(Above: Matty. Thanksgiving 2022. Resting on John’s leg.)
Twenty-seven years ago, I was in London interviewing Emma Thompson for a cover story in Vanity Fair. I had already spent a few days with her in Los Angeles - that's when writers actually spent time with our subjects and were given around four or five thousand words to write a profile. Now when celebrities take time off from spinning their own narratives on social media, one is lucky to get an hour to talk to them between their bowel movement and a Botox injection. And that is often on Zoom - the hour, not the movement or the injection. But I am sure that, too, is in the social media cards at some point. Or maybe they’ve already occurred and I’ve missed those social media moments.
Emma and I had enjoyed each other so much back then that she extended an invitation to visit her in Hampstead over here in London. We spent a day at her lovely, unassuming home - two words that also describe her. Her mother, Phyllida Law, was a neighbor and even popped by for a spot of tea. Now, all these years later, I do wonder if the popping by were purposeful. They did seem to have the lovely, unassuming routine worked out and down pat. Either way, they were splendid company. I was charmed. The next day, Emma and I took a long walk together in Hampstead Heath. That is when I told her that it was Thanksgiving. It had not even crossed her mind. She was deeply apologetic for having invited me on such a holiday week, but I told her I much preferred to be in England with her and catch up on some London theatre. Later, the note below arrived at my hotel accompanied by a bottle of champaign and some flowers. It proved to be, as I knew it would be at the time, one of my most memorable Thanksgivings - until this one in 2022 , although I didn’t even remember it was Thanksgiving today until I had been up for three or four hours. And then the first thing for which I was consciously thankful was my not being aware of it for those few hours.
(Above: My first Thanksgiving in London was in 1995 when I came over to finish up interviewing Emma Thompson for the cover of Vanity Fair’s February 1996 issue.)
Frankly, I have never liked the holiday. I find the food unappetizing and the abundance of it rather vulgar. And I don’t particularly like parades and long ago grew brutally bored by football. I think of Thanksgiving actually as Genocide Day and this year its falling amidst all these mass shootings just points up the dishonesty at the dark heart of the holiday. I think our ritualized gratitude - sincere as it is - is also quite literally a way to whitewash America for having been founded on genocide even before it was built on the horsewhipped back of slavery. That is not an indictment of family gatherings and gobbling up food and gratitude lists spoken aloud and written out and celebrated themselves on social media. One day set aside for being grateful does not make up for all the other days the country seems so lost and violent and divided and so deeply in need of healing. At another such juncture on October 3, 1863, the holiday was established by Abraham Lincoln in a proclamation setting aside the last Thursday in November as day of thanks. (Read it here.) Thanksgiving does offer a healing few hours in its way yet does so in a dishonest fashion, a pleasant placebo that convinces us we are better than we really are. We like to see America as a shining city on a hill, a phrase which was one once recognized for what it was: a flowery branding exercise by Ronald Reagan, an actor turned masterful politician after his having been a masterful branding spokesman in an earlier incarnation. But his political party has moved past just branding and is now aligning itself histrionically with an ahistorical white authoritarianism. The Big Lie is about more than just an election; it is big and bad enough to falsify a whole history of a country into a kind of folkloric frolic in which altruistic white folk, trussed up in Puritan garb and garbling scripture, are just characters yoked to a fanciful yarn. It is not American history. It’s fascist falderal. Mendacity morphed into mythos. And it is dangerous.
In language more erudite and scholarly than mine, Abram Van Engen wrote in a 2020 essay in Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment of the Humanities, about how the groundwork for this fabling of America came about in the modern era by writing about Perry Miller, the midcentury Harvard scholar of history and literature, who helped conjure that image of the country. Van Engen: “Miller’s most lasting influence, however, came not from his overall study of the Puritans but from his assertions about one particular text. In deciding that ‘the uniqueness of the American experience’ was fundamentally Puritan, Miller turned to the precise origin of America—the founding of Boston in 1630 with the arrival of John Winthrop on the Arbella. Or, to be more precise, he turned to the moment marked as an origin in a mostly forgotten text. After all, other Puritans founded Salem in 1628; the Mayflower Separatists established Plymouth in 1620; the Dutch arrived in Manhattan in 1609; the Spanish set up St. Augustine in 1565; and Native Americans had been here all along.”
That final little aside about Native Americans in that sentence was neither erudite, come to think of it, nor scholarly. It is a dismissive shrug, a bit too snide and snug where it is so cleverly placed in a descending order instead of an ascending one. “For Miller, the Puritans ‘spoke as fully as they knew how, and none more magnificently or cogently than John Winthrop in the midst of the passage itself, when he delivered a lay sermon aboard the flagship Arbella and called it “A Modell of Christian Charity,”’” Van Engen continued. “That 1630 sermon by John Winthrop is now famous mainly for its proclamation that ‘we shall be as a city upon a hill.’ Beginning in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan placed that line, from that sermon, at the center of his political career. Tracing the story of America from John Winthrop forward, Reagan built a powerful articulation of American exceptionalism—the idea, as he explained, ‘that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.’ In 2012, American exceptionalism—as summarized by the phrase ‘city on a hill’—became an official plank in the platform of the Republican party.”
Forgive this awkward transition on this Thanksgiving - and the British slant to which I am now returning - but for me the shining city on a hill had been London. I sit here right now writing this column in the downstairs cafe of the Royal Opera House where I am attending the Royal Ballet for the second time this week. If you had told me when Reagan was president that I would one day be working at Vanity Fair, I would have thought you were nuts. If you had told me when I was working at Vanity Fair that I would one day be living in London and not just flying over to interview actors, I would have thought you were even nuttier. And yet here I sit fabling my own narrative in many ways. I won’t let myself off the hook here. I once rationalized some of my writing about myself as getting at a deeper truth than my being completely honest would allow me. That sounds a lot like how people defend the very concept of Thanksgiving as an ideal, a deeper truth, of what America and Americans can be: inclusive, grateful, a land of bounty made available to all with a boundless and generous kindness.
But this Thanksgiving is not about bounty even if kindness is one of the things for which I’m most grateful this year for I have gotten rid of almost everything in my life to discover everything that I am. I am beginning to understand that everything that I am is basically just one thing: a writer. That is it. That is all. That is my essence. What kind of writer I will continue to be depends on the kind of person I am willing to continue to become.
I opened the texts on my phone just now and had one from John, the person who gave my cats, Finn and Matty, a home before I left Hudson enabling me to create this latest chapter in the narrative of my life which I am trying to write more honestly. I had been sitting here wondering what I am most thankful for this Thanksgiving and I now realize it is John and his giving Finn and Matty their new home. I have told him my being able to keep them together was a miracle in my life. John lives in Chatham down the rode from where I lived in Hudson and to me that will now always be my shining city on a hill - yes, even more than London - because he gave Matty and Finn a new home there. I miss those heady Vanity Fair days when Emma Thompson would send me champaign on Thanksgiving but this Thanksgiving what I miss much more than that are Finn and Matty. “I love them so, so much,” John texted when he texted me these photos of them today. I don’t need one day set aside to realize how grateful I am that he does.
I did go back and read some of that Emma Thompson story I wrote. The first pull quote used by Vanity Fair was this:
"I'm steering into a calmer place. Despite the pain, one comes through it."
Me, too, Emma. And I’m thankful, too, for that.
(Above: Finn. Thanksgiving 2022.)
(Above: Finn & Matty. Thanksgiving 2022.)
I am grateful for you and your writing.