77. Self-Made: Reviews of Books and “The Rake’s Progress” by Pippa Hammet
When our boss, Louise Ebersdorf, makes up her mind – and especially when she is mightily frustrated – there is no discussion, no argument, no taking of prisoners. Watching the House Select Committee’s televised hearings on the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, Louise was so shocked by the event’s incursion upon her “cinematic property” that she has cancelled all plans for the motion picture she had in pre-production – D.C.: Demon Cat. Much of the action of the projected film was to take place in the hallways and sub-levels of the Capitol building, and now what Louise refers to as “digital overexposure” has removed all special cinematic novelty from said location, including the shock of seeing presumably hallowed halls as backgrounds for paranormal mayhem. (Rather than the normal mayhem of the Proud Boys.) I argued that the hearings could function prospectively as a trailer for the coming film, whetting audience appetites, but Louise has remained adamant. You may remember that she was hoping to use the former President Trump himself in a small role, but now he may be too busy campaigning for his return to the White House or dealing with criminal charges. (My dear feline Murr may have to wait a bit longer for his film debut. Louise had promised a cameo.) Our leader holds Trump and his loyal Republicans responsible for the shelving of her passion project, especially since the riot ironically achieved little more than increased political ammunition for the Democrats and heightened security for the Capitol building itself – another hurdle for a filmmaker like Louise who would rightly insist on authenticity through on-site photographic realism. Louise sees herself as the Otto Preminger of our time and sees Trump now as a non-player. She keeps murmuring, “Nothing is ever easy for a loser.”
The frustration has caused my boss to consider national politics as her next major arena, although neither existing political party passes the Ebersdorf test in terms of relevant policies and their practical application. And our aging Louise is, unfortunately, now too fragile to run for office herself. She is looking to me – of all people – to take up the slack. If I had any ambitions along those lines, I suppose my gender choice-making would be seen as a plus in the eyes of progressive voters: Pippa the transpolitico! The fact that I am now female is a real plus in a #MeToo environment. I told Louise that I regard myself as the archetypal self-made being (with a little help from her financial backing and from the skills of modern medical science), but perhaps I continue under reconstruction in her eyes. That’s the way many of my coevals seem to see their identities: permanently in process.
Reacting to my hesitation about immediately tossing my hat into the political ring, Louise has given me a prize volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James: The Aspern Papers and Other Tales 1884-1888 (edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Simone Francescato, Cambridge University Press, 2022). In addition to one of my favorite novellas by this author, the volume contains the short story “Pandora”, in which James features a young American character who is a “self-made” being, the new journalistic designation for a novel social type in James’s day.
The story is set largely in Washington, D.C. and seen through the eyes of a young German appointed to a secretaryship at the German legation, Court Vogelstein. On the steamship carrying him to the U.S., Vogelstein has made the brief acquaintance of Pandora Day and her family, who have been on the Grand Tour and are returning to their home in Utica, New York. Pandora intrigues the narrator, especially when she tells him that her immediate ambition is to move her kin from the provinces to New York City. When the young people eventually meet again at a party in Washington, Pandora has not only accomplished her planned relocation but she is found by the Count sitting on a couch talking animatedly with one of the guests, the current U.S. President. Vogelstein manages to speak to the girl and is told that she has made a personal request of her President and expects his official response momently. Vogelstein is again impressed with the skills and aims of Pandora, and he wonders if he could fall in love with her. This possibility is dashed when he learns from his hostess that she is engaged to a businessman from Utica and that Pandora is the current example of the “self-made woman” in D.C. society.
By the end of the tale, the provincial businessman has received a political appointment in Europe from the White House. It is clear that James’s interest in his titular character is qualified. Vogelstein and the author wonder if abject self-promotion and direct influence in the political arena represent suitable exercises for a lady. For example, Pandora is laughed at by members of the diplomatic and political corps at that party, presumably for expert (and very public) use of her feminine wiles. (Vogelstein also encounters mild derision there from various characters whom he approaches for information on the new “type” that Pandora represents.) Should a young woman include in her life the rough-and-tumble of membership in a D.C. Boy’s Club, however the effort may result in her social advancement? (Pandora’s “type” may one day unleash further complications upon the world, like her classical namesake.) As in his famous fiction “Daisy Miller”, James here has authorial doubts. Pandora is much more knowing than young Daisy. Today’s youthful equivalent in our U.S. would probably overcome her scruples in the name of liberation. But the issue may still be there in one form or another, perhaps especially for women’s libbers.
This question was neatly posed in a popular 1999 film, the teen comedy Election. In that movie the high schooler Tracy Flick runs for student body president, and we in the audience admire the young woman for her courage while perceiving certain emotional costs from careerist intrigues. Tracy is brilliantly portrayed in the movie by Reese Witherspoon, an actress who is one of the richest American females in Forbes magazine’s annual Self-Made Women poll. (I believe the vulgar figure mentioned there was $450 million.) The film is based on the novel of that title by Tom Perrota, and he has now published a sequel entitled Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Interesting that James’s theme can be seen as a journalistic meme now and perhaps forever.
Speaking of losers. I reread The Aspern Papers and was impressed with the way James allows the reader to guess at the motivations of the clueless women in the story: the unmarried Juliana, who holds to her ancient bosom love letters written to her in her youth from the legendary American poet Jeffrey Aspern; and her niece Tita, a middle-aged spinster living with her aunt in a dilapidated Venetian villa. When our narrator approaches the pair to rent rooms in a covert attempt to obtain and publish those missives, Juliana immediately sees him as a source of income, perhaps even a dowry for her hopeless ward. Juliana needs monetary support to supplement the dwindling bequest from her long-dead artist father. When the narrator sends flowers to the two ladies to soften them toward his literary ends, Tita takes his attentions as a declaration of love: the woman imagines that she at long last has a suitor. The narrator has no plans to marry, and James gets a great deal of dark comedy out of his spying and manipulations, seemingly unaware of the way the women have seen him as substitute father and possible husband. (His intrusive machinations reminded me of Kinbote’s creepy spying on the poet John Shade in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.) The resulting tensions are all achieved between the Jamesian lines, and the reader becomes aware how entangled the trio’s individual desperations have become. The narrator has no scruples before his nefarious task, and Juliana and Tita are literally unmade women, except in their perfervid fantasy lives. They make James’s Pandora look like a cool social genius.
In James’s Washington Square, a New York doctor’s daughter dismisses her handsome suitor when he proves grasping, and she denies her unloving father’s dying wish that she will remain faithful to the rejection. With help from her grim parent and her penniless lover, Catherine Sloper ultimately becomes her own creation, alas. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote repeatedly on this tale, and you can read her thoughts in the New York Review Books volume, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (2017). I especially recommend her essay “Foster Father: Henry James”, which deals with a repeated motif of young women turning away from fathers or father figures who cannot provide expected love and understanding. (The resultant dramas remind me of my early Samuel Butler years with my father in Hawaii.) James appears to have understood that some men are simply not meant to be supportive patriarchs. They are congenitally unequipped. We have all known women who take out their classical disappointments over fatherly love on their friends and family, sometimes working out such frustrations on subsequent male partners in their adult lives.
And speaking of Hardwick, there is a recent biography (A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis, W. W. Norton, 2022) which is light on her conflicted marriage to Robert Lowell but strong on her dedication to a writing career. It allows brief glimpses of Hardwick’s relation to her father, who was a Lexington, Kentucky plumber. Hardwick is portrayed as fascinated with her father’s singing and indolence. He managed a life of minor financial deceptions in addition to anti-labor practices. There are no major tensions revealed between this parent and this child. And there were no signs of writing talent in the family, at least on the ambitious level of Hardwick’s career. New York Review Books has just released a new volume of her journalism (The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse, 2022), and it contains her moving tribute to George Balanchine as well as what I think of as position papers on topics such as feminism. Hardwick is forthright concerning her doubts about the women’s liberation movement. She is continually processing her thoughts, sometimes leaving the reader undecided about what to think of her provisional conclusions. For example, she claims that women artists lack life experience to draw upon for shaping into works. But there are so many kinds of lived experience. Females have areas of knowledge that are our specialties.
Louise has given me a new book that is a good example of specialized knowledge at its best: Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun (Grove Press, 2022). Calhoun is the daughter of the New Yorker's art critic Peter Schjeldahl. She relates the story of her struggle to complete a biography of the poet Frank O’Hara, the research on which had been begun by her father and then abandoned when he encountered difficulties obtaining the cooperation of the O’Hara estate. Calhoun located many recorded interviews which her father had conducted with men and women who knew O’Hara and which she quotes in Also a Poet, but she herself eventually faced the opposition of his surviving sister to allowing access to O’Hara’s letters and permission to quote from the poetry. Calhoun refers to James’s The Aspern Papers when detailing her efforts to obtain rights, although her efforts were above-board, unlike the narrator’s ploys in the James novella.
The emphasis is two-fold in the book: first, to pay tribute to the love of O’Hara’s work and life (a taste shared by father and daughter) and to deal with the decades-long sense of disappointment the author experienced in her relation to Schjeldahl, who is portrayed as lacking any real interest in his offspring. (He is described as thoroughly socially inept and as having screened Judgment at Nuremberg for her when she was in kindergarten.) The present book project is indebted to him both in his generating impulse to write the O’Hara biography and in his failure to deliver it. Calhoun both loves her father and holds a grudge against him as a “missing” parent. As he is portrayed in this book, Schjeldahl was one of those males not meant to be a father. And yet without his promptings early and late, Calhoun would not necessarily have become a writer, especially of the book under review.
Many readers will wonder if Frank O’Hara’s work is worthy of such biographical struggles as they are depicted in the pages of Also a Poet. Florian says that the man was a promoter of painters, sculptors and photographers and an urban folk-art poet, both of which roles make him beloved by a certain type of reader. In Calhoun’s biography we encounter testimonies on O’Hara from painters such as Jane Freilicher, Norman Bluhm, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers. Fellow poets (Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch) also offer recorded memories. I myself have found the diaristic aspect of Peter Schjeldahl’s writings on art to be an extended form of self-congratulation. In the pages of The New Yorker, we learn more about the critic’s evolving taste than about the artworks under consideration.
What Calhoun makes of her progress toward completing the biography and coming to terms with her feelings about her father focuses and enriches her book. And what is especially delightful throughout the narrative is its portrait of the New York bohemian milieu (lower East Side) that the author must navigate as a young woman. The quoted interview materials describe O’Hara’s world of the 1950s and 1960s art scene, New York School poetry, and the gay social world of that period. The allusive texture of O’Hara’s verse finds its later cultural-history correlative in Calhoun’s autobiographical details. In fact, her skill at keeping all these balls in the air is dazzling. I kept saying to myself, will this author ever again have such perfect subject matter? The result is not only humorous and informative but a kind of classic study of the way a woman may become self-made partially through a complaint against her Dad. This book is a unique testament in more ways than one. As our Louise says, “What a brew!” Sandy and I are choreographers-in-the-making, and in our fascination with the music of Igor Stravinsky we went to a performance of the Jonathan Miller production of The Rake’s Progress at the Met. I was concerned that Auden’s and Kallman’s Baba the Turk would be portrayed archly and that the Anne Trulove would lack grit. (The opera emphasizes that Anne has her father to fall back upon at the end, when finally bereft of her Tom.) I was happy to find that Raehann Brice-Davis as Baba and Golda Schultz as Anne were the discoveries of the production. Schultz’s high C at the end of Act One was fully supported vocally. And Brice-Davis’ Baba had a reassuring gravitas beneath the comic grotesquerie. For once, Baba had that old hermaphroditic magic. This hirsute one is definitely self-made, an achievement I can approve and with which I identify. After all, as Baba might one day put it, the next time you see Pippa the Pol’s moniker, it may be on a ballot!
P.H.
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