DOING THEIR TIRESOME THING

By Douglas Auchincloss

MAY you live in interesting times," goes an ancient Chinese curse. The times are certainly interesting enough. Why, then, does there seem to be such a proliferation of bores abroad? One obvious answer is that there are more of them simply because there are more people; a more telling reason may be that there are more bores because there is more communication. The high-speed richochet of news around the world has been a breakthrough for the bores. Never until now have these trudging pedestrians of the human spirit been able to do their tiresome thing for so many heavy-lidded audiences.

By definition, a bore is someone whose presence or persistence creates in others a galloping case of ennui, an urge to hide in the nearest closet, a yearning to down another martini. The ranks of the world's bores are not limited by hierarchy or elitism: they include both the heroes of the minute, beaming amiably across the tube, as well as the inglorious Miltons who prattle on about stamp collecting. Institutions can be boring, like the Organization of American States, and so can events. Is it possible for even the most politicized Italian to care any more about those endless Cabinet crises in Rome?

A bore may earn his title for reasons other than his innately yawn-provoking characteristics. Whatever Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis is like as a private person is irrelevant; as a public personage she has become for many people a colossal bore. Jackie with hemline up. Jackie with hemline down. Jackie and Ari at Maxim's. Jackie shopping on the Via Gregoriana, the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore, Madison Avenue. What could be more tiresome?

Since the demand for news of Jackie is obviously there, it may be that the Jackie watchers are the real bores. If overexposure has dimmed her luster as a public figure, too much print and portraiture has done even greater damage to the staying power of other notables. Consider the following, who are all but universally regarded as public bores: HUGH HEFNER, who has spared no expense to disseminate his Playboy philosophy of name-brand hedonism among the taboo-haunted unswingers of the Western world.

ANDY WARHOL, who struck out boldly into the high and far-off hinterlands of tedium to develop its commercial possibilities as entertainment in the name of avant-garde and to create himself in his own image. JOHN and YOKO ONO LENNON, who have collaborated in making over the No. 1 Beatle from a witty and light-hearted songwriter into a salvation-dispensing preacher for peace and porn.

RICHARD and ELIZABETH BURTON, an older couple who have worked hard to convert themselves from stimulating theatricalities into citizens as solid, square-cut and clunky as the diamonds they collect. LEONARD BERNSTEIN, whose indisputable composing and conducting talents are so often obscured by his passion for lecturing audiences about the mystical significance of certain quarter notes. JOSEPH ALSOP, a columnist who has so often predicted U.S. victory in Indochina that it may come as a letdown to his readers if it actually occurs.

These are all men and women in the public domain whose impact is not inimical or repugnant but merely tiresome. There are, of course, countless others. Johnny Carson. Joe Namath out of uniform. David and Julie. Barbra Streisand. Norman Podhoretz. Norman Mailer, at least half the time. And, too often these days, Paul VI, the Pope, as some Italians have it, "who kills one bird with two stones."

Then there are people who bring to the eye not a glint of fury but the glaze of fatigue: marchesas, contessas and baronets, Weathermen, Gabors, psychologists with pipes, Latin American colonels. Politicians run a tremendous risk of becoming bores. One might argue that the unstoppable mouth of Hubert Humphrey bored the public into defeating him. As for President Nixon, even those who find his personality less than stimulating have not been bored by his recent television appearances. The Vice President is far from tiresome. A case, though, could be made that he heads the list of the world's protobores: Jane Fonda picketing for a noble cause, Ralph Nader savaging yet another industry.

The modern landscape, alas, is littered with institutions, customs and conventions that, however much can be said for them, are more than a bit of a drag. Opinion polls, for instance; the ecumenical movement; Swedish sex films; the Sunday New York Times; balance of payment deficits; Women's Lib polemics; Award ceremonies--Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Obie, Misses America, Universe and World.

Even if it were somehow possible to escape all these public and visible affronts to the sense of delight and surprise, there is still the common-or-garden bore to contend with. Girl Scouts selling stale cookies door-to-door. Taxi-driving monologuists. The jargon-droppers waving about words like "viable," "feedback" and "parameter," or those who groove excessively on a Now vocabulary of "rap," "uptight," "right on" and "f--;." Rare indeed is the American who does not number among his near and dear someone who a) has just discovered the mystical virtues of analysis or Esalen or macrobiotic dieting b) cannot refrain from enlisting friends on behalf of some intimate obsession, whether it be snowmobile racing, Australian wines, wife swapping or Zen.

. Douglas Auchincloss

The seeming prevalence of name-brand bores in the U.S. may well be a reflection on the nation's collective social health. As historians have noted, tiresomeness has usually been a problem for leisure-full cultures at an incipient state of decay--France under Louis XVI, for example. The scarcely concealed antipathy of so many people to so many names and newsmakers may therefore be an index to a sense of where Americans, as a people, really are. On the other hand, the communications explosion may have contributed temporarily to a "sensory overload"--too much, in brief, of too many good things. The dedicated bore hater can escape the irritating presence of public clods by switching off the TV, canceling his subscriptions and moving to the farther reaches of exurbia. But how many today have the hermit's vocation?

As for private bores, poor things, they can only be dealt with by avoidance and endurance. Faced with the inescapable presence of, say, a dogged propagandist for urban renewal, the trapped recipient of so much stockpiled truth might remind himself, fleetingly, of G.K. Chesterton's argument that bores are really the worthy, enthusiastic, outgoing salt of the earth; it is the people who are bored who are really mean-spirited and carping. "When Byron had divided humanity into the bores and the bored," Chesterton wrote, "he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may in some sense have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic." What this suggests is that both bores and bored are ineradicable realities--like death and taxes.

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