Striking the notes of casualness and geniality that are his trademarks, Brendan Gill is far from claiming any serious purpose for the sketches of old acquaintances that make up A New York Life: Of Friends and Others. Instead, he reports that while attending a memorial service for the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams it occurred to him that "for me, a professional writer, remembering that past is a sad-happy act that is also a duty." But whereas it is understandable that Gill would feel a duty to preserve his recollections of famous people - Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Parker, Eugene O'Neil, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Buster Keaton - he obviously had different reasons for writing the more numerous accounts of obscure lives that appear in his book - Henry Mali, Jay Rousuck, Mary and Ben Bodne.
To some extent his motive seems to have been no more complicated than the habit he evidently shares with the columnist Joseph Alsop: "As he grew older," Gill writes, "Joe turned, as most writers do, inward; he began to recount telltale anecdotes about his own kind, which he defined as the 'Wasp Ascendancy.'" But "telltale anecdotes" suggests juicy gossip, and Gill's anecdotes turn out to be better described as telling, in the sense of being significant or meaningful. Like Alsop's, they concern the chronicler's own comfortably well-off class. But Gill, without saying so, is actually offering an apologia for his class.
The Wasp ascendancy has, of course, hardly been neglected by American writers. But it rarely gets talked about without disparagement. After all, it is not advisable in a democratic society to write admiringly about the rich, lest one be marked out as a snob and a toady. Gill certainly runs this risk, as when he holds up the society photographer Zerbe as a model. As Gill himself puts it, Zerbe spent upwards of half a century depicting attractive people on delightful occasions-christenings, birthday parties, debuts, weddings, hunt breakfasts, costume balls, cocktail parties, dinner parties, supper parties, yacht races, picnics, clambakes, croquet and tennis matches, theatre opening, and excursions to fashionable resorts and watering places.
At first glance it seems not merely inadvisable but positively self-deluded of gill to maintain that his own editing of Zerbe's photographs has assured the photographer "a just place in the history of his time." But Gill understands the apparent outrageousness of his claim. "Christenings and weddings aside," he concedes, "these occasions might strike the historian's eye as trivial." But he then offers two justifications of the lives of the people he has written about. First, "the sorry truth that much of history is an account of mankind at its worst is reason enough to offer as footnotes at the bottom of the page a few glimpses of mankind at its best, or at any rate at its merriest." Second, "even this late in the twilight of the twentieth century, most of us are brought up with a nineteenth-century puritan distrust of good times, and particularly of other people's good times." The first reason represents the typically mild and genial, New Yorker-ish Brendan Gill: the memoirist who has recaptured merry times (he uses the word merry more than once) and offered snapshots of people at their best. But the second reasons harbors a more challenging assertion.
Democratic prejudices against class
The twentieth century has seen the intellectual triumph of ressentiment - the distrust of
...
Read Full Article
|
