Later that night, as I reflected on the interview it began to look a little different. The conversation had been designed as an intellectual duel, a score-settler: Who knows more about the Russians? Who has read more translations of Chekhov, of Tolstoy, of the apparently near-untranslatable Gogol? Who could better pronounce Russian words? Eugene Onegin, anyone? Herzen? Not as easy as you might think. They were on the cusp of a debate on the state of Russian thinkers and writers—Remnick arguing that there were none today near to the generation Stoppard writes of in his trilogy, Stoppard countering with the journalists who risk their very lives writing in Russia now—when the talk turned. But maybe it had been more than a debate. Maybe they disagreed about almost anything, on principle.
By the next morning I’d decided the two men despised one another—why was Remnick always interrupting, and content to end their conversation on a rare inarticulate moment from Stoppard on contemporary American theater? Why did Stoppard insist on replying to a series of questions from Remnick on influence, “The premise is wrong,” as though his questioner were an illiterate who knew nothing of art? They began to seem not two dazzling intellectuals, but two steaming vats of neurotic psychology. They were Bill Clinton on Barack Obama. They were gorillas, smacking the ground in front of them and bearing their considerable gums.
But still, I felt impressed. It was impressive, having what lurks below on display. After all, we’re all steaming vats of neurotic psychology (or, at least, we should be: my mother taught me young that if you weren’t neurotic you weren’t interesting so what hope did I have? Unfortunately, the corollary doesn’t hold—you can also be neurotic and uninteresting, the lethalest of combos). Hence the problem of interpretation. No doubt my evolving reading of the evening told more of my vat than either Stoppard’s or Remnick’s. It’s hard to see for all the murk.
I keep thinking about this night of men being knowledgeable about Russians in concert with the way in which the media has written about Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama of late. I keep thinking of the debate over Michelle Obama’s victory-night dress (googling this phrase brings me to an article on MSNBC’s website, which tells me that though “Critique wasn’t universal,” according to a USA Today poll, 65 percent of those surveyed thought she’d “had an off day”). I keep thinking of the endless reporting on Sarah Palin’s spending spree.
I like clothing as much as (maybe more than) the next girl. I have opinions—strong ones, even—about Michelle Obama’s Narciso Rodriguez dress, and Sarah Palin’s Valentino jacket. And yet.
Perhaps I’ve been thinking about gender roles (a vaguely repellent phrase) more than usual because I am currently a housewife. My mother gets upset when I use that word (more evidence of its complexity—as though we needed it), and I am not only a housewife: I read and write and contribute to society in modest ways. But for now, my husband works a lot, and I work a little; he makes a nice income, and I do not; he leaves his underwear hanging by his towel in the bathroom, and I put it in the laundry. I take a certain comfort in this domestic labor, and in a Marxist sense our household is functioning efficiently and well.And yet. Am I, in worrying over the state of my home, in folding, and washing, and analyzing piles of clutter with great intensity, guaranteeing that indeed I will never know as much as David Remnick and Tom Stoppard? In this time of under-employment, why am I not studying the multiple translations of difficult Russians, but rearranging my furniture? Why am I not becoming expert in anything beyond my own little realm? Am I hiding my murky vat of psychology—which really might serve me well in the hostile world—under a bushel?
When we talk about Virginia Woolf’s feminist writing we remember the room of one’s own. Less so, do we recall the accompanying 500 pounds a year she urged as a necessity for women writers (and that was 1929—in 2008 pounds, no mean sum). Perhaps this is because rooms are easier to come by than generous, sustaining stipends, particularly stringless ones. Woolf writes, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry.”
Of course, more women do write poetry now. But have we, in light of $150,000 wardrobe overhauls, overcome the material poverty, while maintaining the intellectual one? Or do we still have both to contend with? In recent days, mothers on the social messaging website Twitter took arms against an online Motrin commercial, and by opposing, ended it. The seemingly innocuous ad featured a woman's good-natured, harried voice complaining of back pain from carrying her child in a sling—I was going to add that within this community slings are as debatable as Russian thinkers, then stopped myself for the snark of it, then decided the observation was also factually accurate. As one “tweeter” quoted in The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Aren’t there more substantive and meaningful issues where you could direct your combined will?” For women, the refuge and the trap of domestic work is easily all consuming, and has a way of obscuring the outside world. Perhaps it does come down to the vulgar matter of coin. If the world does not reward one’s pursuits, one begins to feel a reciprocal indifference to its affairs.
By beginning with Stoppard and Remnick I do not mean to suggest that they are complicit in some sort of repressive sexual politics (though a glance at the Table of Contents of my Election Special edition of The New Yorker reveals the name of one woman, Joan Acocella, among a slew of brainy men). Rather, I hold them up as good examples of men of the world being men of the world. From this well-kempt apartment, it seems something to aspire to.
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