"... she nicknamed Europe, Mr. Normalcy and Personality Plus, who all wrote back to her. This made her a less-than-attentive receptionist... Inevitably, she was fired. At home in her apartment, she began to write. At first she played amanuensis to [George W. S. Trow, the acerbic cultural critic best known for his essay 'Within the Context of No-Context'] in a pairing encouraged by Charles McGrath, then an editor at The New Yorker.... 'Yield to it,' Mr. McGrath told her, referring to Mr. Trow’s mind. 'Let it wash over you.' Together, she and Mr. Trow produced Talk of the Town pieces, the short... slice-of-life stories that helped define the magazine. He told her, 'Glimpse genuine joy, in a way, in the middle of world horror.' (She was on her way to interview a dog groomer.)... It was Tina Brown... who encouraged Ms. Rose to write about her romantic life. 'How I Became a Single Woman,' an elliptical coming-of-age tale, appeared in April 1996. (One of its more memorable lines: 'The truth is, it can be a form of actual day-to-day social torture to pretend not to notice the little dishes of poison that married people offer you all the time.') The piece caused a minor ruckus at School. Despite their nicknames, the married men were easily identifiable...."
From "Alison Rose, The New Yorker’s Femme Fatale, Dies at 81/She started as the magazine’s glamorous receptionist and became one of its more singular writers. In one of her last articles, she memorialized her time (and lovers) there" (NYT).
ADDED: Now, I'm reading "How I Became a Single Woman." Excerpt:
Anyway, the whole point is that mothers have made their own friends. Literally, they made them out of their bodies. No justifiable tristesse of mine, or, for that matter, exaltation—about a man, or a Nobel Prize in Physics I’d just won—would make any difference to one of these mothers, next to those living things she had made for herself. A friend of mine, a rich young grandmother, says that all she cares about, in the end, is “chubby arms around my neck.” I do at times think it may in fact be all that matters, but I detest the competitive way she says it and the smug moral high ground she claims for herself. I might tell her that Clark Gable and Franz Kafka called me up the other day and she’d still come around to mentioning those chubby arms around her neck.
AND: According to the NYT "the married men were easily identifiable," but I can't get ChatGPT or Grok to identify them. I pushed ChatGPT about the discrepancy, and I guess I have to accept that the married men were easily identifiable to people in that milieu at that time. Emphasis on "were" — they were easily identifiable. Now, what does it matter? These people are all dead. The anonymity of the characters in the 1996 essay has become pervasive. They are anonymous everywhere, and no one cares. But "Billy the Fish" was Burt Lancaster's son, William Henry Lancaster.
Here's Alison Rose's memoir, "Better than Sane/Tales from a Dangling Girl," commission earned, in case you need help extrapolating how beautiful Rose might have been. There's a nice photo of her on the cover.
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13 comments:
Women are never “single.”
They just vary on the amount of selfishness.
Cat ladies are the worst.
Because we are made in God’s image, we expect truth in beauty.
Because we are fallen creatures, we find it isn’t there.
"He told her, 'Glimpse genuine joy, in a way, in the middle of world horror.'"
Allison Rose?
So she fills up her sails
With my wasted breath
And each one's more wasted than the others you can bet
On Allison Road
You just keep telling us about Kafka calling you, sugar tits. I'll take chubby little arms around my neck.
Beautiful, Laurel. No irony intended.
Trow is worth reading.
It was assumed that I would have a fedora hat of my own by the time I was twelve years old. My father had had his first fedora hat at the age of nine, but he said he recognized that the circumstances of his bringing up had been different from the circumstances of mine (it was his opinion that his mother, my grandmother, had been excessively strict in the matter of dress), and he would not insist on anything inappropriate or embarrassing. He said that probably it would not be necessary for me to wear kid gloves during the day, ever. But certainly, he said, at the end of boyhood, when as a young man I would go on the New Haven Railroad to New York City, it would be necessary for me to wear a fedora hat. I have, in fact, worn a fedora hat, but ironically. Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned—not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me. I was born into the upper middle class in 1943, and one of the strange turns my life has taken is this: I was taught by my parents to believe that the traditional manners of the high bourgeoisie, properly acquired, would give me a certain dignity, which would protect me from embarrassment. It has turned out that I am able to do almost anything but act according to those modes—this because I deeply believe that those modes are suffused with an embarrassment so powerful that it can kill. It turns out that while I am at home in many strange places, I am not free even to visit the territory I was expected to inhabit effortlessly. To wear a fedora, I must first torture it out of shape so that it can be cleaned of the embarrassment in it.
Mr. Normalcy? With no other clue, I'll guess John Updike.
11:27 robother:
Same thing today with rich kids buying ripped jeans, soiled trousers, discolored shirts (if they buy anything not black) and covering their bodies, every square inch, w/grafitti
The want nothing to do with Daddy's riches and it's embarrassing to look upper crust. Same as it ever was...
I almost wish I had been born in 1930 so I could have worked in an office in NY in 1950 and had sex with everyone’s secretary. But I played the meager cards I was dealt.
"Because we are fallen creatures, we find it isn’t there."
Because of what Christ did for us, we are free again to find truth and beauty through the power of the Holy Spirit.
He became what we are so that we can become what he is, renewed in the image and likeness of God.
"When I love God I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes, the embraces, the feelings, the scents, the sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my senses in the creations of your love. In all the things that encounter me, you are waiting for me.
For a long time I looked for you within myself and crept into the shell of my soul, shielding myself with an armour of inapproachability. But you were outside - outside myself - and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life
Akkad Daily: "This Feminist is a Lesson to Women"
I'm kind of disappointed that our resident experts on everyone elses' sex lives haven't outed the mysterious trio yet.
Slacking . . .
I think that identifiable relates to people who worked at The New Yorker (School). It it the public at large:
“The piece caused a minor ruckus at School. Despite their nicknames, the married men were easily identifiable.”
Not all of the The New Yorker writers of that era are dead. You could ask Calvin Trillin, he is still alive. He seems an unlikely candidate, but would probably know.
An article in Slate about Alison Rose’s memoir suggests there might be less to the story:
“Rose is often coy about whether she was sleeping with them or just having highly substantive flirtations.”
That puts Trillin back in the running. The Slate article also says that ‘her handsome bullying psychiatrist father called her “Personality Minus.”’ So the one you would want to find out is Personality Plus.
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