A Friend Writes

Not all was downbeat in traditional publishing this past year, especially in the magazine category. Maybe it’s because I can’t shake some old habits, but the enjoyment from reading, in an armchair, a full-length story in a quality weekly or monthly is preferable to skimming it online. This puts me at odds with the rest of the family, who download “The Office” each week and sit in front of a medium-sized Mac screen much like old-timers used to gather around tiny television sets in the mid-20th century.

One recent example was Tad Friend’s superb mini-memoir in the Dec. 18 New Yorker, “The Playhouse: My mother, at home,” the equivalent of reading transcripts from sessions with a shrink. It reminds one of a John Cheever short story, minus the excessive boozing and secret sexual interests. What was particularly unique about Friend’s soul-baring piece was the raw deviation from traditional, and stereotypical, Wasp buttoning-up when it comes to revealing thoughts about family. Friend doesn’t seem extremely close or connected with his relations, although he’s not malevolent, which made the reading all the more riveting. He writes about the blueblood family’s slow loss of the “old money” that, at least to me, was similar to the anecdotes I’d hear from buddies in college, all products of elite prep schools who are probably now, in their early 50s, holding down responsible jobs with sizable incomes but without the taken-for-granted amenities of their youth.

Friend’s article isn’t a riches-to-rags whine by any means; he appears relatively happy and isn’t emptying piggy banks to scavenge for bus or subway fares. His father, still living, was once president of Swarthmore College and is introduced this way: “In our family, he was in charge of logic and money. He husbanded our declining fortunes [if one can say that still maintaining a second home in Wainscott, Long Island, is “declining”]—a decline that, as he recognized, mirrored the broader, Wasp ebb, the outflow of maids and grandfather clocks and cocktail shakers brimming with gin.”

I’ve no idea if Friend succumbs to the sin of envy, but it’s probably true that the sort of people he describes might regard as “vulgar” the recently announced $53.4 million bonus that Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd C. Blankfein just pocketed for his 2006 efforts. The Goldman Sachs record payouts don’t bother me at all, although I’m sure The New York Times stable of affluent yet populist Big Thinkers must be aghast, ignoring the benefits to the city’s economy.

Two details in “The Playhouse” struck me as fascinating. The first, as the journalist provides an expansive portrait of a class of Americans that now wields less social, political and economic clout than even 50 years ago is a real rib-tickler. Friend writes: “When you marry two families, the Friends and the Piersons [his late mother’s clan], that have lived for generations in houses with dumbwaiters and coal scuttles and all manner of oddities, the marriage carries with it a staggering heritage of bric-a-brac that has no bearing on modern life—the junk DNA that gets handed down alongside the useful genes. Our inherited silver alone included mint-julep spoons, bouillon spoons, demitasse spoons, a stuffing spoon, a berry spoon, a pea spoon, sugar tongs, a butter pick, a pickle fork, a lettuce fork, a cocoa pot, salt tubs, and an egg warmer.”

He says that most of this plunder was gradually sold but that some items remain with the family. For Friend’s sake, and his family’s future generations, I hope the pickle fork and berry spoon aren’t trundled off to a pawnbroker any time soon.

The second bit of Friend’s confessional (for that’s what it would certainly be termed by aghast old-line Wasps) that stuck out was the poignant quasi-resolution he arrived at with his mother, a few years before she died. Tad, now middle-aged, was visiting his mother at Thanksgiving in 1999, and she criticized the analysis he’d been in for four years. (One off-putting sentence: “For Wasps, we spent a lot of time murmuring to Jews.”) This angered the son and he told his mother that if she’d spend more than two years in therapy a long time ago she “might even have felt you could have children.”

My oh my, that’s the kind of rejoinder I can’t possibly imagine saying to my own late mother, who, like Elizabeth Pierson Friend, was treated for cancer at the University of Pennsylvania. Anyway, crusty Lib then complained that her two sons and daughter were taking their sweet time in presenting her with grandchildren, saying that she’d always envisioned a house full of kids in her dotage, with all the family living nearby. “And why do you think that is,” Tad said, finally breaking her down.

“She began to cry. I felt sorry, and guilty, and started crying myself. [The dog] trotted into the room then and looked worriedly back and forth. She gathered him up and wept into his fur.”

Near the end of “The Playhouse,” Friend recalls his wedding day at the Wainscott home and, touchingly, describes his mother’s preparations, worried that the September event would be marred by a hurricane. As it turned out, it was a gorgeous day, and “[My mother] danced on the lawn until the last song, adoring it all.”

Don’t get me wrong: This was not a three-hanky read. Still, while parts of Friend’s piece were depressing and not wholly devoid of name-dropping, by and large it was perhaps the most absorbing and even uplifting article I’ve read in the past six months. It was The New Yorker at its finest, waging perhaps the losing battle that some writing is best consumed not hurriedly in front of a computer screen but in more comfortable surroundings.