read what I wrote to imagine how so-and-so will read it, or some other
so-and-so. I am my own best so-and-so. There probably comes a moment in
a writer’s life when the writing they most prefer to read is their own.
It may be our immortal moment. In which case, “being read” can indeed
be “superficial,” as Virginia
said. One day Kenneth called me and said I was an “acclaimed writer.”
Being a realist, I shot back indignantly, “No I am not.” He repeated
himself. So did I. We went on like that. I must have been complaining
about my foot. It seemed suddenly as if he were saying, “Your foot may
be bad, but you’re an acclaimed writer.” Oh well hell then, why not. It
could help me forget my foot. In this letter from Liz Smith, dated 11/25/72 (Ingrid became curious and exhumed them), she says, “Don’t ask me how I can be in Gonzales, Texas reading about you in the London
Times…” Clearly I was once acclaimed, otherwise Liz, who wrote at that
time for Cosmo or the Cosmopolitan Magazine, and whom I never met,
would not have written to me from Texas
about seeing me in the London Times. So Kenneth must be living in the
past. Unless he just wanted to make me feel better. Anyhow, back in
Kenneth’s time, the moment I realized how “acclaimed” I was I ran away
as fast as I could, first in a VW camper, then to a half-renovated barn
that harbored a legion of bees in its walls, until settling down for
five years in a very remote region of southwestern Massachusetts. After many more moves, I have my ageless perspectives. One of them is that to inquire into the evidence for |
something
on which you have already decided is the unacknowledged premise of
every personal inquiry, surely? “Personal” here is “public” in its
source in Alan Bennett’s “The Uncommon Reader” (for which thanks to
Tony, who was a great reader of mine when the writing concerned art,
but remains my friend anyway). Bennett’s fictional Uncommon Reader is
the Queen. Having learned to read (the classics,
past and present), she has taken up writing. “Who knows,” she says near
the end of the book, “it [her writing] might stray into literature.”
The public inquiry of the Academy Awards group is pre-decided by the
conviction that our people have no aesthetic intelligence. That the
people want subjects, not art. That art is incompatible with
entertainment. That what is beautiful must be a fantasy. Or that beauty
and reality never mix. That films I like will never win. This year only
“The Visitor” in my opinion deserved best picture, and it wasn’t even
nominated. Nor did I see the ones that were, except “Milk,” a viewing
of which seemed obligatory. Not for nothing did I once have a slanting
relationship to its subject, becoming therefore an INUNNIAQ—an Alaskan
tribal word standing for “the serious business of staying alive.” It
was good to see that only men qualified finally for this extravaganza
Hollywood coming out party street frenzy and assassination; men unable
to predict that in another thirty years they would be living without
consensus (except over marital rights) in a cozily don’t ask don’t tell
world. Penn made the Academy laugh when he opened his address to the
audience wryly, darkly, ironically, “So you commie homo sons of guns…”
He left out “pinko.” And was “guns” an essential euphemism for
“bitches.”? Penn’s convincing virtuosity in the role of Harvey Milk may
have caused Oprah in her morning-after interviews on the Oscar stage,
now leased to her annually, to ask him why he didn’t acknowledge
“Robin” in his speech. I deduced from what came next—his two
children—that Robin is Penn’s wife. It was a rude question. You don’t
ask the winners why they left out whomever. Penn handled the question
well in a few blurry words, trying to separate family from his job as
actor. But Oprah was sticking her foot in her usually suave mouth.
Having acknowledged Penn’s award in his role as an outrageous gay man,
she seemed too anxious to return him to his family wherein of course
the whole world assumes he is straight. Did anyone else notice this? A
better question might be does anyone I know look at Oprah? Would Joseph
my linguist professor friend, who incidentally first came to me not
through my writing but bells, have heard the indirect slur? A few years
ago I went with Joseph to see “Brokeback Mountain”—a
movie that stood out at the Oscar show for being strictly unmentioned
in context of a posthumous award to Heath Ledger for best supporting
actor in “Black Knight.” It is only by Ledger’s brilliance in
“Brokeback,” and by his untimely death, linked speculatively with his
homo role in “Brokeback,” that we know of him. The sense was that the
Academy’s posthumous recognition of Ledger in a minor film was
compensatory, and the front for a tragedy, seemingly confirmed by the
appearance of Ledger’s family, his parents and a sister flown in from Australia
to accept the award. Ledgers’s daughter by Michelle Williams, his wife
both in “Brokeback” and in reality afterwards, was surely not left out.
What hath we wrought by the obliteration of such a singularly great
film as “Brokeback” in an industry that thrives on violence for its own
sake and on throwaways? An industry with the means for educating the
people to sublime acting and writing. For promoting the development of
aesthetic intelligence. Or the same applied to social issues. Are we
crazy or what? Why is Obama in all his elegance only talking about
money and war? Why doesn’t he netflix “The Visitor” and tell the people
how great it is? He would recognize the elegant script. He could say
that the film shows us how badly the U.S.
government treats illegal immigrants, yet how art and love triumph
nonetheless. My best sighting at the Awards was Richard Jenkins, the
bored Connecticut professor of “The Visitor,” a surprise nomination for best actor. Obama could fly him on Air Force One to Washington in compensation for not winning. It would only cost a billion or so. This airplane is more expensive than the World Trade Towers
were. You can see where I’m going with this, so I want to return to Liz
Smith, a marvelous find in recent days. I can tell from her letters
that she’s a very nice lady. I always liked her when she showed up on
TV. At 86, she must be divine. In a letter she wrote to me June 18 1971,
she fills out a story about one of my better known escapades—diving
topless into a pool at a serious feminist fund-raising party in Easthampton,
scandalizing the cocktail company, endearing myself to the media,
splashing into a deathless future. In her letter, Liz writes that she
had interviewed Gloria for Vogue, and when that party came up, Gloria
told her “I was thrown when Jill Johnston asked me to dance. But on the
other hand I really liked her and she was the only person there I was
interested in talking to.” At the time, Gloria’s “interest” could have
fooled me, but today I’m willing to believe it. It’s so too bad
I lost all those journals, recording so many things of indestructible
import. Here is one I entered recently from a goodbye speech by our
latest ex-president. He was listing his disappointments, one of them
being “not finding WMDS in Iraq.”
Imagine that!—What would he have done had he found them? He never found
them, but he kept saying they were there, his excuse for murdering
thousands upon thousands of Iraqis and American soldiers! Now the
Republicans, I read, have been searching for Obama’s birth certificate.
Unaccustomed to elegance, its origins must be located. Tant le monde est credule. |
