The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 78: May 17

Today I sat next to an eighty-nine-year-old man at dinner named Mr. Pym. He seems, like Dick Cavett, to have known all of the most interesting human beings of the twentieth century. He was not a name-dropper so much as a man who didn’t, by virtue of his lifestyle, know a single unfamous person save his own mother (who was, he thrice repeated in his Georgian accent, “a wonderful woman”; he was haunted, daily, he said, by the unkind words he’d said to her as a boy). When asked by an architect (seated to my other side) if he’d lived his life joyfully or angrily, Mr. Pym replied, “I should have been more angry.” He was too nice, he said, and primarily defined himself as an avoider of conflicts. He was too nice, even, to fire people, he said; “I just wait for them to die.” But then he confessed that he’d considered hiring a murderer from Russia to kill an employee who was making his life hell. “It would only have cost about $3,000,” he said.

For such a conflict-avoiding man, he revealed, through his stories, a fairly consistent aggressive streak. He was, he said, the only person whose advice the writer Mary McCarthy had ever taken. (McCarthy was not a person, apparently, to whom one gave advice.) He’d visited her house in Maine while doing a photo essay on her town and its buildings. (This was the same town with the white house ordinance where Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Elizabeth Hardwick lived.) McCarthy’s house was hidden by a pair of trees. He said to her neighbor, “If I had some overalls and a chain saw, I’d take these trees down myself.” His remark was reported to McCarthy. “He’s right,” she apparently said. The trees came down. Later Mr. Pym mentioned going to the theater with the poet Marianne Moore. Over dinner, this man told Moore about his mother’s house down south (also, it seemed, his house). He hated this house. He wanted to get rid of his mother’s house and move a house from a hundred miles away to the spot her house currently occupied. His own mother would be displaced while this house swapping occurred. He asked Moore what he should do. Live with the terrible house? Or destroy it, make his mother homeless, and truck in, from a distance, the house he desired?

Moore apparently replied, “Mr. Pym, sometimes one must be ruthless.”

I’m sure Mr. Pym, this too-nice man, was often ruthless. I think a lot of self-defined nice people are ruthless. I do not consider this a cynical stance. I consider it a realistic understanding of the word “nice.” If a nice person is famous or successful — and plenty are — that person is not so nice that they are above heeding the logic of status improvement. Right now I am reading a nonfiction book in which a certain poet is portrayed (within the normal range of such things) as ambitious and calculating. I was frankly relieved to discover she was ambitious and calculating because, a few months earlier, I’d read her memoir. She’d presented herself as an angel, a guileless art angel. Her passive approach seemed to implicitly criticize people who had to actually try to succeed. She’d just made art alone in her crappy loft. Fame had found her.

But fame hadn’t. Fame doesn’t. Recently a writer I know expressed irritation with another quite famous writer’s claim that she’d just been a mother, and she’d just sat at her kitchen table writing stories while her kids napped, and that she had no ambition at all. “That’s bullshit,” this irritated writer said. “So an editor decided to randomly phone this housewife and ask her for some stories?”

I’m messily conflating ambition and not-niceness here. To some, to me, I guess, there’s a connection. To be ambitious — to exert one’s self-interested desires beyond the scope of one’s own head — could be seen as impolite. As not nice. I have always been nice; I have been told by others how nice I am. The one person who does not think I’m nice is me. This is because I am ambitious and competitive, and so I must be not nice to someone in order for my otherwise niceness to feel authentic. I am not nice to myself by believing I must pay more than others, and sometimes for others. When I go out to lunch with a person, I must always pay the entire check; splitting isn’t allowed, and I will never permit another person to pay for me. I sometimes think my sense that I must pay comes from growing up in Maine. The five purely beautiful summer days per year are mortgaged hard against months and months of mud and ice and damp. The Maine weather instills in one’s psyche a seasonal rhythm of payment. Of the cost of joy coming due.