True confession: Sometimes I feel bad for Hillary Clinton
Went to Russ & Daughters early this morning to pick up some smoked fish.
Riding back on the F train, I got engrossed in this piece in the LRB about, among other things, the relationship between Margot Asquith—about whom the only thing I had previously known was that she supposedly once said to Jean Harlow, after Harlow kept incorrectly pronouncing the “t” in Margot, “No, no, Jean. The ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow.”—and Virginia Woolf.
After Woolf killed herself, Asquith wrote:
When I last wrote to her I felt lonely and depressed. I told her that at one time I was arrogant enough to think that I was the hostess at the festival of life, but that now I was not even a guest, and there was no ‘festival.’ I added that when I died I hoped she would write my obituary notice in The Times, as that might make me famous.
And I just sat there, feeling intensely moved by how sad a statement that was. Here was a woman of wit and intelligence, thwarted by constraints internal and external, constraints too formidable to overcome. Earlier in her life Asquith had written in her diary:
When I read of Parnell or Lasalle or smaller men who have arrested attention, I feel full of envy, and wish I had been born a man. In a woman all this internal urging is a mistake; it leads to nothing and breaks loose in sharp utterances and passionate overthrows of conventionality.
Which made her friendship with Woolf all the more poignant, as the writer I was reading in the LRB pointed out:
Her [Asquith] own achievements, first as a waspish
socialistsocialite and later as an unsuitable political wife, seemed to confirm this as a bitter truth; but Virginia’s, now set out cleanly before her, showed that a woman’s genius, however embattled, could assert itself in lasting accomplishment.
I sat some more, lost in thought. Then I turned a few more pages, and stumbled across this piece by Terry Castle, one of my favorite writers, about going to a Silicon Valley fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.
Still thinking about Asquith, and all those wealthy women past, denied their place in the sun, I was prepared to feel sad for Clinton as well. True confession: I often feel sad for Clinton. I know it’s politics, and I’m a Sanders supporter, and I loathe everything Clinton stands for, and there’s no human right to be president of the United States. But, still, I find it hard sometimes not to empathize with someone possessing such obvious talent and ambition, doing everything right, yet finding the prize she seeks so elusive. Though this time, of course, she may get the prize, and my sads will be neither here nor there. Besides, pity can be an ugly emotion, and Clinton—a powerful agent in her own right, with plenty of accomplishments to be proud of—neither needs nor wants mine.
In any event, I know Castle to be too shrewd and funny a writer for this kind of sentimentality. I switched gears.
I read the first couple of paragraphs, and found myself laughing out loud. Then, just as I was settling in to my new mood, the announcement came: 7th Avenue. My stop. Time to get off the train.