J.C.H. Mounsey London SW13
We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says, What are you thinking? and I say, Beauty, thinking of how very far we are now from the machine shop and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons of slate skies and the muted passions of roughnecks and scrabble farmers drunk and romantic enough to weep more or less silently at the darkened end of the bar out of, what else, loneliness, meaning the ache of thwarted desire, of, in a word, beauty, or rather its absence, and it occurs to me again that no male member of my family has ever used this word in my hearing or anyone elses except in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer. By God, Henry, thats a beauty. This insight, this backward vision, first came to me as a young man, a boy really, as some weirdness of the airwaves slipped through the static of our new Motorola with a discussion of beauty between Robert Penn Warren and Paul Weiss at Yale College. We were in Kansas eating barbecue-flavored potato chips and waiting for Father Knows Best to float up through the snow of rural TV in 1963. I felt transported, stunned. Here were two grown men discussing beauty seriously and with dignity as if they and the topic were as normal as normal topics of discussion between men, such as soybean prices or why the commodities market was a suckers game or Oklahoma football or Gimpy Neiderland almost dying from his hemorrhoid operation. They were discussing beauty and tossing around allusions to Plato and Aristotle and someone named Pater, and they might be homosexuals. That would be a natural conclusion, of course, since here were two grown men talking about beauty instead of scratching their crotches and cursing the goddamned government trying to run everybodys business. Not a beautiful thing, that. The government. Not beautiful, though a man would not use that word. One time my Uncle Ross from California called my moms Sunday dinner centerpiece lovely, and my father left the room, clearly troubled by the word lovely, coupled probably with the very idea of California and the fact that my Uncle Ross liked to tap-dance. The light from the venetian blinds, the autumn, silver Kansas light laving the table that Sunday, is what I recall now because it was beautiful, though I of course would not have said so then, beautiful, as so many moments forgotten but later remembered come back to us in slants and pools and uprisings of light, beautiful in itself, but more beautiful mingled with memory, the light leaning across my mothers carefully set table, across the empty chair beside my Uncle Ross, the light filtering down from the green plastic slats in the roof of the machine shop where I worked with my father so many afternoons, standing or crouched in pools of light and sweat with men who knew the true meaning of labor and money and other hard, true things and did not, did not ever, use the word beauty.Late November, shadows gather in the shops north end, and Im watching Bobby Sudduth do piecework on the Hobbs. He fouls another cut, Motherfucker, fucking bitch machine, and starts over, sloppy, slow, about two joints away from being fired, but he just doesnt give a shit. He sets the bit again, white wrists flashing in the lamplight and showing botched, blurred tattoos, both from a night in Tijuana, and continues his sexual autobiography, Thats right, fucked my own sister, and Ill tell you, bud, it wasnt bad. Later, in the Philippines, the clap: As far as Im concerned, any man who hasnt had V.D. just isnt a man. I walk away, knowing I have just heard the dumbest remark ever uttered by man or animal. The air around me hums in a dark, metallic bass, light spilling like grails of milk as someone opens the mammoth shop door. A shrill, sullen truculence blows in like dust devils, the hot wind nagging my blousy overalls, and in the side yard the winch truck backfires and stalls. The sky yellows. Barn sparrows cry in the rafters. That afternoon in Dallas, Kennedy is shot.
This academic satire is about two professors and their families. Howard Belsey is a white secular liberal, a specialist in Rembrandt, who is engaged in ideological warfare with a visiting professor, Monty Kippes, a conservative Christian scholar from Trinidad. Each character in the story is undermined by his or her self-deceptions. Howards attachment to theoretical knowledge seems to preclude understanding or controlling his adulterous behavior. Smith brilliantly draws these and other characters and gently but wittily pierces their illusions and pretensions. Howards African-American wife, Kiki, is one of the few characters to offer emotional or moral ballast, along with her son Jerome, who rejects his parents secularism for a newfound Christianity.
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