How the puma affects others, three
Walking with the puma, especially when she was very young, I found that the young black men who use the drum space in my building would bless me and greet the baby, and the men working at the Pakistani restaurant around the corner would talk to the baby and talk to me, and the Yemeni man at the deli would never fail to ask after the baby, and in the immigration line when I landed in India, a man escorted me and the baby to the diplomats line, and said, This is how we treat a mother in India, and at a foreign train station an Ethiopian man walked me and the baby five minutes out of his way to the correct platform when I asked for directions, and on the subway, the construction workers whose shoulders the baby would reach out and pat, asking for their attention, would also play with the baby, and pretty much all women, everywhere, would smile at the baby. There was only one group, very demographable, to whom the baby — and myself with the baby — was suddenly invisible, and that was the group with which I am particularly comfortable, the youngish, white, well-employed, culturally literate male. There’s nothing inherently commendable, or deplorable, in liking, or not liking, babies, or women with babies: it is what it is. And I encountered exceptions, in all categories. But when, without a baby, you walk by hundreds of people a day for years, and then, with a baby, you walk by hundreds of people a day for months and months, you feel you have slip-slided into another strata or you feel you have gone pre-Cambrian, or, perhaps more accurately, that you are contributing, somehow, to the next geological stratum (or both at once) and you begin to wonder what formed each geological layer, and what really was the geological layer you were in before, and what is the geological layer you are in now, and how was it that each layer seemed, individually, when you were in it, to be everything. Did a meteor crash, or the climate abruptly change, or a series of volcanoes erupt? I decide the baby is like a minor climate catastrophe, or, through dumb luck, redemption, and all the people who might hold out the smallest hope that a shift could result in their life on the earth being ever so slightly better feel one way about the royal catastrophe/redemption of infants, while another group that has, more or less, nowhere to go but down, on however subconscious a level, and even however much they might consciously want to be shifted down, also don’t want to be shifted down, which is why their encounter, therefore, with the royalty of infants unavoidably bears an unwelcome message of the end of their own reign, meager or real as it may be, and so they simply avoid noticing the possibility.
Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century
Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century who write or wrote in English were or are writing from England. Or from the English commonwealth. Not as much from America. Also most of the beloved mystery novels come from England. A woman I know, who writes mysteries nowadays, mysteries that are set in Saudi Arabia and often involve a female pathologist, told me, after she sold her first mystery book, that what excited her most was having sold the book to England, where they rarely buy mysteries by Americans, being so well stocked by their own. Why are the English so drawn to mysteries? I read somewhere once — with all the diagrams and tabulations organized like cavalry — that the rise of the mystery genre in England, particularly following the Industrial Revolution, coincided with increased anxiety about social mobility. The argument pointed out, among other things, that the villains in Holmes’s stories almost invariably came from the lower classes, that Moriarty (Holmes’s archnemesis) has an obviously Irish name, and that there’s something supremely comforting about pinpointing a single criminal, about being able to say of a sense of evil just generally around: Here it is, the source, we have found it. Along these lines it is also noticed that the golden age of detective novels in England followed World War I, and the golden age of detective novels in Japan followed World War II. Usually the arc of the novels was a homicide, or a short series of homicides. It makes emotional sense that, among the unmysterious deaths of millions of one’s countrymen, one might find it soothing to focus on a mysterious one or two. The theory may not quite hold water, but has at least a dense enough weave to keep in place a few oversized bouncy balls. Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Golden Child, was a murder mystery set in a museum, written to entertain her husband as he was dying. Muriel Spark’s third novel, Memento Mori, was also a murder mystery of sorts: a series of anonymous calls going out to a circle of older people, saying simply “Remember You Must Die,” which of course they nearly all do, as they are old, and murdered by time.
Women writers
I have often in the past decade or so wanted to write something about “women writers,” whatever that means (and whatever “about” means), but the words “women writers” seemed already to carry their own derogation (sort of like the word “ronin”), and I found the words slightly nauseating, in a way that reminded me of that fancy, innocent copy of Little Women that I had received as a gift as a child but could bear neither to look at nor throw out. What was I going to say? That this or that writer was not Virginia Woolf but was similarly female? That one of my favorite contemporary novels that also happened to be by a woman was The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, and that one of the things I liked about it was that it takes so many pages into the main section before you recognize the narrator’s gender as female, and then so many pages more before you realize that the narrator of that section is a mother, in fact a single mother, who is trying to develop herself as a scholar and who tries to solve the problem of presenting a male role model to her son by setting him up to watch Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai over and over, a ridiculous but understandable plan, and that then the major section of the book is the son trying to solve the mystery of his paternity by investigating one potential father after another? It also seemed relevant to me that this brilliantly wordy and weird book actually sold many copies only because randomly — and I feel pretty sure about this, though I’m only guessing — there was a Tom Cruise film by the same title that came out around the same time as the book. I had so many little artifacts like this that seemed to point to… I didn’t know what they pointed to. I had a strong feeling that I couldn’t see the contemporary situation, and I decided that this was because firsthand knowledge is an obstacle to insight. What of the other artifacts? There were those forgotten American noir women, like Evelyn Piper of Bunny Lake Is Missing and Dorothy Hughes of In A Lonely Place and Vera Caspary of Laura (and thirty-eight other novels) and Patricia Highsmith, less forgotten, of one terrifying betrayal after another, and these oddities, and their odd obscurity, seemed to cluster around… something. As did the fact that the Feminist Press had reissued many of these books, which were otherwise out of print, and I wouldn’t have come across them save their placement on certain remainders tables. (I also felt that Gone Girl took most of its plot from Caspary’s The Man Who Loved His Wife.) Why so much crime? Why so many mysteries? Why was my copy of The Collected Works of Jane Bowles part of the Out-of-Print Masterworks series? The same was true of my copy of Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, a perfect novel about a neglected housewife in love with a giant escaped lizard man.