The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  What is odd is that underneath his upright churchgoing persona and paterfamilial embrace of domestic convention—underneath what Foster Wallace insisted was an immovable solipsism—Updike evinced more interest in the Other, as he/she has come to be called, than most of his contemporaries. He was always forsaking his natural territory—disgruntled marriages, derailed desire, and crumbling Wasp traditions—for darker and less parochial matters. The lure of foreignness steadily intrigued him, be it Jewishness (Bech), militant blackness (Rabbit Redux), or Third World upheavals and misadventure (The Coup, Brazil). In Terrorist, his second-to-last novel, he bravely and not always successfully attempted to inhabit the perspective of a radicalized Muslim adolescent named Ahmad. Although the novel more than anything gave Updike a chance to rail at the materialist, sex-obsessed culture of a decaying New Jersey factory town under cover of Ahmad—“Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God. All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair”—it was also an effort at understanding the intractably alien, those who “belonged to the margins of the Christian world, the comic others in their funny clothes.”

  In the end, John Updike probably shone most brightly as a miniaturist—as a writer of stories and essays, where his supremely conscious, sibylline prose had the chance to chew more than it bit off and thus feature him at his mimetic best. I still remember the excitement with which I devoured stories like “The Fairy Godfathers” and “The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals.” To be sure, he remains one of our most unabashedly heterosexual writers, reveling in the taste of femaleness. I wish I had had the chance to meet him when I was writing for The New Yorker, the magazine that was his home for over fifty years. Above all, I believe he never really got his due, in part because he was so prolific for so long that the emergence of a new book seemed unremarkable; in part because he never wrote the one great, defining novel; and in part again because his kind of lapidary prose and American boosterism went out of style. Then, too, behind his witty discernment one could sense a churlishness gradually creeping in, especially over the last two decades.

  Still, the final verdict has not yet been handed down. In June, a new collection of Updike stories, My Father’s Tears, and Other Stories, is being published, and for all one knows, there may be more to come. There are ideal readers yet to discover him and long-standing admirers yet to make the case for him as a rare and generous and altogether seductive voice.

  IV

  HIGHER VALUES

  WHEN A BAG IS NOT JUST A BAG

  2006

  It is the Thursday evening before New Year’s Eve, a time when most equably minded people are busy laying in the champagne and taking stock of their lives. Or reading on a chaise somewhere pretty and tropical, nibbling on papaya, or perhaps skiing down a white slope in Aspen, Colorado, with the wind behind them. On this day you would have found me scurrying along Madison Avenue on my way to Barneys, the metropolitan mecca of all that is fabulously new and covetable, to return two bags. The items in question were a characteristically whimsical Marni evening pouch that had cost this side of $800—and that I had originally planned on carrying to a nephew’s bar mitzvah to offset a stark, synagogue-appropriate St. John Knits ensemble but in the end decided against, in favor of a borrowed and less contrapuntal Lambertson Truex lizard clutch—and an uncharacteristically unconstructed Jil Sander number ($670) that had briefly spoken to me in my continuing search for an Edenic black bag. It goes without saying that neither one was a strictly necessary purchase (what bag after the first one is?) and that they were about far, far more than themselves.

  The mania for bags—an irrational passion if ever there was one—defines our acquisition-mad cultural moment as surely as the tulip fever that raged through seventeenth-century Holland defined the burghers of Amsterdam. Put it another way: we may have lost our moral bearings in these centerless and often incoherent times, but we know what bag we want to carry our bearings in should we ever find them again. Where shoes once reigned supreme as the dominant wardrobe accessory, bags now lead the way as the top fashion signifier. A woman’s bag also serves as the portable manifestation of her sense of self, a detailed and remarkably revealing map of her interior, an omnium-gatherum of myriad aspects of her life—the crucial Filofaxed information as well as the frivolous, lipsticky stuff.

  Last fall, as if to underscore the point, the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in London staged I Want to Be a Bag, by Alessandra Vesi, featuring sewn, crocheted, and glued constructions that were like visual puns made delightfully concrete. As Anna Johnson suggests in her witty introduction to Handbags: The Power of the Purse, “a good bag becomes an intimate extension of the body,” which is why an astute female reader will realize that Anna Karenina is about to end it all when she tosses aside her red handbag. “A woman who is sick of her handbag,” Johnson observes, “surely, is absolutely sick of living.” (This explains, as well, why Diana Vreeland’s unappeasable dislike of this accessory and her dictum to “ban the bag” were wisely ignored by designers and why, when Tom Ford suggested in a recent interview that the hippest thing a girl can do is carry no bag at all, he instantly revealed the limits of his understanding of what makes women tick.) “The only way I know I exist is if I have my stuff with me,” explains a writer friend, the possessor of a portfolio of bags ranging from a LeSportsac to a “slab of brown buttery leather” measured to the size of a September Vogue and handmade for her by Jutta Neumann.

  Let the record note, then, that I spent the greater part of this past autumn, when not pursuing gainful employment as a writer or nagging my daughter about her homework, buying and returning bags. Among the many returned bags were ones from Pollini and Theory that didn’t hold up to at-home scrutiny. The bags I kept included a beaded and sequined jeu d’esprit of an evening clutch from Anya Hindmarch; an inexpensive espresso leather satchel that is unadorned except for two subtle pieces of Aztec-looking hardware that I picked up at Fred Segal when I was in Los Angeles in September and have yet to bring out of my closet; a Jane August chenille satchel that looks like a magic carpet ride purchased from Linda Dresner; and the pièce de résistance, a dramatically oversize rosy-purple Bottega Veneta. To be scrupulously truthful, I bought and returned the Bottega and then rebought it when I happened to notice it in a glass display at Barneys, discreetly but substantially reduced—making it, at a fraction under four figures, still the priciest bag I have ever bought. (Thankfully, there is no little metal label on the bag telling you its provenance. Only if you peer very closely can you dimly make out its attribution, stamped in a small, bookish typeface into the leather interior, thereby satisfying another of my tendencies, reverse snobbism.)

  Buying a bag is nothing less than a compulsion, a fixation, a tragicomic spectacle, an indication of status anxiety, a sign of existential hope, a fetish, a clue, a puzzlement, a pity, a pleasure. One might even go so far as to conjecture that the British analyst D. W. Winnicott’s notion of “potential space”—an imaginative domain between inner and outer worlds that corresponds to the infant’s sense of play—finds its most perfect habitation in a handbag. It is, above all, the great unstated answer to the Freudian question: What do women want? Well, I am here to clear away this lingering mystery about the nature of female desire forever: women want bags.

  Some of them, like my friend Molly Jong-Fast, crave the latest “It” bag and bugger the cost, be it the Fendi Spy, the Chloé Paddington, the Balenciaga Twiggy, or some multipocketed Marc Jacobs number. Others, like the writer Elizabeth Hayt, are drawn to all bags Chanel because they are, she says, age appropriate for a woman in her forties, impeccably made, and available in slightly off colors, like terra-cotta or distressed gray. She likes them “logo discreet” and big enough to carry her Evian in, but not overtly practical. “I would die carrying a tote,” she says. Still others, like the beautiful fawn-like creature I met at a party who told me she was afraid to make a choice of one bag over another for fear of
what it might say about her, are so aware of the possible implications that they respond counter-phobically by using any old bag.

  And yet again others, like myself, are ascertainably bag crazed but shy away from the obviously commodifiable only to spend hours searching out the unlikely and indefinable—a bag that will not only meet them in all of their complexity but will also telegraph that message of complexity out to the world. Behold the woman who carries such a bag: so supple and yet unyielding, so ephemeral and yet sturdy, so large of presence and yet graceful of mien, so French and yet Italian, so elegant and yet artisan-like, so Hermès and yet Beguelin. So everything, in short, and yet insouciant. You’ve got to love a woman who recognizes the value of a bag like that.

  Although nowadays we associate the carrying of bags almost exclusively with women, from ancient times through the Middle Ages both men and women wore drawing purses around the waist or hips. The handbag as the strictly feminine accessory we know it to be came into being in the Paris of the 1790s, with the introduction of the sheer Empire-line dress. Of course, one might think, given the symbolic importance of bags in modern women’s lives from their adolescent years on, that inquiries into the larger meaning of these receptacles—as maternal substitutes, say, or as holding environments (to borrow from another idea of Winnicott’s) for the fractured or improvised self—would be all over the psychoanalytic literature, right up there with dream interpretation.

  Oddly enough, though the erotically forward-looking seventeenth-century poet John Donne alluded to a woman’s two “purses” (signifying the vagina and the anus) in an elegy titled “Love’s Progress”—“Rich Nature hath in women wisely made / Two purses, and their mouths aversely laid”—amazingly little has been made of the subject by those who are regularly in the habit of reading psychodramas into the average cigar. Since the female body provides our first sheltering container, it would make perfect intrapsychic sense that containers would be viewed as generically feminine, but a quick review of the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing archive yields curiously few references to purses or handbags, and when they do appear, it is in papers that focus on other topics.

  In perhaps the most famous instance of a psychoanalytic interpretation of this crucial female accoutrement, Freud’s case history of the paradigmatic hysteric Dora alludes in passing to her playing with her “reticule” as representative of masturbating; it also spells out that her dream about a jewel case (and the small ivory box carried by another female patient) were stand-ins “for the shell of Venus, for the female genitals.” Interestingly enough, classical analysts of yesteryear tended to view the fantasized scenario or dream of a stolen purse as a metaphor for a missing penis. Talk about the inflexible rule of patriarchy! It seems that even when we lose this crucial, dangling part of ourselves, it is really the opposite sex’s crucial, dangling part that we have, unbeknownst to ourselves, gone in search of.

  Ah, well. The notion of penis envy is not in good repute these days in any event, and I, for one, am inclined to believe that women may have resolved this hypothetical problem with their appropriation and fetishization of the once-androgynous handbag. (Freud believed that women were on the whole less inclined to fetishize, which served his purposes—and left us poor creatures in a permanent state of craving for what we could not have.) “A bag,” observes my friend with the portfolio of bags, “is about controlling the world outside your home. It’s not any more about materialism than Neruda’s ‘Ode to Things’ is. When he says, ‘Oh irrevocable / river / of things,’ he’s talking about his attachments, and some of us cannot bear to be separated from our things for too long.”

  Considered in this light, bags are almost worth the time and money we give them. In being so sublimely iconographic, they tell us nothing less than where we live, who we are, and where you might metaphorically find us, carrying our portable identities in the pouch that best meets our dreams of self.

  A FASHIONABLE MIND

  2011

  All of us have key moments in our fashion evolution—moments when we realize that fashion isn’t simply a frivolous imposition on the self but can be a cunning expression thereof, moments when we are struck by the lexicon a particular designer employs and discover that we have cultural references in common, be they Popeye and Felix the Cat or the decline of the Roman Empire. Just as an entire life story can be told in the fall of a sparrow, so can an entire fashion story be told in the length of a hem or the cut of a sleeve.

  My interest in the possibilities of fashion, in its ability to transcend its own particulars and become a narrative worth paying attention to, collided with my loftier literary side. I was a very bookish young woman, an admirer of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a worshipper at the altar of Virginia Woolf. But I also had a secret self, one enraptured by certain designers and how they looked at the world. I fell in love with the witty and elegant clothes of Geoffrey Beene somewhere in my twenties. It happened just as I was beginning to develop an eye for the way in which fashion can mirror our own anxieties and pleasures back at us in the choice of fabric (in Beene’s case, his use of gray wool jersey for evening wear) or a particular trim (Beene’s innovative deployment of zippers, bow ties, and rhinestones). Here was a man who clearly thought beyond the surface, someone for whom whimsy was a means to a meaningful end, a man after my own heart.

  I remember my first sighting of the pristine Geoffrey Beene label in a dress of my mother’s. More a dabbler in couture than an acolyte, my mother owned a Beene or two along with a smattering of other American designers. A German-Jewish immigrant who’d lived in what was then Palestine for a decade before arriving on these shores, she cared about clothes more than she was willing to let on. My mother perused fashion magazines along with weekly installments of The New Yorker, and I know she read the reviews of new collections that appeared in The New York Times. I don’t recall her ever discussing fashion as such, however, other than to refer to a woman who attended our synagogue as “Mrs. Valentino,” in tongue-in-cheek homage to the woman’s fealty to that designer’s clothes. (My mother also loved to use the word “chic”—which she mispronounced slightly, failing to elongate the i into an e so that the word came out as “shik”—as the ultimate compliment for an outfit.) One of her firm convictions was that clothes should be secondary to the person wearing them, which I’d come to realize was a rather sophisticated view, one held by Beene himself, who didn’t believe in dressing “for success” (“Dressing for success,” he opined, “is something unsuccessful women do”) and was known to take runway bows in a sweatshirt embroidered with the words “MR. BEENE” or in an off-the-rack number with “Polynesia” printed on it.

  Lately I’ve been thinking of Beene a lot—especially of the pared-down, a-gesture-is-all-it-takes Beene—because of the excitement generated by the latest spring collections. For what seems like the first time in a while, American fashion is back on track, sure of itself and its origins, rather than craning its neck to check out what Europe is doing. (The truth is that Europe and America are doing similar things, but this appears more a matter of synchronicity than one side of the Atlantic influencing the other.) “Never look to Europe for inspiration,” advised Beene, who died in 2004. “We’re a modern nation. We move faster. Look here. It’s all on the street.”

  You can see it in the very wearability of spring’s clothes, the simplicity of the cuts, and the bold use of high-voltage color as well as color blocking. There’s a graphic eye appeal, whether from Derek Lam or Matthew Ames, and a signal lack of fussiness, whether from Francisco Costa at Calvin Klein or Alexander Wang.

  After seasons of outfits that look like costumes and an editorially driven endorsement of near nudity, embellishment for its own sake has yielded to function, and in-your-face sexuality to a subtler, hide-and-seek approach to eroticism. Somewhere, the ghost of Geoffrey Beene is dancing a jig, persuaded that at last his message of intelligent fashion—for the woman who wants to put on something vital and becoming but has more importan
t things to do than stroke her clothes into submission—has broken beyond the clutch of fashion insiders who always knew he was a designer’s designer, ahead of the pack in thinking and execution.

  Like many of the most interesting people, Geoffrey Beene was almost entirely self-made, down to his name. He was born Samuel Albert Bozeman, Jr., in Haynesville, Louisiana, and, at his mother’s urging, attended medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans. His passion, though, lay elsewhere. By his own account, he’d always been enamored of design and at the age of eight directed his aunt Lucille, a talented seamstress, to whip up a Simplicity pattern for some beach pajamas in a blue-and-orange floral fabric he’d selected. Beene eventually abandoned medicine, to the consternation of his family, who sent him to Los Angeles for a so-called rest cure. While there, he got a job creating window displays at I. Magnin, but by twenty he’d moved to New York to enroll at the Traphagen School of Fashion. From there, he was off to Paris to learn the art of tailoring and expose himself to the world of haute couture. After returning to New York in 1951, he worked on Seventh Avenue for more than a decade, mostly for the women’s ready-to-wear house Teal Traina, where he earned a reputation for going his own way.