putterings 494 < 495 > 496 index
What intrudes is my passion for bricolage, puttering at the multiple pretexts
- I have been trying to get down to work. It is extremely difficult, even though I’ve taken leave from the office this week. What intrudes is my passion for bricolage, puttering at the multiple material and even mechanical problems which are involved in living here, this winter. ₅₃
- Yet, when I hear a tap dripping, I make a dash for my pliers and my monkey wrench. P. W. Strauss, the complete plumber! The fact is that the seeking and haggling and fixing interest me — quite independently of the eggs and butter and the silence of the tap. I have a compulsion to putter.
Why? Of all Americans, I am surely one of the most committed to what Hegel calls the “nonserious existence.” Then how can I spend hours installing stoves and fixing faucets?
First, of course, because bricolage adjourns the real problem. It is a pretext for putting off the struggle.
But also because my life, everyone’s life, is so charged with frustration. War, collapse, constant crisis — all this muck we live in and no way out. The problems that matter most are insoluble. How soothing, therefore, to enclose a small area of experience and control it perfectly! The tap drips? Well see to that! We putter with the tap, and it no longer drips. What a vindication of the will and the intelligence of man!
So, after all these years, I come to the conclusion that the overall function of puttering in my life is merely a variant of the desperate hunt which is always going on at home — for pretexts to avoid certain fundamental questions; to avoid assuming one’s death, for example.
In America, people spend a fantastic percentage of their time in bricolage, from fixing taps to “earning their living.” ₅₄ - This interests me. There is something about unconsciousness which challenges my instinct for puttering... ₉₈
— a long reminiscence follows, of Tarski and Marie before the war, of their “most brilliant and germinal salon,” that “extraordinary apartment always in the process of growth and change” —
...and they always seemed to be saying: Very well, then, God is dead. An infinity of choice lies before us. What are we going to do? ₁₀₀
- I, on the other hand, was waiting for Mireille, for the apartment upstairs, for Tony’s story (the bare facts of which he had already blurted out) and, please excuse my insistence, for my death.
I am an old man. I have learned how to wait.
She thanked me profusely and then, as I turned to go, gave me (with a perfidious air of commiseration) the disastrous news. Under the weight of this blow, I staggered upstairs to the mezzanine. Mireille was puttering around the kitchen, rearranging pots, pans and crockery, and taking inventory for dinner. ₁₂₇ - A great deal “going on,” but I’ve been swallowed up in my puttering and my serious life. Office becoming so exigent that I think of throwing it all up, provided Style can support me. ₁₉₅
- The letters, I suspect, are trash, and I have puttering enough to do. . . . Over all this, there is an already pervasive smell of boredom. I sit at my Empire desk and wonder: wherever shall I begin? ₂₃₅
all from H. J. Kaplan, The Plenipotentiaries (1950)
via archive.org : link
—
a writings, sorted; and about page is in preparation for Kaplan. There is a lot, of interest.
The only obituary/memorial I’ve found is this —
“H. J. Kaplan, 1918-2009”
Washington Examiner (November 2, 2009) : link
—
The Plenipotentiaries received several reviews, these among them —
Susan Sontag (her first published work, evidently) —
The Plenipotentiaries by H. J. Kaplan. Chicago Review 5:1 (Winter 1951) : 49-50 : link (jstor)
Orville Prescott, in The New York Times (May 9, 1950) : link (paywall)
Alice S. Morris, “Ways of the Expatriate” in The New York Times 4 (April 30, 1950) : link (paywall)
Who (rightly) dismisses the “story” (the young lovers, out of their depths in Paris) —
“...The virtues of Mr. Kaplan’s book do not lie in any grappling with contemporary preoccupations or in creating characters. The fascination of “The Plenipotentiaries” lies in its wonderfully accurate and intimate evocation of Paris — its streets, the quality of light, its whole sense of life. It lies in the spirited intellectual, philosophical or merely cranky reflections of Phineas (or Kaplan)...”
aside —
The Plenipotentiaries is basically a novel of ideas, specifically existentialist ideas. Kaplan knew Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir and others, and translated Raymond Queneau’s Loin de Rueil into English — The Skin of Dreams (New Directions, 1948) : LoC permalink — about which more in the writings, sorted; and about page (under construction).