E.L. Doctorow story from New Yorker

6 thoughts on “E.L. Doctorow story from New Yorker”

1. Thank you as always, Philip. What I read here is a cautionary tale for young women about the difficulty of assessing why an ardent-seeming man is really interested in winning — one’s hand, as it were. Doctorow expands the concept of “trophy wife” by focusing on the dynamics of the competitor/competition rather than the allure of the trophy. Howard Wakefield’s interest in Diana began as the urge to best his best friend, he fueled his own marital frisson by willfully inventing competitors, and his return home in sartorial splendor from his entertainingly proffered perambulations is triggered entirely by the reappearance of his former best friend, now elegantly affluent and newly attentive to Diana. Dirk’s black Mercedes sedan and Howard’s black cashmere overcoat are nice details of this point counter-point … I see this theme because I’ve somewhat lived it … I first married in a foreign country where my new social milieu was over-populated by my husband’s numerous male colleagues, many of whom became my would-be suitors. I was well aware that most of them were motivated by competition with my husband, who presented an enticing target to topple: handsome, intelligent, gifted, fit, affluent, arrogant, aloof … And how was I so aware so young? Just lucky to have an intuition informed by my lifelong experience that my parents actually loved each other.

2. Edie,
   Your recollections make it all pretty simple:
   There are scores of sorry men out there.

3. Mark,

   Hmm. I did not follow the lives of that cohort so I don’t know what they are doing out there now. I remain glad that those concentrated demographics brought patterns to my attention. It was liberating to observe that the fuss wasn’t about me. One less sturm and drang! And I did wonder if it was an inevitable developmental stage. What do you think?

   Cautionary tales are so you don’t get stuck in your own or especially somebody else’s developmental stage. This one is artfully memorable for our times, and it seems somewhat more pessimistic about human nature in the end than Voltaire’s Candide.

4. My experience is less often being interested in someone due to competition than talking with a friend and realizing after the fact that we (and likely all the others in our circle) were all discretely going after the same beautiful girl, and thus were unknowingly in competition.

   I think male desire is less shaped by competition and fashion than generally assumed and more based on innate desires for symmetry, etc. If competition were the primary factor, then looking at images of beautiful women on the Internet would have little allure. Yet many men would rather look at a picture of a “9” or “10” than compete in real life (whether competing for an attractive woman who is out of their league or competing for an unattractive person who is the best available).

5. K

   Ah, but for the beautiful girl whom the men in your example are “discretely going after” — her key question for assessing her own best interests remains the same: why do each of these suitors want her? And how will their various motives, even an innate desire for symmetry, interact with and affect who she is or is becoming?

   Forgive me 🙂 but with your last line I can’t resist mentioning a website put up by Advertising Women of New York, AWNY. Watch for their The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Awards for depictions of women in advertising: http://www.pigsanonymous.com. There are a couple of amusing videos of real-life advertising principals at Lowe Worldwide participating in a purported “pigs anonymous” 12-step group. And one guy says, “I think women are great! … even the ugly ones.”

   E.L. Doctorow is of Russian Jewish descent, and that darker cultural background may inform the way he links Wakefield’s blatant competition with a yearning for meaning, a link some other Russian Jewish writers explore — especially Isaac Babel, who gracefully tells many a gritty tale of finding out “… what life is really made of.”

   Here Doctorow’s protagonist tells us why he wanted Diana, and he passes over aesthetics to get to the next level: “I registered her as pretty, of course, very attractive, with a lovely smile, light-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and what the merest glance could affirm was a fine body, but somehow it was Dirk’s interest in her, which was clearly of the most intense kind, that made me consider Diana as a potentially serious relationship for myself.”

6. Edie:

   I like your analysis, but I think Wakefield’s relationship to his wife was not the main point. I think the bigger issue was that Wakefield didn’t know who he was outside of competition; he only valued what other men valued, and that pertained to his wife, but also to his job and his home. His entire personality was a reaction, and not his own. When his life stabilized around his achievements in middle age, he found that the competition was over, and thus so was his desire for all that he had. He had to lose intentionally to renew the competition and find meaning in his life again.

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