The view this morning.  "Everything seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine."  -- Henry James

I had intended on a view of the Sussex Weald this morning which is where we'd left off yesterday, but I know how anxious some of you are about the fires here.  The greatest displacement of Americans -- nearly half a million now -- since the Civil War, and over a billion dollars worth of damage, according to the media.  But the light filtered through the smoke makes for rosy pink dawns and golden afternoons and Armageddon sunsets.  Beautiful until you remember what's causing it.

As I said, I had wanted to focus on Sussex, which seems to me a place so full of writers -- my cousin the novelist Margaret Summerton lived in Etchingham, where Anthony Burgess also had a home and Kipling too (a 17th century Jacobean structure now part of the National Trust).  And Virginia and Leonard had that place in Rodmell, and so on.  Also, Sussex seemed a safer point from which to jump back into our discussion, since even the mention of the subject matter of Edmund White's novel-within-a-novel is enough to bring in e-mails an undercover cop for "To Catch a Predator" would blush at.  Creepy, quite frankly. 

However, even setting aside the whole unsavory pedaphilic angle, why, I wondered, does the subject of desire have to end up being so polarizing, so divisive?  Why does it seem to come down to the young terse, realistic, manly straight Stephen versus the fat, bald, stuttering, pompous, repressed "old woman" Henry?  Why does it seem to turn into a discussion of opposites, of Gay/Straight, Top/Bottom, S/M -- why, to paraphrase Raymond Carver, do we end up talking this way when we talk about love?

"You want to stay away from the whole Gay Literary Debate," my new friend A. told me.  "And chuck the NAMBLA crowd too.  This fascination with Stephen Crane's hardscrabble youth? It's a James Dean die-young thing. You don't need any of that.  And have you read Maggie Girl of the Street?  Painfully bad, trust me."

"That's what Edmund White said," I replied.  "But he also made it clear how really easy it is to parody the dense convoluted language of The Golden Bowl, so --"
"Well, just steer clear is my advice."
"But perhaps it's time to be mean about Henry James?" I countered.  "After Colm Toibin's The Master and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty?  They're so adoring, you know." 
"If you ask me, it's never a good time to be mean," she replied, a little sharply.  "We all get old and fat."

I was forced to admit she had a point. 

"At night in the sorrowful blackness," she said then, quoting something, "one could see the red eyelike gleam of hostile camp fires set in the low brow of distant hills."

"The Red Badge of Courage," she explained off my questioning look.

"My sister always loved the Classic Illustrated comic of it," I said.
"Who doesn't?" A. said. Then, "Stick with the fires," she added.  
"Baltimore?" I asked.
"Good choice," she answered.  "You know, you just can't go wrong with a natural disaster."

Exactly.