A Begrudged Truce
Nov. 16th, 2023 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraWoke up yesterday with a one-sided sore throat and a slight but palpable swelling of the associated lymph node.
Aha! I thought. I’m sick!
Which was all the excuse I needed to cancel anything remotely resembling physical exertion but not (sadly) anything resembling mental exertion ‘cause, like I say, it would be swell to finish the current Remunerative Project by the time I leave.
The current Remunerative Project is actually kinda interesting—a deep dive into various healthcare providers’ salary ranges from state to state. In healthcare, more than in practically any other industry, pricing (hence, salary) is completely arbitrary, so it’s always fun to chase the mad economic indicators through various thickets of consumption, cost of living, gross domestic product, supply, and demand, as though they actually mean something.
###
I also started plotting the D.C. festivities and activities, which made me very gleeful & buzzy indeed!
And finished reading The Secret Life of John le Carré, an awfully interesting case history.
Cornwell/le Carré seems to have been married to the dullest woman alive. A woman whose chief enticement seemed to be that she let her husband do whatever the hell he pleased with a minimum of grumbling.
Toward the end of his slim volume, Sisman describes the only solo interview he was ever allowed to conduct with Jane Cornwell. Cornwell/le Carré fled the London marital home to stalk a nearby moor—wait! there are moors in London?—while an obviously coached Jane told the biographer: No one woman can ever have all of David.
This would actually make a really funny Monty Python sketch!
###
If you scrape away the layers from Cornwell/le Carré’s compulsive philandering, you discover an almost archeological relic of courtly love. Sprung from the imagination of the gauchest and most sentimental of 14-year-old boys! Wordless communion of souls across every barrier time and space might conspire to erect is everything! Physical consumation—though sportingly pursued, of course!—spoils all the fun.
Sisman is good. He tracks the way these affairs were absolutely essential to le Carré’s writing process. They kinda created—I dunno, a necessarily secret world, which is the only world in which le Carré was able to get lost enough to write. As writing methodologies go, this one is fascinating.
When le Carré lost interest in philandering in his late sixties, his writing took a nosedive.
###
Immediately after Ben died, I found myself in his apartment one afternoon—and made a beeline to his computer, so I could read through his emails before access was denied.
I think this may have been the same afternoon Ben’s vengeful ghost manifested.
Cornwell/le Carré’s epistolary romances reminded me so much of Ben’s! Ben had a real gift for scuttling hermit-crab-like into a certain type of woman’s fantasies. He was not good-looking in the slightest, and to 50% of the people who met him—men and women alike—he came across as a complete nonentity. But to that other 50%...
Ben was also an exceptionally talented writer.
##
I hate thinking of myself as that “certain type of woman,” but, of course, I must have been.
A complete patsy.
Though I’m not now.
On his deathbed, Ben fought through the morphine fog to tell me, I love you.
I’m pretty sure I was still sufficiently under his thrall to see this as some kind of vindication. I’ve been too afraid to look back in my diary to read how that deathbed scene actually came down.
Thing is, he’s RTT’s father. So I could never say to Ben, Burn in hell, asshole. Which, you know, would give me some measure of delight: I am Sicilian.
I love RTT, RTT loved his father and loves his father’s memory.
So, I am forced into a begrudged truce with his father’s ghost.
Aha! I thought. I’m sick!
Which was all the excuse I needed to cancel anything remotely resembling physical exertion but not (sadly) anything resembling mental exertion ‘cause, like I say, it would be swell to finish the current Remunerative Project by the time I leave.
The current Remunerative Project is actually kinda interesting—a deep dive into various healthcare providers’ salary ranges from state to state. In healthcare, more than in practically any other industry, pricing (hence, salary) is completely arbitrary, so it’s always fun to chase the mad economic indicators through various thickets of consumption, cost of living, gross domestic product, supply, and demand, as though they actually mean something.
###
I also started plotting the D.C. festivities and activities, which made me very gleeful & buzzy indeed!
And finished reading The Secret Life of John le Carré, an awfully interesting case history.
Cornwell/le Carré seems to have been married to the dullest woman alive. A woman whose chief enticement seemed to be that she let her husband do whatever the hell he pleased with a minimum of grumbling.
Toward the end of his slim volume, Sisman describes the only solo interview he was ever allowed to conduct with Jane Cornwell. Cornwell/le Carré fled the London marital home to stalk a nearby moor—wait! there are moors in London?—while an obviously coached Jane told the biographer: No one woman can ever have all of David.
This would actually make a really funny Monty Python sketch!
###
If you scrape away the layers from Cornwell/le Carré’s compulsive philandering, you discover an almost archeological relic of courtly love. Sprung from the imagination of the gauchest and most sentimental of 14-year-old boys! Wordless communion of souls across every barrier time and space might conspire to erect is everything! Physical consumation—though sportingly pursued, of course!—spoils all the fun.
Sisman is good. He tracks the way these affairs were absolutely essential to le Carré’s writing process. They kinda created—I dunno, a necessarily secret world, which is the only world in which le Carré was able to get lost enough to write. As writing methodologies go, this one is fascinating.
When le Carré lost interest in philandering in his late sixties, his writing took a nosedive.
###
Immediately after Ben died, I found myself in his apartment one afternoon—and made a beeline to his computer, so I could read through his emails before access was denied.
I think this may have been the same afternoon Ben’s vengeful ghost manifested.
Cornwell/le Carré’s epistolary romances reminded me so much of Ben’s! Ben had a real gift for scuttling hermit-crab-like into a certain type of woman’s fantasies. He was not good-looking in the slightest, and to 50% of the people who met him—men and women alike—he came across as a complete nonentity. But to that other 50%...
Ben was also an exceptionally talented writer.
##
I hate thinking of myself as that “certain type of woman,” but, of course, I must have been.
A complete patsy.
Though I’m not now.
On his deathbed, Ben fought through the morphine fog to tell me, I love you.
I’m pretty sure I was still sufficiently under his thrall to see this as some kind of vindication. I’ve been too afraid to look back in my diary to read how that deathbed scene actually came down.
Thing is, he’s RTT’s father. So I could never say to Ben, Burn in hell, asshole. Which, you know, would give me some measure of delight: I am Sicilian.
I love RTT, RTT loved his father and loves his father’s memory.
So, I am forced into a begrudged truce with his father’s ghost.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-16 07:51 pm (UTC)And of course he loved you, up to the end! That's genuine. ...Just didn't stop him from doing every other goddamn thing he pleased, you know? (Edited to take out that last part b/c it was too much... sorry about that)
no subject
Date: 2023-11-17 01:07 pm (UTC)No doubt. And I'm tired of them. 😀
no subject
Date: 2023-11-17 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-17 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-19 07:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-19 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-19 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-19 01:42 pm (UTC)Cornwell/le Carré used to call it "secret sharing." 😀