Birthday

Much of Saturday was consumed with a birthday party for my almost-7-year-old, whose official nativity date is July 1 but for obscure reasons we held the celebration eight days early. Birthday parties for children are no longer held at home, which is deemed too prosaic. I’ve carted my kids to gymnastics studios, a pottery-painting shop and a Chuck E. Cheese. I remember only two parties held in private homes, and one of them included a visit from a very tired female clown who smelled of cigarettes. The other featured one of those inflatable rooms in which kids jump around until someone gets sick.

We had the party on Saturday at a rock-climbing gym. This is a building with steep ceilings and plastic walls meant to simulate El Capitan. The kids put on harnesses resembling bondage-and-domination gear, get hooked up to pulley-and-rope contraptions and dream they’re ascending the Matterhorn. Climbers split evenly between dim-witted macho overachievers and the rest, like me, who get nosebleeds four feet off the floor. The most amusing part is not the screaming, frightened children but the adults, usually fathers, who come on like Teddy Roosevelt.

Our group was representative of Houston and, I suppose, the rest of the country. We had two Iranian-American kids, one Mexican-American, and the rest were mongrel-Americans (“white”). The mother of the Iranian girls is shy, soft-spoken, limited in English and quite charming. With her daughters, who except for being notably polite are like any American kids, she speaks a seamless amalgam of English and Farsi. I’ve known her for several years and have never even seen her husband, though they live a block away from us. She was baffled by the American eagerness to have little girls climb plastic walls, but she remained good-humored and encouraging. She and the rest of this unlikely scene, which I could never have imagined as a kid in the nineteen-fifties, reminded me of a passage in Marianne Moore’s poem “England” devoted to the United States:

“. . . America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the
street in the north; where there are no proof-
readers, no silk-worms, no digressions;
the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, language-
less country in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not
in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

We find a darker, less approving version of Moore’s America in Henry James, one of her favorite writers. James left the U.S. in 1883, when he was 40, and did not return until 1904, when he was almost 61. One of the products of that homecoming, and one of the great books about America, is The American Scene. The 1907 American edition of the book omits a passage from its conclusion that did appear in the English edition, “whether through editorial carelessness or design we do not know,” according to James’ biographer, Leon Edel. Here’s part of the once-omitted passage:

“You touch the great lonely land – as one feels it still to be – only to plant upon it some ugliness . . . . You convert the large and noble sanities that I see around me, you convert them one after the other to crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed; and you so leave them to add to the number of the myriad aspects you simply spoil, of the myriad unanswerable questions you scatter about as some monstrous unnatural mother might leave a family of unfathered infants on doorsteps or in waiting rooms.”