Kathryn Kontent Hollingsworth

"Portrait of a Young Woman Reading," 1938 by G.B. Barlow

Katya Kontent, whose story is told in The Rules of Civility [2011] by Amor Towles, grows up in Brooklyn with a Russian immigrant father. Her mother abandons them and at 19, Katya’s father dies, leaving her almost without family. By this time, however, she has a job doing typing and stenography for an attorney in New York and lives in a boardinghouse with her roommate Eve.

At 24, Katey and Eve are ready to take the town by storm. It is 1938 and the Depression is waning. They go out for a drink in a jazz club and meet an attractive man, Tinker Grey, who leaves them with his address and a gold lighter. At lunch one day, in the hole in the wall diner Katey enjoys, Tinker turns up and they talk. Katey falls in love with him. But an accident, in which the car the three of them were sharing is hit by a milk truck and Eve is badly injured, makes Tinker, who was driving, take responsibility for her. Eve recuperates at his apartment, and soon they are off to Palm Beach and then Europe. Katey is left to her books (often Dickens) and games of contract bridge, which she plays with herself in her apartment on the lower East Side.

During a bleak winter, Katey runs into Tinker’s brother, a painter. “Place no trust in appearances,” she is told. She also meets Ann Grandyn, Tinker’s “godmother.” By June, she is given a promotion, becoming the top secretary at her firm. On June 21, her birthday, she buys a new dress, shoes and clutch and goes out to dinner by herself at La Belle Epoch. Unlike her father, who thought restaurants an “ungodly waste,” Katey feels they are the height of civilization. “A fine dinner could revive the spirits.”

Katey quits her job and talks herself into a job at Pembroke Press. Here, the workers don’t need their jobs, don’t care what they are paid, as they have family money. Very quickly she is snapped up by the editor of a new magazine. Gotham is a Conde Nast publication of cultural demolition, clearing the way for something new. In a week, Katey’s life in New York has “come about.”

Katey’s new friends are very well off. Wallace, who is kind, steady and sincere, takes her shooting. He is planning to leave to fight in the Spanish Civil War, however. Katey and he shop for his Christmas gifts to his family in August, wrapping them and squirreling them away. Katey hears that Tinker and Eve will become engaged. She secures an invitation to the Hollingsworth Labor Day picnic on Long Island. When she finds that Tinker and Eve are there, she leaves for the train, but her host sends her home in a car with his son, Valentine. The radio is playing “Autumn in New York.”

Eve, it turns out, has refused Tinker and run away. She keeps running, all the way to California. Katey notices that Tinker is relieved. He invites Katey to come see him at Wallace's hunting camp, where he is building fires and reading Thoreau. They spend the night together, and Tinker invites her to meet him at a club on Monday night. Katey joyously prepares, but at lunch she runs into Tinker and Ann Grandyn, who is clearly much more than a “godmother.” Katey slaps him and ends up telling her friend the whole story.

Tinker tries to apologize; he was actually bidding Ann and the many things she provided him with goodbye. But Katey has been badly hurt. She goes out with others and runs again into Tinker’s brother. “My old man lost everything,” he tells her. “Tinker was sent to school, learned five languages. What he’s got can’t be taught in schools.” Katey knows this. Tinker is vibrant, fearless, naïve. Katey admits that she loves him.

Katey finds Tinker in the flophouse where his brother lived near the docks. His brother has enlisted. Tinker is not downcast or unraveled. Katey apologizes and they have lovely times together until Tinker sets off to find his way to unfettered openness. “I’m going to try the present on for size.” Katey keeps her eyes open, but she does not run into him again.

Katey continues to work for Gotham, the Depression ending as 1940 arrives. Wallace dies in Spain and bequeaths Katey $800 a year, enough so that she can continue to live with integrity and no regrets. In 1947 she is introduced to Val Hollingsworth, who remembers their drive, listening to “Autumn in New York.” She becomes editor of Gotham in 1955. In 1966, she and Val go to an exhibit of Walker Evans’ photographs of people on the subway, taken in 1938. Katey spots Tinker, twice. Once in his cashmere coat, looking rich, and later looking scruffy and happy.

Amor Towles' wonderful book is a love poem to New York, replete with all kinds of characters. “Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out?” But it is also the story of a young working class woman who maintains her dignity. On her way up, she does not do anything against her true feelings, does not demean herself. Dignity is under-rated, in my estimation. Katey’s father has left her with this advice: “One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition, and all manner of glamorous enticements.” She does not tell her husband about what happened between her and Tinker, keeping the memory of her 24^th year to herself. She has no regrets, though she does note that “the right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.” As physical creatures, we can only live one life.

Jia Tanchun

Wenying Dongfang, 1987 television series

The Story of the Stone, also called The Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xuequin [first printed 1791] is well-known as the story of a young man, Bao-yu, living in a large Confucian household torn between the love of a gifted, difficult poet, Lin Dai-yu, and his fated marriage to a more measured, beautiful woman, Xue Bao-chai. Hundreds of characters with many complex stories fill the pages of this classical Chinese novel, which we most likely read in the David Hawkes translation. The novel has spawned its own study, “redology,” and endless debates are held about which of the two beauties is the better match for Bao-yu. Interesting as all this is, for me, the woman with her feet most on the ground, and a way into the story, is Bao-yu’s half-sister Tanchun.

Tanchun is one of the “twelve beauties” Bao-yu dreams of early in the book. One of the three “springs,” her name means “seeking spring.” Like Lin Dai-yu, she is a wonderful poet, but also she has managerial ability and can restore balance to a situation. Her mother, Auntie Zhao, is a concubine, and an unlikeable character, which dims Tanchun’s prospects. But Tanchun makes the most of her life and is one of the most successful beauties in the end.

As the story opens, Bao-yu, his cousins and relatives are quite young. The two branches of the Jia family live in adjoining mansions, each housing perhaps 300 people. One of their number has become consort to the emperor, so the families create a garden between the mansions, suitable as a residence for her when she comes to visit. The garden is pronounced lovely, but Jia Xuanchun says that the garden should not be left empty. Bao-yu and his young cousins, siblings and servants all move into it.

Bao-yu is supposed to be studying the Confucian classics, as directed by his father. But he refuses, spending his time idly, getting mixed up in intrigues and writing poetry. Bao-yu is the mouthpiece of the writer, Cao Xuequin, himself the scion of a great house about which he wrote with nostalgia as it went into decline. The book is a critique of society, castigating the Confucian scholar ruling class of the time with hypocrisy and lack of feeling. Those who study only to move up in the world are “career worms,” in Bao-yu’s eyes. Confucians felt passion was bad and must be quelled, but Bao-yu is interested in authenticity, finding the genuine feelings in one’s nature. Without passion, one is hardly a man. Thus his feelings for the romantic Dai-yu.

While living in the garden, Tanchun proposes a poetry club. When someone walks by with a pot of crabflowers, this name is attached to the club. Tanchun lives in the Autumn studio, where she paints and writes poetry. Under the benevolent eye of Grandmother Jia, the young people play games, go boating on the lake, watch plays and participate in ceremonies and festivals. When Wang Xi-feng, the spirited woman who manages the house, becomes ill, Tanchun learns to fill her shoes. Partly through the machinations of Wang Xi-feng, and certainly due to some of the wrongdoing of the greedy, lascivious and lazy members of the household, the Jia family falls into decline. When dealing with the quarrels, petty rivalries and outright fights, Tanchun says more than once that she wishes she lived with fewer people!

The climax of the book in reached with Bao-yu’s marriage. Everyone in the Jia household becomes involved in the deception. About this time, Zhou Qiong, a military man from the Haimen Coastal Region, asks for Tanchun’s hand. Tanchun must travel far to the south. A year or so later, at a tumultuous time, when Bao-yu cannot be found after his examinations and the only daughter of Wang Xi-feng is also missing, Tanchun and her husband return for a visit. “She had always been gifted with a knack of finding the right thing to say, and her natural equanimity restored a degree of calm to the gatherng.”

When visiting Hong Kong, I made a friend of a young girl whom I met in the street with a thick red book under her arm. Sure enough, it was a copy of Dream of the Red Chamber. I asked her about it! We met several times so she could practice her English. The book is a realistic depiction of the life of its time, but is also full of overtones of Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. An opera made of the work opened in San Francisco in 2016. I have found whole courses in English on “redology,” such as these by Anthony E. Clark of Whitworth University. Clark expounds on the language, the story, the philosophy and history of the book. I wish you the joy of reading it yourself and finding your own favorite character. I could tell that Professor Clark loved best Wang Xi-feng, the “fox fairy.”