The Legend of Good-Humored Poverty
for my sons, Hunter and Dash
IT’S A PHRASE from a Henry James novel. An uptight, square American is in Paris on business, and he finds himself in a low-rent apartment of bohemian artists. People start showing up. So it’s a party. Wine, loose talk. At first, he’s uncomfortable, but soon he starts enjoying himself, and even liking everybody.
He liked the ingenuous compatriots—for two or three others soon gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free discriminations. He liked above all the legend of good-humored poverty, of mutual accommodation fairly raised to the romantic.
This newcomer pegs these arty people as “ingenuous,” but of course, he’s the naïve one—just starting to feel the first twinge of growing into a more sophisticated person. A practical man will want to think of himself as hardheaded and pragmatic; he’ll be reluctant to start thinking maybe “poverty” (as he names their situation) could be cheerful, let alone propitious.
ANYWAY, JAMES’S phrase put me in mind of this other thing I want to say to you both. I want to talk about your generation and how you’ll all be living. At my age, personally, I’ll be dead before the major “correction,” but you two boys will go on living in the direction of the full twenty-first century. It’s going to be an undertaking. My generation won’t be leaving behind
