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Lives of Comfortable Obscurity
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17132 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1990 |
1,775 Words |
| Author
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Peter Shaw
Peter Shaw is a frequent contributor to Commentary, the
American Scholar, and other journals. He is the author of The
Character of John Adams. |
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
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