Meghan Daum Is Having A Moment

Do you like someone’s work because you are friends with them? Or are you friends with them because you like their work? Bonus material: a wedding proposal at Cafe Loup, circa 2002.

I reviewed Meghan Daum’s new book, The Catastrophe Hour, for Air Mail.

When I told her about this she said, “Are you even allowed to do that?”

“I’m not hiding anything,” I said. “I put the conflict of interest right at the top.”

I had published her first book, as well as having edited and published other pieces of hers.

I think having edited someone’s work means you may be especially dialed into the nuances of what they are doing or trying to do. If you worked with them early in their career, you will probably have a sense of the author’s trajectory, themes, the evolution of their style.

There are some important venues, papers of record, that need to be vigilant about this sort of conflict of interest. One of small pleasures of the old Spy Magazine was “Logrolling In Our Time.” But if Air Mail - edited by the Graydon half of Spy - wants to do a series on editors writing about their authors, I would love that. Get Michael Pietsch and Colin Harrison on the work of David Foster Wallace. Ann Patty on Mary Gaitskill. I would have loved to read Giancarlo DiTrapano writing about the work of Atticus Lish... For that matter, why not ask Gordon Lish to write about any of the authors he has edited? (Lish would sometimes send postcards to authors we had published at Open City saying, in essence, ‘I like your work but the editing is lacking.’ He sent these postcards to the authors care of Open City.)

But talking about editors and writers elides the more complicated issue: what about reviewing work by a friend?

I mention all this because it touches on something I think about a lot: Do you like someone’s work because you are friends with them? Or are you friends with them because you like their work? I suppose this is an issue one is likely to run into if you are a person who is drawn to editing literary magazines, or who will write to an author about their work. But it applies to everyone, really: Is your taste in literature bent by your affinities for a person, or are you personal affinities guided by your taste in writing?

One answer to this is, obviously, that so much of the joy of literature is in being engrossed and enchanted with the work of people who may have lived long ago or far away. Even if they live across town, or they simply have no degree of separation from you on social media, you can engage with the work without the messy reality of the author, of whom the work is a kind of idealized representation. Their personal existence has no bearing on your relationship with their books. I assume I could take the subway to Don Delillo’s front door but I don’t want or need to do that. An association I surely had because just today I was quite intrigued by a woman reading White Noise on the subway, her look, her vibe, and the possibility that she was at that very moment reading about the most photographed barn in the word, which as far as I can tell is the the analog era’s best anticipation of our future social media panopticon. I rudely took her picture, rationalizing that her mask meant I was not invading her privacy.

(A straphanger on the subway reading White Noise.)

I later grasped that Meghan’s comment was part of a severe round of self-inoculation she had undertaken against any expectations she might have in connection with her new book: My having written about it might entice her to think it would be positive, and therefore allow a stray bit of hope to enter into her pre-publication thoughts. Her focus on stamping out any such hopes was so intense that she commented, provocatively, that she doesn’t even think essay collections should be reviewed at all—unless none of them have previously been published. This in spite of the fact hat almost all of her debut collection had appeared in publications before being collected as a book. Every now and then I hear some version of this - that books that contain previously published material and somehow less authentically new and original - and I find it completely baffling and threatening: for one thing most contemporary short story collections would bite the dust if the stories having previously been published disqualified them from reviews. Raymond Carver, Deborah Eisenberg, Z.Z. Packer, Lorrie Moore, Thom Jones, John Cheever, Anthony Veasna So. I could go on and on. They all published some of their short stories in magazines big and small before collecting them into books.

But that was then. Now, Meghan and her book have gone over the falls, and she has loosened up. People seem to like it, according to her. I’d say getting this fact from her was a conflict of interest, but it’s actually as unconflicted as she gets. And anyway, she has bigger issues to deal with, as she explained an interview with the New York Times.

*

I want to take this Meghan Moment to highlight an an essay in My Misspent Youth, “Variations on Grief”, that is both anomalous and an important key to understanding her work. Like the final piece in The Catastrophe Hour, it stands somewhat apart from the rest of the book and in some ways is a form of commentary on it. It focuses on these very issues of friendship and ambition, which here is a stand in for creativity of any kind, or just personal velocity.

“Several years ago, my oldest friend died,” it begins, “presenting me with an occasion not to be sad, not to cry, not to tell people and have them not know how to respond. Several years ago I decided to create an ironic occurrence rather than a tragedy, a cautionary tale rather than the wretched injustice it really was.”

Almost every line that follows is startling in its cold candor and precision. There is an almost hypnotized quality to the writing: “I liked Brian because he had nothing to do with the passage of time. He was immune to maturity, resistant to forward motion. He existed the way childhood homes are supposed to and never do, as a foundation that never shifts, a household that never gets new wallpaper, or turns your bedroom into a study, or is sold in exchange for a condo in Florida.”

I remember the excitement of publishing that book, and what pieces were most often cited in reviews - the piece about the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, the one about being an assistant at Conde Nast, and most of all the one about going broke in New York City. Few if any of the reviews contended with “Variation on Grief.”

Most of the book was, in one way or another, about ambition. In “Variation on Grief,” she wrestles with both her grief for her friend’s death and her contempt for his lack of ambition. His lassitude, both professional and social, is baffling to her and even repulsive. In his short life, he achieved nothing. A fate worse than death, is the implication. Daum is candid about sex and money in her work, but it’s her candor on the topic of ambition and its discontents that feels most radical. Variation on Grief addresses the other side of this coin: guilt.

**

In 2002 I had a drink with Meghan at Cafe Loup and we witnessed something strange and agreed to both write about it. It first appeared on Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, soon to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

Wedding Proposal At Cafe Loup

By Meghan Daum

Every Sunday the local newspaper in the midwestern town where I live prints engagement and wedding announcements that look like the pages of a high school yearbook. The faces are fair skinned and robust, some still marked with acne. Their pictures are taken at portrait studios by photographers who appear to have directed them to gaze into each others eyes and said “think about the moment he proposed to you, imagine the scene, try to recreate the look on your face . . . okay, there!”

Sometimes couples simply send in their senior prom pictures. I often suspect that the guy popped the question on the dance floor while the Titanic theme played over the loudspeaker and some tattooed girl in a spaghetti strap dress smoked a joint hundreds of yards away in a bathroom stall covered with phrases like “If you love something set it free. If it doesn’t come back to you, hunt it down and kill it.”

Recently, my friend Tom and I were in Café Loup drinking non-alcoholic beverages around 6 in the evening. Café Loup is located in Manhattan on 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues and the newspaper I just mentioned is published in a town that is located in the south eastern corner of a state that’s sandwiched between Kansas and South Dakota. I bring this up because at some point during that 6:00 hour an event occurred that probably occurs all the time, except that neither Tom nor I had ever seen it occur in quite that way and for about ten minutes we got the feeling that we were witnessing something bizarre and extraordinary, even though no one else in the restaurant seemed to notice it. A man in the front of the restaurant, about ten feet from where we were sitting, started singing a song I’d heard many times on the radio. It was by an artist like Celine Dion or Leanne Rimes and went “you1re my love, my valentine.” It sounded a bit odd coming from a male singer with a Broadway belt. He was singing to a young couple who was with him. The woman1s face suggested she was nonplussed but trying to be polite. The man had his back to me, but suddenly he was on his knees, evidently proposing marriage. The woman started weeping. They hugged. The man pulled out a cell phone and made a call. When they walked towards the bar Tom and I could see their faces. I don1t know what he made of them but I recognized them right away. They were the faces from my town newspaper, dressed up like New Yorkers, or at least like midwesterners who, after a few years in New York where they were probably temping while trying to make it as actors or playwrights or clog dancers, had acquired some errant New York trappings. The woman wore an imitation Betsy Johnson dress. The man wore a black tee shirt and shoes that I cannot remember as anything other than Capezio jazz shoes, which I’m certain they were not. They lived in Jersey City.

I figured their first date had been at Café Loup or that they had met on Valentine’s Day (hence the song) or at least that Café Loup was a favorite spot or they shared an affinity for Celine Dion or whomever had recorded that song. But when Tom and I began questioning them, like reporters interrogating flustered Oscar winners backstage, they told us they had never been to Café Loup. It had no particular significance in their relationship. Until now, of course. The man, whose name was Walt, was from Oklahoma. I think the woman1s name was Caroline, but I didn’t catch where she was from, only that it was far away. I admired her engagement ring, which seemed like the sisterly thing to do, even though engagement rings all look the same to me. Tom and I shook their hands and congratulated them. They went off to have dinner. I ordered another club soda.

Tom and I had a conversation that skirted around our tacit belief that this couple was, in a certain sense, not as sophisticated as we were or liked to think we were. His term was “goofy,” which was not a groundless observation, and without coming right out and saying it we both seemed to agree that the only people who can fall in love and get engaged over a Celine Dion type of song and weep about it are people whose imaginative standards are such that a café in which to propose marriage can be chosen not based on its nostalgic value or even champagne selection but solely on the fact that it is located on 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in New York. The moment seemed to have made Tom somewhat melancholy. I didn’t feel much emotion, but I felt the emotional conflict. I’ve experienced it so many times by now that no longer elicits feelings, merely a replay of the thoughts I1ve had a thousand times. It’s what happens when happiness is held in front of your face like a painting you don1t want to own, but whose placard, nonetheless says “This Is Happiness.” I asked Tom if there was anyone he respected who could feel romantically satisfied for longer than one day. He kind of laughed and looked away and later he would recall me as saying “do you know anyone who is smart who is romantically happy for more than one day at a time.”

That’s not how I phrased it‹I know I didn1t use the word “smart,” although “respect isn’t much better. It doesn’t really matter though, because the more I think about that couple the more certain I am that in 15 years, when some version of Tom and me are still sitting at that bar, Walt and Caroline will have a house in Oklahoma or Nebraska or even Jersey City and it will have a basement family room where they keep their photo albums and when they show their wedding pictures to their children Caroline will say “your father proposed to me in a café in Greenwich Village in New York. A man sang. We drank champagne. That was a beautiful day.”

**

Wedding Proposal At Cafe Loup

By Thomas Beller

The other day, through no fault of my own, I was witness to a very public proposal of marriage that took place at the Café Loup.

It was a humid early evening and my friend Meghan and I were at the bar drinking non-alcoholic beverages. Club soda for her. Tea with lemon for me (I was hung over; I don’t know what her excuse was). Meghan lives in Nebraska now, and we began catching up. Then, in the vestibule area at the front of the restaurant, a man started singing. Right away there was something about his tone of voice that made me cringe a little. His voice wasn’t awful, but it had this weird emotional charge that made us stop talking. He was singing something about a Valentine. We craned our necks. There is a vestibule area at Café Loup and our view of it from the bar was obscured by a pillar.

I could see this guy singing, and the look of unbridled happiness and emotion sweeping over him, as though he were serenading a new born baby. He had a cell phone in one hand. A tape recorder was on the table beside him. And he was looking at… something, someone, I couldn’t see. Then I saw that there was a couple standing in front of him, and I understood.

“I think someone is getting married,” I said.

“No!” Meghan gasped. She craned her neck. I craned my neck.

The bartender sat at the far end of the bar, reading the paper.

I leaned back in my seat to get a better view. There was a guy down on one knee in a black T-shirt, blond hair, wispy mustache. Before him stood a woman: Long brown hair, flowery dress through which you could see her nice shape. Big honest face. Beaming, blushing more and more as the guy on his knee spoke to her. The guy who had been singing was beaming as he looked on, the Maitre D, standing near by, was beaming, we were craning our necks. The bartender was reading the paper at the far end of the bar.

A ring was produced. He slid it on. Hugs. The cell phone was handed around. Who was on the other line? For some reason I imagined it was her father. “Sir, I have just proposed to Caroline, and she said yes. Is that OK with you? It is? Great! I love your daughter!” That is what I imagined being said.

“We have to ask them what is going on,” said Meghan.

“But it might spoil the moment,” I said.

This was dishonest. I was put off by the moment, so I shouldn’t be defending it. But maybe I wanted to protect them from disgust. What was my problem anyway? I had long ago trained myself to smile with beneficent life-affirming goodwill at the site of couples kissing in the park. Love blooms, it’s great for all of us, how wonderful, etc. I’m happy for kissing couples! But now I was hungover and all this earnest “there is no one in the world I would rather be with than you” emoting was making me a little sick.

“I don’t think they would have done this in public if they didn’t want people to watch,” she said.

“Watching and asking questions are not the same thing,” I said. The woman was crying a little. She was on the phone now. Was it her father? This was a big surprise for her, obviously.

And then they were near us. The singer, who had performed the role of surrogate religious figure in the choreography of the whole scene, was now standing out on the sidewalk on the phone, and the happy couple were beside us.

So we launched in. Straightforward questions, honest questions, yet it was peculiar, as though they had just won an award or been on a game show and were now at the post-show news conference.

His name is Walt. I forget hers. They live in Jersey City. They had never been here before. He was from Oklahoma originally. His friend, the singer, was friends with the manager of this place… and his best friend couldn’t be here, “he was going to start the whole thing off by reading a poem,” explained Walt, but since he couldn’t be here they called him so he could hear it, and yes, it was a total surprise for her…

“Did you guys meet on Valentines day?” asked Meghan. There had been this Valentines theme to the song.

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

They looked at each other.

Oh shit, I thought. We’ve done it. A pang of excitement and guilt welled up within me. We’ve gone and contaminated the thing with our questions. For a brief moment the bloom was off the rose. Their first matrimonial spat. But they figured it out. Their first date was on valentines day. The bloom was back on, big hug, wet eyes, time to go back and finish the meal, best regards, bon voyage, we all shook hands as though we were on line to enter a special zone, a circle of light. What is it about proposals of marriage that lends itself to these public performances?

“They were goofy,” I said, pouring more hot water into my tea.

“Of course they were goofy,” said Meghan. “Do you know anyone who is smart who is romantically happy for longer than a day at a time?”

**