A Day at the Beach
Wolff, Geoffrey
4 4 hT e reason I lied as a young man," Geoffrey Wolff has written, "was the same reason my fiction was so awful: I didn't know that anything had happened to me." Astonishing—his life has been more...
...Perhaps he really is still unaware that anything has happened to him...
...And why does Wolff give us a pseudonymous mystery man when he's merely rehashing old material about a non–public figure...
...weren't the kind of guys who ratted us out...
...Wolff is a bit less sanguine about the behavior of the staggering Vermont farmers who attend a girly show in "At the Fair...
...Andrew, in fact, is one John Douglas...
...Wolff has some interesting drinking buddies...
...For Andrew is such a typical communist (with a small "c") that he doesn't stop being a communist until some of the hippies he's been sharing his Vermont farm with suggest he share the farm's title as well...
...His stepmother's first husband was an early developer of LSD...
...That's exactly what you're gonna see...
...T he heart-attack narrative has be- come an American literary staple, and Wolff's title piece—in which he weaves his cardiac history into an account of a nightmare vacation in Sint Maarten—stands up well against Philip Roth's and Howard Moss's, to name just a couple...
...We all made our own from 180-proof grain alcohol...
...A quick leafing through an almanac and a Who's Who will reveal his father as James Henderson Douglas, Jr., Ike's secretary of the Air Force from 1957 to 1959...
...CI...
...The sisters at Rejans, working with the same raw material, worked alchemy...
...The Duke of Deception, Wolff's memoir of his father, is a non-stop picaresque of dodging creditors and the law in the company of a globe-trotting dipsomaniac confidence man with several aliases and a wall full of fake degrees...
...He's happier larking around, and prone to haut-preppy failings: brand-name litanies...
...The pricks who sold us out didn't wear neckties...
...Again: Why all the subterfuge...
...I'm not wearing a necktie," I said...
...smirky synonym-chasing, like saying "tits-up" for "belly-up...
...In this rich country, older writers are always in danger of mistaking the hobbies their writing success has permitted them for the adventures that allowed their writing success...
...Wolff even lets the reader in on his little equivocations: "No, I'm being flip . . ." "Not so fast . . ." "I mean to say . . ." There's a postmodern self-consciousness here, a need to tell us how he got his material and to assure us that writing, especially his own writing, is nothing special...
...And Tobias's memoir This Boy's Life...
...they served their vodka chilled and straight in silver thimbles, and none smoother anywhere ever, with a hint of the Seville oranges they were rumored to grow for no reason other than to impart to their vodka a hint of Seville orange...
...The pub crawling is relentless: Turkish vodka was awful, awful, awful...
...They're gonna shake it to the east, they're gonna shake it to the west, they're gonna shake it down the middle where you boys like it best...
...His father drank with Lon Chaney, Jr...
...A pedestrian effort on the whole, but the fact that Wolff continues to drink ("No surrender," as Henry Fairlie reportedly used to say) will cheer all tosspots who hope the game is not (quite) up...
...If the narrative doesn't exactly die after Wolff's successful open-heart surgery, then it does retire to Leisure World...
...Wolff dated not only Crabbe's daughter but also Hunter S. Thompson's ex, who tried to stab him...
...Racy, spicy, horny and red-hot...
...One: $5 Twenty-five: $75 Fifty: Five: $20 $130 Ten: $35 One-hundred: $250 (Quantity discounts apply only to orders for the same report...
...Send for your copies today...
...Wolff doesn't suffer a real myocardial infarction, only a mildly "stenosed" aortic valve, which strikes him down after he has been booked for a week into an exorbitant "resort" located at the end of a runway, paid six dollars apiece for shrimp, had all his money stolen, and been forced to share his digs with a crowd of fat tourists from Queens and their unneutered dog, whom the reader comes to know as Five-Legged Butch...
...A Day at the Beach—Wolff's uneven collection of autobiographical reminiscences—is something of an unwitting sequel...
...Shake it loose like a bucket of juice—they're gonna do it...
...was the snow clean...
...and off-color punsmanship, like translating Choate's motto Quai [surely Quae?] sivi bona tibi not as "I have sought to do thee good," but as "We seek to do thee: good...
...The Washington material echoes Bad Debts, his first novel...
...Wolff just doesn't tackle these serious emotions well, and much of the book is an apology for not having taken the high road to being a "Writer," as he puts it, in the solemn sense...
...In A Day at the Beach, he lets us know of his friendships with polemicist "Izzy" Stone, journalist "Nick" von Hoffman, critic "Al" Alvarez (yes, that's A. Alvarez's first name), and novelist "Jimmy" Baldwin...
...This log of a sailing trip in the Bahamas winds up a paean to his family—his son's seamanship and generosity, his wife's patience and insight—that reads like a pastiche of schlock genres: part-1984 Reagan campaign plug ("If I couldn't have counted on Priscilla to continue to see and say unambiguously, we wouldn't have come to this place in this way"), part-Geritol commercial ("I thought of it as her rainbow, and do...
...guys like this...
...Usually very...
...Matterhorn" is saved by an informative account of Edward Whymper's tragic ascent of the peak in 1865, but is otherwise a fairly predictable Men's-Movement-manifesto, road-nottaken piece about not climbing the Matterhorn...
...And Wolff's Princeton novel The Final Club...
...John/Andrew is an example of Wolff's annoying tendency to reuse and recycle material, a tendency familiar to buyers of Grateful Dead albums: only half the songs are ever new...
...was snow on the ground...
...The "M—t D—n" whose brother he gives a chemistry set is clearly the Margaret Dean he bought mittens for in Duke of Deception...
...Who is this A DAY AT THE BEACH: RECOLLECTIONS Geoffrey Wolff Alfred A. Knopf/259 pages/ $22 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL 56 The American Spectator June 1992 guy...
...Yeah," she said, "but you look like a guy in a necktie...
...I fell in love with her for the inexpressible reasons people fall in love"), and part–Hewlett Packard prospectus ("Imagine someone who sees things and systems whole, and who articulates preAmerican Spectator Reprints Available Copies of Michael Fumento's report on Magic Johnson and AIDS (February 1992) and David Brock's investigation of Anita Hill (March 1992) are available to American Spectator readers...
...These reports are ideal for distribution to your friends, business colleagues, teachers, and political representatives...
...After a brief introductory chapter, Wolff reintroduces us to his mercurial family (and Shep, the dog) with a yearby-year tourist's guide to his youthful Christmases, which he rates with Michelin Man–style icons: The quality and quantity of gifts received (by me) is bestowed one to four Santas...
...with a separate bedroom for me...
...The yokels in this rural noir piece, this Barthesian mythology, shout obscenities at (and perform obscenities on) a troupe of clueless women...
...It has been a point of dispute between me and people I love that I suffer from a failure of gravity...
...and Buster Crabbe...
...Wolff would probably see it as a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, but it reads more like a stop-me-if-you've-heard-this-one self-effacement...
...did we live in a house with a fireplace...
...Box 549, Arlington, VA 22216-0549 Yes, please send me: copies of Michael Fumento's "This Magic Moment" $ copies of David Brock's "The Real Anita Hill" $ Total enclosed $ Name' Address: City: State: Zip Code: RP9205 L The American Spectator June 1992 57 cisely what she sees . . . because her comprehension is a renewable resource driven by curiosity...
...He was tutored by George Steiner and R. P. Blackmur...
...Leave it at this: Wolff has an acute ear for the stomach-turning, cornball spiel of the carnival barker: You know what you wanna see, they know what you wanna see, that's what you're gonna see...
...The best line in the book—about Wolff's uncertainty whether to describe his distant mother as "a Spanish Communist exiled to Russia or a Russian princess exiled to Spain"—is another comebacker...
...Wolff can write about drinking bouts so sensually that it's no surprise where it all ends: the chapter called "Drinking" describes the late-night phone fun that all drinkers will recognize, runs for the umpteenth time through the list of American writers whowere alcoholic, and quotes Sinclair Lewis's famous poser: "Can you name five American writers since Poe who did not die of alcoholism...
...The book opens with a letter he wrote his brother Tobias from Cambridge: "We live in an age when contraception and the Bomb and rejected opportunities usurp each other as negative functions . .." A good send-up of his own youthful pretension and preciosity, but it's already in Duke of Deception...
...Maybe a childhood on the lam has inclined Wolff to undervalue the adventures he has had...
...When I met Priscilla in 1963, she was temperamentally unlike anyone I'd known...
...The most interesting character we meet, however, is "Andrew," Harvard kid, son of a "cabinet officer in Eisenhower's administration," best man at Wolff's wedding, off-the-deep-end hippie, "despotic nutritionist," and documentary filmmaker...
...That's not a good quality in a memoirist...
...The longest and last essay, "Waterway," should clearly have been lopped...
...Astonishing—his life has been more interesting than the average person's, and considerably more interesting than the average Princetonian's...
...Have no fear, these girls are here...
...ation...
...And in the third chapter, "The Sick Man of Europe," Wolff shows himself to have been very much his father's son in Istanbul—where he spent the early sixties teaching English, chasing prostitutes, and marveling at the Turkish propensity for homosexuality and autoerotic asphyxiChristopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...was Daddy .. . Drunk...
...The people Wolff loves are right...
...Hootchykootch, a red-hot ramble waiting for you...
...But Butch isn't along on Wolff's other holidays, and it's a shame...
...Andrew actually appeared as "John" in Duke of Deception...
...Their observations don't bear printing in a family magazine...
...After years of estrangement, Wolff confronts him, only to find out that Andrew has avoided him because he suspected Wolff of working for the CIA and of betraying him to the government...
...The worst finks were the coolest dudes...
...What I call quality of life [includes:] was an edible holiday feast served in a timely manner...
...Wolff is saved from obloquy by Andrew's teenage girlfriend, who tells him that Wolff is not cool enough to have been a CIA man: "Hey, Andrew...
...The American Spectator, P.O...
...Is thisall Wolff has to offer us in place of his hobo father and R. P. Blackmur...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
