Cost-efficient. Used it there and in Dubai. Had to. Otherwise we’d have sizzled our personnel.”
A certain dreaminess entered his gaze for an instant, an involuntary softening at the evocation of Dhahran, Dubai, cost-efficient technology for Aramco, and then, quite abruptly, he made a harsh guttural noise, apparently intended as the sound of sizzling personnel, and laughed.
That was Dwight Christian.
“Visited DWIGHT and Ruthie (Mills College ’33) CHRISTIAN at their very gracious island outpost, he has changed the least of our classmates over the years and is still Top Pineapple on the hospitality front,” as an item I saw recently in the Stanford alumni notes had it.
On the occasion when Harry Victor seemed to me most explicitly himself he was patronizing the governments of western Europe at a dinner table on Tregunter Road in London. “Sooner or later they all show up with their shopping lists,” he said, over rijstaffel on blue willow plates and the weak Scotch and soda he was nursing through dinner. He had arrived at dinner that evening not with Inez but with a young woman he identified repeatedly as “a grand-niece of the first Jew on the Supreme Court of the United States.” The young woman was Frances Landau. Frances Landau listened to everything Harry Victor said with studied attention, breaking her gaze only to provide glosses for the less attentive, her slightly hyperthyroid face sharp in the candlelight and her voice intense, definite, an insistent echo of every opinion she had ever heard expressed.
“What they want, in other words,” Frances Landau said. “From the United States.”
“Which is usually nuclear fuel,” Harry Victor said, picking up a dessert spoon and studying the marking. He seemed to find Frances Landau’s rapt interpolation suddenly wearing. He was not an insensitive man but he had the obtuse confidence, the implacable ethnocentricity, of many people who have spent time in Washington. “I slept last night on a carrier in the Indian Ocean,” he had said several times before dinner. The implication seemed to be that he had slept on the carrier so that London might sleep free, and I was struck by the extent to which he seemed to perceive the Indian Ocean, the carrier, and even himself as abstracts, incorporeal extensions of policy.
“Nuclear fuel to start up their breeders,” he added now, and then, quite inexplicably to the other guests, he launched as if by reflex into the lines from an Auden poem that he had been incorporating that year into all his public utterances: “ ‘I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.’ W.H. Auden. But I don’t have to tell you that.” He paused. “The English poet.”
That was Harry Victor.
My point is this: I can remember a moment in which Harry Victor seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember a moment in which Dwight Christian seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember such moments about most people I have known, so ingrained by now is the impulse to define the personality, show the character, but I have no memory of any one moment in which either Inez Victor or Jack Lovett seemed to spring out, defined. They were equally evanescent, in some way emotionally invisible; unattached, wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive. They seemed not to belong anywhere at all, except, oddly, together.
They had met in Honolulu during the winter of 1952. I can define exactly how winter comes to Honolulu: a kona wind comes up and the season changes. Kona means leeward, and this particular wind comes off the leeward side of the island, muddying the reef, littering the beaches with orange peels and prophylactics and bits of Styrofoam cups, knocking blossoms from the plumeria trees and dry fronds from the palms. The sea goes milky. Termites swarm on wooden roofs. The temperature has changed only slightly, but only tourists swim. At the
A certain dreaminess entered his gaze for an instant, an involuntary softening at the evocation of Dhahran, Dubai, cost-efficient technology for Aramco, and then, quite abruptly, he made a harsh guttural noise, apparently intended as the sound of sizzling personnel, and laughed.
That was Dwight Christian.
“Visited DWIGHT and Ruthie (Mills College ’33) CHRISTIAN at their very gracious island outpost, he has changed the least of our classmates over the years and is still Top Pineapple on the hospitality front,” as an item I saw recently in the Stanford alumni notes had it.
On the occasion when Harry Victor seemed to me most explicitly himself he was patronizing the governments of western Europe at a dinner table on Tregunter Road in London. “Sooner or later they all show up with their shopping lists,” he said, over rijstaffel on blue willow plates and the weak Scotch and soda he was nursing through dinner. He had arrived at dinner that evening not with Inez but with a young woman he identified repeatedly as “a grand-niece of the first Jew on the Supreme Court of the United States.” The young woman was Frances Landau. Frances Landau listened to everything Harry Victor said with studied attention, breaking her gaze only to provide glosses for the less attentive, her slightly hyperthyroid face sharp in the candlelight and her voice intense, definite, an insistent echo of every opinion she had ever heard expressed.
“What they want, in other words,” Frances Landau said. “From the United States.”
“Which is usually nuclear fuel,” Harry Victor said, picking up a dessert spoon and studying the marking. He seemed to find Frances Landau’s rapt interpolation suddenly wearing. He was not an insensitive man but he had the obtuse confidence, the implacable ethnocentricity, of many people who have spent time in Washington. “I slept last night on a carrier in the Indian Ocean,” he had said several times before dinner. The implication seemed to be that he had slept on the carrier so that London might sleep free, and I was struck by the extent to which he seemed to perceive the Indian Ocean, the carrier, and even himself as abstracts, incorporeal extensions of policy.
“Nuclear fuel to start up their breeders,” he added now, and then, quite inexplicably to the other guests, he launched as if by reflex into the lines from an Auden poem that he had been incorporating that year into all his public utterances: “ ‘I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.’ W.H. Auden. But I don’t have to tell you that.” He paused. “The English poet.”
That was Harry Victor.
My point is this: I can remember a moment in which Harry Victor seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember a moment in which Dwight Christian seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember such moments about most people I have known, so ingrained by now is the impulse to define the personality, show the character, but I have no memory of any one moment in which either Inez Victor or Jack Lovett seemed to spring out, defined. They were equally evanescent, in some way emotionally invisible; unattached, wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive. They seemed not to belong anywhere at all, except, oddly, together.
They had met in Honolulu during the winter of 1952. I can define exactly how winter comes to Honolulu: a kona wind comes up and the season changes. Kona means leeward, and this particular wind comes off the leeward side of the island, muddying the reef, littering the beaches with orange peels and prophylactics and bits of Styrofoam cups, knocking blossoms from the plumeria trees and dry fronds from the palms. The sea goes milky. Termites swarm on wooden roofs. The temperature has changed only slightly, but only tourists swim. At the
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