24, 25 and 27 April

Tuesday 24th

David, of course, was used to his mother’s busy people-filled life. As she liked to say, he had been brought up “on coats,” meaning she had dragged him along to the many parties and “happenings” and other events she had not wanted to miss just because she had a young child. … In fact, though he had a much stronger sense of privacy than Susan did, like her, he grew bored and restless when things were too quiet. He also had her stamina, and though he was perhaps somewhat less social than she, he was far more social than I, who already carried the seeds of the person I would become: someone who spends ninety percent of her time alone. (76)

That’s Sigrid Nunez, in Sempre Susan: A memoir of Susan Sontag. I read the book yesterday, with the greatest pleasure. I had understood it to be something of a hatchet job, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. Although Nunez itemizes Sontag’s foibles, she does not ridicule Sontag herself. She presents her rather as a mixed-up person like all of us, only much more determined to be famous. This pursuit of fame, which used to be positively admired in men, is treated by Nunez with kindness and generosity. She finds two great flaws in Sontag’s professional character. In the only passage in the memoir that I found “judgmental,” Nunez deems her subject to have been “mortally malcontented,” largely because, although famous, she wasn’t famous for her fiction. The other flaw, seemingly fatal for a writer, was that Sontag hated being alone. She had two ways of dealing with this problem, according to Nunez. She would create the undergraduate fugue state of dexedrine-fueled all-nighters, obsessively combing through piles of books in search of the mot justissime, or she would rope in a friend to play editor, and the two of them would decide where the commas belonged.

Meanwhile, Nunez was carrying those seeds.

***

I put the book down and talked about it with Kathleen — without whom I should certainly be someone who lived alone in more ways than one. I observed that I have never learned much from people directly, except, and I’ll come back to this, about who they are. What I mean here is that I’ve never learned how to live from the example of another person. I have never had a role model or a mentor. I thought for a long time that this signified a moral failing of some kind. Instead, I learn from books. And I learn, or demonstrate what I have learned, by writing. Reading and writing are something of a mining operation in which I excavate and assay myself and so find my place in the civilization around me. It is not an image that I want to push very far, but it feels like an apt description of how I have spent my life most profitably. The restless socializing, occasional thrill-seeking, the longing to find myself embedded in the alienated but romantic scenario of an Antonioni film — these were enormous, sometimes nearly catastrophic wastes of time, at least to the extent that it took so long to figure this out. The wonderful thing about being old is having outgrown, outlived all such urges.

What could be less “popular,” less “American,” less generally recommended, though, than learning about life, not from people directly, but from books. An interesting point occurs to me. Looking for wisdom in people, I would focus on one person at a time, as if interviewing prospective gurus. Nothing extraordinary about that. But with books, I was never looking for right one, the book that would unlock the secrets of the universe. (I’m amazed by the number of books that make such claims.) Certainly there were books that made an extraordinary impression at the time, but they never prevented me from reading other books, books that I never expected to be revelatory. When I say that I learned from books, I mean exactly that: from an undifferentiated pile, variously digested, of texts. It was only when I had read thousands of books — I hope that nobody takes that for a boast; it would be lame of me indeed if I could not at least make that claim — that the learning began, that the writing took on a purpose.

Kathleen — remember that we have spent more than half our lives together — agreed.

***

What I have learned from people is about them. This may have been what slowed me down in school: I learned more about teachers themselves than about what they were teaching. I’m not talking about secrets here. I learned what made people smile, what their smiles were like, what made them cross or impatient; I learned whether they were generous or mean (although almost everybody is both). I learned most about people when they were not paying attention to me — although this was another thing that it took me too long to realize. I would have learned more if I hadn’t been so fond of talking. I still like to talk, and Kathleen, bless her, insists that she likes to listen. But, more than ever, I like to watch people.

At lunch in a quiet restaurant, I am annoyed when my reading is interrupted by a telephone conversation that I cannot help overhearing half of. Sometimes, in cases of great witlessness, both halves — is there anything as passively obnoxious as activating the speakerphone option in a public place? These intrusions are never quite entertaining enough to justify the nuisance, probably because people who conduct private business in the company of strangers lack rudimentary discernment. Actual conversations between people sharing a table can be just as bothersome. The other day, I could not shut out the Elmer-Fuddish monotone of a sensible, plain-speaking Midwesterner as he lectured a younger person, who might have been his daughter but who was probably, given her animation, a more distant relative, on the virtues of an IRA account. Everything that I heard come out of the man’s mouth was worthy of the very earliest pages in some Life for Dummies handbook. No sooner had the two of them left than a woman about my age took a seat. She was not very glamorous to look at, but her voice reminded me very much of Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton at the beginning of Something’s Gotta Give, when she can’t wait to get rid of Jack Nicholson, her very laugh a sigh of dismissal. I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the waitperson, with whom this customer was going to be both chummy and demanding. Not long after she had ordered, her phone rang — the “old phone” ringtone. All I could make out was that she was looking for a better package than what they were offering. If you’re going to complain like Diane Keaton, perhaps you had better look as good as she does, too.

***

Wednesday 25th

The last page of Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, a meditation on responsibility, built on interviews with Franz Stangl, the Kommandant of the Treblinka death camp, is entitled “Epilogue.” But it is actually a closing prayer. Here are the first and the last two paragraphs:

I do not believe that all men are equal, for what we are above all other things, is individual and different. But individuality and difference are not only due to the talents we happen to be born with. They depend as much on the extent to which we are allowed to expand in freedom.

Social morality is contingent upon the individual’s capacity to make responsible decisions, to make the fundamental choice between right and wrong; this capacity derives from this mysterious core – very essence of the human person.

This essence, however, cannot come into being or exist in vacuum. It is deeply vulnerable and profoundly dependent on a climate of life; on freedom in the deepest sense: not license, but freedom to grow: within family, within community, within nations, and within human society as a whole. The fact of its existence therefore – the very fact of our existence as valid individuals – is evidence of our interdependence and overall responsibility for each other.

There are no names on this page, no specifics — as befits a common prayer. Nevertheless, I take it to mean, in particular, that, had he grown up in a better world, without an abusive parent and then the social collapse into fascism, Franz Stangl would have remained a working man, as he was before and after his Nazi career as the attendant to exterminators. I don’t take it to mean that Stangl, in particular, wasn’t fully responsible for what he did, but only that we are none of us fully responsible for ourselves, and that we are all somewhat responsible for one another. Human society depends on this interdependence, but as we have seen again and again it is prone to break down when the reach of that society stretches too far, too quickly, beyond conceptions of family, community, and nation. At this very moment, thousands of American men — I hope they are only thousands — are nourishing the worst in one another, forming an adamantine opposition to the intrusion of “human society” into American life.

As it happens, I am also reading some of the essays in Lionel Trilling’s collection, The Liberal Imagination. Sadly, none of the essays bears this title, or describes what it refers to, but the opening essay, “Reality in America,” makes it clear to me that the book’s title ought to have substituted “American” for “liberal.” Writing during the Forties, Trilling could assume that ours was a liberal society, at least for the moment. He could write, in the Preface, that “nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Not that he was complacent: he could project from recent European experience the lesson that “it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it masks in ideology.” Even without the menace of a conservative movement (one that, at that very moment, ironically, was furiously developing ideas, mainly in the brain of William Buckley), there was for Trilling the crack in the liberal, or American, outlook:

Its characteristic paradox appears again, and in another form, for in the very interests of its great primal act of imagination by which it establishes its essence and existence — in the interests, that is, of its vision of a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction of human life —it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination.

Trilling gives this thought an almost poetic expression in “Reality in America.”

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency: our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time. (18)

So much has changed since Trilling wrote — which is practically the same thing as to say, during my lifetime — but not that. If anything, the tendencies outlined in that passage have, if you’ll allow me, massified, grown like the biceps of a committed weightlifter. They have done so primarily by means of broadcast television and its spawn: the biggest mistake that any media critic could make would be to downplay in the slightest degree the fact that our entertainments are mirrors distorted to flatter us. Understanding and thought are not only dull but idiosyncratic: it’s hard to understand what someone else is thinking, no matter how lucidly the thought is presented. But wrath is exciting, and what better way to wind up a sitcom episode than with a bit of moralizing? Bad enough for shows, these tendencies have wrecked the very idea of “news,” occluding complication with violence of every kind, from the automotive to the meteorological, and reducing public figures to the vocabulary of pap.

The liberal vision of enlargement and freedom and rationality — I would put it, the enlargement of civil freedom — is, like all hope, somewhat opportunist, ready to extrapolate success from promising signs, to expect that rackety improvisations will stabilize in time, and, ultimately, to invite disappointment. When we consider what happened in and to the United States during the forty years after Trilling’s preface, by which time only dimwits admitted to being liberal, the Columbia professor’s prescience can seem otherworldly. But I think that Trilling was simply more aware than most Americans wanted to be of the difficulty of the liberal project, and of its dependence for success upon a rigorous, not a freewheeling, imagination. The climate of life in which a human society can flourish on Earth demands much more than heartfelt commitment. That’s where things begin. From there, it is a matter of long, hard thought.

***

Friday 27th

If I have ever read everything in Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, then I have certainly forgotten it or, more likely, grown a different mind. In the past couple of days, two passages from essays in the the later pages of the collection have shocked me.

[T]here can be no doubt that a society in which homosexuality was dominant or even accepted would be different in nature and quality from one in which it was censured.

**

A prose which approaches poetry has no doubt its own values, but it cannot serve to repair the loss of a straightforward prose, rapid, masculine, and committed to events, making its effects not by the single word or by the phrase but by words properly and naturally massed.

The first comes from “The Kinsey Report” (p 241) and the second from “Art and Fortune” (p 273) Both are offensive in more ways than one. The functional equation of homosexual dominance and heterosexual acceptance is as bizarre, or gratuitous, as it is grating; the implication that the nature and quality of a society in which homosexuality is censured are superior to those of the hypothetical alternative is, among other things, evasive. This is clearly a topic about which Trilling believes that the less said is the better. He has postponed this distasteful discussion of “sexual aberrancy” almost to the essay’s final paragraphs. The other passage, which is preceded by comments on T S Eliot’s judgement of Nightwood, a novel whose name Trilling does not disclose, even though he must assume it to be common knowledge among his readers — more distaste; if you look up Djuna Barnes today, Google will tell you that Nightwood is “a classic of lesbian fiction” — yokes poetry to femininity and prose to masculinity, with the latter alone capable of “words properly and naturally massed.”

These remarks are offensive — today. Trilling, writing in the Forties, seems unaware of making controversial or exceptionable statements. His opinions are delivered with a conviction that can afford to be understated. And I do not think that he was mistaken. These are not the only instances of Trilling’s expressed belief in the salubrious superiority of maleness. (“Masculinity” is the figleaf essential to decorous writing.) It was widely if not universally shared at the time; alternative beliefs would have raised eyebrows. And yet they betray a certain unease, the “concern” that might attend efforts to extinguish a fire before it gets out of control. Kinsey and Eliot, perhaps without realizing it, are encouraging the forces of anarchy and upset. To be sure, Trilling is far more worried about the deadly substitution of ideology for ideas in American discourse, and with good reason. Very much contributing to the shocking effect of the passages that I have copied out is a tone quite unlike that of most of the text. As I say, it would seem that if Trilling could have figured out a way not to mention homosexuality at all in his critique of the Kinsey report, he would have taken it, and the entire collection is shot through with admiration for Henry James, whose sexuality was, in those days, a secret almost brutally suppressed by Leon Edel’s control over access to Harvard’s Houghton Library.

And yet I cannot help but be upset by these glancing blows. They betray the power of common, deep-rooted prejudices in a very fine mind.

Bon week-end à tous!

17 and 20 April

Tuesday 17th

If we want to blame our moral disasters upon the loss of dogmatic authority, we shall again find ourselves in the midst of notions which have little if any place in the great tradition of Western thought or in the history of ideas. For politically speaking, it was the fear of hell which acted as the most potent curb upon the potential criminality of human beings. And the idea that a motive of such obvious moral inferiority as the fear of hell should have restrained mankind from the worst crimes is no more palatable than the notion that such an intellectually unspeakably low product as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion should have had the power to influence the course of contemporary events. Yet, I am afraid these very unpalatable notions are closer to the reality with which we were confronted than any dialectic of ideas. It would lead us too far astray now, but I think it can be shown that the belief in hell is the only strictly political element in Western religion, and that this element is neither Christian nor religious in origin. If this is true, then it would follow that the politically most momentous consequence of the loss of dogmatic authority was the resulting loss of belief in rewards and punishments in a Hellfire.

To be honest, I copied out this passage* simply for the pleasure of repeating the phrase “a motive of such obvious moral inferiority as the fear of hell.” The Roman church’s exploitation of hellfire is arguably its most discreditable failing. We are left with a somewhat cynical question: did it work? I myself suspect that the totalitarian atrocities of the Twentieth Century would never have occurred without the many new facilities of technological convenience in communication, transportation, and manufacturing. We have no way of knowing (I suspect further) how many agents in the Holocaust and the Soviet purges found it easier to participate because they no longer feared eternal punishment. I often wonder if the hellfire element of medieval life (of which we know very little directly) wasn’t overdone, resulting in a demoralized population incapable of virtue. I wish I knew more about the paradoxes of Calvinist predestination, which  if anything re-moralized Europeans. This brings me to my other thoughtful lady.

It has been usual to treat the great school of writers who emerged from American Puritan culture in the nineteenth century as having put aside the constraints of the old faith and stepped into a larger conceptual world. But in fact the striking kinship among them suggests they found source and stimulus closer to home. Whatever else might be part of a Puritan world-view, the exalted mind is central for them as it for all these writers. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, share a fascination with the commonest elements of life as they are mediated and entertained by perception and reflection. The Puritans spoke of their religion as experimental, that is, experiential. Sacredness is realized in the act of attention because reality is communicative and the mind is made, grace assisting exquisite effort, to experience its meaning. … The absence of shrines and rituals and processions that interpreted the world and guided understanding of it in England and Europe reflected, as absence, a sense of immanence that gave the theological meaning to anything in itself in the moment of perception — a buzzing fly, a blade of grass. The exalted mind could understand the ordinary as visionary, given discipline and desire.**

In this passage, what captivates me is the description of thinking as a communication with reality. Although Hannah Arendt belonged to an earlier generation and was trained in a very different cultural environment, I like to think that she would agree with Robinson on this point. A mind such as Robinson or Arendt’s is stuffed with learning, with highly articulated ideas of “authority” and “grace” (to pick an example from each), but the act of thinking is always an undertaking to find points of articulation by which the mind’s stock can connect with the palpable world. Connection is more important than explanation, if only because explanation is impossible without it. Both thinkers exhibit a gentle impatience with the sluggishness of connection — there is never enough of it; one is never satisfied. Arendt and Robinson combine a practical worldliness with tremendous suspicion — not unlike, say, Jonathan Edwards’s fear of religious hypocrisy — of the reduction of reality to the dimensions of a problem that can be solved.

***

Something to think about:

On the one hand, we have readers who nod deliberately when the Times intones that the President is not above the law. On the other, we have a television audience for whom those are just words, words like any others in the script, or the show, or whatever it is — the word does not exist, does it? that describes the contemporary entertainment experience, something categorically beyond symbiosis, in which the audience is part of the show, and the show is part of the real world, a world more vivid than the world perceived by the audience members when they are not watching, or, to put it better, involved with the show. One the one hand, we have political discourse. On the other, political discourse is suffocated by entertainment, entertainment that consumes all the oxygen (ie meaning) in the public space that is occupied by the audience.

Better than to say that television created this audience, to say that television inspired the audience to create this reality. The audience is wholly, morally, responsible.

*The extract is from “Challenges to Traditional Ethics: A Response to Michael Polanyi,” in Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken, 2018), p 189-90.

** From “Old Souls, New World,” in Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), p 294-5.

***

Friday 20th

Kindly attribute my silence this week to my discretion on two points: first, that I have been thinking full-time about something that doesn’t appear to have been much thought-about by anyone (then again, I don’t get out much), and my thoughts are not yet fully fit for publication; second, an iron determination not to mention a certain German-American political thinker (1906-1975) more than once a week.

So much for her.

What I have been thinking about is privacy, and I have been thinking about it because the idea of privacy seems to me to be what’s missing from current social discourse, particularly in the context of lamentations about social media. The word “privacy” is mentioned all the time, but there is no real idea behind the word, just a bundle of legal concepts. This makes a certain sense, because our notions of privacy have their origin in jurisprudence, specifically in the arguments of Louis Brandeis and others, made around the beginning of the last century, that we all have the right to be left alone. Far from being a universal right, moreover, privacy is not only a relative novelty, apparently confined, until very recently, to the Anglophone world.

Isn’t that odd. Privacy is important to everyone — to mature adults, anyway. How can it not always have been?

In the old days, before the word “privacy” had much currency, the right to be left alone was limited to a few special cases, usually involving the word “privy.” Alone, it represented what we now call the privacy of the bathroom, although actual bathing was not covered by it, for the simple reason that bathers had to be provided with hot water by helpers capable of filling and lifting pails. At the other end of the scale — what scale, exactly, I hesitate to say — the king and his advisers met in privy council. I have a couple of scholarly to-dos to check off. When did the word “privates” come to be used as a partial euphemism for genitals, and how do we explain the positive right to privacy deriving etymologically from words denotating deprivation? But these don’t seem terribly important at the moment.

In the old days, ideas of modesty and discretion imposed the effects of privacy on everyone. And there was also an idea of the family that encompassed a large part of the idea of privacy that I’m trying to work out. It would be wrong to say that there was no need for privacy, but there was no thought of it as something that was missing from the rule book. Finally, aside from smoke signals and bonfires, there was no such thing as communicating at a distance.

The last thing I want to do is to lapse into treatise-writing mode, beginning with definitions and distinctions. That’s precisely what I’ve been doing all week. But if I have the sense to keep my doodles to myself, I still think that there is at least one worth sharing, and it’s something that I call social privacy. It is the privacy of two or more people living more or less together more or less intimately. That’s to say that they may or may not live in the same place all the time, and that they may or may not be what we’ll call lovers. They may be parents and children. They may be cousins or friends. They may be like the group of five or six former camp counselors who get together every summer in cabins on a pond in Maine (my wife being one), a gathering not to be confused with your garden-variety reunion.

The second thing that I want to say about social privacy is that it is nourishing, beneficial. Toxic relationships preclude it. Unhappy families do not enjoy it. Nor does it just happen by itself. It requires certain kinds of behavior, and working out what that behavior might be is my real concern here.

The third and last thing that I want to offer is a distinction between secrecy and privacy that might be useful. A secret is simply information that is purposefully withheld from universal knowledge. It is defined by the people who don’t know it. (Those who know that it exists together with those who don’t.) Privacy is positive, a possession really. Privacy operates on the assumption that those who don’t share it don’t exist. The right to know a secret might be disputed — it’s disputed every time friends argue about whether to tell someone about a cheating spouse. What takes place in private, however, is nobody’s business — which is why these arguments occur. Whether the social privacy of an adulterous relationship destroys the social privacy of a marriage is, I conclude from the variety of human experience, not a question to be answered by deduction from principles. I will leave this very thorny question here.

What makes these thoughts urgent is, of course, the mobile phone in all its varieties. The mobile phone has created a contested, confused space, one in which many people pursue their private lives in the company of strangers. Strangers are on record as finding this annoying, but the greater harm, it seems to me, is the nuisance to the users. Is it not foolish to detach private conversations from the affect of physically sharing a familiar interior?

That’s enough for now. Bon week-end à tous!

Wednesday 11th

The other day, a copy of Thinking Without a Banister arrived. This collection of essays, speeches, letters, and journalism by Hannah Arendt, edited by Jerome Kohn, takes its title from Arendt’s description of thinking in modern times.

I have a metaphor … which I have never published but kept for myself. I call it thinking without a banister — in German, Denken ohne Geländer. That is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hold on to the banister so that you don’t fall down, but we have lost this banister. That is the way I tell it to myself. And this is indeed what I try to do.

I’ve read only the first essay in the book, but I expect that the second, “The Great Tradition,” will describe that banister and what happened to it. I’ll let you know. For the moment, I want to say something about reading the first essay, a two-part block of seriousness in which it is sometimes difficult to tell whether Arendt is speaking for herself or crystallizing the thought of her subject, Karl Marx. Sometimes my sense of perspective, of point of view, becomes unsteady, and I can’t really follow the train of thought. Sometimes I suspect that my problem comes down to not having had a German education.

It’s more likely that my problem comes down to not having read Marx and other modern political thinkers until rather late in life. I may be accused of having cultivated patches of ignorance, a slightly paradoxical endeavor in which I simply refused to learn more about something that puts me off. In the case of modern political thought (and action), what puts me off is collectivization, bundling individual people up into indissoluble lumps and dealing with them en masse. My humanism, I now realize, has always been liberal humanism. Not Roman Catholic or Christian humanism; not atheist humanism; not even the anthropocentric humanism that underlies the whizbang triumphs of material progress. Liberal humanism can be simply described but never simply lived. As a liberal humanist, I treat each and every person with whom I come into contact as an unaffiliated individual, a person with unique resources. I like some people more than others, of course, but I don’t like or dislike anybody on account of a tribal or ethnic allegiance. Even “Trump voters”! I cannot think in terms of “classes.”

Now that I am robustly resistant to ideology of any kind — I maintain that liberal humanism is not an ideology like any other but rather a set of rules for, among other things, withstanding ideologies — it is safe for me to read about the formation of modern political ideas, forms of government, and social organizations. And I think that I have done wisely in appointing Hannah Arendt as my tutor. She can be as ponderous and obscure as any mystical German, but she can also be homely, homely in a very sophisticated manner. (This comes out strongly in her correspondence with Mary McCarthy.) Denken ohne Geländer is a fine example of her everyday style.

The lesson that I have most strenuously postponed is Arendt’s insistence that Karl Marx is the central figure. That so much of what he wrote was wrong is not the point. The point is that he alone is our link to the Western intellectual tradition that came crashing to the ground in the multiple revolutions that clustered around the year 1800. Marx was one of the last thinkers to be formed by the old tradition, and one of the first to understand that it had been wrecked beyond repair. Being Marx, he celebrated the wreckage, and went all in for the new dispensation, the previously unthinkable enfranchisement of what Arendt calls “the laboring classes.” I was brought up to find laborers uncouth, and Marx an incendiary lunatic. Now I understand that laborers often have the wisdom as well as reason to hope that their children will not be laborers, and I agree with Arendt about the centrality of Marx, despite as much as because of his confused legacy of inhumane totalitarianism.

But what am I to make of this:

The social revolution of our time is contained in the simple fact that until not much more than one hundred years ago [Arendt was writing in the Fifties], mere laborers had been denied political rights, whereas today we accept as a matter of course the opinion that a nonlaborer may not even have the right to stay alive. (37)

We do? Where? Outside the nightmare of totalitarian régimes, where have “parasites” been put to death, or denied medical attention? This is the sort of perplexity that sometimes makes it difficult to digest Arendt.

***

Karl Marx gave us the concept of “capitalism,” and it has taken me several years to understand just how profoundly the term is, or ought to be, defined by the historical developments that inspired him. Unfortunately — most unfortunately — it has become synonymous with “business” and “private ownership.”

Last summer, I read a book that I wrote about in August, before I’d quite finished reading it, William Janeway’s Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (Cambridge, 2012). What I took away from Janeway’s memoir of successful investing was an understanding of capitalism as a vital preliminary phase that, if prolonged, could easily become toxic. Mature businesses don’t need to issue equity shares; if they require cash, they can issue debt, and do so all the time. (It is a commonplace to observe that the public trading in Silicon Valley’s Big Five stocks was simply a reward to early investors, a liquidation, if anything, of capital commitment.) Capitalism is a necessary instance of gambling; when and if the gamble pays off, capitalism’s contribution to the enterprise comes to an end. At this point, shareholders ought to be replaced by stakeholders. The work of legally determining what we mean by “stakeholders” remains to be done — probably in step with environmental restoration. But it seems to me that there is plenty of room for options between state ownership and public (ie rentier) ownership.

Another book that highlights the transitory nature of capitalist enterprise is Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, by Joshua Freeman (Norton, 2018). Freeman’s subject isn’t so much the factory as the really big factory, the vogue for which has come and gone within the space of two centuries. What explains the trajectory is the workforce. In case after case, the workers at impressively huge new factories consolidated the power of their numbers, and by the postwar era it was a rule of thumb for industrial giants like General Motors and General Electric to avoid enlarging existing plants and to develop new works in smaller, geographically diffuse locations. Polish and other Communist authorities learned the same lesson the hard way.

I have known, ever since I began reading about medieval trading operations years ago, that capitalists hate one thing more than all others combined: the payroll. The ideal capitalist payroll does not exist, because it is unnecessary: there are no employees. If Freeman’s behemoths had been erected in order to nourish the prosperity of their workers, many of them might still be operating, and those that weren’t might have been neatly dismantled or repurposed. Imagine: a corporation in the business  of employing people and paying them well! Rocket science?

***

Thursday 12th

A great deal of the current issue of the London Review of Books (40/7) is given over to James Meek’s report on breakdowns in health care, particularly the care of frail, elderly people, in Leicestershire, an English county beset by a familiar strain between uncongenial urban and rural populations. Well on the way to being frail and elderly myself, I read it with harrowed interest. But nothing in Meek’s piece was as shocking to me as an innocuous sentence in another article, Rosemary Hill’s essay on “frock consciousness” — the phrase is Virginia Woolf’s, and she found it difficult to define — entitled “What does she think she looks like?“

Clothes, for those who could afford to choose them freely, had always been to some extent an expression of the wearer – of their status, character and taste – but it was in the popular Modernism of the interwar years, when so many men had died and women consequently found themselves with more room to manoeuvre in society, that the particular compound of woman + clothes, Woolf’s ‘frock consciousness’, became a significant aspect of female experience, a colour on the writer’s palette, a possible agent in a narrative.

Forget parsing “woman + clothes.” The electrifying phrase is this: when so many men had died and women consequently found themselves with more room to manoeuvre in society. Haven’t we all — but perhaps it’s just we men — haven’t we long looked back on the Twenties and the Thirties as the time of a Lost — dead — Generation? Hasn’t it been customary to feel sorry for all the women who couldn’t find mates? An intellectual cliché, certainly; but we couldn’t get through the day without thousands just like it. Hill’s sentence takes a scalpel to the received view and scrapes a bloody gash. Many men dead -> more room to maneuver for women.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” No, indeed I hadn’t. And I’m not sure that the point would register so sharply if we weren’t in the #MeToo moment, when every intelligent man feels estopped from generalizing about women. I felt no such constraint forty years ago, when men were pigs, period. Those were crude times. What did women want? They seemed to know only what they didn’t want. We learn to want things from what we see, and many women saw nothing desirable except career opportunities formerly available only to men. So this was changed, but that was about it. Men certainly didn’t change. Most women decided that they couldn’t do without pigs after all; they settled down.

Now a new generation has stood up to complain about men. The complaint is vastly more focused, and yet there is a blur at the center. What does the narrator of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” want? We know what she doesn’t want. But is there a way to describe her beau idéal that would serve as a template for young men to emulate? Something that isn’t simply negative (“don’t get any ideas from porn”)?

(Interestingly, most men accused of sexual improprieties have not put up a fight, but quickly folded. So that has changed.)

It seems to me that Rosemary Hill has hit upon something positive. Room to maneuver. It is a bit vague, but it is not at all negative, except to the extent that all freedom implies the elimination of limits.

Hill devotes several paragraphs to the wardrobe of Emily Tinne. Mrs Tinne was a doctor’s wife in Liverpool; the Tinnes belonged to “the solid Liverpudlian bourgeoisie.” When Emily Tinne died, in 1966, she left behind a rather grand collection of evening dresses, some with matching “coatees.” What she did not leave behind were matching shoes or handbags. Many of the outfits still carried price tags. Hill concludes that they were never worn, if they were ever worn at all, outside of Mrs Tinne’s chamber. Perhaps she merely went through them lovingly, with her hands, like Mrs Danvers with Rebecca’s underthings. It is too late for us to scold Mrs Tinne for wasting her husband’s money on a private wardrobe; she enjoyed it while she had it. Indeed, one lesson to be drawn from the exhibition of her gowns at the National Museums, Liverpool would be that pleasure, like taste, is non disputandum.

Bon week-end à tous!

2, 4 and 6 April

Tuesday 3rd

In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, a woman agrees to adopt the Great Dane that belonged to an old friend, a man who has committed suicide, even though the lease to her apartment expressly forbids dogs. Whether or not she will be evicted by her landlord provides dramatic excitement. The woman’s friends are excited, anyway. They “stage an intervention” at one point, insisting that she cannot risk losing her apartment because of a delusional attachment.

None of that is what The Friend is really about, though. The eviction is issue is dealt with so calmly and assuredly that it becomes something of a tease; surely the reader can’t really have worried. The woman herself never seems perturbed. Several times, she blithely says that she’s hoping for a miracle, but no miracle is required, thanks to advances, sort of, in medicine. I’ll leave it there.

We could say that the woman narrates The Friend, but it would be better to say that The Friend is a letter that she writes to her dead friend. This might sound creepy, but so strong is the second person pronoun that it brings the departed squarely into view, if not quite back to life. (Indeed, the letter’s power draws from our awareness that it will never be answered: the letter is a final judgment.) We could say that writing the letter is the woman’s way of grieving the loss of her friend, but this would be arch. In fact, the woman grieves in the ordinary ways: she weeps and she remembers. Time passes. The need for a miracle disappears at just about the same time as the grief. The Great Dane has become her new friend: in the final chapter, the second person pronoun addresses the dog, not the suicide.

Everybody mentioned in the letter, with the exception of the apartment superintendent, the Great Dane — Apollo, the only creature bearing a name — and the dead man’s third wife, is a writer. Almost everybody is not only a writer but a teacher or a student of writing. The man was once the woman’s writing teacher. Then she became, more or less, his colleague. He wrote notable books, but he continued to teach, for the money: no Philip Roth he. The woman, who lives in Manhattan, can spot other writers anywhere. She can detect the complicity with which writers support the transfiguration of actual men and women, hitherto leading their private lives, into the characters who appear in published books. She quotes a famous writer who said that, when a writer is born into a family, that family is “finished.”

In the penultimate chapter, the woman sketches an alternative ending. The pronouns here are third-person. The woman visits the man, who did not die, who was saved at the last minute. He has come out of the hospital, and she is returning his dachshund, which she cared for in his absence. The two writers talk shop. The man is distressed to hear the woman announce that she has set aside what he considered a promising piece of work, a report on women living in a Victim of Trafficking refuge. These women have had horrific experiences, often having been sold into sex slavery by family members, and, in the third chapter of the letter, we are taken to the shelter and told some of those awful stories. The woman concludes:

Here is what I learned: Simon Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

This was the lasst thing you and I talked about while you were still alive. After, only your email with a list of books you thought might be helpful to me in my research. And, because it was the season, best wishes for the new year. (76)

Weil’s observation is expressly negated by the man in the eleventh chapter — the alternative ending in which he is allowed to live.

“I find myself inclined to agree with people like Doris Lessing, who thought imagination does the better job of getting to the truth. And I don’t by this idea that fiction is no longer up to portraying reality.”

Here he breaks off into a tirade against his “self-righteous” students, for whom it doesn’t matter

“how great a writer Nabokov was, a man like that — a snob and a pervert, as they saw him, shouldn’t be on anybody’s reading list. … It upsets me how writing has become so politicized, but my students are more than okay with this. … That’s why I’ve decided not to go back to teaching. Not to be too self-pitying, but when one is so at odds with the culture and its themes of the moment, what’s the point.”

And not to be too cruel, she doesn’t say, but you will not be missed. (194)

That last line went through me like an arrow, and in fact it made me read the book all over again. As I say, this alternative ending allows the man to live, but it also denies him the right to be relevant, to engage with the future of writing. “You will not be missed” is a way of telling us that the friend is better off dead, as indeed may explain his suicide. It also tells us, of course, that the grieving is over, at least the grieving that is inspired by the death of an artist.

Reading The Friend a second time, I not only saw how beautifully woven it is, and how effortlessly it handles — without attempting to solve — the problem of priapic writers and their adoring female students. I saw that it is a conundrum, a sort of Möbius Strip. The dust jacket announces that The Friend is a novel. But it reads like a letter — at some points like one of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, or like an entry from the displaced diary, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The writer’s reflections on writing are never discursive or impersonal, but they are grave; intellectual positions are every bit as vital here as emotional states: not the stuff of regular literary fiction, much less fiction generally. The eleventh chapter is an argument, right out of a philosophical dialogue. The rigors of defined terms may be avoided, so that it really does read as two people talking, but you still have to know who Svetlana Alexievitch is and why she won the Nobel Prize. So, is the book a memoir? Did this really happen? Is Nunez exploiting a suicide? And yet, no one has a name, not the writer, not the dead friend, not Wife One, Wife Two, or Wife Three. Is that discretion or a process of enfabling?

I think that I had to go through The Friend a second time because, for such a serious book, it is awfully easy to read. And, thanks to Apollo, not without moments of great fun.

***

Wednesday 4th

In my enthusiasm for Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, yesterday, I elided direct reference to the rumbling argument that surfaces here and there in throughout the novel and before being taken up directly by the interlocutors in the eleventh chapter. It is not so much an old argument as the revival of one. Whether you call it a moral argument or an aesthetic argument probably indicates which side you’ve taken. It is proof, I think, that our literature culture (at least) has embarked on a confrontation with the “collapse of values” that characterized, or was said to characterize, the postwar years.

In the passage that I quoted yesterday, we see the man grasping the essence of the argument when he mentions Vladimir Nabokov, author, notoriously, of Lolita. Is Lolita a worthy novel or a dirty book?

It would be disingenuous to disclaim that Nabokov invites this question. Lolita is narrated not by a third person representing the values of the community, as shocked as anyone by the report, but by a pedophile. A European pedophile — a monstrous growth from foreign parts. Lolita luxuriates in its criminality, never more than in the narrator’s account of his aimless tour, both tortured and tedious, of America’s roadside motels. It would be one thing if Humbert Humbert carried Lolita off to a handsome chateau by a Swiss lake. Lolita is another thing altogether, altogether sordid. It is regarded as a triumph because the sordid details are expressed in such luminous prose.

Years and years ago, a friend and I were goofing around in a racy gift shop near Wall Street. She pointed to a nude male pinup calendar and asked, in a stage whisper, “But is it art?” “No,” I replied, “it’s Hank.”

The idea that art can redeem patent immorality is, like our taste for polyphony, unique to the post-medieval West. It is a notion whose prevalence in Europe and America encourages mullahs to denounce the depravity of our civilization. For quite some time, sophisticated Westerners have regarded such critics as primitive and benighted. But now, this kind of criticism is coming from Western students. They are no more impressed by the luminous language than are the mullahs. They are not saying that Lolita is not art. They don’t seem to get that far. They just don’t think, as the man in The Friend says, that Lolita belongs on a reading list.

This argument is bound up with another quarrel. Can truth be revealed by fiction? Generations of critics and literature professors have insisted that it can — that, indeed, it gets closer to the truth than any mere reportage of facts. But students — including former students, like the woman who writes the letter that is The Friend — are in open disagreement. The imagination may produce an account that is meaningful and compelling, and perhaps even morally useful. But it is not really true. It leaves things out, it alters slight details, it struggles to present a coherence that does not in fact exist.

If anything can account for this new moralism, this brisk change in the artistic climate, I think it is the failure of the sexual revolution to overpower and eliminate predatory men. Put this another way: the sexual revolution unleashed predatory men in the company of “nice” girls. Girls from good families, girls who had been to good schools, girls with professional futures. Before the sexual revolution, social norms had protected such woman from untoward advances (much less threats). It may have been conveniently forgotten by polite society, that predatory men exist. Some of these predatory men, moreover, like the suicide in The Friend, were and are nice guys. They ask politely and they don’t make gross requests. They are never coercive. But they manage to indulge their appetites. According to the man who later killed himself, “the classroom is the most erotic place in the world.” (28)

Guys who weren’t so nice (or nice-looking) took note.

***

Thursday 5th

Bob Odenkirk’s “Headlines You May Have Missed” is very amusing, but unlike most such pieces that appear in The New Yorker, I expect it to enjoy a long life in print. Its satirical view of the way we live now will be as easy to laugh at in twenty or a hundred years as it is now. Well, maybe not. But it captures our ludicrous obsession with screens, our insane conviction that the screen is the locus of reality.

It’s more than a little interesting to set Odenkirk’s mordant exaggerations next to something else that I read yesterday, this in the Times, an op-ed piece by Tim Wu arguing for the replacement, not the reform, of Facebook.

What the journalist Walter Lippmann said in 1959 of “free” TV is also true of “free” social media: It is ultimately “the creature, the servant and indeed the prostitute of merchandizing.”

Wu has written a book, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads. I haven’t read it, although I feel that I ought to, out of some sort of solidarity. It has long been obvious to me that promotion is the whole point of “free TV” and “free apps.” Promotions must necessarily get our attention, and do so in a very short stretch of time. Initially, broadcast television offered a series of “programs” — dramas, evening news, sports — with occasional promotions, or advertisements. Over time, every moment of broadcast television was surrendered to the promotion of something — the network itself, its stars, the excellence of its presentations, the careers of athletes; and then along came Fox News, with its relentless promotion of right-wing grievances. What Fox News effectually promotes is viewers’ anger and dissatisfaction. Where old-time ads urged members of the television audience to improve their appearance, Fox News marinates viewers in their own funk and applauds the stink. Fox News is really all about you, the viewer: that’s what it’s promoting. What an unbeatable product! What an orgy of egoism! No wonder the “you” whom Bob Odenkirk addresses in his funny piece has missed the birth of a grandchild and isn’t aware of any car trouble.

(That’s my favorite part of the piece: “The smell has to do with your brake pads. Doesn’t matter—just keep driving and ranting at the dashboard, and soon this problem, and all your problems, will end.” — and all your problems.)

The difference between persuasion and promotion is the disingenuousness of the latter, a deceptiveness that works only in the short term. Persuasion lines up the pros and the cons of an argument as objectively and comprehensively as possible. Promotion makes no such attempt. The pros are suited up like Marvel heroes, the cons look like the monstrosities in fun-house mirrors. Often the cons are simply left out, exploiting the genteel proposition that, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. Promotions are rarely lengthy, even when they can afford to be, because, inevitably, infotainment begins to smell of shill, an indifference to right and wrong that is foreign to persuasion.

Has someone come up with a term that describes the behavior of people, whether at a crime scene or in the presence of a celebrity, who turn to their phones for the televised version of what’s right in front of them? The same behavior can be seen during a game at Madison Square Garden. Cameramen are the arbiters of our reality: they know what will interest us before it happens. The cession of personal judgment to professional interpreters is alarming, but I hear no alarms. More to the point, I don’t hear any discussions. No: I see couples sitting at tables for two in restaurants, each bemused by a device.

Doesn’t matter.

Bon week-end à tous!