My first high-school reunion was postponed for a year by the COVID-19 lockdown. We met in 2021 for the fifty-first at a supper club on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. Lake Erie was a hundred yards to the north and when conversation lagged, I could watch the ore boats moving down the river. The Cleveland skyline, much of it unrecognizable from childhood, started on the other side of the Cuyahoga. It was a perfect late-summer evening, and we sat on the patio, trying to talk over the “classic rock” blaring from the overhead speakers. I didn’t like the Guess Who in 1970, and that hasn't changed. Nostalgia has become an industry.  I met three of my former teachers, including Linda Wagy, my eight-grade English teacher from 1965-66. It had been her first year teaching and she thoughtfully pretended to remember me. Most of the classmates I had hoped would be there did not attend. The highlight was meeting a woman I knew from thirteen years of public school but hadn’t seen in fifty-one years. I recognized her immediately and even remembered her name. I wrote about our conversation the following day. The dreariest encounter came when I met a guy who has changed his name (his birth name, he explained, had “too many consonants”) and is now a lawyer in Cleveland. He was boring in 1970 and remains so. Boring in a very earnest, strident, self-centered way. It took a long time to shake him so he could bore someone else.   The organizers have announced a fifty-fifth-year reunion to be held in September at the Cleveland Yachting Club, and I plan to go. Mostly I’m curious. In high school I was shy and usually a loner. What friends I had were those I knew from the A.P. classes. My only social involvement was editing the school literary magazine – no dances or sports. There are risks, of course, the principal one being another consonant-free nudnik. The wittily acerbic Louisiana poet Gail White feels otherwise. In “Why I Failed to Attend My High School Reunion,” she says:   “Because it would have gone like this: Hello, hello, hello. (You never liked me, did you? Where was this friendship 15 years ago?) You’re looking wonderful. I wouldn’t kid you about it – you look great. (You hefty cat.) And Jeffrey – are you married? Oh, you are! Three kids? However did you manage that? (For God’s sake, someone point me to the bar.) Me? I’ve just spent the summer in Tibet learning some basics from a Buddhist nun. It’s an experience I won’t forget. (As if you cared.) More crab dip, anyone? (And here’s the Great Class Bore. You’re still the same.) Forgive me. I can’t quite recall your name.”   White explains her poem is “humor based on truth. I’m now 78 and have never been to a class reunion. Nobody who likes me would be there. I didn’t make real friends until I went to college and started meeting people who read books.”

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A reader asks what I hope to accomplish in retirement. I’m not one for making grand plans or resolutions. No golf and little travel. It’s more likely I’ll continue what I’m already doing – writing, reading, family matters – just more of it. More Montaigne, J.V. Cunningham, Shakespeare, Rebecca West. Luke O’Sullivan writes in his introduction to Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014):  “What [Montaigne] had to offer, he believed, was not a consistent set of arguments with which to answer problems of the human condition, but (like Aristotle) a feeling for balance and an ability to live without the need for certainty. Moreover, he had a sense of his own integrity; late in life, Oakeshott made a note of Montaigne’s remark that ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.’”   The Montaigne quote is from the essay “Of Solitude,” written around 1572, and it seems applicable to late-life retirement. The previous year Montaigne had retired from public life to the Château de Montaigne. In its tower he kept his books and found the privacy he needed to write his essays. Like Montaigne, I’m no hermit but I need quiet and a moderate amount of solitude to get done what I want to do. I understand some retirees get bored and start drinking and preparing themselves for a premature death. They have never learned “how to belong to oneself.” In his Notebooks, Oakeshott writes:   “We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”   Montaigne echoes Oakeshott in his essay “Of Physiognomy” (c. 1585-88):   “[D]eath is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object. Life should be an end unto itself, a purpose unto itself; its rightful study is to regulate, conduct, and suffer itself. Among the many other duties comprised in this general and principal chapter on knowing how to live is this article on knowing how to die; and it is one of the lightest, if our fear did not give it weight.”

Two Junichiro Tanizaki novels from the 1920s for Japanese Literature Month over at Dolce Bellezza.  Always interesting to see what people are reading.  Thanks as usual.  18th edition! The two novels I read, Naomi (1924) and Quicksand (1928-30), are closely related.  Both are about dominant and submissive sexual relations, an obsession of Tanizaki.  Both were serialized in newspapers.  How I wish the books had explanations of how the serialization worked.  Both novels are written in, or at least translated as, plain, sometimes even dull prose, perhaps a consequence of tight serial deadlines. Both have narrators who may well be playing tricks on me, although if so I did not see the signals, and believe me I am alert to the signals, well-trained by Pale Fire and The Tin Drum and Villette and so on.  Maybe Tanizaki’s tricks are different. Naomi is narrated by a creep of an engineer who picks up – grooms – a 15 year-old waitress who he finds especially “Western.”  … most of her value to me lay in the fact that I’d brought her up myself, that I myself had made her into the woman she was, and that only I knew every part of her body.  For me Naomi was the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself.  I’d labored hard and spared no pains to bring that piece of fruit to its present, magnificent ripeness, and it was only proper that I, the cultivator, should be the one to taste it.  No one else had that right.  (Ch. 18, 161) Pure poison.  By this point in the novel Naomi has taken power, well on her way to complete control, crushing her groomer, who is likely, it turns out, happier crushed. Much of the novel is set in the modern, Westernized Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, before the terrible earthquake that obliterated the dancehalls and movie theaters.  I found all of that detail quite interesting, as it was in Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929-30).  One more piece of bad luck and Naomi might have become one of the homeless teen prostitutes in The Scarlet Gang.  Too bad Naomi does not have the innovative linguistic interest of Kawabata’s crackling novel. The Japanese title of Quicksand is a single character, the Buddhist swastika, a perfect representation of the content of the novel, which is a four-way struggle for dominance among the narrator, her girlfriend, her husband, and the girlfriend’s boyfriend.  Some of the weapons in the struggle are pretty crazy, like a scene where the narrator and the girlfriend’s lunatic boyfriend swear a blood oath.  Eh, they’re all crazy.  The narrator is the eventual winner, obviously, I guess.  Maybe she is making it all up.  Quicksand has a lot in common with Ford Madox Ford’s devious The Good Soldier, another four-way struggle, but as I said if Tanizaki’s narrator is a tenth as tricky as Ford’s I sure couldn’t see it.  She seems more unreliable in theory than practice. One technique that is interesting and may hold clues: Tanizaki and the narrator return to key scenes, describing what happened from different perspectives, yes, like in Akutagawa’s “In a Bamboo Grove” (1922), except everything is filtered through the narrator, which does have the appearance of what I am calling a trick, a technique of emphasizing and controlling unreliability.  How newspaper readers followed this over two full years baffles me, but my understanding is that the lesbian aspect got the attention. I have trouble imaging the literary world where these were newspaper novels.  Naomi was in fact too shocking and was booted from the newspaper, with Tanizaki completing it in a magazine. Should I give an example of what I mean by dull prose?  Is it worth the tedium of the typing?  I mean that there is a lot of this: “Were you still asleep, Mitsu?” “Your phone call wakened me!” “I can leave anytime now.  Won’t you come right away too?” “Then I’ll hurry up and get ready.  Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?” “You’re sure you can?” “Of course I am!”  (Quicksand, Ch. 15, 98) And this is nominally supposed to be the narrator telling her story to Tanizaki.  Serialization filler?  Maybe you can see why I am not in a hurry to solve the puzzle of Quicksand.  The appeal of both novels, for me, was exploring the psychology of the believably awful characters and seeing how their less believable awful schemes work out. Anthony Chambers translated Naomi; Howard Hibbett did Quicksand.