The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Byblos: To get back to The Memory of Old Jack, last visited here last Saturday: The novel is what we call today a “celebration of life,” a phrase that did not exist when Berry wrote the novel (the New York Times’s first use of the phrase was in a 1960 headline over the review of a biography of the dancer Isadora Duncan, whose “Art Was a Dionysian Celebration of Life”), especially not with the meaning we ascribe it today–as a counterpoint to the inevitable, or a reversal to ancient Egyptian customs of mummifying death as a joyful continuation of life by other means. What faith there is in this book is in the land, not in the hereafter. Jack’s memory wants to memorialize, justify, excuse, confess, atone, settle a few scores. Like all celebrations of life it can be moving and terribly sad, which fits Berry’s elegiac tone, but also maudlin, a bit ridiculous, and at times cruel, as when he describes his daughter Clara and her husband, the rich banker Glad Pettit, whom he decides to refer to–to his face–as “Irwin.” There’s no hiding Jack’s didactic contempt for those and what he disapproves of. He wants to sell Pettit his farm to ensure its future. Pettit politely will have none of it. Cue the last judgment: “Glad was no longer the lean and muscular young man he had been when he married. He was fleshy now and somewhat stooped in the shoulders; he had been more weakened by the last fifteen years than Jack had been by the last fifty. But his superfluous weight, covered as it was by a tailored suit, set off by his graying hair, a diamond ring, and an excellent cigar, somehow made him look richer, more substantial, more dignified than ever. As his consort, Clara had become plump and opulent. Though she was still pretty, her looks had somehow become merely decorative. She had made of herself a sort of portable occasion for the ostentatious gifts of her husband, a sort of bodiless apparition in fine clothes—useless, so far as Jack could tell, for either work or love.” The prose is rich, the polemic richer, the author’s meanness richest. These are value judgments: Pettit made it rich in the city. Jack doesn’t like him for it and makes his daughter pay.  (to refer to Clara as her husband’s “consort” and “plump and opulent” in the same sentence reminded me of Updike’s description in “Wife-Wooing” of the “sad yellow” between the wife’s breasts, of her “drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge.” These are value judgments. He is not kinder to Ruth, though he’s not to blame. His courtship is ardent and sincere. He thinks his love is, too. But we are to understand–we’re told, not shown–that Jack has a violent side, and that Ruth wants to remake him in her family’s image. He was “accustomed to an exciting manhood,” he had been “a dancer, a drinker, a wencher, a fighter,” all of which Ruth mummifies in a marriage based “on the condition that he become better than he was.” “And so when he became her suitor and then her husband, Jack did not exactly occupy a vacancy; he usurped the place of some well-educated young minister or lawyer or doctor whose face and name were perhaps not yet known to the mother and daughter but whose place had nevertheless been appointed. It was this hypothetical and shadowy figure that she held up to Jack as a standard.”

—P.T.