Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The other three days are spent jumping horses at an exclusive club in the fashionable but integrated Boston suburb where he and Lalah live. And how they live! Surrounded by the most extensive array of electrical gadgets outside of Hammacher-Schlemmer: electronic ice crushers, wine coolers, bedside machines which make synthesized sea noises, automatic egg-decapitators, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, automatic cocktail shakers, lawn mowers which move by remote control, hedge clippers programmed to make topiary designs, whirlpools which whirl the bathwater around, bidets which swirl the toilet water around, lighted shaving mirrors which pop out of the wall, color TV sets concealed behind framed copies of the most banal modern graphics, and a bar which pops out of the wall in the foyer when the front doorbell rings. The doorbell, by the way, plays the first few bars of “When the Saints Come Marching In"—Bob’s one and only concession to negritude. With all these gadgets and horses and three cars (one for each of them, and one for their white South American housekeeper), we all assumed that they hadn’t time even to consider having children—to my parents’ relief, I suppose. Arab grandchildren are one thing, but at least they have straight hair. However we were wrong. Lalah was, in fact, on fertility pills for two years (as she later informed us and all the newspapers), and last year gave birth to quintuplets. The rest (as they say) is history. You may even have seen the Time Magazine article about the “Goddard Quints” in which they were described as “cute, coffee-colored, and quite an armload.” “Wow!” reacted Mother Lalah Justine Goddard (née White), twenty-four, when told she had given birth to quints. And now Lalah and Bob have their hands full with broken bones, gadgets, horses, social climbing, and the quints (who, incidentally, they named the most ordinary names they could think of: Timmy, Susie, Annie, Jennie, and Johnnie). And Dr. Bob is making more money than ever, since it appears that having mulatto quints is the greatest way of building up a medical practice since Vitamin B shots. As for Lalah, she writes me once a year to ask why I don’t stop “farting around with poetry” and “do something meaningful” like have quints. After Randy’s Arab and Lalah’s Negro and my first husband’s conviction that he was Jesus Christ, my parents were actually quite relieved when I married Bennett. They had nothing whatsoever against his race, but they greatly resented his religion: psychoanalysis. They suffered from the erroneous impression that Bennett could read their minds. Actually, when he looked most penetrating, ominous, and inscrutable, he was usually thinking about changing the oil in the car, having chicken noodle soup for lunch, or taking a crap. But I could never convince them of that. They insisted on thinking that he was looking deep into their souls and seeing all the ugly secrets which they themselves wanted to forget.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The city of Beirut itself is all right, but not as gorgeous as you’d think, to hear Pierre talk about it. Nearly everything is new. There are hundreds of white cornflakes-box-shaped buildings with marble terraces, and everywhere the streets are being ripped up for new construction. It’s unbearably hot and humid in August and whatever grass there is has turned brown in the sun. The Mediterranean is blue (but not bluer than the Aegean—no matter what Pierre says). From some angles, the city looks a little like Athens—minus the Acropolis. A sprawling Oriental city with new buildings springing up beside ruined-looking old ones. What you remember are Coca-Cola signs next to mosques, Shell stations advertising gas in Arabic, ladies in veils riding in the backseats of curtained Chevrolets and Mercedes-Benzes, droning Arabic music in the background, flies everywhere, and women in miniskirts and teased blond hair promenading down Hamra Street where all the movie marquees advertise American movies and the bookstores are full of Penguins, Livres de Poche, American paperbacks, and the latest porno novels from Copenhagen and California. It seems that East and West have met, but instead of producing some splendid new combination, they’ve both gone to the dogs. The whole family was waiting for me at Randy’s apartment—all except my parents, who were in Japan but were expected any day. Despite her numerous pregnancies, Randy continued to act as if she were the first woman in history to have a uterus. Chloe was moping around waiting for letters from Abel (they had been going steady since she was fourteen). Lalah had dysentery and made sure that everyone heard all the details of every attack—including the color and consistency of the shit. The children were wild from all the visitors and attention and kept galloping around the terraces cursing at the maid in Arabic (which caused her to pack her bags and resign at least once a day). And Pierre—who looks like Kahlil Gibran in his own self-flattering self-portraits—wandered around the vast marble-floored apartment in his silk bathrobe and made lewd jokes about the old Middle Eastern custom by which the man who marries the oldest sister is entitled to all the younger ones too. When he wasn’t regaling us with old Middle Eastern customs, he was reading us translations of his poetry (all Arabs write poetry, it seems) which sounded very vanity press to me: My love is like a sheaf of wheat bursting into flower. Her eyes are topazes in space… “The trouble is,” I said to Pierre over syrupy Arabic coffee, “sheaves of wheat don’t usually burst into flower.” “Poetic license,” he said solemnly.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘You live in this house, you have to help out with family stuff,’ said Kiki, getting down to fundamentals in order to defend a decision whose unfairness she had already privately registered. ‘That’s the deal. You don’t pay any rent here.’ Zora brought her hands together in penitent prayer. ‘That’s so gracious, thank you. Thank you for letting me stay in my childhood home.’ ‘Zoor, don’t start messing with me this morning – I mean it, don’t even – ’ Without anyone noting it, Howard had entered the room. He was fully dressed, even shoed. His hair was wet and combed backwards. It was maybe the first time in a week that Howard and Kiki had stood in the same room like this, albeit ten feet apart, and now with full eye-contact, like two formal, unrelated, full-length portraits turned so as to face each other. While Howard asked the  the anatomy lesson kids to leave the room, Kiki took her time, looking. She saw differently now; that was one of the side-effects. Whether the new way of seeing was the truth, she couldn’t say. But it was certainly stark, revelatory. She saw every fold and tremble of his fading prettiness. She found she could muster contempt for even his most neutral physical characteristics. The thin, papery, Caucasian nostril holes. The doughy ears sprouting hairs that he was careful to remove and yet whose ghostly existence she continued to catalogue. The only things that threatened to disturb her resolve were the sheer temporal layers of Howard as they presented themselves before her: Howard at twenty-two, at thirty, at forty-five and fifty-one; the difficulty of keeping all these other Howards out of her consciousness; the importance of not being sidetracked, of responding only to this most recent Howard, the -year-old Howard. The liar, the heart-breaker, the emotional fraud. She did not flinch. ‘What is it, Howard?’ Howard had just finished ushering his resistant children out of the room. They were alone. He turned round quickly, his face a very nothing. He was at a loss as to what to do with his hands and feet, where to stand, what to rest upon. ‘There’s no ‘‘it’’,’ he said softly, and pulled his cardigan around himself. ‘Particularly. I don’t know what that question means. It? I mean . . . obviously, there’s everything.’ Kiki, feeling the power of her position, re-established her folded arms. ‘Right. That’s very poetic. I guess I’m just not feeling too poetic right now. Is there something you wanted to say to me?’ Howard looked to the floor and shook his head, disappointed, like a scientist getting no data from an elaborately set-up experiment. ‘I see,’ he said finally and made as if to return to his study, but then turned back at the door. ‘Umm . . . Is there a time when we could talk, properly? Like human beings. Who know each other.’ For her part, Kiki had been waiting for a hook. That would do.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  From here he could keep an eye on both ends of the street and the mouth of the station. A few minutes later he looked up and saw the man he assumed he was waiting for, rounding the corner of the next street. To Howard’s eye, which fancied itself attuned to these things, he looked African. He had that ochre highlight in his skin, most visible where the skin was in tension with bone – at the cheekbones and across the forehead. He wore leather gloves, a long grey topcoat and a dark blue cashmere scarf tied smartly. His glasses were thin-rimmed and gold. His shoes were an item of interest:  kipps and belsey very grubby trainers of the flat, cheap kind Howard felt sure Levi would never wear. As he came closer to the station, he slowed down and began to cast his eyes around the small gathering of people waiting for other people. Howard had thought himself as instantly recognizable as this Michael Kipps, but it was he who had to come forward and hold his hand out. ‘Michael – Howard. Hi. Thanks for coming to get me, I wasn’t – ’ ‘Find it OK?’ Michael cut in with extreme shortness, nodding at the station. Howard, who didn’t understand the point of this question, grinned stupidly back at him. Michael was quite a bit taller than Howard, which Howard was unused to and disliked. He was broad too; not that freshman muscle that Howard saw in his classes, the kind that begins at the top of the neck and makes young men trapezoid, no, this was more elegant than that. A birthright. He’s one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is ‘noble’. Howard didn’t much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers. ‘This way, then,’ said Michael, and took a step forward, but Howard caught him by the shoulder. ‘Just going to get these – new passport,’ he said, as the photos were delivered to the chute, where an artificial breeze began to blow on them. Howard reached for his pictures, but now Michael’s hand stopped him. ‘Wait – let them dry – they smudge otherwise.’ Howard straightened up, and they both stood still where they were, watching the photos twitch. Although perfectly content with silence, Howard suddenly heard himself saying ‘Soooo . . .’ for a long time, with no clear idea of what was to follow ‘so’. Michael turned to him, his face sourly expectant. ‘So,’ said Howard again, ‘what is it you do, Mike, Michael?’ ‘I’m a risk analyst for an equities firm.’ Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.  On Beauty ‘Oh, I see . . . that’s very . . .

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  8. Compare De Monorchia, ii.9. See next canto.10. The Guelfs oppose the French arms and influence to the Empire. The Ghibellines take the name of the Empire in vain for factious purposes.11. Carlo Zoppo (= Charles the Lame), of Anjou, titular King of Jerusalem (see Canto xix), and actual King of Naples and head of the Guelfs of Italy. Dante is never weary of expressing his contempt for him. Many a mightier lion than Cripple Charles had had his fell torn off his back by the Imperial Eagle. 12. A forecast perhaps of some miseries that actually fell on the descendants of Charles, and of others which Dante vainly anticipated. Compare Canto ix.13. (Last five stanzas.) See Villani, vi.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva was quiet for a while, cold white puffs of air rising up off her tongue as she licked the long plastic spoon. The heating was way up. I was sweating under the fur. She stuck the McFlurry cup between her knees and continued to drive and eat. “You can take a nap in my room,” she said. “It should be quiet down there. My relatives are over, but they won’t think you’re being rude or anything. We don’t have to be at the funeral home until two.” We passed a high school, a library, a strip mall. Why anyone would want to live in a place like that was beyond me. Farmingdale State College, a Costco, five cemeteries in a row, a golf course, block after block of white picket fences with perfectly snowblown driveways and walkways. It made sense that Reva had come from a place as lame as this. It explained why she slaved away to fit in and make a home for herself in New York City. Her father, she’d told me, was an accountant. Her mother had been a secretary at a Jewish day school. Reva was, like me, an only child. “This is it,” she said as we pulled into the driveway of a tan-colored brick house. It was ranch-style and small, probably built in the fifties. Just by looking at it from the outside, I could tell that it had wall-to-wall carpeting, humid, sticky air, low ceilings. I imagined cabinets full of crap, flies flurrying around a wooden bowl of brown bananas, an old refrigerator covered in magnets pinning down expired coupons for toilet paper and dish soap, a pantry packed with cheap store-brand foods. It looked like the opposite of my parents’ house upstate. Their house was an eerily spare Tudor Colonial, very austere, very brown. The furniture was all dark, heavy wood, which the housekeeper polished religiously with lemon-scented Pledge. Brown leather sofa, brown leather armchair. The floors were varnished and shiny. There were stained-glass windows in the living room and a few large waxy plants in the foyer. Otherwise it was colorless inside. Monochromatic drapes and carpets. There was very little to catch your eye

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I pulled one of the Infermiterol samples Dr. Tuttle had given me from the pocket of my fur coat. I was curious if Reva would respond to it the same way I had. “What are these?” “Samples.” “Samples? Is that legal?” “Yes, Reva, of course it’s legal.” “But what is this, In-fer-mit-er-ol?” She looked at the box and tore it open. “It’s a numbing aid,” I answered. “Sounds good. I’ll try anything. Do you think Ken still might love me?” “No.” I watched her face flash with fury, then cool. She shook out a pill and held it in the palm of her hand. Was her face at a deviant angle? Was everyone’s? Were my eyes crooked? Reva bent over and picked a hair elastic up off the floor. “Can I borrow this?” I nodded. She put the pill down and fixed her hair. “Maybe I could look it up when I get home. In-fer-mit—” “Jesus. It’s fine, Reva. And you can’t look it up,” I said, although I’d never tried. “It’s not on the market yet. Psychiatrists always have samples. The drug companies send them. That’s how it works.” “Does she ever get Topamax samples? Skinny pills?” “Reva, please.” “So you’re saying it’s safe.” “Of course it’s safe. My doctor gave me it.” “What does it feel like?” “I can’t really say,” I said, which was the truth. “Hmmm.” I couldn’t be honest with Reva. If I’d admitted to having blackouts, she would have wanted to discuss it endlessly. I couldn’t stand the prospect of watching her shake her head in horrified awe, then try to hold my hand. “Tell me everything!” she’d cry, salivating. Poor Reva. She might actually have thought I was capable of sharing things. “Friends forever?” She’d want us to make some sacred pact. She always wanted to make pacts. “Let’s make a pact to have brunch at least twice a month. Let’s promise to go for a walk through Central Park every Saturday. Let’s have a daily call-time. Will you swear to take a ski trip this year? It burns so many calories.” “Reva,” I said. “It’s a sleeping pill. Take it and go to sleep. Give yourself a break from your Ken obsession.” “It’s not an obsession. It’s a medical procedure. I’ve never had an abortion before. Have you?” “Do you want to feel better or not?” “Well, yeah.” “Don’t leave the house after you take it. And don’t tell anyone about it.” “Why? Because you think they’re illegal? Because you think your doctor is some kind of drug dealer?” “God, no. Because Dr. Tuttle gave the Infermiterol to me, not you. People aren’t supposed to share medications. If you have a heart attack, it would trace back to her. I don’t want to mess up my relationship with her over some lawsuit. Maybe you shouldn’t take it.” “Do you think it could hurt me to take it? Or hurt the baby?” “You care about hurting the baby?”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “I miss you,” she said, her voice cracking a little. Maybe she thought those words would break through to my heart. I’d been taking Nembutals all day. “We probably shouldn’t be friends,” I told her, stretching out on the sofa. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I see no reason to continue.” Reva just sat there, kneading her hands against her thighs. After a minute or two of silence, she looked up at me and put a finger under her nose—something she did when she was about to start crying. It was like an Adolf Hitler impression. I pulled my sweater over my head and grit my teeth and tried not to laugh while she sputtered and whined and tried to compose herself. “I’m your best friend,” she said plaintively. “You can’t shut me out. That would be very self-destructive.” I pulled the sweater down to take a drag of my cigarette. She batted the smoke out of her face and fake coughed. Then she turned to me. She was trying to embolden herself by making eye contact with the enemy. I could see the fear in her eyes, as though she were staring into a black hole she might fall into. “At least I’m making an effort to change and go after what I want,” she said. “Besides sleeping, what do you want out of life?” I chose to ignore her sarcasm. “I wanted to be an artist, but I had no talent,” I told her. “Do you really need talent?” That might have been the smartest thing Reva ever said to me. “Yes,” I replied. She got up and ticktocked across the floor in her heels and shut the door softly behind her. I took a few Xanax and ate a few animal crackers and stared at the wrinkled seat of the empty armchair. I got up and put in Tin Cup, and watched it halfheartedly as I dozed on the sofa. Reva called half an hour later and left a voice mail saying she’d already forgiven me for hurting her feelings, that she was worried about my health, that she loved me and wouldn’t abandon me, “no matter what.” My jaw unclenched listening to the message, as though I’d been gritting my teeth for days. Maybe I had been. Then I pictured her sniffling through Gristedes, picking out the food she’d eat and vomit up. Her loyalty was absurd. This was what kept us going. “You’ll be fine,” I told Reva when she said her mother was starting a third round of chemo. “Don’t be a spaz,” I said when her mother’s cancer spread to her brain. • • •

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  9 res est, de me cognoscite, Furcifer iste, venenum praesentarium comparare sollicitus centumque aureos solidos offerens pretium, me non olim convenerat, quod aegroto cuidam dicebat necessarium, qui morbi inextricabilis veterno vehementer implicatus vitae se cruciatui subtrahere gestiret. At ego perspiciens malum istum verberonem blaterantem atque incon- cinne causificantem,certusque aliquod moliri flagitium, dedi quidem potionem, dedi ; sed futurae quaestioni praecavens non statim pretium quod offerebatur accepi, sed ‘Ne forte aliquis' inquam *Istorum quos offers aureorum nequam vel adulter repperiatur, in hoc ipso sacculo conditos eos annulo tuo praenota, donec altera die nummulario praesente compro- 488 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X remain a thing irrevocable, but he would be de- livered to the hands of the executioner. Then there arose a sage ancient of the court, a physician of good conscience and credit throughout all the city, that stopped the mouth of the pot that none might rashly cast his stone therein, saying thus before the assembly : ; “Iam right glad, ye reverend judges, that I am a man of name and estimation amongst you all the days of my life, whereby I am accounted such a one as will not suffer any person to be put to death by false and untrue accusations, neither you (being sworn to judge uprightly) to be misinformed and abused by invented lies and tales of a slave. For I cannot but declare and open my conscience, lest I should be found to bear small honour and faith to the gods: wherefore I pray you give ear, and I will shew you the whole truth of the matter. You shall understand that this servant, which hath merited to be hanged, came one of these days to speak with me, promising to give me a hundred crowns if I would give him a present poison, which would cause a man to die suddenly, saying that he would have it for one that was sick of an incurable disease, to the end he might be delivered from all his torment. But I, perceiving that the varlet was talking foolishness and telling a clumsy tale, and fearing lest he would work some mischief withal, gave him a potion, yea, I gave it; but to the intent I might clear myself from all danger that might happen, I would not presently take the money which he offered: but lest any one of the crowns should lack weight or be found counterfeit, I willed him to seal the purse wherein they were put with his manual ring, whereby the next day we might go together to the goldsmith to try them. This he did, 489 LUCIUS APULEIUS bentur. Sic inductus signavit pecuniam, quam ex- inde ut.iste repraesentatus est iudicio, iussi de meis aliquem curriculo taberna promptam afferre, et en ecce perlatam coram exhibeo. Videat et suum sigillum recognoscat: nam quemadmodum eius veneni frater insimulari potest quod iste comparaverit ? "

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  15 Talis illa mulier miro me persequebatur odio: nam et antelucio recubans adhue subiungi machinae novicium clamabat asinum, et statim ut cubiculo primum processerat insistens iubebat incoram sui plagas mihi quam plurimas irrogari et, cum tempestivo prandio. laxarentur iumenta cetera, longe tardius applicari praesepio iubebat. Quae saevitia multo mihi magis genuinam curiositatem in suos mores ampliaverat: nam et assiduo plane commeantem in eius cubiculum quendam sentiebam iuvenem, cuius et faciem videre cupiebam ex summo studio, si tamen 422 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX to the intent your ears may be delighted in hearing the same, and I do now begin it. The baker which bought me was an honest and sober man, but his wife the most pestilent woman in all the world, in so much that he endured with her many miseries and afflictions to his bed and house, so that I myself did secretly pity his estate and bewail his evil fortune: for there was not one single fault that was lacking to her, but all the mis- chiefs that could be devised had flowed into her heart as into some filthy privy; she was crabbed, cruel, cursed, drunken, obstinate, niggish, covetous in base robberies, riotous in filthy expenses, an enem, to faith and chastity, a despiser of all the gods whom others did honour, one that affirmed that she had instead of our sure religion an only god by herself,’ whereby, inventing empty rites and ceremonies, she deceived all men, but especially her poor husband, delighting in drinking wine, yea, early in the morning, . and abandoning her body to continual whoredom. This mischievous quean hated me in such wonder- ful sort that she commanded every day, before she was up, that I, the new ass, should be put in the mill to grind: and the first thing which she would do in the morning, when she had left her chamber, was to see me cruelly beaten, and that I should grind and be kept from the manger long after the other beasts did feed and take rest. When I saw that I was so cruelly handled, she gave me great desire to learn her conversation and her life; for I saw oftentimes a young man, which would privily go into her chamber, whose face I did greatly desire 1 It is supposed that Apuleius represents this abandoned woman as a Christian, and so expresses his dislike and con- tempt of the new religion. 428 LUCIUS APULEIUS velamentum capitis libertatem tribuisset meis ali- quando luminibus ; nec enim mihi sollertia defuisset ad detegenda quoquo modo pessimae feminae flagitia. Sed anus quaedam stuprum sequestra et adulterorum internuntia de die cotidie inseparabilis aderat, cum qua protinus ientaculo ac dehinc vino mero mutuis vicibus velitata seaenas fraudulentas in exitium miserrimi mariti subdolis ambagibus con- struebat. At ego, quamquam graviter suscensens errori Fotidis, quae me dum avem fabricat, perfecit asinum, isto tamen vel unico solacio aerumnabilis deformitatis meae recreabar, quod auribus grandis- simis praeditus cuncta longule etiam dissita facillime sentiebam.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  The Baker which bought me was an honest and sober man; but his wife was the most pestilent woman in all the world, insomuch that he endured many miseries and afflictions with her, so that I my selfe did secretly pitty his estate, and bewaile his evill fortune: for she had not one fault alone, but all the mischiefes that could be devised: shee was crabbed, cruell, lascivious, drunken, obstinate, niggish, covetous, riotous in filthy expenses, and an enemy to faith and chastity, a despise of all the Gods, whom other did honour, one that affirmed that she had a God by her selfe, wherby she deceived all men, but especially her poore husband, one that abandoned her body with continuall whoredome. This mischievous queane hated me in such sort, that shee commanded every day before she was up, that I should be put into the mill to grind: and the first thing which she would doe in the morning, was to see me cruelly beaten, and that I should grind when the other beasts did feed and take rest. When I saw that I was so cruelly handled, she gave me occasion to learne her conversation and life, for I saw oftentimes a yong man which would privily goe into her chamber whose face I did greatly desire to see, but I could not by reason mine eyes were covered every day. And verily if I had beene free and at liberty, I would have discovered all her abhomination. She had an old woman, a bawd, a messenger of mischiefe that daily haunted to her house, and made good cheere with her to the utter undoing and impoverishment of her husband, but I that was greatly offended with the negligence of Fotis, who made me an Asse, in stead of a Bird, did yet comfort my selfe by this onely meane, in that to the miserable deformity of my shape, I had long eares, whereby I might heare all things that was done: On a day I heard the old bawd say to the Bakers wife:

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I had been asked by a new magazine to observe all the fun and games of the Congress closely and to do a satirical article on it. I began my research by approaching Dr. Smucker near the galley, where he was being served coffee by one of the stewardesses. He looked at me with barely a glimmer of recognition. “How do you feel about psychoanalysis returning to Vienna?” I asked in my most cheerful lady-interviewer voice. Dr. Smucker seemed taken aback by the shocking intimacy of the question. He looked at me long and searchingly. “I’m writing an article for a new magazine called Voyeur,” I said. I figured he’d at least have to crack a smile at the name. “Well then,” Smucker said stolidly, “how do you feel about it?” And he waddled off toward his short bleached-blond wife in the blue knit dress with a tiny green alligator above her (blue) right breast. I should have known. Why do analysts always answer a question with a question? And why should this night be different from any other night—despite the fact that we are flying in a 747 and eating unkosher food? “The Jewish science,” as anti-Semites call it. Turn every question upside down and shove it up the asker’s ass. Analysts all seem to be Talmudists who flunked out of seminary in the first year. I was reminded of one of my grandfather’s favorite gags: q: “Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?” a: “And why should a Jew not answer a question with a question?” Ultimately though, it was the unimaginativeness of most analysts which got me down. OK, I’d been helped a lot by my first one—the German who was going to give a paper in Vienna—but he was a rare breed: witty, self-mocking, unpretentious. He had none of the flat-footed literal-mindedness which makes even the most brilliant psychoanalysts sound so pompous. But the others I’d gone to—they were so astonishingly literal-minded. The horse you are dreaming about is your father. The kitchen stove you are dreaming about is your mother. The piles of bullshit you are dreaming about are, in reality, your analyst. This is called the transference. No? You dream about breaking your leg on the ski slope. You have, in fact, just broken your leg on the ski slope and you are lying on the couch wearing a ten-pound plaster cast which has had you housebound for weeks, but has also given you a beautiful new appreciation of your toes and the civil rights of paraplegics. But the broken leg in the dream represents your own “mutilated genital.” You always wanted to have a penis and now you feel guilty that you have deliberately broken your leg so that you can have the pleasure of the cast, no? No!

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The male reviewer, grateful to be served this lovable, delicious novel (each chapter garnished with epigraphs), embarrasses himself with digestive rumblings. While intimacy with Isadora Wing is maintained, the reader accepts the value she puts on her own story: a reconciliation of the hunger at the poles of her being, a triumph, if precarious, over aerophobia and the socially conditioned guilt and slavishness that lie beneath it. At a little remove, however, the story can be viewed as that of a spoiled young woman who after some adventures firmly resolves to keep on spoiling herself. She bounces about on a ubiquitous padding of money: her parents were well-to-do, her first husband’s parents were able to pay for private treatment of his madness whose “fees were about $2000 a month,” Charlie Fielding lived on a trust fund, both her present lover and her husband are psychiatrists, with the subliminal affluence of that priestly profession. To be sure, the middle class has problems, too, and most novels are written about them, but as an instance of sexist oppression Isadora Wing should be recognized as a privileged case, with no substantial economic barriers between her and liberation, and (by her own choice) no children, either. Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin’s elegiac novel of female revolt, The Awakening, was a mother as well as a wife, and drowned herself to escape the impasse between her personal artistic identity and her maternal obligations. Childless, with an American Express card as escort on her pilgrimage and with a professional forgiver as a husband, Isadora Wing, for all her terrors, is the heroine of a comedy. On the back jacket flap, Mrs. Jong, with perfect teeth and cascading blond hair, is magnificently laughing, in contrast to the somber portrait that adorns her two collections of poetry. Rather disconcertingly, not only does Isadora Wing, like Erica Jong, write poetry but she writes Ms. Jong’s poetry, two samples of which are in this book. And the reader of Fruits & Vegetables (1971) and Half-Lives (1973) has already encountered Isadora Wing’s fractured leg and burgeoning crow’s-feet, her multicolored notes to herself and the trail of sequins one of her gowns leaves, her mother’s avocado tree behind her mother’s avocado-colored couch, her mad first husband and her fondness for likening human cheeks to willow tips for softness, her irritated observation of Braque and Utrillo prints in psychiatrists’ offices, and her quotation of Sylvia Plath’s question “Is there no way out of the mind?” In some of the poems of Half-Lives, the husband and lover of Fear of Flying are distinctly silhouetted, and in the earlier collection the sequence entitled “Flying You Home” presents the removal of “Brian Stollerman” to a California hospital in a slightly different light—more moving and ominous than what we find in the corresponding chapter of the novel, where the incident seems one more of the long string of zany mishaps that comprise Isadora Wing’s amorous education.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Kiki spotted the subject of her question, Claire Malcolm, turning away from a stall selling massage oils. Claire looked confused for a moment, panicked almost, but then raised a hand, smiling. In response Kiki gave Claire the long-distance look of surprise and swept her hand up and down to signify the change in Claire, a little green sundress instead of her winter staples of black leather jacket, black polo neck and black jeans. Thinking about it, she hadn’t seen Claire Malcolm since the winter. Now she was speckled a toasty Mediterranean brown, the pale blue of her eyes intensified by the contrast. Kiki signalled to her to come over. The Haitian man, having fastened Kiki’s anklet, dropped his hands and looked anxiously at her. ‘Warren, just wait one minute – let me just do this – how much again?’ ‘Fifteen. For this fifteen.’ ‘I thought you said ten for a bracelet – Warren, sorry about this, just one minute – didn’t you say ten?’  kipps and belsey ‘This one fifteen, please, fifteen.’ Kiki hunted in her purse for her wallet. Warren Crane stood beside her, with his hefty head, too large for that neatly muscular blue-collar New Jersey body, his beefy sailor arms crossed and a whimsical look on his face, like that of an audience member waiting for the comedian to get on stage. When you are no longer in the sexual universe – when you are supposedly too old, or too big, or simply no longer thought of in that way – apparently a whole new range of male reactions to you come into play. One of them is humour. They find you funny. But then, thought Kiki, they were brought up that way, these white American boys: I’m the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of their childhoods, the pair of thick ankles Tom and Jerry played around. Of course they find me funny. And yet I could cross the river to Boston and barely be left alone for five minutes at a time. Only last week a young brother half her age had trailed Kiki up and down Newbury for an hour and would not relent until she said he could take her out some time; she gave him a fake number. ‘You need a loan, Keeks?’ asked Warren. ‘Sister, I could spare you a dime.’ Kiki laughed. She found her wallet at last. Money dealt with, she said goodbye to the trader. ‘That’s pretty,’ said Warren, looking down her and then up her again. ‘As if you needed to get any prettier.’ And this is another thing they do. They flirt with you violently because there is no possibility of it being taken seriously.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Choo clasped his friend around his shoulders and had the gesture returned. ‘Your brother,’ he said affectionately, ‘thinks of all his brothers. That’s why we love him – he’s our little American mascot. He fights shoulder to shoulder with us for justice.’ ‘I see.’ ‘Take one,’ said Levi, and pulled a double-sided piece of paper printed like a newspaper from his voluminous back pocket. ‘You take this, then,’ said Jerome, handing him the Herald in return. ‘It’s Zora. Page . I’ll get another one.’ Levi took the newspaper and forced it into his pocket. He tucked the last lump of burger into his mouth. ‘Cool – I’ll read it later . . .’ Which meant, Jerome knew, that it would be found torn and screwed up with the rest of the trash in his room a few days from now. Levi handed the dog over to Jerome. ‘Jay, actually – I got something I gotta do just now – but I’ll see you later . . . you coming to the Bus Stop tonight?’ ‘Bus Stop? No . . . no, um, supposedly Zora’s taking me to some frat party or other, down in – ’ ‘Bus Stop tonight!’ said Choo over him and whistled. ‘It will be incredible! You see all those guys?’ He pointed to their silent companions. ‘When they get on stage, they tear up everything .’ ‘It’s deep,’ confided Levi. ‘Political. Serious lyrics. About struggle. About – ’ ‘Getting back what is ours ,’ said Choo impatiently. ‘Taking back what has been stolen from our people.’ Jerome winced at the collective term. ‘It’s profounding,’ explained Levi. ‘Deep lyrics. You’d really be into it.’ Jerome, who doubted this very much, smiled politely. ‘Anyway,’ said Levi, ‘I’m out.’ He touched fists with Choo and each of the men in the doorway.  on beauty and being wrong Last was Jerome, who received not a touched fist, nor the hug of Levi’s younger days, but rather an ironic chuck on the chin. Levi crossed the square. He went through Wellington’s main gate, across the quad, out the other side, into the Humanities Faculty site, into the building, along the halls, into the English Department, out the other side, down another hallway, and arrived finally at the door of the Black Studies Department. It had never struck him before how easy it was to walk these hallowed halls. No locks, no codes, no ID cards. Basically, if you looked even vaguely like a student, nobody stopped you at all. Levi shouldered open the Black Studies door and smiled at the cute Latino girl on the desk. He walked through the department, idly mouthing the names on each door. The department had that last-Friday-before-a-vacation feeling – people hurrying to finish off their odds and ends. All these industrious black folk – like a mini-university within a university!

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I’ve noticed, anyway, that unless a man is a bona fide genius, a Harvard education is a permanent liability. Not so much what they learn there, but what they presume about themselves ever after—the albatross of being a Harvard man: the aura, the atmosphere, the pronunciation problems, the tender memories of the River Charles. It tends to infantilize them and cause them to go dashing about the corridors of advertising agencies with their ties flapping behind them. It causes them to endure the dreadful food and ratty upholstery of the Harvard Club for the sake of impressing some sweet young thing with the glorious source of their B.A. Charlie had this Harvard impediment. He had graduated with a straight C– average and yet he always felt incredibly superior to me with my Phi Beta Kappa from grubby déclassé Barnard. He felt that at Harvard he had been touched with the brush of refinement, that despite all his failures in the world, he was still (a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus should sing out this phrase) a Harvard Man. Most mornings, Charlie slept until noon, then got up and had breakfast at one of the dairy restaurants left over from the old immigrant-neighborhood days. But two mornings a week he dragged himself out of bed at nine and took the subway uptown to a music school where he taught piano and conducted a choral group. The money he earned from this work was negligible, but he lived mainly on the income from a trust fund his father had set up for him. He was terribly furtive about the amount of his income, as if it were a dirty secret. Still, I always assumed that if it hadn’t gone against the grain of his stinginess, he could have lived somewhat less grubbily than he did. There was, however, a dirty family secret and maybe that was what made the money so embarrassing. Charlie’s family had met with money by way of Charlie’s Uncle Mel—the famous pseudo-WASP ballroom dancer who glided through the 1930s with patent-leather hair and a fixed nose and a dancing shikse wife. Mel Fielding had made a lifelong career of keeping his Jewishness secret, and he agreed to share his wealth with the family only on the condition that they fix all their noses too and change their names from Feldstein to Fielding. Charlie refused to comply with the nose, but took the name. Charlie’s father, however, did amputate half his nose (with the result that he wound up looking like a Jew with an absurdly small nose). But the main thing was that the Feldsteins left Brooklyn and turned up in the Beresford (that gilded ghetto, that pseudocastle) on Central Park West.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  And because Howard had conceded willingly, it was easy for Kiki to be gracious. And so here, on the first landing, we have a large representation of one of the English Belseys, a charcoal portrait of Howard’s own father, Harold, hanging as high up the wall as is decent, wearing his flat-cap. His eyes are cast downward, as if in despair at the exotic manner in which Howard has chosen to continue the Belsey line. Howard himself was surprised to discover the picture – surely the only artwork the Belsey family had ever owned – among the small bundle of worthless bric-a-brac that came his way upon his mother’s death. In the years that followed the picture has lifted itself out of its low origins, like Howard himself. Many educated upscale Americans of the Belseys’ acquaintance claim to admire it. It is considered ‘classy’, ‘mysterious’ and redolent in some mystifying way of the ‘English character’. In Kiki’s opinion it is an item the children will appreciate when they get older, an argument that ingeniously bypasses the fact that the children are already older and do not appreciate it. Howard himself hates it, as he hates all representational painting – and his father. After Harold Belsey follows a jolly parade of Howard himself in his seventies, eighties and nineties incarnations. Despite costume changes, the significant features remain largely unchanged by the years. His teeth – uniquely in his family – are straight and of a similar size to each other; his bottom lip’s fullness goes some way  kipps and belsey towards compensating for the absence of the upper; and his ears are not noticeable, which is all one can ask of ears. He has no chin, but his eyes are very large and very green. He has a thin, appealing, aristocratic nose. When placed next to men of his own age and class, he has two great advantages: hair and weight. Both have changed little. The hair in particular is extremely full and healthy. A grey patch streams from his right temple. Just this fall he decided to throw the lot of it violently forward on to his face, as he had not done since  – a great success. A large photo of Howard, towering over other members of the Humanities Faculty as they arrange themselves tidily around Nelson Mandela, shows this off to some effect: he has easily the most hair of any fellow there.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Or are they awful?’ ‘Do you think he’ll bring his whole family?’ ‘Honey, I really don’t know. Probably not. But if they do come, we’re all going to have to be real grown up about it.’ ‘You’re tripping if you think I’m hanging around.’ ‘Good,’ said Kiki with facetious cheeriness. ‘You can go back to Brown, problem solved.’ ‘No, I mean . . . like maybe I’ll go to Europe or whatever.’ The absurdity of this plan – economically, personally, educationally – was debated loudly here in the middle of the road, while the Thai woman who ran the stall grew nervous about the weight of Kiki’s elbow as it pressed down beside a pyramid display of her useful little men. ‘So I’m just meant to sit around like an asshole – pretend nothing happened, is that it?’ ‘No, it means we’ll deal it with politely as a family who – ’ ‘Because of course that’s the Kiki way of dealing with trouble,’ said Jerome over his mother. ‘Just ignore the problem, forgive and forget, and poof, it’s gone away.’ They stared at each other for a moment, Jerome brazen and Kiki surprised at his brazenness. He was, temperamentally, traditionally, the mildest of her children, the one she had always felt closest to. ‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ said Jerome bitterly. ‘He only ever thinks of himself. He doesn’t care who he hurts.’ ‘My vagina / In Carolina / Is much finer / Than yours,’ said Ron, walking close (Claire felt) to the racial line, with his exaggerated impression of the girl’s feisty head movements and sing-song intonation. But the class fell into hysterics, Zora leading the laughter and so, in a vital way, sanctioning it. Of course, thought Claire, they’re less sensitive about all that than we were. If it were  this room would be as silent as a church. Through the laughter and conversation, the ordering of drinks, the opening and closing of toilet doors, the girl kept going. After ten minutes the fact that the girl was not good stopped being amusing and began, as Claire heard her students put it, ‘getting old’. Even the most supportive members in the audience stopped nodding. Conversation grew louder. The MC, who sat on a stool by the side of the stage, switched his mike on to intervene; he begged them for quiet and attention and respect, this last word having some currency in the Bus Stop. But the girl was not good, and soon enough the chatter started up again.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Have I the right hunch or have I the wrong? Will it be Bach I shall hear or just a Cole Porter song? —Cole Porter, “At Long Last Love” (1938) harlie Fielding (“Charles” when he signed his name) was tall and stoop-shouldered and looked like the Wandering Jew. His nose was enormously long and hooked and had flaring nostrils, and his small down-turned mouth always wore a sour expression, somewhere between contempt and melancholy. His skin was sallow and unhealthy-looking, and had been ravaged by acne which still troubled him from time to time. He wore expensive tweed sport coats which hung on his shoulders as if on wire hangers and the knees of his trousers bagged. The pockets of his old Chesterfield were distended with paperback books. From his worn pigskin briefcase, the point of a conductor’s baton protruded. If you had seen him on the subway or eating a solitary dinner in Schrafft’s (where he charged the bills to his father’s account), you would have supposed, from his expression, that he was in mourning. He was not—unless he was mourning in advance for his father (whose money he was due to inherit). Sometimes, while waiting for his dinner to arrive (creamed chicken, hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream), he would take an orchestral score from his briefcase and, holding his baton in his right hand, would begin to conduct imaginary musicians. He did this with perfect unself-consciousness and apparently without any desire to be conspicuous. He was simply oblivious to the people around him. Charlie (his mother had named him for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Charlie was, after all, a Jewish prince) lived alone in a one-room apartment in the East Village. The same neighborhood his poor ancestors had lived in two generations before. The venetian blinds were laden with greasy black soot, and grit crunched under your feet as you walked across the bare floor. The surroundings were Spartan: a pullman kitchen whose cupboards were always bare except for boxes of dried apricots and bags of hard candy, a rented piano, a single bed, a tape recorder, a portable record player, two cartons of records (which had never been unpacked since he brought them from his parents’ house two years before). Outside the window was a fire escape overlooking a sooty courtyard and across it lived two middle-aged lesbians who sometimes neglected to draw the blinds. Charlie had that defensive contempt for homosexuals which people often have when their own sexuality is an embarrassment to them. He was horny all the time, but he was terribly afraid of being vulgar. His Harvard education had been designed to extinguish all the vulgarity glowing deep down in his genes, and though he wanted to get laid, he did not want to manage it in a way that would make him appear crude—either to himself or to the girls he tried to seduce.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Umbrellas, like dead birds after a shooting party, pile up in the far corner. Professors and research fellows and visiting lecturers gravitate towards the long tables at the back of the room. These are laid out with pastries wrapped in cellophane and steaming pots of coffee and decaf in their steel industrial tankards. Faculty meetings – especially those chaired by Jack French, as this one will be – have been known to go on for three hours. The other priority is to try to get a chair as near the exit as possible, so as to enable discreet departure halfway through. The dream (so rarely achieved!) is that one might then be able to leave both early and unnoticed.  On Beauty By the time Howard arrived at the doors of Keller Library all escape-route seating had already been taken. He was forced right up to the front of the room, directly underneath the portrait of Helen and six feet from where Jack French and his assistant Liddy Cantalino were fussing over an ominously large pile of paper, spread out across two empty chairs. Not for the first time at a faculty meeting, Howard wished himself as sensorially deprived as Keller herself. He would give a lot not to have to look at Jane Colman’s pointy little witch face, her mane of parched frizzy blonde hair and the way it thrust out from beneath the kind of beret you find in the ‘Be a European!’ ads in the New Yorker . Ditto the student favourite: -year-old, already tenured Jamie Anderson, specialist in Native American history, with his expensive tiny laptop, which he now balanced on the arm of his chair. Most of all Howard wished he could not hear the poisonous mutterings of Professors Burchfield and Fontaine, two portly grandes dames of the History Department, squeezed up together on the only sofa, wrapped in their swathes of curtain fabric, and presently giving Howard the evil eye. Like Matrushka dolls they were almost identical, with Fontaine, the slightly smaller of the two, seeming to have sprung fully formed from the body of Burchfield. They sported utilitarian bowl cuts and bulky plastic eyewear dating back to the early seventies, and yet they remained radiant with the almost sexual allure that comes with having written – albeit fifteen years ago – a handful of books that became set texts in every college in the country. No faddish punctuation for these gals: no colons, no dashes, no subtitles. People still spoke of Burchfield’s Stalin and Fontaine’s Robespierre. And so in the eyes of Burchfield and Fontaine, the Howard Belseys of this world were mere gadflies, flitting from institution to institution with their fashionable nonsense, meaning nothing, amounting to nothing.