Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. In newspapers. In columns in newspapers. Special columns devoted to the personal papers of literary men. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn’t want to read a book by Ruskin. This man very often writes about his family life.
Is he a fool? No. Absolutely not. He is doing what is appropriate. He is following a sound instinct. Instinct is so important. You have to go with the gut feeling. The gut feeling is that nothing could matter less than Ruskin. The guy feeling is that there isn’t any grid to support Ruskin. The two grids left are the grid of enormous success—the grid of two hundred million—and the tiny, tiny baby grid of you and me and baby and baby’s problems and my problems and your problems and can we keep even this little baby grid together?
And comfort? What is comfort? It’s focus. You bring this grid together with that grid, you get the images to overlap, and suddenly things have a bit of focus, as in a certain sort of 35mm camera. What shall we bring together? The two grids. You and me and baby and baby’s problem breathing and the grid of two hundred million. It is such a comfort. So it is a comfort when the literary man who knows no Ruskin tells us how it feels in his marriage when a friend brings home a pretty young girl. And it is a comfort when a comedienne whom we know, whom we love, whom we’ve known for years and years, whom we’ve loved for years and years, tells us that there has been a drug problem in her family. Suddenly, the grids merge. You and me and baby and drugs together on the grid of two hundred million. It’s so intimate. It’s like waking up with a friend. But just for a minute.
—George W.S. Trow, Within The Context of No Context, 1981, Little, Brown. Originally published in The New Yorker; republished by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1997, with introductory essay “Collapsing Dominant”
I think I want to read this book.
You really should.
“No one, now, minds a con man. But no one likes a con man who doesn’t know what we think we want.”
Yeah, Bill, you’ll dig it.
It took me some time with it to appreciate that the things about it I was finding infuriating…the deliberately hermetic, gnomic perspective delivered with such confidence in its essential correctness…was part of what made it noteworthy as LITERATURE as such. And then of course there’s the fact that he predicts Dan Kois. Oy.
It’s kind of poignant, too the way he takes it all so damn personally. Definitely an odd duck of letters.
Trow was quite an interesting character. He was into black guys – the more louche the better.
His script for James Ivory’s Savages, co-written with Michael O’Donahue, is a thing of beauty.
He was wrong about Ruskin, however, as Proust has demonstrated.
Ordered.
“I began to read Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and this … enraged my father, who was a disciple of John Stuart Mill’s. One night a quarrel over Ruskin came to such a height that in putting me out of the room he broke the glass in a picture with the back of my head. Another night when we had been in argument over Ruskin or mysticism, I cannot now remember what theme, he followed me upstairs to the room I shared with my brother. He squared up at me, and wanted to box, and when I said I could not fight my own father replied, ‘I don’t see why you should not.’”
– William Butler Yeats
O SAVAGES, o mores! Really amazed no one discusses that tripped-out basal haymaker of a class war satire more. It does sorta stand out, distinct-like, from the rest of Ivory’s work, kinda like SLAVES OF NEW YORK that way, only with more loincloths and painting licking. Plus Joe Raposo’s standard tinkly faux-ragtime score which, if you grew up hearing its like in the background of seemingly every episode of SESAME STREET as I did, gives SAVAGES an even more disjunctive effect. I’ve always wanted to see Sam Waterson introduce the film and maybe inform an audience precisely how many metric tons of LSD was required to unleash the freakery that threatens to overwhelm the proceedings by the end like a production of MARAT/SADE that starts to take its themes a mite too seriously. Of course, Trow and O’Donoghue first met in the golden era of National Lampoon, which was easily for those first five years and fitfully for almost another decade the greatest achievement in satire this nation has ever seen. Then they up and made a Chevy Chase vehicle from a terrible John Hughes NatLamp story, whereupon not even Mission of Burma nor Last Exit could prevent the 80’s from sucking.…
Here’s the skinny on Trow
http://nymag.com/news/features/29442/
The piece David E. just linked to could in some ways almost be about Whit Stillman: “Trow recognizes in Ertegun (or projects onto him) something that was also fundamental to his own human project: that he ‘was made restless by the thought he had *missed it*, that authority had drained from the figures he most admired and from the aesthetics he most wanted to master.’ ”
I beg to differ. Whit Stillman is straight and as far as I know not inclined to destructive relationships or suicide attempts.