WHEN your ship leaves Honolulu they hang leis round your neck, garlands of sweet smelling flowers. The wharf is crowded and the band plays a melting Hawaiian tune. The people on board throw coloured streamers to those standing below, and the side of the ship is gay with the thin lines of paper, red and green and yellow and blue. When the ship moves slowly away the streamers break softly, and it is like the breaking of human ties. Men and women are joined together for a moment by a gaily coloured strip of paper, red and blue and green and yellow, and then life separates them and the paper is sundered, so easily, with a little sharp snap. For an hour the fragments trail down the hull and then they blow away. The flowers of your garlands fade and their scent is oppressive. You throw them overboard.
No one knew better than he that he was an important person. He was number one in not the least important branch of the most important English firm in China. He had worked his way up through solid ability, and he looked back with a faint smile at the callow clerk who had come out to China thirty years before. When he remembered the modest home he had come from, a little red house in a long row of little red houses, in Barnes, a suburb which, aiming desperately at the genteel, achieves only a sordid melancholy, and compared it with the magnificent stone mansion, with its wide verandahs and spacious rooms, which was at once the office of the company and his own residence, he chuckled with satisfaction. He had come a long way since then. He thought of the high tea to which he sat down when he came home from school (he was at St. Paul’s), with his father and mother and his two sisters, a slice of cold meat, a great deal of bread and butter and plenty of milk in his tea, everybody helping himself, and then he thought of the state in which now he ate his evening meal. He always dressed, and whether he was alone or not he expected the three boys to wait at table. His number one boy knew exactly what he liked, and he never had to bother himself with the details of housekeeping; but he always had a set dinner with soup and fish, entree, roast, sweet and savoury, so that if he wanted to ask anyone in at the last moment he could. He liked his food, and he did not see why when he was alone he should have less good a dinner than when he had a guest.
BATEMAN Hunter slept badly. For a fortnight on the boat that brought him from Tahiti to San Francisco he had been thinking of the story he had to tell, and for three days on the train he had repeated to himself the words in which he meant to tell it. But in a few hours now he would be in Chicago, and doubts assailed him. His conscience, always very sensitive, was not at ease. He was uncertain that he had done all that was possible, it was on his honour to do much more than the possible, and the thought was disturbing that, in a matter which so nearly touched his own interest, he had allowed his interest to prevail over his quixotry. Self-sacrifice appealed so keenly to his imagination that the inability to exercise it gave him a sense of disillusion. He was like the philanthropist who with altruistic motives builds model dwellings for the poor and finds that he has made a lucrative investment. He cannot prevent the satisfaction he feels in the ten per cent which rewards the bread he had cast upon the waters, but he has an awkward feeling that it detracts somewhat from the savour of his virtue. Bateman Hunter knew that his heart was pure, but he was not quite sure how steadfastly, when he told her his story, he would endure the scrutiny of Isabel Longstaffe's cool grey eyes. They were far-seeing and wise. She measured the standards of others by her own meticulous uprightness and there could be no greater censure than the cold silence with which she expressed her disapproval of a conduct that did not satisfy her exacting code. There was no appeal from her judgment, for, having made up her mind, she never changed it. But Bateman would not have had her different. He loved not only the beauty of her person, slim and straight, with the proud carriage of her head, but still more the beauty of her soul. With her truthfulness, her rigid sense of honour, her fearless outlook, she seemed to him to collect in herself all that was most admirable in his countrywomen. But he saw in her something more than the perfect type of the American girl, he felt that her exquisiteness was peculiar in a way to her environment, and he was assured that no city in the world could have produced her but Chicago. A pang seized him when he remembered that he must deal so bitter a blow to her pride, and anger flamed up in his heart when he thought of Edward Barnard.
HE splashed about for a few minutes in the sea; it was too shallow to swim in and for fear of sharks he could not go out of his depth; then he got out and went into the bath-house for a shower. The coldness of the fresh water was grateful after the heavy stickiness of the salt Pacific, so warm, though it was only just after seven, that to bathe in it did not brace you but rather increased your languor; and when he had dried himself, slipping into a bath-gown, he called out to the Chinese cook that he would be ready for breakfast in five minutes. He walked barefoot across the patch of coarse grass which Walker, the administrator, proudly thought was a lawn, to his own quarters and dressed. This did not take long, for he put on nothing but a shirt and a pair of duck trousers and then went over to his chief's house on the other side of the compound. The two men had their meals together, but the Chinese cook told him that Walker had set out on horseback at five and would not be back for another hour.
It was nearly bed-time and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight. Dr. Macphail lit his pipe and, leaning over the rail, searched the heavens for the Southern Cross. After two years at the front and a wound that had taken longer to heal than it should, he was glad to settle down quietly at Apia for twelve months at least, and he felt already better for the journey. Since some of the passengers were leaving the ship next day at Pago-Pago they had had a little dance that evening and in his ears hammered still the harsh notes of the mechanical piano. But the deck was quiet at last. A little way off he saw his wife in a long chair talking with the Davidsons, and he strolled over to her. When he sat down under the light and took off his hat you saw that he had very red hair, with a bald patch on the crown, and the red, freckled skin which accompanies red hair; he was a man of forty, thin, with a pinched face, precise and rather pedantic; and he spoke with a Scots accent in a very low, quiet voice.
Outside on the quay the sun beat fiercely. A stream of motors, lorries and buses, private cars and hirelings, sped up and down the crowded thoroughfare, and every chauffeur blew his horn; rickshaws threaded their nimble path amid the throng, and the panting coolies found breath to yell at one another; coolies, carrying heavy bales, sidled along with their quick jog-trot and shouted to the passer-by to make way; itinerant vendors proclaimed their wares. Singapore is the meeting-place of a hundred peoples; and men of all colours, black Tamils, yellow Chinks, brown Malays, Armenians, Jews and Bengalis, called to one another in raucous tones. But inside the office of Messrs. Ripley, Joyce and Naylor it was pleasantly cool; it was dark after the dusty glitter of the street and agreeably quiet after its unceasing din. Mr. Joyce sat in his private room, at the table, with an electric fan turned full on him. He was leaning back, his elbows on the arms of the chair, with the tips of the outstretched fingers of one hand resting neatly against the tips of the outstretched fingers of the other. His gaze rested on the battered volumes of the Law Reports which stood on a long shelf in front of him. On the top of a cupboard were square boxes of japanned tin, on which were painted the names of various clients.
At night on a Malaya rubber plantation a gunshot rings out. A man stumbles out of a bungalow, pursued by a woman, who empties all the chambers of her revolver into him. The moonlight reveals a distraught, gun-toting Bette Davis – this is the unforgettable opening of the 1940 version of The Letter, adapted from Somerset Maugham’s celebrated short story and play, which had been filmed several times already.
‘Reading is my chief comfort’ … Edmund White. Photograph: Dan Callister
The
Books
0fmy
life
Edmund White: ‘My earliest reading memory is a lady toad with a nasty temper’
The author on being snobbish about Proust, discovering Death in Venice, and the dark side of Waugh
My earliest reading memory
When I was four or five we had a cottage in Michigan and the previous owners had left some books behind. I was besotted with a children’s book about a lady toad with a big calico hat and a nasty temper.
My favourite book growing up A book I found in my public grade school library, illustrated, about American history. I was nine and it was in Evanston, Illinois. All I can remember is a passage about Ben Franklin in Philadelphia who, exceptionally, wasn’t a Quaker: “The friendliest friend in the City of Friends wasn’t a Friend at all.” It was a big format book with plasticised covers. I liked it because it was clever and gave me talking points.
The book that changed me as a teenager I was 12 when I read The Catcher in the Rye. That and the movie Rebel Without a Cause, which I saw when I was 15, were the first works of art that spoke to me in my own language. That both were “rebellious” without being political suited a teen in the Eisenhower years.
The writer who changed my mind When I was 16 and a very horny if guilt-ridden gay boy I read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which excited me because it was about homosexual desire, unsatisfied, which seemed right. I was being psychoanalysed, hoping to go straight. I read it on Walloon Lake in Michigan with lots of knotty pine staring at me.
The book that made me want to be a writer When I was 17 at my Midwestern boarding school I wrote an essay on Proust. I had a theory of my own: that homosexual lying, in which one heterosexualises one’s experiences and makes one’s boyfriends into girls (the so-called Albertine strategy), is a crucial step in the novelist’s development (which would explain why there are so many great gay fiction writers). To reinvent one’s own experiences and to supply the new version with convincing details and to make all those substitutions consistent (and to remember them) is already the first major step in creating, as Proust did, a sublime autofiction. Of course that theory was (and is) very self-serving.
The author I came back to I’ve read Proust several times in my life. As a teen I was pretty much faking it, only read part of it, pretended I could read French, drew the wrong conclusions from it (it is a damning critique of snobbism but reading it made me more snobbish). In my late 20s I read Proust with a group of New York friends and we drew life lessons from it and recognised our acquaintances in his characters. Finally I wrote a short biography of Proust in Paris in 1998, my last year (of 16) of living in France. This time I read Proust for the first time in French.
The book I reread Henry Green’s Nothing. First as an 11-year-old in Evanston after discovering Green’s books in the open stacks of the public library. I liked the look of them and what I thought was the simplicity of their style. Now I read it every two years as an old man. It makes me sick with laughter. It is about late-middle-age love, blithe selfishness, the rekindling of old passions, sly maneuvering among privileged adults – a treasure house of sharp dialogue and vicious scheming that leads to complete contentment.
The book I could never read again I have a book group of two with the novelist Yiyun Li. I suggested we read Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which I’d read as a student and thought was terminally sophisticated. When we tried it a year ago I thought it was antisemitic (Father Rothschild!), heavy-handed and unfunny.
The book I discovered later in life Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. I’d “read” it in my 20s in a desultory, uncomprehending way, but now I loved the Parisian social scenes, the seamless use of history, the progression d’effet, the cynicism about romantic love. I could see why Ford Madox Ford had memorised it entirely and he and Conrad studied it religiously.
The book I am currently reading The Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne, about the ancien régime, the revolution, Napoleon, the restoration, the fall of the Bourbons in 1830, etc. As a Parisian lady who knows everything about court life (Bourbon, Napoleonic and Orleanist), who is a brilliant observer and has a historian’s memory and a gossip’s relish for detail, she is the perfect witness of a chaotic moment. Now I read it between midnight and 2am.
My comfort read In my homebound loneliness, reading is my chief comfort. My comfort read is Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his illegitimate son, a dolt who he was trying to turn into a gentleman with reams of useful advice. It’s the only foreign book of manners that the French thought worth reading. Among other things it is a relic of an age when educated people spoke German, French, Italian and English and knew ancient Latin and Greek.
NBR: You are a writer, teacher, political activist, wife and mother. How do you manage so much?
Paley: I remember somebody once asking that and I gave my usual wise-guy remark: pure neglect. You know, something like that. But really, I think that any life that’s interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it. It seems to me natural that I’d be pulled in those ways. When you’ve got children, you don’t want to just hand them over to somebody. It’s interesting how children grow and you deprive yourself if you give too much of it away. I don’t mean that you don’t want to be free, you do, you want all that. But that’s again a pull, you’re pulled, and it’s only one life for Christ’s sake. And you are privileged somehow to do as much as you can. I wouldn’t give any of it up. And I’ve talked a lot about this with women’s groups because I think that in whatever is gained, that everything, that the world should be gained. But that nothing should be given up. I think a good hard greed is the way to approach life. (Laughter).
One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: "Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway." By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year's Day. She said sadly, If you come home at 4 a.m. when you're seventeen, what time will you come home when you're twenty? She asked this question without humor or meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She would not be present, she thought, when I was twenty. So she wondered.
Tearful laughter, raunchy story telling, and punchy witticisms are not the typical ingredients one expects to find in a tribute to a late literary legend. Then again, Grace Paley and ‘typical’ never met.
Last Tuesday the Center for Jewish History and Jewish Women’s Archive paid homage to the poet, short story writer and political activist, who passed away in her Vermont home in August 2007. The evening consisted of a panel discussion with excerpts from Lilly Rivlin’s new film, “Grace Paley: Collected Shorts.” The film, which premiered at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July, will be shown at a selection of upcoming festivals on the East Coast, including the New York Jewish Film Festival in January.
Celebrated short story writer and poet Grace Paley died of cancer last August at the age of eighty-four. A lifelong activist, pacifist, and an early figure in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, Paley was one of those writers who managed to combine a public life of frequent readings and appearances in support of a range of causes with work lauded for its artistic integrity. A familiar figure at writers conferences and rallies against, over the years, the war in Vietnam, nuclear proliferation, apartheid in South Africa, and the Iraq War, she was tireless in her efforts to bring injustice to light. As one of the first American writers to explore the lives of ordinary women in her work, she broke ground and served as a role model for women writers who came of age in the ‘60s and ’70s. In her writing and activism, she achieved something rare, a life in which the public persona and the private person were one.
A master of the short story, Paley excels at exposing the small regrets and ruptures that chafe and scar landsmen and kin in midcentury. Fortified by a frankness and brass-tacks approach to life tethered to a Yiddish pragmatism, her characters argue over progressive politics and struggle with social change while trying to love and live every day. Paley’s stories offer intimate, often messy personal exchanges that are compelling and familiar—sometimes achingly so.