Privileged Lives
MERKIN, DAPHNE
\\friters &\^iting PRIVILEGED UVES BY DAPHNE MERKIN c all her, in this instance, Natasya. It happens that she likes her real name—it is one of the nicer attributes her parents have bequeathed...
...Finally, Natasya has a strange uneasiness about the culture out of whose depths Dmitri writes and to which he is, presumably, addressing himself...
...These questions—and more—are answered in the course of Philipson's long-winded and resolutely humorless narrative...
...It is not, incidentally, Dmitri's "elite angst" that disturbs her...
...Dmitri, of course, is John Leonard's on-again, off-again pen-name when he is writing his weekly New YorkTimes column, "Private Lives...
...And who has been stealing objects from Conrad's office...
...Conrad Taylor is the vice president of a prestigious Eastern university...
...He does call his wife, "my beloved," and speaks of "the surpassing generosity of women...
...Morris Philipson's A Man In Charge (Simon and Schuster, 364 pp., $10.95) is a puzzling and inept novel...
...Moreover, Natasya has also observed that the women she knows either do or don't adore men as people (mostly don't, now that she considers it), without pronouncing upon the fact as if it deserved a gold star...
...The intricate plot lumbers noisily along, full of bizarre twists of fate that you'd been watching out for from the start, since this is the kind of story where the author steps in and tells fate what to do...
...Murdstones all...
...He has even devoted two whole columns to their care and feeding, and has proffered a tentative philosophic meliorism based on "the mere fact of kittens": "If there is a chord in us that kittens strike, maybe there's one for justice, and for mercy, for sacrifice and reciprocity, kindness and respect...
...For one, she admires his book reviews, which are often wise as well as clever, but that is by-the-bye...
...The 14-year-old son—also known as "the male child"—reads Tacitus and proclaims his atheism just in time for Dmitri to compose a column about dwindling faith and a new translation of the Gospel According to St...
...They tend, however, to go to the opposite extreme of his children and ask the kind of artfully "childlike" questions that Art Linkletter used to elicit on that long-ago television program, Kids Say theDarndest Things: "If bleeping is supposed to be something people do when they love each other, why are you always angry when you say it...
...The puzzling part is that there are interludes of great intelligence in this book, struggling to be noticed amid the debris—the patently unconvincing dialogue affixed to various unconvincing personalities, and descriptions that sound as if they were lifted from a Jacqueline Susann primer...
...Even John Travolta took unto himself a partner...
...Her long, golden hair had been swept casually but smoothly up over the crown of her head and all the outer lines of it held the light from the fireplace behind her, so that they seemed to flicker and quaver as her face remained immobile...
...Now, a nod every so often in the direction of someone else's moment in the spotlight may not seem a big deal...
...Leonard, with an autodi-dact's cunning, makes a minor art form out of dressing his column in pithy hand-me-downs...
...Then, most conspicuously, there is Dmitri's Adoration of the Female, especially startling in our age of sexual upheaval...
...Will Conrad obtain the post on the basis of his many years of devoted labor on behalf of the university...
...She is much younger than he (his first, older, wife walked out on him), exceedingly wealthy, a creature of impulse whom Conrad stalked on the slopes of St...
...They make blissful love every night, sometimes twice...
...In the spirit of fair play, Natasya would like to admit a number of things right off...
...They sound so unbearably precocious that she has wondered on occasion whether they are figments of his imagination, characters for a novel to be called And You Thought the Glass Family was Smart...
...Despite the fact that Conrad is next-in-line for the job, the President decides to appoint a Search Committee...
...She wishes Dmitri would get rid of the adolescent residue in his prose...
...Dmitri seems always to be in his milieu, and yet Natasya can't figure out who else lives in this milieu...
...A JL JL return to normalcy, then...
...Dmitri's friends have children, too...
...Natasya is too impatient to figure it out...
...Among these is "a happy way with quotes," as he remarks about the term papers of his wife's students...
...Are these plausible grounds for criticism or simply transparent rationalizations of envy...
...Could it be young Tom Spofford, his obsequious assistant, who "had a passion for success but no sense of direction...
...Natasya feels a wee bit suspicious of men who vociferously prefer women—as people—to men, because she assumes such choices are not arrived at without expectation of reward...
...Were they Mr...
...This is, you understand, the early '70s, when Search Committees were rampant throughout the land...
...If it takes two to tango, she muses, then why should John Leonard hog the floor...
...Gilbert, can come in very handy...
...The trips to Greece...
...they imply a longing to be cute on the part of people who are natively intense...
...Canned laughter, anyone...
...Although book-reviewing, to be sure, is a far less comradely enterprise, Natasya sees no reason to clunk along while Dmitri pirouettes by, the Baryshnikov of typewriter key-tappers...
...Rather it is the accoutrements of Dmitri's private life that exhaust her, the unending flow of good tastse...
...she wishes, you see, merely to return to her old, homespun self...
...Trouble brews when the provost of the university dies...
...First and foremost: She loathes (a word both more emphatic and more fearful than the simple "hate") cats, and cats are frequently slinking through thegaps between Leonard'sone-liners...
...Those damned cats...
...It is as though Philipson has shackled an observant, even Jamesian mind to a mass-market, obtuse mode of expression...
...Or will it go instead to Grant Hannover, a brash millionaire who is also a trustee and has the contacts necessary to raise much-needed funds...
...He displays here his undeniable virtues...
...They remind Natasya of Dick Cavett, whom she never feels gently toward...
...Quite a few of them are famous, to boot, but even the obscure ones are definitely crime de la creme—well-housed, well-educated, well-disposed to airings of sense and sensibility...
...Mark, written by one of Dmitri's friends...
...Dmitri, by the way, has many talented friends...
...Natasya doesn't care for Dmitri's children either...
...Obtrusions like, "Compared with Prometheus, Faust was a twerp, and everybody since Faust has been Dennis the Menace" or, "You always remember being a creep...
...she is all in favor of elite angst...
...Philipson's technique includes such antiquated devices as foreshadowing—not tactful hints of future developments, but the real, stagey stuff: "It did not occur to Conrad then that Ruby was going to get what she wanted...
...Now that 69 of these pieces have been collected in a book, Private Lives in the Imperial City (Knopf, 209 pp., $8.95), Natasya has a chance to sit back and consider the sustained performance rather than merely glimpse Leonard's efforts as they flash in the pan of her reading between subway stops...
...The wine...
...Conrad is married to Isabel of the long, golden, flickering hair...
...It could not have occurred to either of them at the moment that two weeks later Conrad would barely escape being killed...
...The tulips...
...Moritz and ultimately won when he proved himself capable of grand, impulsive (and expensive) gestures of affection...
...Its characters appear to be hacked out of granite...
...When the band has passed, though, not much remains except dim echoes of what might have been...
...A man of learning and integrity, a highly competent administrator and a loyal friend, he is in addition good-looking, sensuous, witty, and a fair skier—in short, a walking advertisement from the New York Review of Books "Personals...
...The "mature" Woody Allen, maybe...
...Aptness is as aptness does, and besides, anyone can consult a Bartlett's...
...A Man In Charge pulsates with sound and fury—and will leave many readers entranced...
...Yet she is not entirely a grouch when it comes to John Leonard...
...Still, for those who traffic in words, having quaint Dutch proverbs on tap, along with scraps of Yeats, Donne, Novalis, and W.S...
...No one she knows personally...
...This might, on the other hand, be mere contentiousness, and Leonard's column on "New York Women" is reason enough to muffle her doubts...
...It happens that she likes her real name—it is one of the nicer attributes her parents have bequeathed her—but when she reads John Leonard she feels the urge to throw away her everyday clothes and put on dancing shoes instead...
...She sympathizes with this dilemma, but believes it should be resolved by one's 30th birthday...
...As should be clear by now, Natasya is of a generally irascible constitution—being the sort of person who would rather rant than do most anything...
...You are reminded in the night...
...Although the strength is fast ebbing from her toes, Natasya has more to say...
...Natasya recalls having read somewhere that Leonard writes to the women in his audience...
...They are not real gaps, Dmitri is just pausing for breath: You try being clever—in public—sometime...
...A Man In Charge is about civilization and its discontents...
...Such well-meant ruminations cause Natasya to furrow her brow and play with her worry beads: Where in God's name (Dmitri, she has noticed, refers to the deity a lot—"I am writing a memo to God about the weather in Rochester") did that leave her—and the others like her (she hoped there were others) whose chords were permanently tone-deaf to the appeals of kittens and similar mewling creatures...
...Evidently Dmitri has been told such effects are engaging: watermarks of vulnerability that his readers will smile at in gentle recognition...
Vol. 62 • May 1979 • No. 11
