It isn’t always so bad to know what your genre is; in fact, many of us encourage it, canting our lives this way or that, tailoring our patter to ensure that the genre we end up installed in is the one that we want. So that, for example, Sebastian Junger gets to be Epic-Heroic; my friend Debbie is Romantic-Comedic; many of us have settled into Melodrama. And we understand our categories and are comfortable in them.
The mickey comes later, when you’ve passed some silent meridian, in the thick of life but with a broad view of the thinning side, and you start to suspect that the role you’ve been assigned within your genre is not the one you’d hoped for. What’s more, you finally get that History happens twice, first as Tragedy, then as Farce, then as Tragedy, then as Farce, then as Tragedy, then as Farce, ad infinitum, the same handful of plots, invariant, the only thing differing from generation to generation the names of the actors plugged into the concrete-cast roles.
Perhaps this makes you think of Ruth Hale, who, at a party one night shortly after the publication of The Great Gatsby, went up to its editor, the legendary Max Perkins, and said, “That new book by your enfant terrible is really terrible,” and felt wonderful about herself. Here she was in a roomful of the cleverest people of her time, and she’d got off the best line. Not only had she got off the best line, she’d scored against the annoyingly sterling Max Perkins himself. And a little while later she walked off into the night and looked cornily up at the stars and saw herself twinkling among the constellations, because she had done it, hers was the quote that everyone would be quoting and, as its originator, she’d carved herself a place in the tricky New York firmament. Now she would be spoken of alongside Dorothy Parker. Then she would run roughshod over Dorothy Parker. And it would all just grow and grow and grow and get better and better and better. And ninety years later the only thing Ruth Hale is remembered for is that incredibly fatuous remark.
What if that’s you?
What if, in the middle of your High Comedy life, having meant to be Dorothy Parker, you’ve ended up Ruth Hale instead?
What if, right there in the shimmering ballroom, you’re the bitter one, the loveless one, the mocked one, the talentless one, the freak, the suicide?
Genres are nothing; it’s the role that damns you.