The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 17: September 9

Today I tried again to read Pages from the Goncourt Journals. I am reading a lot of journals and diaries right now — by Kafka, Woolf, a white Russian named Maria “Missie” Vassiltchikov, the Goncourts. The Goncourts were two brothers who aspired to be famous writers but instead only hung out with famous writers — Flaubert, Balzac, Proust, those guys. Not a shabby life, bouncing around the Paris literary scene of the nineteenth century, but a disappointing one for them. They wanted more, or rather different, fame. They wanted more timeless literary cred for their novels. Unfortunately nobody talks about their novels (not so much then, is my understanding, and definitely not now), but I have been told by many people how wonderful their journals are; how the true Goncourt genius lay, tragically, not in the many mediocre fictions they spun and co-spun, but in the reportorial acuity displayed in the journals, their bitchiness and their gossipiness.

For a long time, I did not want to read the Goncourt journals for fear that I would suffer the same fate as these pitied, embittered brothers. Their failure is a contagion to which I feel a greater susceptibility. I have been told, for example, that I “should receive a MacArthur for my e-mails.” This was meant as a compliment, but I heard it as an insult. By reading the Goncourts’ book, I risked suffering the same fate they did. After I am dead, my books of collected e-mails would be passed around and enjoyed at the expense of my other work, and every time anyone complimented my amazing books of e-mails, my accidental oeuvre, while overtly not complimenting my novels, they would do so with an implicit sigh—poor thing.

The other insecurity is reader-related. Everyone loves the Goncourt journals, they just love them! I, however, don’t love the Goncourt journals. My failure of affection has nothing to do with the period nature of their language and observations — Sei Shōnogan, the famous Japanese courtesan and author of The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnogan, is older than the Goncourts by a few thousand years, and I totally relate to everything she writes. I just don’t understand what’s so great about the Goncourts, even though I’ve tried to read them repeatedly, and I’ve traveled with them to other states and other countries, because I don’t want to miss my chance. Suddenly, here, in the Balkans for a literary festival, because of the perfect collision of barometric pressure, and air/water density, the smell of this burning trash, I will understand their greatness!

Today, however, I decided my failure has nothing to do with air pressure. I will never understand. But I wanted a good reason to abandon these Goncourts for good. I found one on page 18, which proves how little traction I ever got in their book. Which proves I did not give the Goncourts a fair shake before I concluded, definitively, that it was okay for me to give up on them. On page 18 the Goncourts write,

Woman is an evil, stupid animal. She is incapable of dreaming, thinking, or loving. They can’t create any poetry or things of that nature except what they are educated to create. The female mind is inherently inferior to the masculine mind. Women are also overly self assured, which allows them to be extremely witty with nothing but a little vivacity and a touch of spontaneity. Man on the other hand is endowed with the modesty and timidity which woman lacks. Women are unbearable if they try to act educated and on the same intellectual level as men.

To object to this kind of antique woman-hating, on principle, would make me too humorless to be endured. Who cares if the Goncourts hated women; so did everyone back then. So probably does everyone now; I suspect the Goncourtian attitude toward women, give or take many conscious degrees of vitriol, to be shared by a few of my friends’ husbands, all of whom I’m fond of, in my way. I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they’re pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter. I recall a time in my midtwenties dating career when a suitor, typically around the third date, would give me a James Salter book. Salter articulated these suitors’ internal lives (or their fantasy of their internal lives) without their needing to. Inside, they saw themselves as earnestly arty fighter pilots with souls too deep for any girl to plumb. Salter was their intimacy shortcut. They could hand me a Salter book — supposedly a “gift”—and say without saying, This is me. I might someday say stuff like “Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they’re ready to leave.” I appreciated the overture; it prompted me to be expedient in breaking off with these men. Salter helped me see so clearly the unendurable life these men and I would have together, not ever laughing about totally unfunny things.