Archives for December 2003

“One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan–or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”

Norman Podhoretz, Making It

Earlier this evening, three generations of family converged on my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., there to eat dessert and talk. We’d just dined together in the banquet room of the Grecian Steak House–the first time my mother’s family has ever eaten its collective Christmas dinner in a restaurant, or at any time other than on the night before Christmas. Things went surprisingly well, too, considering that we’d torn up a half-century’s worth of family tradition in one fell swoop. Two dozen of us crammed ourselves into the living room, desserts balanced on knees, and discussed in detail all the things that small-town families like to talk about whenever they get together. (More often than not, illness is the number-one topic, closely followed by restaurants.)

I don’t know how typically American my mother’s family is nowadays, though there was a time not so long ago when we would have seemed far more typical than we do now. My mother was born and raised in the country, though not on a working farm (her father worked in a shoe factory). Most of her family lives within a two-hour drive of Smalltown and its environs. We all work for a living, pursuing a wide variety of blue- and white-collar jobs. One of us is divorced, two childless, the rest ensconced in more or less conventional nuclear families. Only about half of us have college degrees.

I’ve always been the odd man out. I’m the only member of the extended family who lives in New York City, the only one who is a member of what Joseph Epstein calls the “verbal class,” and the only one to have become seriously interested in the arts (though the wife of one of my cousins is an amateur painter whose favorite artist is John Singer Sargent). Everyone is proud of me for having made my way in the world, but only in the most general of senses, and I suspect that no more than three of my relatives, not counting my mother, read my last book.

None of this bothers me. I’m glad to be a self-made man, and I also find it surprisingly useful to have been born into a small-town family. For one thing, the experience of growing up in southeast Missouri made me a cultural realist. (I learned early on that there’s no such thing as a really famous writer.) It has also given me an understanding of Red America not shared by many New Yorkers of my acquaintance. I’ve changed a lot since I left town in 1974, but part of me remains deeply rooted in the place where I grew up. I’m like a walking, talking focus group: I almost always know what will fly in southeast Missouri, and what will flop.

Given all this, I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that I think The Great Gatsby is the great American novel, but I also have a special place in my heart for a much less well-known novel by John P. Marquand called Point of No Return. Published in 1949, it’s the story of an ambitious young boy from a small town in Massachusetts who makes his way to Manhattan, there to become the vice president of a small private bank. Point of No Return is no Horatio Alger tale–Charles Gray, the hero, is deeply alienated and riddled with self-doubt–but neither is Marquand cynical about the complex experience he portrays. He describes with great psychological sensitivity the long journey from Clyde, Massachusetts, to the suburbs of New York City, and though Point of No Return isn’t a great novel, I’ve never read any other book, whether fiction or non-fiction, that did a better job of putting the feelings of a man like Charles Gray on paper. My life wasn’t much like his, but some of my feelings were, and I always think of him–and of Clyde–whenever I spend an evening with my mother’s family.

It takes forever for me to access my e-mail via a dial-up connection, so I haven’t even looked. No doubt the bag will be overflowing by the time I return to New York on Monday, at which time I’ll see what you all wrote this week.

Incidentally, I haven’t forgotten that I promised to answer some of last week’s accumulated e-mail on the blog during my visit to Smalltown, U.S.A. I still mean to do just that, but once I got here, it struck me (perhaps wrongly!) that at least some of you might be no less interested in what I was up to out here in southeast Missouri. For those who aren’t, relief is on the way.

By way of Reflections in D Minor, an on-line quiz that purports to answer a question of the highest importance to all music-minded folk: What key signature are you?

Here’s the answer I got:

E-flat major – you are warm and kind, always there for your friends, who are in turn there for you. You are content with your comfortable life and what you are currently achieving; if you keep in this state you will go far.

Go figure.

Where are you, OGIC? The world longs to hear your voice!

Speaking of my sister-in-law (see below), I mentioned at the dinner table yesterday that I was going to Chicago next weekend. “So,” she replied, “will you be seeing the Girl?” It took me two beats before I realized that she was referring to Our Girl in Chicago.

That’s fame.

My mother, who like most septuagenarians doesn’t quite grasp what a blog is, just poked her head in my bedroom and asked, “Are you actually working on something, or are you just piddling?”

Possible answer: “Why, Mom, I’m busy shaping the cultural conversation.”

Probable response: “I’d rather you took out the trash.”

Here’s a better answer: if all of you out there in the blogosphere will be so kind as to click on this link and place an advance order for A Terry Teachout Reader (out in May from Yale University Press), then I can tell my mother I was working. Otherwise, I was just piddling.

(P.S. Even if you don’t want to order the book just yet, click on the link anyway and you can see the dust jacket!)

In case you’re just joining us, I’m blogging this week from Smalltown, U.S.A, the southeast Missouri town where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. My sister-in-law, who lives in Smalltown and reads this blog from time to time, e-mailed yesterday to inform me that she and my brother now have a high-speed modem, thank you very much. (I had previously mentioned in this space that I was having trouble getting used to the dial-up connection at my mother’s house.) Of all the new wrinkles that have come to Smalltown, U.S.A., since my last visit home, that one might just be the most significant.

I haven’t gotten around to replying to Felix Salmon’s recent comment on what I wrote about the Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcasts, but it’s relevant here, so I’ll mention it now. In case you didn’t see my posting, I was writing in response to an article by Tony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of the New York Times, in which he explained why it was a bad thing that the Met broadcasts, which have lost their corporate funding, might be in danger of cancellation. I begged to differ:

[T]he future of classical radio lies not in what has come to be called “terrestrial radio” (i.e., conventional radio broadcasting) but in satellite and Web-based radio, which make it possible to “narrowcast” a wider variety of programs aimed at smaller audiences. I suspect that’s where the Met really belongs–not on terrestrial radio. And if I had to guess, I’d say that the Tony Tommasinis of today would be more likely to listen to the Met on their computers than on high-quality radios bought by their parents.

(In his original piece, Tony had reminisced about how he’d discovered opera by listening to the Met broadcasts as a boy.)

Here’s part of Felix’s response:

The Met radio broadcasts reach 11 million people

“What is the Ninth Symphony compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a memory!”

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen