I felt a terrible renunciation coming on, of all seriousness

   This sets an insupportable example for the young,

   I realise, second only to yielding to the tempta-

   tion to confide it. But we'd been going through a

   little impromptu power outage in our neighborhood,

   a classic if tiresome Virginian response to snow-

   fall of the gentlest distribution; and there one

   was, alone under the covers with a trusty torch.

   What to do, what to do; yes, and with so little

   practice of having to improvise the onset of drow-

   siness without adding to one's irritation. The e-

   ternal hole card at bedtime - reading - would have

   to be played just right, or news of the Battle of

   Kursk (in Antony Beevor's fine telling) or Alan

   Bennett's inconclusive interview between Auden and

   a rent boy in Oxford, could, well could ratchet up

   the sense of a day's not ending just perfectly, es-

   pecially as one is being napped in freezing ambient

   infusions.

I suppose it is as obvious to everybody else, as it eventually became to me, that it's to the sardonic that we turn, in such circumstances, even at some risk of a literary experience. Who else do we know, who could make such a happy omelet of privation, as Dorothy Parker? Yes, but everybody else remembers, better than I, how she turned Benchley's seat of theatre criticism into such an unhinged riot of contrarianism, when he took leave at The New Yorker in the early '30s, to dabble in Hollywood (everybody else loved him with milk, in his bar room greeting of Joel McCrea in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent).

I very much hope that everybody else would be prepared to say, that this page has 'roused no suspicion of taking a position on whom one should read in bed, even in a power outage. John Lanchester, for example, is blessedly sardonic, and even edifying on how to murder a talentless cook in the subway. There are, that is, horses for courses: natural pairings which occur circumstantially, and under certain conditions, per-form at their very best. Ms Parker and everybody else are a match of enslavement at the best of times - everybody else and I couldn't think, of better guest room reading - but if one is ever feeling the pinch of a pitched tank battle or a dys-functional tryst, it helps to believe it might not be happen-ing, if (that is) it is.

                              

Antony Beevor

The Second World War

  Chapter 31:  The Battle of Kursk

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012©

Alan Bennett

The Habit of Art

Faber & Faber, 2009©

Dorothy Parker

Kindly Accept Substitutes et seq.

The New Yorker, 21 February 1931

The Portable Dorothy Parker

Marion Meade, editor

Penguin Classics, 1976©

John Lanchester

The Debt to Pleasure

Picador, Henry Holt, 2001©